sey075

Academia.edu has a system of "recommendations" for publications that I have never been fond of. Now they want to commercialize them by selling commendations. The way the recommendations work is that some scholars are invited to submit recommendations. I can't find the criteria listed on the website, but as I recall the only criterion was that one had published one or two papers ever. The recommenders are then supposed to recommend papers by clicking a button on the paper in question. This information become public, and the number of views on those papers increases. Individuals are given an "Authors rank" based on the number of recommendations their papers have received, adjusted for the rank of the recommenders. My author rank is 3.6, but I have no idea if that is high or low; the nature of the scale is not revealed. I tried being a recommender for a while. I recommended some things, and then I'd get messages stating that views of those papers had increased...

This post is part of the  " Grand challenges for archaeology blogging carnival ." We do archaeology in order to learn about the past. This is a pretty broad purview. We learn about an amazing variety of past things from archaeology, from Richard III’s posture to the causes of the Maya collapse, from what the Natufians ate for breakfast to how the Plains peoples hunted bison. We work hard to recover treasure, garbage, dirt, tools, cathedrals and latrines, and we use them to make statements about what happened long ago. We ask all sorts of questions: Whodunnit? What the heck is that? Why is this particular coin sitting in that specific layer? What were they thinking? We do archaeology for many diverse purposes, from reconstructing the lives of ancient kings and queens to creating historical narratives, from helping communities reconstruct their past to complying with government regulations. In this essay I will discuss one of those purposes—creating reliable information about ...

Archaeology sometimes seems to exist in its own little scholarly world. Compared to other disciplines, we have strange kinds of data—sites and artifacts. These weird data require odd specialized methods, from lithic refitting to grave-lot seriation to dog-lease surface collecting. Scholars in other disciplines don’t do these things, and they don’t need labels for them. Quite naturally, archaeology requires its own specialized vocabulary. Does it matter whether our terms match up with those in other disciplines? After all, we are doing our own thing, and we rightly assert our ability to define our own terminology. This is fine, up to a point. But there is a tendency for archaeologists to take this disciplinary autonomy—and its associated terminology—too far. We have a habit of adopting terms that have a standard definition in other fields, and giving them an entirely new meaning within archaeology. I am not referring to adopting a standard term (say, stratigraphy from geology) to the p...