sey075

I received a number of good things by email this morning, including radiocarbon dates, ceramic petrography results, and a completed index for a book! When it rains it pours. Dealing with this stuff left little time for the sherd drawing I am supposed to be doing in the lab. This is the first time I have used a professional indexer for a book. Normally I index my own books, and I like the process. An index is an important tool, and constructing a good index is an intellectual exercise as well as an organizational task. Don't you hate it when a book has a lame, four-page index and you are trying to find some specific information? Don't you REALLY hate it when a book lacks an index entirely? But indexing takes time, and with three co-editors for this book we decided to hire a professional indexer. This is a good book, buy it, you'll like it . You see, after going on and on in this blog about how most edited volumes in archaeology are worthless, I can't afford to edit a bad...

I've been reading the June 15 issue of Science, and I am struck by the irony of two articles. The first is a news item titled "Social scientists hope for reprieve from the senate." The U.S. House of Representatives recently voted to prohibit the NSF from funding political science research, and to reduce the scale of the American Community Survey (a census-based social survey). The bill was co-sponsored by an  unenlightened congressman from my own (unenlightened) state of Arizona, Jeff Flake (jokes about "what's in a name" come to mind here). "Flake says political science isn't sufficiently rigorous to warrant federal support." Does Flake base his policies and views on rigorous research?  I doubt it. Conservative politicians periodically go after the social sciences in Washington, and we should all hope that the current attack is as unsuccessful as previous ones have been. Is archaeology more or less rigorous than political science? If we use sc...

In a previous post, Rejected by Science!, I identified two different concepts of science in archaeology. Archaeological science type 1 is the pursuit of knowledge in a way that conforms to a scientific epistemology. In the words of John Gerring: ·          “Inquiry of a scientific mature, I stipulate, aims to be cumulative, evidence-based (empirical), falsifiable, generalizing, nonsubjective, replicable, rigorous, skeptical, systematic, transparent, and grounded in rational argument. There are differences of opinion over whether, or to what extent, science lives up to these high ideals. Even so, these are the ideals to which natural and social scientists generally aspire, and they help to define the enterprise in a general way and to demarcate it from other realms.” (Gerring 2012:11). Archaeological science type 2, on the other hand, is the use of non-archaeological scientific techniques by archaeologists, for whatever purpose. Ideally, science t...