George Cowgill's database and my introduction to scientific archaeology

Here is a very short video that describes how I first got into the science of archaeology:

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Ian Hodder says archaeology is bullshit. My reply: “Bullshit!”

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In a remarkably bad short paper in the current SAA Archaeological Record , Ian Hodder makes a number of statements that equate to the claim that archaeology is bullshit (Hodder 2018) . “Bullshit” is a term that refers to speech intended to persuade without regard for truth. Liars care about the truth and try to hide it; bullshitters don’t care whether their speech is true or false. Harry Frankfurt (1986, 2005) published the major works on bullshit, although antecedents can be found back to Plato and Orwell (1946 (1968)) ; see also Cohen (2002) . Hodder’s first dubious claim is that “the most important public value and function of archaeology is its role in place- and history-making” (p. 43). That is, archaeology is primarily about heritage, identity, and cultural achievement. It is about the present, not the past. Most archaeologists disagree with this. Archaeology is about the past. That is why we carry out excavations, surveys, artifact analyses and dating—to reconstruct and learn ...
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Coercive citations

Suppose you had submitted a paper to a journal ("Journal-X") and you got this message from the editor: "You only cite Journal-X once. Consequently, we kindly ask you to add references of articles published in Journal-X to your present article." Would you comply? This is known as "coercive citation," something I had never heard of until I read the latest issue of Science: Wilhite, Allen W. and Eric A. Fong  (2012)  Coercive Citation in Academic Publishing. Science 335:542-543 . It seems that this practice is rampant in the fields of business research. These authors did a thorough study with lots of interviews with authors and studies of journals in several fields. At least some authors in every field considered (social sciences and business) reported attempts a coercive citation, but there was considerable variation. They took economics journals as the standard for regression analysis, and found that contributors to journals in marketing, management, finan...
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Science and the Human Sciences: Prehispanic Maya Settlement and History

(This is a guest post by Gary Feinman) Published in the journal Science , Medina-Elizalde and Rohling’s (2012) quantitative analysis of Terminal Classic period Maya (AD 800-1000) climatic shifts is a welcome refinement of the extent of a late 1 st millennium episode of climatic change. Yet the authors' speculations regarding the fall of inland Maya settlements (the so-called Maya Collapse) is fraught with failures in logic and limitations in hypothesis evaluation that too often are characteristic of natural scientists delving naively into the causes and complexities of societal change. Even more problematic is the repeated license given by one of the world’s premier science journals to this kind of disciplinary overreach at a time when extremely few articles by archaeologists are offered this broadly visible platform.  Medina-Elizalde and Rohling begin with the premise that drought precipitated the collapse of these inland centers. But, when finding precipitation declines of only ...
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