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I recently received  a request from a journal editor (a friend) to remove a pdf of an article of mine published in that journal from my site on Academia.edu. I complied with the request. The following text is taken from my email to the editor: I have complied with your request to remove the pdf of my recently published paper from my Academia.edu site. I approach this issue from two—often contradictory—perspectives: moral and legal. Morally, I am complying with your request under protest. In my mind, I own my scholarly publications. I did the research, I wrote the paper, and the products are my own. I resent the policies of journals that do not permit an author to post his or her publications on the internet. These policies restrict the distribution of scientific knowledge, thereby harming the advancement of scholarship and depriving the public of knowledge obtained often with public funding. As a result, such policies also harm my career, my reputation, and the advancement of my o...

My popular book, At Home with the Aztecs: An Archaeologist Uncovers their Daily Life , will be released (Routledge) March 3, 2016. This is my first explicitly popular book. That is, it is non-technical, written in a narrative fashion, full of personal stories, and such. I tried to find a commercial trade publisher, but ended up with Routledge when none of the big New York publishers thought it had enough commercial potential. I talk about some of my experiences HERE. I am floundering a bit on the marketing of the book. I've gotten advice that I need to use social media. So the book has a Facebook page (which I haven't started tinkering with yet...). I need to set up a separate website for the book, though. And now I have jumped into the waters of Twitte r. The book has a hashtag (#AtHomeWithAztecs), and I have decided to post at least one tweet a day with something interesting from the book until it is released in March. Check it out. My Twitter has been somewhat of a disapp...

An excellent book I just finished indexing my new book last night. I actually enjoy indexing my books. It does take some time, but I find it fun and interesting to compile the index. This is a creative, intellectual task. You have to organize knowledge, cross-reference concepts and terms, and figure out how readers or users of the book might want to find information. I might say "market exchange," you might say "commercial exchange" and someone else might simply say "trade," all for the same concept. So the index has to accommodate all these terms, using "see" and "see also" entries. Users might want to find out about exchange systems, so should I put in an entry "exchange:  see market exchange"? Or do I let it go, assuming that this reader will think to look for markets or trade or commercial? My wife Cindy, who is an editor, hates indexing. She loves editing, page production using desktop publishing programs, and graphic de...