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This coming week is "Open Access Week". Check out the central website, called Open access week . The promise and importance of open access was one of the main reasons I started this blog in 2007. Over the years I think I have grown cynical about the lack of progress in open access on most fronts, but I remain committed to the concept. I was asked by librarian Anali Perry to respond to several questions about open access; my responses (and several others) will be posted on the library website this week. Here are my replies:   What is your experience with open access publishing? I write about open access publishing in my blog, “Publishing Archaeology” (see URL below) and I speak out within my scholarly community (archaeology) through papers and workshops at conferences, publishing in newsletters, and such. I have posted papers in online open access “journals” (non-peer reviewed). I post most of my papers, somewhat inconsistently between my personal ASU website, Academia.edu,...

Suppose you are writing up some archaeological results. You will be making a bunch of arguments--statements that draw on data and theory to come to some conclusion of interest. Most works contain a number of arguments, often at different levels. For example you make claim that you found 41 pieces of obsidian in the lowest level and only 14 in the uppermost level. This is an argument, but it is not a particularly interesting one. You may later make a more interesting argument suggesting that the decline in obsidian was due to changing commercial routes that now avoided your site, or perhaps you will argue that the decline came from a reduction in blood-letting rituals that employed obsidian blades. Now, suppose you decide that you want to make a weak argument that few of  your colleagues will find convincing. While I am of course being sarcastic here, as I was in my post, "How to give a bad conference paper ", this is a serious point. Why? Because it often seems that archaeolo...

I haven't been posting lately. I've been busy running a bunch of research projects, and I'm teaching a new grad seminar on theory in archaeology. We've finished with the epistemology part of the class (what is theory? how to you construct a good argument? what is an explanation? how should you use analogy?), and have started on the theory part. We are focusing on theory that can be applied archaeologically, and on how one goes about applying theory. One benefit of the epistemology part of the class is that it has helped me organize my thoughts, and given me a better understanding of just what is wrong with much of the work published in archaeology today. In short, many archaeologists don't know how to make a solid argument. I've talked about this previously . They don't know how to put data together with theory to reach a rigorous conclusion about what likely happened in the past and why it happened. So, I plan to write an article about this problem. Right ...