sey075

While archaeologists have been working for decades to figure out the collapse of Teotihuacan, in come the geologists to decide the matter with a graph of rainfall patterns from a cave >300 km away (Lachniet et al 2012). Guess what? Drought caused the collapse of Teotihuacan ((sarcasm)). Although the authors claimed to "test hypotheses of climate and cultural change in the highland Basin of Mexico," (p.259), I didn't see any testing in the paper. Instead of testing a model, they employ what Lewis Binford called a post-hoc accomodative argument. They generated some findings, then scratched their head and thought about how to interpret them without reference to explicit hypotheses. They should have derived the implications for different collapse scenarios ahead of time, and tested for these. What is the most likely timing and nature for a killer drought to generate urban catastrophe? A sudden major drought, or a prolonged less severe event, or a sequence of sporadic ...

When scholars working on closely related topics get together, it is possible to make real progress and greatly advance understanding of the phenomenon at hand. Diverse perspectives and data sets generate synergies, and the give-and-take direct communication of ideas within a small group can generate real intellectual or scientific progress.  Too bad this rarely happens. Much of the structure of contemporary academia works against such synergies and progress. We have events that ostensibly promote intellectual progress -- conferences, symposia at annual meetings, edited books -- but actually serve to inhibit the kind of intensive intellectual interaction that generates advances.  Several events in the past couple of weeks have brought this point home to me. (1) A couple of weeks ago, Ryan Anderson posted a nice discussion on Savage Minds titled "numbers. " Most of his ten items had to do with the amount of time spent on research and the amount of money required and available ...

Maybe I didn't realize how lucky I was when I got quick turnaround s from the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology and the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory. I had an article accepted in a journal in May, and six months later, no word about editing, proofs, or anything. I emailed the editor, who replied that the manuscript was waiting for production (maybe their Production Editor is named Godot??). This is not an archaeology journal. It is published by Routledge. I was asked if I wanted to have the paper posted "online first." I thought they meant that the completed typeset article, in pdf format, would be posted online prior to the issue date of the print journal. Great, they will start editing my paper. But no, it means that the paper gets posted RIGHT AWAY, in its unedited manuscript format. I guess that's a good thing. I'm not really fond of these early postings, unless it is something I am desperate to read (not too many of those, I'm afraid)....