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Mississippian objects a the Field Mus The Field Museum of Natural History is one of the premier natural history museums in the U.S., with extensive collections in archaeology, anthropology, and many other disciplines. Last week, the Museum annnounced major budget cuts and restructuring that will reduce the scientific value of its collections. The museum evidently will cut back the scope of its scientific mission (collections and basic research) in order to pay back major debts and concentrate on exhibits. This operation will be a disaster to archaeological research in a number of ways. First, the collections will be more difficult to access, and the infrastructural support for visiting scholars will undoubtedly be reduced. I have worked on Mesoamerican pottery in the Field Museum's collections on several occasions (the last time was just this past July). Museum collections are an invaluable resource for archaeology, crucial for many important research questions. See Smith (2004; n...

An unfortunate trend in archaeology today consists of making arguments using faulty logic and faulty methods of argumentation. This is one of my biggest beefs with the work of postmodern/postprocessual archaeologists. They don't test models or hypotheses, their theories are true by definition, and their arguments are based more on speculation than on empirical evaluation. A colleague remarked recently I that don't seem to like archaeological works that deal with things like negotiation, identity, and agency. But these are important social science concepts and they all have their use. In archaeology today, however, they are buzz words. They are used more to signal adherence to a theoretical perspective than as analytical concepts that do intellectual work. Brubaker and Cooper (2000:19) talk about this with respect to identity; when scholars say that identity is " multiple, unstable, in flux, constructed, negotiated, and so on," these terms serve as "gestures signa...