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The outoing editor of American Anthropologist, Tom Boellstorff, has published an eloquent plea for the American Anthropological Association to move toward Gold Open Access for its journals. As you will recall, gold OA is the situation where journals are posted on the internet, freely available for reading and downloading by anyone ( see some of my previous posts about this ). Here are his reasons (quoted from page 389): "There are three primary reasons why this transition to gold open access is imperative, reasons that are simultaneoulsy ethical, political, and intellectual. First, there is a fundamental contradiction between the often-repeated goal of making anthropology more public and relevant on the one hand and the lack of open access on the other hand. Second, there is an incompatibility between the broad interest in transnationalzing anthropology and the lack of open access. Third, it is wrong for any academic journal to be based on a model where the unremunerated labor of ...

I still cringe when I recall the words of a former colleague (not an archaeologist) to the effect that graduate students should not publish papers. Students should spend all of their available time reading everything they can, and worry about publishing once their PhD is in hand. This attitude is closely related to what Krathwohl calls the "dissertation as process" approach --the idea that a dissertation is a methodological exercise and does not have to be an important piece of original research worth publishing. You learn methods and skills in writing a dissertation, and then you go on to apply them later. Do I have to say that I disagree very strongly with this position? Well, if you don't publish articles while still a student, then you won't have to worry about applying your dissertation skills (because you won't get an academic job). Here are some reasons why graduate students should publish papers: (1) To build up a resumé in preparation for the job market....

I've been wondering recently why more archaeologists don't use the method and concept of "natural experiment." In one sense, natural experiments are not uncommon in archaeology; we sometimes call them "controlled comparisons," probably borrowing that term from cultural anthropology (Eggan 1954). But we rarely use the phrase "natural experiment," which has been gaining ground in the comparative branches of the social sciences, history, and ecology. This isn't just a terminological issue; natural experiments are all about how to determine causality. Most archaeologists, however, avoid discussing causality, and this may account for the rarity of the natural experiment concept in our field. (Postmodern, postprocessualist, and other "post" archaeologists can probably stop reading here, unless you are looking for more fodder to critique simplistic scientistic Smith). A natural experiment is " an observational study that nonetheless has...