Publishing Archaeology

Rejected by Science !!

2012-01-27T20:25:00.000-07:00

I just got a rejection for a manuscript sent to the journal Science. That's strike two for me with Science (I sent them my paper on agricultural terraces, back in the early 1990s; it ended up in JFA). I have something else up my sleeve for Science; maybe the third time will work. Because so many papers are submitted to Science, they have a bulk system for evaluating them. Each manuscript gets a quick once-over by one of a small number of editors, who say "no" to most papers. If they say "yes," then the paper gets sent out for peer review. This means that rejections come fast - it took them just a few days to reject my paper. I have to admire that efficiency.

This experience got me thinking about how the Science review process affects the kinds of archaeology papers published in the journal. If you pay attention to the journal, you will know that they tend to favor high-tech methods, archaeometry, fancy quantitative methods, and reports about "the earliest" this or that. While I can only recall one or two papers in Science that I thought were incompetent (a much better record than most archaeology journals, some of which are full of incompetent articles), their selection of archaeology papers is definitely biased in a certain direction. I think one way of expressing this might be that Science publishes archaeology articles that will appeal on methodological grounds to non-archaeological scientists. My guess is that papers that are more synthetic or less methods-heavy don't make it through the initial review (which is done by non-archaeological scientists).

This suggestion links up with the issue of what does "science" mean in archaeology. Not in some big ontological sense, but in practical terms. What kinds of archaeology can be called scientific, and what kinds of archaeology are recognized by other scientists (such as editors at the journal Science) as being scientific in nature? "Scientific method" in archaeology has two meanings. (1) On the one hand science means research done following a scientific epistemology (empirically testable, logically coherent, done with a critical spirit, etc.), whether it employs high-tech methods or not. (2) Scientific methods in archaeology also means the use of non-archaeological scientific techniques: archaeometry and the like. Now ideally, these two meanings of "science" go together, but often they do not. Much research that is epistemologically scientific does not use jazzy methods (as in the paper that was recently rejected by Science). And scientific methods (sense #2) are often used in non-scientific research (sense #1).

What do I mean by that last observation? Consider two examples. First, there are post-processual archaeologists who explicitly reject a scientific epistemology for archaeology, yet they embrace archaeometric methods. This is science of definition #2, done in opposition to science of definition #1. Would this kind of research get by the editors of the journal Science? Good question. Second, there is research that would claim to follow a scientific epistemology, but is too sloppy to be considered good science. Many archaeometric sourcing studies fit here. The archaeologists picks a bunch of artifacts of type X, and subjects them to technical provenience analyses. But if those artifacts were not selected with a rigorous sampling scheme, then this is simply not a good scientific research design. The results cannot be generalized beyond the sample that was analyzed (although archaeologists who are sloppy in picking their samples tend to also be sloppy in overgeneralizing their results). Now this kind of work can easily get past the editors and reviewers of journals, which always puzzles me and bugs the heck out of me. I have pissed off a number of authors and editors over the years with my complaints about the publication of such papers.

So, what's a scientific archaeologist (definition #1, whether or not using methods from definition #2) to do? I guess try another journal. For the sake of the discipline, one can only hope that these powerful editors at Science are not too often fooled by science #2 that does not conform to science #1.

Has Latin American Antiquity abandoned book reviews?

2012-01-22T22:42:00.000-07:00

Just got the Dec 2011 issue of Latin American Antiquity. This allowed me to complete the book review graph through 2011. This graph shows the number of book reviews published per year in the journal:

This really steams me up, and I've complained about it before; see some of the posts listed under "book reviews" in the list of terms on the right side of the blog (scroll down).

We can't trust publishers, even academic presses, to not publish bad books. Yes, most book manuscripts are reviewed by outside reviewers, but a good number of real stinkers (and lots of pedestrian yawners) get through that process and are published each year. So how does the discipline exercise quality control with respect to books? This is a prime role for book reviews in peer reviewed journals. But if the major journals refuse to publish book reviews, the discipline suffers. My field, Mesoamerican archaeology, is particularly badly served by its major journals. Ancient Mesoamerica refuses to publish any book reviews at all. And Latin American Antiquity does allow book reviews, but now they only publish a few reviews each year (see graph).

If you want to see a really bad book criticized in a zinger of a review, check out Richard Blanton's review of a new book by Charles Maisels in the online journal, Cliodynamics.

Internet on strike against censorship

2012-01-17T17:46:00.000-07:00

Wednesday, Jan 18, much of the Internet will be on strike to protest the censorship legislation now before Congress. The bill, known as "Stop Online Piracy Act," will have a chilling effect on the use of the internet in the U.S. and around the world. Scholarship and free expression will be reduced, while large media corporations will increase their profits. Lots of basic scholarly practice will become criminalized.

For information see the SOPA STRIKE site (including ways to write your congressman, code to temporarily black out your site for the day (as Wikipedia will do), and other materials.

Wikipedia has a very nice article, with pro and con views, supporters and detractors, technical details, and such.

Swords, chainsaws, and edited volumes

2012-01-15T15:54:00.000-07:00

I'm not the only one with a dim view of the value of edited volumes. As I've expressed previously ("Why are so many edited volumes worthless?") most edited volumes in archaeology are insufficiently integrated, have too many poor quality essays, and do a poor job of advancing research. I was thus not surprised to find the following comments in a recent book review published in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. This was a review of "Comparing Cities: the Middle East and South Asia" (ed. by Ali and Rieker, Oxford Univ press, 2010. Review 2011, JRAI 17:671-672); review by Hayder Al-Mohammad:

"one is left to wonder what this edited volume is hoping to respond to or push in terms of new resesarch, ideas, and methods." (p.671)

"Comparing Cities should be a warning to future editors of volumes that readers require more than just a number of articles thrown together in one book to make it a worthy and coherent read." (p.672)

Well, I an dubious about whether the poor quality of any single edited volume will serve as a warning for future volume editors. If so, the genre of poor edited volume would not still be flourishing.

Unfortunately the kind of quality control shown in the cartoon above is typically absent from the evaluation of edited volumes by publishers. Maybe if we had more tough-looking reviewers armed with swords and chainsaws, and fewer pussycats armed with badminton rackets, the quality of archaeological edited volumes might improve.

Here are my older posts on edited volumes:

How can we explain social change in the past?

2012-01-11T19:47:00.001-07:00

Philosophers of science and social scientists have identified a variety of perspectives on the meaning of explanation and the ways scholars go about explaining social phenomena in the present and the past. I would guess that I am like many archaeologists in generally avoiding this literature because much of the work and writing is difficult to follow and difficult to relate to archaeology. But over the past couple of years I have become convinced that we need to pay attention to this material so that we can do a better job of explaining the past. I've talked about this issue previously, here, and here. Today I will point to two authors who do discuss issues of explanation, causality, and epistemology in a particularly clear fashion, and in ways that relate to archaeology: Daniel Little and Charles Tilly.

(1) Daniel Little is a philosopher of science who specializes in social science. He has an impressive record of publications (see below), and he writes with great clarity. I especially want to recommend his blog, Understanding Society. He has recently written a number of posts on explanation, and these are well worth reading by archaeologists:

A few publications by Daniel Little:

1988    Collective Action and the Traditional Village. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 1(1):41-58.
1998    Microfoundations, Method, and Causation: On the Philosophy of the Social Sciences. Transaction, New Brunswick.
2007    Levels of the Social. In Philosophy of Anthropology and Sociology, edited by Stephen P. Turner and Mark W. Risjord, pp. 343-371. Handbook of the Philosophy of Science. Elsevier, New York.
2010    New Contributions to the Philosophy of History. Springer, New York.
2011    Causal Mechanisms in the Social Realm. In Causality in the Sciences, edited by Phyllis McKay Illari, Federica Russo, and Jon Williamson, pp. 273-295. Oxford University Press, New York.

(2) Charles Tilly was one of the leading social scientists of the late 20th-early 21st century. His field was historical social science, applying political and sociological models to historical data. He was a highly original thinker, and published numerous books and articles (see below for a few). The following scheme outlines five ways that social scientists and social historians have approached the topic of explanation. It is a synthesis and paraphrase of three sources: Tilly (2001, 2008), and Tilly and Gooden (2006).

1. Skepticism.The world is too complex to explain. Sounds like post-processual archaeology (oops, I think I mean social archaeology).

2. Law-seekingaccounts. Social life is said to exhibit empirical regularities that attheir highest level take the form of laws; explanation then consists ofsubsuming particular cases under broadly validated empirical generalizations oreven universal laws. This approach, associated with Carl Hempel, was considered outdated and inappropriate for social science even BEFORE Binford and the New Archaeologists adopted it as the standard for archaeological explanation (leading to Flannery's observation that this approach could only produce "Mickey Mouse Laws").

3. Propensityaccounts. Social units are seen as self-directing, whether driven byemotions, motives, interests, rational choices, genes, or something else.Explanation then consists of reconstructing the state of the social unit—forexample, an individual’s beliefs at a given point in time and space—andplausibly relating its actions to that state. Even if this were considered a valid social science approach (see Tilly for critiques), it pretty clearly would not work for archaeology.

4. Systemicexplanations. Particular features of social life are explained byspecifying their connections with putative larger entities: societies,cultures, mentalities, capitalist systems, world systems, and the like. Explanation thenconsists of locating elements within systems. Functional explanation is asubcategory of systemic explanations. This approach is valuable for explaining some aspects of some past phenomena, but inadequate or incomplete as a general approach to explanation.

5. Mechanism-basedaccounts. This approach claims that explanation consists of identifying in particularsocial phenomena reliable causal mechanisms and processes of general scope.Causal mechanisms are events that alter relations among some set of elements.Processes are frequent (but not universal) combinations and sequences of causalmechanisms.

Not surprisingly, the causal mechanism approach is the one favored by Tilly, Little, and many social scientists today. Whereas law-seeking accounts explain events and processes by showing that they fit under a general law, mechanism-based accounts explain events by identifying the causes that brought them about. Thus law-seeking accounts require a general law explaining, for example, the rise of the state in all cases, and a universal trajectory followed by all cases. Mechanisms-based accounts, on the other hand, identify a small number of causal mechanisms (population growth, intensification, etc.) that operate in distinct combinations in diverse settings to bring about parallel (but not identical) processes of social change.

A few works by Charles Tilly:

Tilly, Charles
1984    Big Structures, Large Processes, and Huge Comparisons. Russell Sage Foundation, New York.

1990    Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1990. Blackwell, Oxford.

1999    Durable Inequality. University of California Press, Berkeley.

2001    Relational Origins of Inequality. Anthropological Theory 1(3):355-372.

2008    Explaining Social Processes. Paradigm Publishers, Boulder, CO.

2010    Mechanisms of the Middle Range. In Robert K. Merton: Sociology of Science and Sociological Explanation, edited by Craig Calhoun, pp. 54-62. Columbia University Press, New York.

Tilly, Charles and Robert E. Goodin
2006    It Depends. In Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis, edited by Robert E. Goodin and Charles Tilly, pp. 3-32. Oxford University Press, New York.

Bill in US Congress to limit Open Access

2012-01-08T08:59:00.000-07:00

The Research Works Act, H.R. 3699, is a bill that would make it illegal for researchers to post their own publications on the internet for public access. Guess who is behind this bill? Elsevier and the commercial publishing lobby (the Association of American Publishers).

Steven Harnad's post: The Private Publishing Tail Trying To Wag The Public Research Dog, Yet Again contains the most detailed and useful discussion of the issue that I've seen.

Michelle Clement's blog at Scientific American, Reseaerch Works Act would deny taxpayers access to federally funded research., starts out, "Carolyn Maloney, a congresswoman funded by Elsevier, which is a major for-profit publishing company, is trying to pass the Research Works Act, which would deny Americans free access to research funded by taxpayer money."

For more information about the bill and about WHAT U.S. CITIZENS CAN DO about this, see the Alliance for Taxpayer Access.

Free labor by academics so that commercial publishers can make a profit

2012-01-07T15:34:00.000-07:00

This allegory is from "Time for academics to withdraw free labor", on Dorothy Bishop's BishopBlog:

Jack is a sheep farmer. He gets some government subsidies,and also works long hours to keep his sheep happy and healthy. When his beastsare ready for slaughter, he offers them to an abattoir. The abattoir is verychoosy and may reject Jack’s sheep, which is a disaster for him, as there is noother route to the market. If he is lucky the abattoir will accept the animals,slaughter them and sell them, at a large profit, to the supermarket. Jack doesnot see any of this money. The populace struggle to afford the price of meat,but the government has no control over this. When Jack feels like a nice pieceof lamb, he buys it from the supermarket. Meanwhile, Jack provides his servicesfor free as an inspector of other farmers’ animals.

Crazy story, right? But that’s the model that academicpublishing follows..........

See BishopBlog for more. Dorothy Bishop wants authors and reviewers to boycott Elsevier journals.

Her blog has a number of fascinating and humorous posts, including:

How to become a celebrity science expert (sarcastic)

Science Journal Editors: A Taxonomy

Did the Maya predict the end of the world in 2012 ?

2011-12-21T14:08:00.004-07:00

The whole craze over the supposed Maya prophecy of the end of the world in 2012 is based on bogus, commercialized, fake claims. The D-day ("destruction day) is one year off: December 21, 2012. This will not be the end of the world, nor will it mark a new era of enlightenment. The ancient Maya had numerous very accurate calendars. All of them were cyclical in that they came to an end and started over at zero. December 21, 2012 is merely the re-start date of the "Long count calendar," a count of days that started back in 3114 BC (well, at some point in the first millennium AD, the Maya extrapolated the Long count back to a zero date thousands of years earlier).

The Maya Long count calendar is just like the odometer on a car. There are five digits, and it ticks one digit for every day. Here are some dates:

8.12.14.8.15 ---- July 2, 292 (a date from the Maya city of Tikal)
12.19.18.17.15 ---- December 21, 2011 (today)
12.19.17.19.19 ---- December 20, 2012
0. 0. 0. 0. 0 ---- December 21, 2012

The 2012 text from Tortuguero

(This is a base-20 numbering system, with the middle digit only going up to 18 before repeating).

So, what did the Maya predict would happen on the zero date? There is exactly one (count 'em, one) ancient Maya hieroglpyhic text that talks about this, monument 6 at the site of Tortuguero (see photo at right). Apart from the fact that key parts of the monument are broken, the text is a bit enigmatic. One recent translation (from Gronemeyer & MacLeod 2010) reads:

It will be completed the thirteenth Baktun [i.e., the end of the cycle]
It is 4 Ajaw 3 Kankin [the day and month designations]
And it will happen a "seeing"
It is the display of [the god] Bolon-Yokte
In a great "investiture."

- Gronemeyer, Sven and Barbara MacLeod (2010) What Could Happen in 2012: A Re-Analysis of the 13-Bak'tun Prophecy on Tortuguero Monument 6. Wayeb Notes vol. 34. Wayeb: European Association of Mayanists.

Hmmmmm, this is not about the end of the world, or a new beginning. It is an enigmatic statement that some god (whom we know next to nothing about) will show up on that date.

So why does everyone go around talking about the end of the world? Try typing "2012 Maya prophecy" into the search window in Amazon.com. There are more than 100 books about this topic. People are making money by inventing bogus claims about the 2012 Maya Long count event. It is a commercial feeding frenzy, involving wildly inaccurate and made-up claims by fake scholars. Read my lips:

THE MAYA DID NOT PREDICT THE END OF THE WORLD IN 2012.

The Maya were accomplished astronomers, mathematicians, and scientists. They devised a whole series of incredibly accurate calendars. They invented the concept of zero. They extended the Long count calendar more than a millennium into the future. But they die NOT predict the end of the world. To read about Maya calendars and culture, and some scientific details about the 2012 nonsense, read any of these books, all by recognized experts in the field:

Aveni, Anthony F. (2009) The End of Time: The Maya Mystery of 2012. University Press of Colorado, Boulder.

Restall, Matthew and Amara Solari (2011) 2012 and the End of the World. Rowman and Littlefield, New York.

Stuart, David (2011) The Order of Days: The Maya world and the Truth About 2012. Random House, New York.

Van Stone, Mark (2010) 2012: Science and Prophecy of the Ancient Maya. Tlacaelel Press (private publication, Imperial Valley, CA.

But please avoid the nonsense found in commercial books on Amazon.com. Check out the authors on the internet. The authors of the books listed above are all recognizied experts, easy to tell from a number of websites.

Aztec astronomer observes the stars

But what about the Aztecs?

It turns out that the Aztecs DID predict the end of the world. Their priests observed the heavens, and their mythology predicted the destruction of the world. This will come at the end of a 52-year calendar cycle, but we don't know which cycle! At the end of each cycle, the Aztecs would put out all their fires and wait around to see if the sun would rise again for a new period of 52 years. New fires were then lit (it was called the "New Fire Ceremony"), and the world was saved for another 52 years. The last such ceremony before Cortés arrived took place in 1507. To read more about this, check out the new 3rd edition of my book, The Aztecs, in which I've boosted the coverage of the New Fire Ceremony.

Lighting of the Aztec New Fire+

When I was an undergraduate, we extended the Aztec calendar forward (now you can do that easily on the internet; back then it was a lot of hand calculations). We discovered that there was a 52-year cycle completion in the middle of a semester! We had a blow-out, end-of-the-world party, which was fun, but the world did not end (although I think it may have felt that way the next morning). The next scheduled cycle completion will be in the year 2027.

As an Aztec specialist, this whole Maya 2012 nonsense really bugs me. The Maya always get all the publicity, and the Aztecs get very little. The Maya are always on the History Channel or in National Geographic Magazine. Maya, Maya, Maya! We Aztec specialists often get an inferiority complex with respect to the Maya.

The Aztecs actually DID predict the end of the world, but who gets all the credit for ancient prophecies for doom and destruction: the Maya, who didn't even make such prophecies.

This morning, I was interviewed on local TV about the Maya 2012 bit. I didn't get to say very much, but check out the video.

Problems with Bourdieu? We can help! Call now.

2011-12-20T08:37:00.001-07:00

I find that I am not the only one puzzling over the infatuation of archaeologists with the work of Pierre Broudieu and other incomprehensible French social philosophers. Here are some suggestions about what an archaeoalogist can do:

(1) Steve Lekson: Use other theorists who are more grounded and make sense.

Steven Lekson has an amusing post, "La Maladie Française" on his blog, The Southwest in the World. This blog is fascinating - it consists of chapters and parts of chapters of a book that Lekson is in the process of writing. Readers can follow his book as it is constructed, quite an innovative process. This particular post is about the convoluted prose of Bourdieu, de Certeau, et al. Lekson says:

"I have from time to time disparaged French social philosophy. It’s not so much the content (it’s that too), but rather the language. To paraphrase Professor Higgins, the French don’t care what they say actually, so long as they write it properly. Which, for French social philosophers, means convoluted, obtuse, ambiguous, impenetrable — well-known hallmarks of French philosophy, generally."

After posting several choice uncomprehensible quotes., Lekson lists some archaeological theoreticians. who write clearly and comprehensibly. He says:

"Theory does not require Delphic obscurantism. Many useful thinkers think clearly and write clearly. I list several below – a quick, short list with only a few works for each. Some are old and some not so old. You must judge if their thinking is useful (I find it so). But – and this is key – you can judge their thinking directly on its merits, and not as faith that something useful lies buried in the verbiage."

(2) Robert Rosenswig: Why cite Bourdieu and Giddens when Marx said it better?

In an interesting paper, Robert Rosenswig notes that many archaeologists cite Bourdieu and Giddens without engaging with their work. He compares their perspective on agency and practice to the ideas of Marx. But whereas Marx presented a materialist theory of agency, these scholars promote an idealist version. Rosenswig advocates a return to Marx's materialist theory of modes of production and social change.

Rosenswig, Robert
2011 Materialism, Mode of Production, and a Millennium of Change in Southern Mexico. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 18:(in press).

(3) Andrew Abbott: Bourdieu contributes nothing new; avoid abstract social theory.

I've raved about Andrew Abbott's (2004) very useful book several times in this blog, here, here, and here. Abbott is not a big fan of high-level abstract social theory:

· “A good idea, then, ought to have some referentin the real world. This is not to deny the utility of pure social theory, butthe vast majority of social theory consists of relabeling. All real theoryarises in empirical world, in the attempt to make sense of the social world, nomatter how abstractly construed. A student is well advised to stay clear ofwriting pure theory. It’s an open invitation to vacuity .... Relabeling is a general activity in socialscience because it’s a way of appearing novel without having to do much.” (p. 218).

In another passage, Abbott explicitly calls Bourdieu's concept of habitus as a simple relabeling of concepts long used in sociology.

Abbott, Andrew
2004    Methods of Discovery: Heuristics for the Social Sciences. Norton, New York.

Other prominent sociologists who have little use for Bourdieu include Jon Elster, Raymond Boudon, Peter Hedström, Robert Sampson, and Charles Tilly. Also check out philosopher of science Mario Bunge (1995).

Bunge, Mario
1995    In Praise of Intolerance to Charlatanism in Academia. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 775:96-115.

(4) Yours truly: You can do rigorous theoretically-informed research without bothering with Bourdieu et al.

As detailed in my paper on urban theory (Smitih 2011), archaeologists interested in causality and explanation can conduct their research and engage with theory on an epistemological level below that of high-level, philosophical, social theory (I wrote that paper before reading Abbott). I call such theory "empirical theory." In the social sciences (outside of archaeology) such theory is labeled "middle-range theory," drawing on the concept by Robert K. Merton (which has nothing to do with Lewis Binford's idiosyncratic concept of the same name). I got tired of grant proposals and articles by archaeologists (students and professionals) in which the authors spend a lot of time waxing poetic about Giddens and Bourdieu, and then go on to describe their research in rather pedestrian terms that ignore the theory entirely. If you are not going to USE theory, then don't waste your time talking about it. Better still, find empirical theory that you CAN use to plan and carry out your fieldwork and to analyze your data.

Smith, Michael E.
2011    Empirical Urban Theory for Archaeologists. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 18:167-192.

For further clarification of different kinds of theory (and how high-level theory relates to middle-range causal theory), see also my earlier post "Theory, theory theory: What do we mean by theory?"

More on predatory journals

2011-12-20T08:29:00.000-07:00

As a follow-up to my post on Jeffrey' Beall's list of "predatory open access journals" (see my previous post on this) (Beall's original post is here; see also here), Open Access journalist and advocate Richard Poynder has posted an interesting interview with the founder and Managing Director of one of the target companies:

The Open Access Interviews: OMICS Publishing Group’s Srinu Babu Gedela.

Srinu Babu Gedela, or course, denies that OMICS is a predatory publisher.

Poynder suggests that the research community should accept some of the responsibility for these bogus journals. After all, thousands of researchers (including archaeologists) have agreed to serve on the editorial boards of these journals, and perhaps review articles for them.

Richard Poynder does research and journalism about Open Access. I highly recommend his blog, Open and Shut. If you want to explore Open Access in more detail, I highly recommend Poynder's extended interviews in a series called the "Basement Interviews" (follow the link on the main page). The first two interviews, at the bottom of the list, are with Steven Harnad and Peter Suber, my two heroes in the Open Access movement.

"Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory"

2011-12-09T21:40:00.001-07:00

A new online journal has just started publishing. "Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory."

According to its mission statement, the journal:

"aims to situate ethnography as the prime heuristic of anthropology, and return it to the forefront of conceptual developments in the discipline.

The journal is motivated by the need to reinstate ethnographic theorization in contemporary anthropology as a potent alternative to its 'explanation' or 'contextualization' by philosophical arguments, moves which have resulted in a loss of the discipline's distinctive theoretical nerve. By drawing out its potential to critically engage and challenge Western cosmological assumptions and conceptual determinations, HAU aims to provide an exciting new arena for evaluating ethnography as a daring enterprise for 'worlding' alien terms and forms of life, by exploiting their potential for rethinking humanity and alterity."

In looking around the journal website and its first issue, I became confused about the meaning of the term "ethnography." I always thought it meant fieldwork, the first-hand gathering of social or cultural data through participant observation. The initial article, by David Graeber, is a reworking of ethnographic data from others about Shilluk divine kingship. The second, by Marshal Sahlins, is about kingship in ancient Sparta, which doesn't seem very ethnographic. I guess if you can get a paper by someone as prominent as Sahlins, you don't worry too much about sticking to your specifications. Or maybe I am mistaken in my conception of "ethnography." I have to admit that I pay less attention to anthropology than I used to, particularly since resigning from the American Anthropological Association. And then there are some papers on kinship, a few theoretical papers, English translations of three papers by Maurice Godelier, and some reprints of classic anthropology articles by Evans-Pritchard and others.

I guess this is what they mean by ethnography (also from the mission statement):

"Topics addressed by the journal include indigenous ontologies and systems of knowledge, forms of human engagement and relationality, cosmology and myth, magic, witchcraft and sorcery, truth and falsehood, indigenous theories of kinship and relatedness with humans and non-humans, hierarchy, materiality, perception, environment and space, time and temporality, personhood and subjectivity, alternative metaphysics of morality."

Hmmm, what about economics and politics? Personally, I'm more interested in how Shilluk or Spartan kings collected taxes than in the symbolism and meaning of divine kingship. The topics covered in this new journal reside in one corner of the universe of cultural anthropology, leaving out big portions of scientific anthropology (or scientific ethnography), from medical to economic to cognitive to political anthropology. But still, this new journal looks much better than many offerings in cultural anthropology today, particularly in its focus on theory that is more empirically grounded and less philosophical (see my urban theory paper for my views on philosophical theory). Take a look at Hau.

"Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme" and disciplinary myopia

2011-12-08T09:25:00.001-07:00

In college, I took a course in French classical drama, and one of the few things I still recall is a quote from Molière's play, "Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme." The protagonist discovers, to his astonishment, that he can speak prose:

"Good heavens! For more than forty years I have been speaking prose without knowing it!"

(Act II, scene 4: "Par ma foi, il y a plus de quarante ans que je dis de la prose, sans que j'en susse rien.")

I have recently had such a Molière moment. I have been reading works on research methods in political science and sociology (in preparation for a proposal where a group of us will have to make an argument for the value of comparative research ancient cities that will satisfy sociologists and political scientists). It looks like what we are doing is called "case study research" in those fields. I was excited (and daunted) to find a large methodological literature on case study research, and I have started rooting around in that literature. I can now exclaim, with the same pride as Molière's protagonist:

"Good heavens! For more than thirty years I have been doing case study research without knowing it."

In the non-anthropological social sciences, case-study research is presented as an alternative to the dominant quantitative-statistical methodological emphasis. The latter focuses on comparisons of variables across numerous cases, whereas the case-study approach uses much smaller samples and focuses on the cases.

So how is this helpful for archaeology? From one perspective, a familiarity with this literature will help me explain archaeological research to audiences in other disciplines. But more importantly, the case study literature has methodological insights that can help archaeologists design and carry out comparative research that is more rigorous and convincing. Topics discussed in that literature include sampling, case selection, constructing indicators, causal inferences, different sources of bias, and the like. In archaeology, methodological topics like this are discussed in print most commonly in the holocultural approach promoted by Peter Peregrine and others (see the journal Cross-Cultural Research). That body of work, and its related theme within sociocultural anthropology, is an example of variable-focused research. Why don't we have more of a methodological literature in archaeology for case-based comparative research? Addressing this lack was one of the reasons for publishing The Comparative Archaeology of Complex Societies (although we don't use the term "case study research" in that book).

So why hasn't someone linked up archaeology with this body of research before now? (Case study research is part of a larger, very interesting, and relevant field, that of social science history and historical sociology). I can better understand why social scientist methodologists have ignored archaeology, than why archaeologists have ignored broader trends in the social sciences. Well, it is the end of the semester, and I don't have time to rant and rave about this like I might be tempted to. Later, when I have read more of the case-study literature, I may write a methodological paper about how it relates to archaeology. In the meantime, I have found this paper a good intro to some of the issues:

Kiser, Edgar and Steve Pfaff
2010    Comparative-Historical Methodology in Political Sociology In Handbook of Politics: State and Society in Global Perspective, edited by Kevin T. Leight and J. Craig Jenkins, pp. 571-587. Springer, New York.

In a quick perusal of a number of books and edited collections, this one looks the best to me (that is, broadest and most relevant to archaeology):

Gerring, John
2007    Case Study Research: Principles and Practices. Cambridge University Press, New York.

I am a fan of Gerring's research in social science methods. Check out his website; it has most of his articles posted, descriptions of his book, book reviews, papers in progress, all kinds of good things. If you study ancient empires, you need to read Gerring et al 2011 on direct and indirect control.

Here are a few more works on case-based research in sociology and political science:

Byrne, David, and Charles C. Ragin (editors)
    2009    The Sage Handbook of Case-Based Methods. Sage, London.

Ragin, Charles C.
    1997    Turning the Tables: How Case-Oriented Research Challenges Variable-Oriented Research. Comparative Social Research 16:27-42.

Ragin, Charles C., and Howard S. Becker
    1992    What is a Case? Exploring the Foundations of Social Inquiry. Cambridge University Press, New York.

Ragin has also published a number of more recent methodological books on the topic.

Predatory (Bogus) Open Access Journals

2011-12-02T20:58:00.001-07:00

I just found a nice post, "Beall's list of Predatory, Open Access Journals." This is the definition given:

Predatory, open-access publishers are those thatunprofessionally exploit the author-pays model of open-access publishing (GoldOA) for their own profit. Typically, these publishers spam professional emaillists, broadly soliciting article submissions for the clear purpose of gainingadditional income. Operating essentially as vanity presses, these publisherstypically have a low article acceptance threshold, with a false-front ornon-existent peer review process. Unlike professional publishing operations,whether subscription-based or ethically-sound open access, these predatorypublishers add little value to scholarship, pay little attention to digitalpreservation, and operate using fly-by-night, unsustainable business models.
.

This definition is followed by a list of publishers, including Bentham Publishers. When their new journal, The Open Anthropology Journal, was announced in 2008, I expressed my sketicism in this blog, and then again when the first articles came out.

Here is the recommendation of Jeffrey Beall:

Recommendation: Do not do business with the above publishers, including submitting article manuscripts, serving on editorial boards, buying advertising, etc. There are numerous traditional, legitimate journals that will publish your quality work for free, including many legitimate, open-access publishers.

If you are involved in any form of scholarly evaluation such as, hiring, tenure / promotion review, or grant funding, be skeptical of articles published by any of these publishers listed above. Reading a list of publications or a vita, it is very difficult to distinguish legitimate journals from the illegitimate ones. One of the tricks the sham publishers use is to assign authentic-sounding and appearing titles to their journals. The presence of these bogus publishers has changed the task of scholarly evaluation, which now needs a keener eye to discern articles published in fraudulent journals.

Lest anyone think that "bogus" is too strong a word to use for these predatory journals, consider the apparent lack of rigorous peer review. In my classification of new journal-like venues, these would fall into the category of "pseudo-journals."

War stories from academic job interviews

2011-11-20T15:04:00.001-07:00

I've had nine academic job interviews in my career. Here is my won-lost score:

3 successful interviews (Loyola University, SUNY-Albany, Arizona State University)
4 unsuccessful interviews in good faith.
2 unsuccessful interviews in bad faith. A "bad faith" interview, as defined here, is one where there is no possibility that the candidate will get an offer. One or more candidates are brought in so that the department can claim to have examined several candidates, when in fact they are set on a particular person from the start (and you are NOT that person). {{Warning for new PhDs: you are the main fodder for this kind of episode, so don't take it too hard if it happens to you.}}

First, some generic advice. A commenter on my prior post ("How to give a bad conference talk") asked my advice on job talks. You just need to give an excellent presentation, longer than at a professional meeting, and one that explains a bit more of what you are all about intellectually and professionally. Much more important, in my mind, is how a candidate interacts personally with people in the department. You should read up on the faculty and programs, and be prepared to talk about them intelligently. Read this very complete and excellent list of job interview questions. I always took the attitude that an interview was a chance to learn about a program, to make new contacts, and to talk shop with a bunch of typically interesting colleagues who will either be very interested in you, or at least will probably pretend politely they are interested. If you don't get an offer, you at least have benefited from the experience.

As for my experiences, the juiciest episodes are better explored over a beer sometime. I will sanitize things and only tell a few tales here, using anonymity to protect the guilty. I am still peeved about the bad faith interviews (not that I would like to work at either institution!). In one case, a small but high-quality program, no one seemed at all interested in my work. They had someone there on a temporary line, and clearly wanted to hire this person full time. It is not uncommon to have one applicant already in a department, and rumor ALWAYS says that this person must have the inside track. But in several searches I know well, this was not the case. The searches were rigorous and unbiased, really looking for the best person, whether or not there was someone already in the department with a temporary position.

My other bad-faith interview was in a large prestigious department in a major university. A bunch of the people I talked to spent most of their time saying how great Dr. X is. (Do you know his work? Isn't it good? Have you heard what he said about this or that? Oh, and where do you work?) Before I finished, I asked someone outright if they planned to make an offer to Dr. X, and got a positive reply. I felt good when Dr. X. turned them down.

Several years later this same department asked me again to interview! I made darn sure they indeed had a real interest in me before I went. Yes, I was a serious candidate. I thought the interview went well; I talked to lots of people (more than on my first trip), who seemed very interested in what I had to say. I was told they wanted to make an offer, and had to do a tenure review (I was tenured elsewhere at the time) in order to make an offer with tenure. I sent them all my publications, etc. And that was the end of it. I never heard back from the department, to this day (some 20 years later!). Maybe my email tomorrow will contain a belated job offer (or a rejection!). After quite a while with no news, I ran into someone from the department at a meeting, who said they were sorry the job didn't work out. When I evidently looked puzzled, they said, "Didn't the chair contact you?" Nope. Still waiting for that one...... (Note that I am counting this one as a "good-faith" interview, perhaps too generously).

It turns out I did not pass their tenure review, because I had not yet published a book. It was a "book department": no book, no tenure. Now, every time a book comes out, I am tempted to send a copy to that department. I have published more books now than any archaeologist in that department. But I guess I just wasn't good enough for them. Actually, this episode may have been a blessing in disguise. I had an offer from Albany at the same time, but I might have been tempted by the prestige of the other university. Albany was a much better fit for me (and a much more congenial department overall), and I flourished in ways I would not have at the other place.

One more interview story. It's too long to go into detail here, but I will mention one notable aspect. This was one of my unsuccessful, good-faith interviews. A question from a graduate student after my talk effectively destroyed the entire conceptual foundation of my talk. Absolutely buried me! Deader than a doornail. The interviewee's worst nightmare. As soon as the question was posed, I realized I was sunk. Yet I had this flash that the answer to the contradiction was just at my fingertips, but I couldn't bring it in. I did not get an offer (surprise, surprise). Later I figured out how to resolve the conceptual contradiction that burned me, and got some mileage out of it in a couple of articles. In the acknowledgements of one, I thanked an anonymous graduate student for asking the right question at the wrong time. But after that experience, I was bullet-proof at interviews. There was nothing anyone could do to me as harmful as that experience, and I was much more relaxed at interviews.

I have no idea how typical my experiences have been. Did I have an especially high number of bad-faith interviews? I don't know. I did enjoy most of the interviews, and I met people and learned things at all of them. And now, I hope, I am through with job interviews!

I was thinking that three out of nine was not too bad a record for interviews, but then I talked to my daughter Heather, who is in the business world. Every single job interview she has participated in has led to an offer! Oh well.

How to give a bad conference talk!

2011-11-19T15:26:00.000-07:00

I just found that I had never posted this entry, written over a year ago.

I just got back from the Society for American Archaeology meetings in St. Louis. I have always been amazed at the low quality of many presentations at these meetings, starting at the first one I attended as an undergraduate. I am not just picking on students here; some of the worst clunkers are from senior scholars. It seems that many archaeologists must WANT to be boring and even insulting at conferences. If that is the case, then I can be helpful! Here are some tips on giving bad presentations:

Read your paper from a prepared text. This will almost always result in a worse presentation than if you talk from notes, or talk from your slides. This is an excellent way to give a boring talk. But it is not fool-proof; sometimes reading produces a good presentation.
Go over the time limit. This makes the session chair mad, it shows a lack of respect for the audience and other presenters, and it makes you look less professional. Maybe this is what you want. If so, read on…..
If you want to go over the time limit, here are some good ways to do it:

Read your paper from a prepared text. Then when you have misjudged the timing (this happens in most cases), and your allotted time runs out, you still aren’t done! The best material is in the conclusions, right?, and so you can’t just skip them. Go on and forge ahead to gain all the benefits of running overtime.
Stop to explain a slide. If you have planned your talk (whether to read or talk from notes), and in the process you take time out to explain a slide, I guarantee you will not finish within the time limit. Yes, this is a money-back guarantee. Try it sometime and let me know if I am right or wrong.
Don’t bother to look at the clock or your watch during your talk.
Don’t waste time practicing your talk ahead of time.
Use a pointer to show something on screen (please don’t use the simple tools of powerpoint to emphasize sites or places or points with arrows, circles, etc.). Much better to wave your pointer (with an unstable hand) in the general direction and hope the audience can find the thing you are talking about, while wasting time.

Well, perhaps you are young and nervous and insecure and feel that something will go seriously wrong if you don’t read your paper. That is probably not the case, but if you feel this way, here is a way to make sure your presentation is bad: Write the text using the style of discourse you would use in writing a journal article. That almost guarantees that your talk will be stiff and boring and difficult to follow. Don’t write it out in the style of verbal discourse, and whatever you do don't be informal or clear; that might produce a good presentation and that is not our goal here. Postmodern obfuscatory prose can help you underachieve.
Here are some tips for making sure your slides are bad:

Have long paragraphs of text in the slide.
Use small font (or odd color schemes) so people can’t read the text easily.
Use complicated charts and graphs that can’t be comprehended quickly and easily. A table that fills the screen with numbers is a great way to put the audience to sleep.
Use a pointer to show the audience something that is painfully obvious on the slide. Needless repetition is good here, both for making you look unprofessional and for putting time on the clock to help you run over the limit.

Insult your audience! (this should be #6, sorry) If you don't think the tips listed above will be sufficiently damaging to your talk and reputation, you can step it up a notch and insult the intelligence of your listeners. One of my favorite tricks is to put a bunch of text up on the screen, and then read it out loud, verbatim. That insults me every time.

If you follow some of these tips, you will be sure to give a low-quality presentation at your next professional conference.

New Online Anthropology "Journals": Semi- Quasi- or Pseudo- ?

2011-10-27T17:02:00.001-07:00

Since this is open access week, here are some thoughts on a couple of new online "journals" or journal-like entities, in the field of anthropology. They are Anthropologies, and Anthropology of this Century. I've published in the first, but not the second. Each has published some interesting papers. They seem to favor works relating to contemporary issues or contemporary disciplinary concerns.

This is the blurb for Anthropologies:

"This goal of this site is to explore contemporary anthropology through essays, short articles, and opinion pieces written from diverse perspectives. There is no single way to define the field, hence "anthropologies." By presenting various viewpoints and positions, this site seeks to highlight not only what anthropology means to those who practice it, but also how those meanings are relevant to wider audiences."

For Anthropology of This Century, the description is:

"ANTHROPOLOGY OF THIS CENTURY (AOTC) publishes reviews of recent works in anthropology and related disciplines, as well as occasional feature articles. There are three issues per academic year – in October, January and May."

This is not a full analysis of these two things, just some random thoughts and queries. Should we call them journals? Each has a name that sounds like it could be the name of a journal, and each is arranged in numbered volumes or issues, each with several papers (often on a theme). So outwardly these look like journals. Anthropologies calls itself variously a "site" and a "collaborative online project." Does that collaboration refer to the three members of the "Editorial Team," or to all the authors? Perhaps I am a collaborator in this project by virtue of the inclusion of my article; I'm not sure about this. AOTC does not call itself anything, perhaps on purpose. It has a list of people as "Our Authors," and one person is listed as "Publisher and Editor."

Semi-Journal ("half journal" or "partial journal") might be an appropriate name for these things. That is, they have some attributes of journals (editors, articles by scholars, numbered volumes), but not others (peer review; clear submission guidelines, editorial boards). Or perhaps Quasi-Journal (almost a journal, as if it were a journal)? I wouldn't call them Pseudo-Journals (false or fraudulent journals), since they do not claim to be academic journals. And they aren't blogs or wikis.

This name issue is not as trivial as it might sound. What is the intellectual and professional status of these things? When I mention my article in Anthropologies, I am never sure what to call it. ("Yes, I published something on that topic in an online _______" WHAT??). What should I call this on my CV? It is certainly not a peer reviewed journal article. I couldn't remember what I did with it, so I just checked my CV. Guess what - I forget to add it to my CV! And there is no appropriate category there to include it! Hmm, I will have to modify or add to the categories of written work on my CV to accommodate this article.

My confusion here is part of the general situation of flux in the online production of intellectual work throughout the disciplines. I must admit here, I am one of those old fashioned academics ("fossilized" some will say) who sees the value of peer-reviewed journals as much greater than things like blogs and online semi-journals. This and my other blogs are all well and good, a way to let off steam, but as a scholar I want to be known and appreciated for my scientific and scholarly publications. This issue came up in discussion on Neuroanthropology and other anthropology-related blogs recently. Greg Downey argued that blog writing should be taken more seriously by tenure and promotion committees, and judged as true intellectual production. I disagreed, suggesting that blogging is better viewed as a service activity, separate from intellectual contributions like peer-reviewed articles, books, grants, etc. Some other folks supported Greg (e.g., Jason Anstrosio; see posts on his very nice blog, Living Anthropologically), and praised blogs that discussed real scholarly topics, combining citations to the peer-reviewed literature with links to blogs and other internet venues (like semi-journals).

Perhaps one part of the disagreement here has to do with disciplinary differences. Blogs like Neuroanthropology often take on real scientific issues and discuss them in a sophisticated way, with citations to the relevant research. The archaeology blogs I am familiar with, on the other hand, mostly communicate to non-specialists, or else discuss disciplinary issues (like this one), but rarely take on serious intellectual issues. The papers on Anthropologies and AOTC are closer to the serious end of this spectrum, and perhaps they deserve more status or consideration than the typical archaeology blog. Nevertheless, they are not peer-reviewed. Say what you like about the criticisms and problems of peer-review; it is still the best filtering method available for maintaining the quality of academic production in scholarly disciplines.

I wouldn't mind calling Anthropologies and AOTC and other similar things "semi-journals," or literally, "half-journals." But I would emphasize that the half that they lack includes the most important thing for science and scholarship -- peer review. That said, these are interesting and important new venues, and it is hard to predict where internet scholarship will be 5 or 10 years from now. Check these out, especially Anthropologies, which is quite good and exciting.

How to Tell Good Ideas from Bad Ideas (according to Andrew Abbott)

2011-10-17T20:18:00.000-07:00

This is my third post on Andrew Abbott's excellent book, Methods of Discovery: Hueristics for the Social Sciences. Previous posts focused on:

The major debates in the social sciences. Abbott really clarifies theoretical divisions in the social sciences (and thus in archaeology), a discussion I have found tremendously useful.
Take Andrew Abbott's "taxi driver test." This device is about being able to explain your research in a couple of minutes to a taxi driver. If you can't do this, then you don't really understand your research.

Here I will discuss some material from Abbott's chapter 7, "Ideas and Puzzles." Much of his book is concerned with how to come up with new ideas. In this last chapter of the book, he talks about some ways to tell the good ones from the bad ones. Here are some of the ways to do this.

(1) Test your ideas.

"Obviously, the first test of an idea is to try it out, to run it past some data." (p.213). If you are going to test your ideas, they "must be framed in such a way that they can be wrong" (p.215). This sounds pretty basic, but Abbott observes, "It is quite surprising how many researchers -- even graduate students in their dissertations -- propose arguments that can't be wrong." (p.216). Such arguments are often classifying phenomena, or simply illustrating a theory. (Note, in Gabriel Abend's 2008 typology of theory, this kind of theory-illustration is typically associated with theory types 3, 5 and 7). Abbott goes on to state (p.218):

A good idea, then, ought to have some referent in the real world. This is not to deny the utility of pure social theory, but the vast majority of social theory consists of relabeling. All real theory arises in empirical work, in the attempt to make sense of the social world, no matter how abstractly construed. A student is well advised to stay clear of writing pure theory. It's an open invitation to vacuity.

(Note: by "real theory" Abbott is probably referring to Abend's theory types 1 and 2). Abbott goes on to argue that Bourdieu's concept "practice" is just a relabeling of what others in sociology have long called "regular behavior."

(2) Get opinions from other people.

Get feedback from friends, colleagues, and others. "an idea that requires a huge amount of explanation is probably not a good idea." (p.222). Don't get mad at negative feedback. It often does not mean your idea is bad, but rather that you did not state it well. This is where he brings up the "taxi driver test." And in reference to colleagues, Abbott suggests that "the ability of others to restate your idea clearly is the watershed." This signals that you have a good idea and that you have explained it well.

Abbott goes on to discuss other ways to evaluate ideas, including how they fit in the literature, good taste (that is, good taste in scholarship and academic phenomena), and personality. This is a fascinating chapter, full of useful insights.

Abbott, Andrew
2004 Methods of Discovery: Heuristics for the Social Sciences. Norton, New York.

Abend, Gabriel
2008 The Meaning of "Theory". Sociological Theory 26:173-199

Why did I resign from the American Anthropological Association?

2011-10-13T08:50:00.000-07:00

I recently resigned my membership in the American Anthropological Association, after nearly forty years. The AAA asked for my reasons for this, and gave me 900 characters to respond. This is what I told them:

4. Is there anything you care to say about yourmembership experience?

(1) During the nearly 40 years of my membership, Ihave found the AAA very poor in its responsiveness to members concerns.

(2) I have long been dismayed at the postmodern trendin anthropology, and the recent "science" episode tipped the scales.For me this involves 2 concerns:

(A) This confirmed my fears of an anti-sciencesentiment within anthropology.

(B) The response by the AAA president and board wascompletely inadequate in terms of internet communication and the role ofindependent bloggers. It showed a serious lack of understanding of both currentsentiment and the nature of blogs and internet communication.

(3) The AAA is too heavily politicized. As aprofessional organization, the AAA should not be taking stands (throughresolutions, etc.) on current political issues. This not only marginalizes somemembers, but also detracts from the ability of anthropology to contribute to the solution of social problems (see works by Doug Massey in sociology on this).

These are the works by Massey I was referring to (but did not have space in include in my reply to the AAA):

Massey, Douglas S.
2006 Doing Social Science in Anti-Scientific Times. American Sociologist 37:87-95.

2007 The Strength of Weak Politics. In Public Sociology: Fifteen Eminent Sociologists Debate Politics and the Profession in the Twenty-first Century, edited by Dan Clawson, Robert Zussman, Joya Mistra, Naomi Gerstel, Randall Stokes, Douglas L. Anderton, and Michael Burawoy, pp. 145-157. Universitiy of California Press, Berkeley.

Why is it that I find more inspiration these days -- both intellectual and professional -- from the field of sociology than from anthropology? That is one higher-level reason for leaving the AAA (although not a big enough reason to join the ASA!). For the price of my AAA membership, I can subscribe to several new journals, including Social Science History and Urban Morphology. I can get American Anthropology online through my university, but the thing I miss most about the AAA membership is easy access to the Anthropology News. This is online, with a five-year embargo!!! As if people really want to read a newsletter from five years ago.

I am enjoying these new journals, and I can get what I want out of American Anthropologist without having to worry about all the negative aspects of the AAA.

"Sign here"

2011-10-05T17:26:00.000-07:00

Perhaps you should think about adding the SPARC Author's Addendum to the copyright agreement form the next time you are asked to "sign here." It lets you keep some of the rights to your own published article.

Thanks to Daniel Lende at Neuroanthropology for this.

Don't publish in the wrong journal!

2011-09-26T13:29:00.000-07:00

I just read in interesting paper by James Acheson, "Ostrom for Anthropologists" (International Journal of the Commons 5 (2), 2011, pp. 319-339). Acheson reviews Elinor Ostrom's work on the exploitation of common pool resources and relates it to work in anthropology. One of the stated reasons for publishing the paper is that Ostrom's work is not as well known in anthropology as it should be, and Acheson wants more anthropologists to know about it and use it. So why publish it in a journal that anthropologists don't read?????? Does this make sense? If anthropologists DID read this journal, then presumably this article would not be necessary. This paper would be far more successful in a mainstream anthropology journal, and it is a case of "publishing in the wrong journal." I saw the paper only because the journal started emailing me its tables of contents, probably because I reviewed a manuscript for them a few months ago. But it is a great journal, and fully online and open access.

By the way, archaeologists could stand to pay more attention to Ostrom's work also. I've only seen a couple of papers that use it, including:

Bayman, James M. and Alan P. Sullivan, III
2008 Property, Identity, and Macroeconomy in the Prehispanic Southwest. American Anthropologist 110(1):6-20.

Ostrom's research is very relevant to archaeological work on land tenure and property, and also to the growing fields of archaeological research on collective action and cooperation.
--------------------------------------------

An archaeological example of publishing in the wrong places is Roland Fletcher's work on demography and settlement size. His model of the significance and implications of changes in the population size and density of settlements is quite important, both for archaeology and for general and comparative research on urban demography. He develops the model most fully in his 1995 book, The Limits of Settlement Growth, but all of the papers listed below deal with it in some way. One of the intriguing aspects of Fletcher's model is its applicability to modern and future urban growth. He develops this theme most fully in the book and in his 1999 paper, but it is touched on in most of the papers cited below.

How many explicit models do we have by archaeologists that make realistic empirical predictions about future social trends? Not many. Fletcher's work really needs to be read by demographers, sociologists, planners, and others interested in urban growth (that is, just about anybody interested in contemporary urbanization). But do these folks read books with titles like Time and Archaeology, or A Companion to Archaeology? Hardly. They might be temped by the title of Fletcher's 1995 book, but I have rarely if ever seen it cited by a non-archaeologist.

In this case, Fletcher is technically not publishing in the wrong journal. What he has done, in fact, is worse: he published in obscure edited volumes that have close to zero probability of being seen by scholars of modern urbanization. If he were to publish his model in a major urban journal, and cite his book and other papers, then perhaps others would take note. Last night on the airplane I read another paper on modern urban demography that really needed Fletcher's insights, but of course his work was not in the bibliography:

O'Brien, Daniel Tumminelli2009    Sociality in the City: Using Biological Principles to Explore the Relationship Between High Population Density and Social Behavior. In Advances in Sociology Research, edited by Jared A. Jaworski, pp. 1-14, vol. 8. Nova Science Publishers.

I've made a few of these mistakes myself, of which I'll just mention that a couple of my best papers appeared in obscure (and in one case, low-quality) edited collections that no one reads. These papers would be much more visible, with much higher scholarly impact, if I had published them in journals.

So please think carefully about where you publish your papers. If you want someone besides archaeologists to read them, then think about what kind of journal will get them seen where you want. Yes, the situation is much better with journals posted on the internet today, making it much easier to find papers in other fields. But just because something is published and is online does not mean that the target readers will find it.

Fletcher, Roland
1993    Settlement Area and Communication in African Towns and Cities. In The Archaeology of Africa: Food, Metals and Towns, edited by Thurston Shaw, Paul Sinclair, Bassey Andah, and Alex Okpoko, pp. 732-749. Routledge, London.

1995    The Limits of Settlement Growth: A Theoretical Outline. Cambridge University Press, New York.

1999    Appraising the Urban Future: An Archaeological Time Perspective. In Time and Archaeology, edited by Tim Murray, pp. 88-108. Routledge, New York.

2004    Materiality, Space, Time, and Outcome. In A Companion to Archaeology, edited by John Bintliff, pp. 110-140. Blackwell, Oxford.

2009    Low-Density, Agrarian-Based Urbanism: A Comparative View. Insights (University of Durham) 2:article 4. .

2012    Low-Density, Agrarian-Based Urbanism: Scale, Power and Ecology. In The Comparative Archaeology of Complex Societies, edited by Michael E. Smith. Cambridge University Press, New York.

The book review crisis

2011-09-19T08:40:00.000-07:00

A book not worthy of review?

Why is there no review of my 2008 book, Aztec City-State Capitals, in an archaeology or anthropology journal? Although I am biased, of course, I happen to think it's a good book; thus its absence is probably not due to a judgment by book review editors that it is not worthy of reviewing. I would think it relevant to anthropology journals that include archaeology, to journals in anthropological archaeology, and to journals in Mesoamerican and New World archaeology. Yet to date, none of these journals have reviewed the book.

Why not? This is a real question, not a rhetorical question that I will now proceed to answer. The book has been reviewed by two urban journals. Caroline Dodds Pennock wrote a review in the Urban History, and Elizabeth Graham recently reviewed it for the online forum, H-Urban (*** disclaimer: I am one of several review editors for H-Urban, but I did not solicit or edit this review, which was handled by another editor). But why won't journals in my own home fields review the book?

I have spoken several times in the blog about what I call the "book review crisis" in New World archaeology/anthropological archaeology. Some of the main journals (e.g., Ancient Mesoamerica) don't publish book reviews, and others (e.g., Latin American Antiquity) have dropped to embarrasingly low levels of reviews (about one per issue lately). These are my previous posts on the subject:

Latin American Antiquity book review update (14-October, 2010)

Has Latin American Antiquity abandoned book reviews (12-April, 2010)

The book review crisis in Latin American archaeology (21-August, 2009)

Is there a book review crisis in New World archaeology? (27-July, 2008)

It is interesting that in the three years I have been complaining about this, not one journal editor, or book review editor, or journal editorial board member has even mentioned the issue to me. The obvious explanation here is that they aren't following this blog. Ok, c'est la vie. But why are journals not publishing book reviews? It is not just me - at one point I made a list of some important books in my field that had not been reviewed by the journals (and now I can't find the list...). No, I'm not angling for a job as a book review editor. Been there, done that. Maybe again someday, but certainly not with a sabbatical coming up soon.

I apologize here for using my own case to make a general point, but it is a case I know well. But I do feel strongly about the general point, and I wish I had an explanation (and, better still, a solution).

The Comparative Archaeology of Complex Societies

2011-09-04T19:33:00.004-07:00

My new edited volume, The Comparative Archaeology of Complex Societies, was released last week! I got my copies in the mail on Friday, and they look great. Based on a conference at the very nice Amerind Foundation in spring 2008, the chapters are a selection of case studies showing how to do rigorous comparative analysis with archaeological data. Chapter 1 is a group statement or manifesto by all participants on the importance of comparative analysis in contemporary archaeology. (You can read this statement here.). The book is not a textbook, and we don't offer a unified set of methods that we advocate for others to adopt. Rather, we base our examples on several principles (e.g., it is best to compare primary archaeological data, rather than comparing the interpretations of diverse archaeologists about their data), and make our argument through the case studies themselves.

One of the ulterior motives for the conference and book is to re-invigorate the use of rigorous comparative methods in archaeology. Comparative analysis was one of the casualties of postmodern archaeology, and as archaeologists with a scientific approach we are asserting the primacy of comparison to a rigorous explanatory archaeology.

Here is the table of contents:

1. Comparative Archaeology: ACommitment to Understanding Variation

Groupstatement by all contributors

2. Approaches to ComparativeAnalysis in Archaeology

Michael E. Smith and Peter Peregrine

3. Comparative Frames for theDiachronic Analysis of Complex Societies: Next Steps

GaryM. Feinman

4. What It Takes to Get Complex: Food,Goods, and Work as Shared Cultural Ideals from

theBeginning of Sedentism

MonicaL. Smith

5. Challenges for ComparativeStudy of Early Complex Societies

RobertD. Drennan and Christian E. Peterson

6. Patterned Variation inRegional Trajectories of Community Growth

ChristianE. Peterson and Robert D.Drennan

7. The Genesis of Monuments inIsland Societies

MichaelJ. Kolb

8. Power and Legitimation:Political Strategies, Typology, and Cultural Evolution

PeterPeregrine

9. The Strategies of Provincialsin Empires

BarbaraL. Stark and John K. Chance

10. Households, Economies, andPower in the Aztec and Inka Imperial Provinces

TimothyEarle and Michael E. Smith

11. Low-Density, Agrarian-BasedUrbanism: Scale, Power and Ecology

RolandFletcher

12. Archaeology, Early ComplexSocieties, and Comparative Social Science History

MichaelE. Smith

Index

Commercial publishers and scholarly research

2011-08-31T15:48:00.000-07:00

Have you have ever wondered about the curious situation in which academic scholars do research for free, and then publish it in commercial journals, whose corporate owners then get rich by charging big fees while preventing authors from distributing our work? You may want to read:

"Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist" in The Guardian.

The major debates in the social sciences

2011-08-17T19:02:00.000-07:00

This is post #2 in my series based on Andrew Abbott's excellent book, Methods of Discovery: Heuristics for the Social Sciences (2004, Norton). Many or most of these resonate with theoretical perspectives in archaeology. Arguments between Binfordites and Hodderites reproduce several of these, as do arguments between selectionists and processualists or between materialists and culturalists. Think about archaeology as you read through these. I think they are very instructive and helpful.

These are Abbott's brief descriptions from a table (page 52-3); that is, this is a long quotation.. The table is preceded by brief sections on each debate.

Methodological Debates

· Positivism: reality is measurable.

· Interpretivism: there is no meaning without interaction and hence no measurement in the abstract.

· Analysis: there is no explanation without causality.

· Narration: stories can explain.

Debates about Social Ontology

· Behaviorism: social structure (i.e., routine behavior) is the proper foundation of analysis.

· Culturalism: culture (i.e., symbolic systems) is the proper foundation for analysis.

· Individualism: human individuals and their acts are the only real objects of social scientific analysis.

· Emergentism: social emergents exist, are irreducible to individuals, and can be real objects of social scientific analysis.

· Realism: social phenomena have endurance and stability; analysis should focus on the enduring, stable qualities of social phenomena.

· Constructionsim: social phenomena are continually reproduced in interaction; analysis should focus on that reproduction.

· Contextualism: social phenomena are inevitably contextual and cannot be analyzed without taking account of context.

· Noncontextualism: social phenomena have meaning (and can be analyzed) independent of their contexts.

Debates about Problematics

· Choice: analysis should focus on why and how actors make choices and on the consequences of those choices.

· Constraint: analysis should focus on the structural constraints that govern action.

· Conflict: we need to explain why there is so much social conflict.

· Consensus: we need to explain why there it not more social conflict.

Debates about Types of Knowledge

· Transdendent knowledge: our knowledge should apply at all places and times. It should be ‘universal.’

· Situated knowledge: our knowledge must be limited in its application. It is always local or particular.

I find these all quite apt and intuitive, except perhaps conflict/consensus. As pointed out by Randall Collins in his review of the book, Abbott's discussion of this debate is the opposite of how this pair is normally understood.

Later in the book Abbott presents a very interesting discussion of the productivity of arguments moving back and forth between particular sides or approaches. The overall focus of the book is on heuristics - how to find new ideas. Abbott provides examples of, for example, contextualist researchers who make a non-contextualist move (and the reverse), resulting in new insights.

Take Andrew Abbott's "Taxi driver test"

2011-08-09T20:24:00.003-07:00

This is the first of several posts based on Andrew Abbott's (2004) book, Methods of Discovery. This is one of the best books I've read on the social sciences: how arguments work, what are the major debates, how can they be combined or exploited, where do good ideas come from, etc. It is intended as a manual for students, undergraduate and graduate, but I found it fascinating, exciting, and informative. Any archaeology student who is interested in social-science kinds of issues will learn much from this book.

So, here is the "taxi driver test":

If you are on your way somewhere to present your idea and you cannot in five minutes explain what you are talking about well enough so that your taxi driver or the person in the adjacent aircraft seat can understand it and see why it’s interesting, you don’t really understand your idea yet. You aren’t ready to present it. This holds no matter how complex your idea is. If you can’t state it in everyday terms for an average person with no special interest in it, you don’t understand it yet. Even for those working in the most abstruse formalisms, this is the absolute test of understanding.”

Think about it. Can you explain YOUR research, including its importance and why it is interesting, to the taxi driver? I would like to think that I can do this, but in reality I think that I would be more successful with some of my ideas and less successful with others. This feature reminds me of some of the work of sociologist Robert Sampson. Sampson, who holds an endowed chair at Harvard and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, is a very productive and influential sociologist who works on modern U.S. urban neighborhoods, crime, poverty, and their interrelations. We had him out to ASU as a consultant and speaker on our urban neighborhoods project. Out of many things that I find important in Sampson's work, one of his most impressive attributes is the way he explains and organizes knowledge about his basic research. He identifies three basic ideas, shows why they are important, what we need to know, and how his research contributes to each theme.

Briefly, Sampson's three themes are:

Things go together. That is, a variety of typically negative social patterns have strong spatial and causal clustering. These include poverty, crime, racial segregation, and neighborhood deterioration.
Durability and poverty traps. Neighborhood differences in poverty, crime, etc, are remarkably stable and persistent over time, reinforced by violence and disorder.
Structural intervention. It is exceedingly difficult to fix these urban problems (and they certainly are not going to go away by themselves). Structural intervention is needed in the form of specifically targeted programs and actions.

These three ideas provide the structure for a very clear and fascinating paper summarizing much of Sampson's research (Sampson 2009). When he gave a public lecture at ASU, he used these 3 themes to organize the talk, and as a result it was a model of clarity for a diverse audience (professors to undergrads, many discplines). I'm sure that if the taxi driver asked Rob Sampson about his research, he could rattle off these 3 ideas and pass Andrew Abbott's test with flying colors. Ever since hearing his lecture, I have been mulling over this device, trying to find three (or 2 or 4) basic ideas that tie together my own research. I am still mulling......

Anyway, back to Andrew Abbott. Don't just take my word about how great this book is. Check out what Randall Collins (one of the premier social scientists today) has to say in a review. This taxi driver test is just one minor point in the book; I will probably have later posts on Abbott's list of major social science debates, his discussion of the five fundamental social science methods, and perhaps some of his cracks about high-level social theory (e.g., "the vast majority of social theory consists of relabeling", p.218).

Go buy this book and read it. It is better than any archaeological book on social methods or theory, although I doubt the "social archaeology" crowd will agree with me here. Actually, reading Abbott has helped clarify my disagreements with that approach. Compared with postmodern or social archaeology, I happen to line up on the opposite side of about half of his major social science debates. Stay tuned.....

Abbott, Andrew
2004 Methods of Discovery: Heuristics for the Social Sciences. Norton, New York.

Sampson, Robert J.
2009 Racial Stratification and the Durable Tangle of Neighborhood Inequality. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 621:260-280.

Why don't archaeologists talk about causality, explanation, and epistemology?

2011-07-20T20:34:00.000-07:00

I just read a nice review article in American Anthropologist (vol. 113 (2):200-212, 2011), "Explaining the Past in 2010," by Elizabeth Arkush. As a review article, I found it intelligent, well-organized, and useful (as judged by the resulting growth in my Endnote bibliography file). But I found it slightly bizarre that an article titled "Explaining the past" has almost nothing to say about explanation, causality, or epistemology. Arkush does mention the postmodern/scientific theoretical split in archaeology and wisely does not get hung up on it. But in what ways can the various accounts she reviews be seen as "explaining" past society and historical change? What does explanation mean in archaeology, anyway? Why don't we talk more about these things?

First, a caveat. I am not any kind of expert in this area; in fact I'm not even sure my command of these epistemological and ontological issues is even minimally competent. Nevertheless, I do think that much of archaeology is in poor shape epistemologically, and I have recently become aware of numerous good models and approaches outside of archaeology and anthropology that we are ignoring at our peril. So while I hesitate to claim expertise or deep understanding, I do think that my suggestions are worth a look.

Why are we in bad shape epistemologically? Binford and the new archaeologists got off on the wrong foot by throwing in with Hempel's covering-law approach to explanation, even though it was already under attack by philosophers of science as inappropriate for the social sciences. There are still some scientifically-oriented archaeologists advocating covering-law explanations today (e.g., Kuznar and Long 2008). Then postmodernism hijacked theoretical discussion in archaeology. To the postmodernists (post-processsualists, "social archaeology" advocates, poststructuralists, postcolonial archaeologists, etc.), causality and explanation were (and are) bad and not to be discussed (mere scintistic delusions). Those archaeologists who did have some concern with epistemology got hung up on comparing scientific and postmodern archaeology ("see, both sides really use almost the same kinds of reasoning"), a trend that continues today. And while archaeologists have been excavating, arguing, navel-gazing, and rubbing up against cultural anthropology, the other social sciences (and the philosophy of science) were getting on with the job of producing reliable explanations of society, behavior, and historical change. It's time that archaeologists looked to this broader literature for suggestions and models. Here are a few suggestions.

Kuznar, Lawrence A. and Kenneth Long (2008) Deductive-Nomological vs. Causal-Mechanical Explanation: Relative Strengths and Weaknesses in Anthropological Explanation. In Against the Grain: The Vayda Tradition in Human Ecology and Ecological Anthropology, edited by Bradley B. Walters, Bonnie J. MacKay, Paige West and Susan Lees, pp. 159-173. AltaMira, Lanham, MD.

Middle-range theory (Mertonian, NOT Binfordian)

I deal with this issue at length in my urban theory paper (Smith 2011), so I won't say much here. Suffice it to say that the high-level social theory many archaeologists are enamored of is simply not up to the task of explaining actual empirical social changes or processes (in the past or in the present). What is called middle-range theory by everyone except archaeologists is needed for the day-to-day, nuts-and-bolts work of archaeologists who want to explain social processes.

The postmodernists out there will hate this diagram, and dismiss it out of hand; see Smith (2011) for discussion of the issue.

Smith, Michael E. (2011) Empirical Urban Theory for Archaeologists. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 18:(in press).

Causal mechanisms

The “nuts-and-bolts” metaphor above was deliberate. It is one way that sociologists and political scientists describe their work in identifying the causal mechanists that account for social change. Here are just a few of the many sources that contain discussions of causality and causal mechanisms that are very relevant for archaeology:

Bunge, Mario (1997) Mechanism and Explanation. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 27:410-465.

Elster, Jon (2007) Explaining Social Behavior: More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences. Cambridge University Press, New York.

Gerring, John (2007) Review Article: The Mechanistic Worldview: Thinking Inside the Box. British Journal of Political Science 38:161-179.

Hedström, Peter (2005) Dissecting the Social: On the Principles of Analytical Sociology. Cambridge University Press, New York.

Hedström, Peter and Petri Ylikoski (2010) Causal Mechanisms in the Social Sciences. Annual Review of Sociology 36:49-67.

Sampson, Robert J. (2011) Neighborhood Effects, Causal Mechanisms and the Social Structure of the City. In Analytical Sociology and Social Mechanisms, edited by Pierre Demeulenaere, pp. 227-249. Cambridge Universitiy Press, New York.

Tilly, Charles (2008) Explaining Social Processes. Paradigm Publishers, Boulder, CO.

Explanation more generally

Fogelin (2007) is a very useful account, although a major deficiency, to my mind, is that he doesn’t stress the value of causal mechanisms. But read some of the stuff above to remedy that deficiency. Gibbon (1989) and Kelley and Hanon (1988) presented excellent accounts of scientific realism and explanation to archaeologists, but they never had the impact they deserved. See also Bunge (2004), Vayda (2008) and many of the other works cited in this post.

Bunge, Mario (2004) How Does It Work?: The Search for Explanatory Mechanisms. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 34(2):182-210.

Fogelin, Lars (2007) Inference to the Best Explanation: A Common and Effective form of Archaeological Reasoning. American Antiquity 72:603-625.

Gibbon, Guy (1989) Explanation in Archaeology. Blackwell, Oxford.

Kelley, Jane H. and Marsha P. Hanen (1988) Archaeology and the Methodology of Science. University of New Mexico Press`, Albuquerque.

Vayda, Andrew P. (2008) Causal Explanation as a Research Goal: A Pragmatic View. In Against the Grain: The Vayda Tradition in Human Ecology and Ecological Anthropology, edited by Bradley B. Walters, Bonnie J. MacKay, Paige West and Susan Lees, pp. 317-367. AltaMira, Lanham, MD.

The nature of theory

Lars Mjøset (2001) identifies four approaches to theory in the social sciences, and in his 2006 paper he expands this to six. His discussions illuminate how different archaeological camps approach theory and explanation:

Law-oriented
Idealizing
Explanation-based
Critical
Transcendental
Deconstructionist

And in a brilliant paper, Gabriel Abend (2008) shows how sociologists mean one of seven different things when they use the term “theory.” Most of his seven meanings are directly relevant to anthropology and to archaeology. A very insightful paper, and I also recommend his 2006 paper, particularly for nomothetically-inclined U.S. archaeologists who have dealt with scholars in Latin America who might be more idiographic in orientation.

Abend, Gabriel (2006) Styles of Sociological Thought: Sociologies, Epistemologies, and the Mexican and U.S. Quests for Truth. Sociological Theory 24(1):1-41.

Abend, Gabriel (2008) The Meaning of "Theory". Sociological Theory 26:173-199.

Mjøset, Lars (2001) Theory: Conceptions in the Social Sciences. In International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, edited by Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes, pp. 15641-15647. Elsevier, New York.

Mjøset, Lars (2009) The Contextualist Approach to Social Science Methodology. In The Sage Handbook of Case-Based Methods, edited by David Byrne and Charles C. Ragin, pp. 39-68. Sage, London.

Charles Tilly and social science epistemology

I nominate Charles Tilly for the best social scientist that archaeologists have never heard of. He explains social science epistemology and ontology so clearly, that even a philosophically-challenged guy like me can begin to understand. Here is one of his lists of major social science epistemologies, or “logics of explanation” (Tilly 2008:8):

Covering laws
Specification of necessary and sufficient conditions
Statistical regression accounts (where one variable “accounts for” another
Locations of structures and processes within larger systems (functionalist)
Stage models; invariant growth sequences.
Identification of individual or group dispositions just before a point of action.
Reduction of complex episodes, or certain features of those episodes, to their component mechanisms and processes.

Tilly’s writing is clear and insightful. Here are just a few of his works that have relevance for archaeological considerations of epistemology, causality, and explanation (and if you work on states, be sure to check out Tilly 1985 and 2008 on states as protection rackets).

Tilly, Charles (1985) War Making and State Making as Organized Crime. In Bringing the State Back in, edited by Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschmeyer and Theda Skocpol, pp. 169-186. Cambridge University Press, New York.

Tilly, Charles (2001) Mechanisms in Political Processes. Annual Review of Political Science 4:21-41.

Tilly, Charles (2001) Relational Origins of Inequality. Anthropological Theory 1(3):355-372.

Tilly, Charles (2008) Explaining Social Processes. Paradigm Publishers, Boulder, CO.

Tilly, Charles and Sidley Tarrow (2006) Contentiouis Politics. Paradigm, Boulder, CO.

Some useful philosophy of social science

Boyd, Richard (2010) Scientific Realism. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2010 Edition), edited by Edward N. Zalta. Stanford University, Stanford.

Bunge, Mario (1996) Finding Philosophy in Social Science. Yale University Press, New Haven.

Bunge, Mario (2011) Knowledge: Genuine and Bogus. Science and Education 20:411-438.

Elder-Vass, Dave (2010) The Causal Power of Social Structures: Emergence, Structure and Agency. Cambridge University Press, New York.

Jarvie, Ian and Jesús Zamora-Bomilla (editors) (2011) Sage Handbook of the Philosophy of the Social Sciences. Sage, New York.

Little, Daniel (1998) Microfoundations, Method, and Causation: On the Philosophy of the Social Sciences. Transaction, New Brunswick.

Little, Daniel (2010) New Contributions to the Philosophy of History. Springer, New York.

Pawson, Ray (2000) Middle-Range Realism. European Journal of Sociology 41:283-325.

Sayer, R. Andrew (2000) Realism and Social Science. Sage, New York.

So, maybe I have violated the “Confucius says” phrase I remember from fifth grade: “Sometimes it is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.” Or maybe some of this will be useful to others. I have certainly found much to think about in this literature (Smith 2011, 2012).

Smith, Michael E. (2011) Empirical Urban Theory for Archaeologists. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 18:(in press).

Smith, Michael E. (2012) Archaeology, Early Complex Societies, and Comparative Social Science History. In The Comparative Archaeology of Complex Societies, edited by Michael E. Smith, pp. 321-329. Cambridge University Press, New York.

Desperate to present a paper? We can help! Go to BogusConference.Com

2011-07-17T08:08:00.000-07:00

Every time I get one of these email solicitations for a bogus conference I vow to blog about it. I just received this message:
-------------------------------------------------------------

Call for Papers from ICSSS 2011

Considering your research in related areas, we cordially invite you to submit a paper to ICSSS 2011.

2011 International Conference on Social Sciences and Society (ICSSS 2011) will be held in October 14-15, 2011 in Shanghai, China.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: economics, management, sociology, education science, linguistics, art theory, political science and other humanities and social sciences.

Website: http://www.icsa-association.org/icsss/

The submission system is open.

http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=icsss2011

Paper format see: http://www.icsa-association.org/icsss/ps.htm

Paper Submission Due：August 10, 2011(Extended)

Contact Email: icsss2011reg@163.com

Tel: + (86) 186 2787 2331

-------------------------------------------------------

Okay, what is wrong with this message? (This is like one of those kids games: can you spot five things wrong with this picture?)

The theme is way too braod to be of any intellectual value at all.
You've never heard of this conference or organization.
You've never heard of any of the people on the organizing committee.
The registration fee is $1,400. That's right, $1,400. Check the website.
The "Call for Papers" is a long list of disciplines (including archaeology!), many of which have nothing to do with one another.

Let's look a bit deeper. I googled one of the organizers, Gary Lee, of the "Information Engineering Institute." In about three minutes of searching, I found him listed as an organizer for these conferences:

2011 International Conference on Social Sciences and Society (ICSSS 2011)
2012 International Conference on Electronics, Information and Communication Engineering (EIEC 2012)
2011 2nd International Conference of Electrical and Electronics Engineering
2011 International Conference on Future Information Engineering (ICFIE 2011 - Bangkok, Thailand
2011 International Conference on Mechanical Engineering and Technology (ICMET 2011)

If you haven't guessed yet, the goal of these conferences is to make money off students and professionals
who are desperate to present papers. A few years ago, some MIT students submitted some fake papers to one of these bogus conferences. The text was complete gibberish (computer generated blather), yet the papers were accepted. Shades of Alan Sokal.

I wonder what would happen if someone submitted an abstract for the SAA or AIA meetings that was gibberish. A good way to do this would involve the Postmodern Text Generator. Click on the link, and then refresh the site for a new text. I have served as Program Chair for the SAA meetings, and I can't honestly say whether we would have rejected a nonsense abstract or not. Hmmmmmmm...........

Journal impact factors, scholars who don't cite the literature

2011-07-07T17:50:00.000-07:00

In case your were wondering whether the journal Endeavor (a British journal on the history and philosophy of science) was improving its impact or not, I pass on this email I just got from Elsevier:

	Endeavour
	2009 Impact Factor WAS 0.167 2010 Impact Factor NOW 0.245

Listed by highest Impact Factor

Journal title	2010 Impact Factor
Journal Of Archaeological Science	1.710
Journal Of Anthropological Archaeology	1.623
Journal Of Historical Geography	0.983
Studies In History And Philosophy Of Modern Physics	0.447
Studies In History And Philosophy Of Science	0.325

Wow, Endeavor is up from 0.167 to 0.245! That makes my lone contribution to the journal (a book review a number of years ago) much more visible and valuable! One thing that puzzles me, though, is why did they send me this particular list of journals? I can understand if Elsevier has in its database that I have published recently in the Jr. of Anth. Archy and Jr. Historical Geography. But how did they link me up with Endeavor, from one book review nine years ago? There are literally hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Michael Smiths out there publishing in academic journals. Are they looking at my website? Or perhaps the data are from ResearcherID? (I'm not sure if the book review is listed there or not).

In any case, this provides a link to my second topic, scholars who don't cite the literature. I was reading a review of a book by S.N.Eisenstadt by Charles Tilly, who took the author to task for leaving out large bodies of relevant literature (the review is republished in Tilly's excelent book, Explaining Social Processes). This reminded me of my contribution to the journal Endeavor, a review of Ross Hassig's book, Time, History and Belief in Aztec and Colonial Mexico. Hassig has some interesting ideas about how Aztec calendars were linked to political processes, and I find his materialist explanation of various calendrical issues congenial.

However, Hassig's methods leave something to be desired. He analyzes the primary sources well, evaluates them against one another, and reaches his conclusions, which seem reasonable on the basis of his argument. However, he completely ignores the secondary literature on those topics. For example, from his discussion of whether the Aztecs added a day to their annual calendar every four years (leap years) to account for the length of the solar year, one would never know that this is a contentious issue, with much debate and many publications by specialists. And since much of this literature draws on sources and concepts and methods not covered by Hassig, his discussion is incomplete and out of step with the literature. Some of his conclusions match consensus views, and some are out in left field, but a non-specialist reader (perhaps someone interested in Babylonian calendars) would never know which is which.

So, who should one pay attention to? Ross Hassig (generally a very good scholar), or the larger body of specialist literature that he does not cite? In science, the results of research are judged by a community of scholars (Calleigh 2000; Harris 1979:chapter 1). This is an amorphous group of individuals, who express themselves in publications, peer reviewing, lectures, emails, conversations over beers, and (increasingly), blogs. Hassig's work would be more convincing if he could show that his conclusions are not contradicted by the findings of other scholars. I don't claim to understand the details of Aztec or Mesoamerican calendrics (a ridiculously complicated topic), but I do trust the community of scholars more than I trust a single author laboring in isolation. And Hassig's contributions to the community of scholars would be greater if he engaged with the research of the rest of the specialists (e.g., Anthony Aveni, Hanns Prem, Edward Calnek, Michel Graulich, Rafael Tena).

Yes, scholars often work alone. But our research is part of broader disciplinary and transdisciplinary contexts, and it is judged not by absolute standards but the the relevant communities of scholars. We should all cite the literature, and frown on those who choose not to.

Calleigh, Addeane S.
2000 Community of Scholars. Academic Medicine 75(9):912.

Harris, Marvin
1979 Cultural Materialism: The Struggle of a Science of Cultures. Random House, New York.

Dumping on Binford

2011-07-04T20:09:00.000-07:00

Colleen Morgan at Middle Savagery pointed to a new article in which Alice Kehoe bashes Lewis Binford (Kehoe 2011). Kehoe obviously has some serious and long-standing beefs with Binford, and her piece is more an emotional rant than an intellectual analysis. It jumps all over the place, from serious intellectual and empirical issues to innuendo and hearsay. I agree with Bradley Garrett, in his comment on Colleen's post, that Kehoe's paper is "deeply embarrassing for all parties involved. Why would a scholarly journal publish such a vicious personal attack thinly veiled as a disciplinary biography?" Well, if their emails are any indication, I would conclude that the journal (Arqueología Iberoamericana") is desperate for articles. This one certainly wouldn't be accepted (in its published form) at most archaeology journals.

I think many of us have our beefs with Binford. For example, see my urban theory paper (Smith 2011) for some remarks on his academic provincialism, which contributed greatly to the isolation of archaeology from other social sciences by using standard social science terms (e.g., "middle-range theory," "normative") in idiosyncratic ways. But what is needed is serious intellectual analysis of Binford and his role, not emotional personal attacks.

It often seems hard to come to grips with the intellectual legacies of major scholars immediately after their death. For example, almost everything written about Gordon Willey since his death ten years ago (e.g., Sabloff and Fash 2007) has been in the hagiographic mode: what a great man, such important contributions, wasn't he wonderful! Yet in my opinion, his stubborn (and puzzling) view that the Maya were a non-urban civilization held back the progress of Mayan studies for several decades. Now this is a small point in comparison with Willey's broad range of positive contributions, but I haven't seen a negative word published about Willey.

Archaeology needs some serious work in the area of intellectual biography. The lives and works of recently deceased towering scholars, from Lewis Binford and Gordon Willey, to William Sanders and David Kelley (there is a definite Mesoamerican slant here), deserve close scrutiny. Although I agree with many of Kehoe's criticisms of Binford's thinking, and in spite of some entertaining notions ("Binford as a Southern Baptist preacher"), I think Lew deserves better.

References

Kehoe, Alice B.2011    Lewis Binford and his Moral Majority. Arqueología Iberoamericana 10:8-16.

Sabloff, Jeremy A. and William L. Fash (editors)
2007    Gordon R. Willey and American Archaeology: Contemporary Perspectives. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman.

Smith, Michael E.2011    Empirical Urban Theory for Archaeologists. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 18:(in press).

Binford vs. Childe: Who was the most influential archaeologist?

2011-06-15T12:59:00.000-07:00

"Lewis Binford was the most influential archaeologist of the 20th century." (Robert Kelly 2011).

"V. Gordon Childe was the most influential archaeologist of the 20th century." (Michael Smith 2009).

So, who is right here? Kelly's remarks are from his very nice obituary of Lewis Binford in Science, May 20, 2011, p. 928; my quote is from: Smith, Michael E. (2009) V. Gordon Childe and the Urban Revolution: An Historical Perspective on a Revolution in Urban Studies. Town Planning Review 80:3-29.

When I was an undergraduate in the 1970s, this question would have been a no-brainer. I found Binford's emphasis on science and rigor new and exciting, very attractive to someone who wandered into archaeology from a math/science background. On the other hand Childe's work (the one article I forced to read, "The Urban Revolution") was boring and obvious. Ho hum, what's so great about this? He is saying what all the textbooks say, big deal! But the reason I found Childe's work obvious was that he had largely created modern archaeological views of past society, and the textbooks and current research all flowed from Childe.

Perhaps if one qualifies the superlative, the question is easier to resolve:

Binford was the most influential ___________ archaeologist:

Anthropological
New World (perhaps)
Recent theoretical/methodological
Hunter/gatherer

Childe, on the other hand, was the most influential ____________ archaeologist:

Prehistoric
Old World
Early 20th century theoretical
Neolithic and states

But if qualifications are not allowed, I stand with my prior assessment: Childe over Binford, no contest.

Childe created the modern social interpretation of the archaeological record. His concepts of the Neolithic Revolution and Urban Revolution synthesized vast amounts of data from around the world for the first time. He emphasized the importance of these transformations in human history. Almost all subsequent archaeological research on agricultural origins, the rise of states, and everything in between, is based on Childe's foundational work. My 2009 paper is an exploration not only of the historical importance of Childe's Urban Revolution concept, but also of its continuing importance and influence today. I don't think there is any concept or breakthrough by Binford that comes close to the broad influence of the concepts of the Neolithic Revolution and the Urban Revolution.

Binford founded the New Archaeology, which had major theoretical and methodological influences in the latter part of the 20th century. But many of his theoretical innovations were quickly challenged by the postprocessualists, and today they seem less earth-shattering than they did when I was an undergraduate. Binford's call for archaeology to be anthropology now seems almost quaint. He meant that archaeologists should study society and social change, in place of the prior classificatory and descriptive orientation of much of New World archaeology. But Childe had made the same argument decades earlier (more for social interpretation generally, less for anthropology specifically), and good social interpretations of archaeological data long pre-dated Binford and the New Archaeology. Although some of today's social interpretations of the archaeological record are heavily influenced by Binford, much owes little to his work.

On the topic of hunters/gathers, however, there is no contest; Binford is a towering figure in this area, and Childe made quite modest contributions. Perhaps it is not surprising that Bob Kelly, a hunter/gatherer type, calls Binford the most influential archaeologist, while as an urban type I see Childe as more important.

Lewis Binford was extremely influential for a generation of anthropological archaeologists. He also had important theoretical and methodological influence on archaeology world-wide. But to my mind, Gordon Childe had a much bigger impact on how archaeologists interpret the past and on the discipline more generally.

Did Stephen J. Gould Fudge The Data ?

2011-06-13T12:38:00.000-07:00

I will assume that most archaeologists have read some works by the late biologist and public intellectual Stephen J. Gould. His works on history and evolution (Gould 1986, 1987, and 1989) are of fundamental importance for those who (like me) consider archaeology as a historical science. History, archaeology, geology, paleontology, astronomical cosmology, and other historical sciences share a number of conceptual problems concerning how we can understand what happened in the distant past. Reading what Gould says about how these problems have been addressed in geology and paleontology helps archaeologists think about our own methods and data. And while I am on this theme, Darwin's book on worms is also of great use here (Darwin wondered why ancient Roman ruins became buried, and did fieldwork to investigate the actions of worms in the burial of old ruins -- great stuff!!), and Gould's introduction to that book is very good also. Don't forget Toulmin and Goodfield (1965), another important work in this area. And by coincidence, today I am wearing a T-shirt with Darwin's portrait, wearing a Che Guevara-style beret, with the logo, "Viva la evolución!"

Anyway, back to Gould possibly fudging data. In Mismeasure of Man, Gould uses Samuel Morton's measurements of human cranial capacity (in the 19th century) as an example of how a scientist's personal bias can influence his work and skew one's results. Morton wanted to show that Causians had the biggest brains, and Gould claims to show that this desire led to subtle "fudging" of Morton's data in favor of his preconceptions. Even since 1981, this has become a "textbook example" of bias in research. Well, now some anthropologists have gone back and remeasured a bunch of Morton's skulls at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, and re-analyzed Morton's and Gould's data. They concluded that Morton's results were NOT biased or skewed, but that Gould's analyses were biased, with some aspects evidently made up. Wow, this is disheartening -- Stephen Jay Gould has long been one of my intellectual heroes.

The article is:

Lewis, Jason E., David DeGusta, Marc R. Meyer, Janet M. Monge, Alan E. Mann, and Ralph L. Holloway
    2011    The Mismeasure of Science: Stephen Jay Gould versus Samuel George Morton on Skulls and Bias. PLOS Biology 6(6):1-6. .

The University Museum is using the study to generate publicity. There is information on their website, including a short video about Morton and his collection. The video, narrated by Janet Monge, does not have the best discussion of the collection and the new research, however.

For a nice summary of the new article, see John Hawks' blog.

References:

Darwin, Charles
1985    The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms, with Observations on Their Habits. Orig. pub. 1881 ed. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Gould, Stephen Jay

1981    The Mismeasure of Man. Norton, New York.

1986    Evolution and the Triumph of Homology, or Why History Matters. American Scientist 74:60-69.

1987    Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

1989    Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History. Norton, New York.

Toulmin, Stephen and June Goodfield
1965    The Discovery of Time. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Help Cahokia win the challenge!

2011-06-10T13:31:00.000-07:00

In Wide Urban World, I talk about Cahokia as an example of an ancient urban center. I also mention a challenge now going on now. This is the "This Place Matters Community Challenge," a contest presented by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The top three sites will receive a cash prize to help preserve their site. The challenge hopes to "highlight the important role that historic buildings and properties play in preserving our national heritage as well as in preserving our environment." If you check the other sites on their list and compare them to Cahokia, you will definitely vote for Cahokia. So please do so!

Smithsonian magazine published looted artifacts

2011-05-26T14:40:00.001-07:00

The May 2011 issue of Smithsonian Magazine has an article about the Maya site of El Mirador (Brown, Chip, 2011, Lost City of the Maya. Smitsonian 42(2 (May)):36-49.). The article includes photographs of several spectacular Maya polychrome vessels (p. 45) that apparently are not from the site. In fact, we have no idea where these vessels are from; they lack provenience. In a post on the Aztlan listserv today, Karen Bruhns identifies these vessels as unprovenienced, looted, objects.

In a subsequent email, she notes that at least one of the vessels are from the notorious "November Collection" of looted Maya art that caused a stir when it was exhibited in a number of U.S. museums in 1998 (New York Times article). This collection was featured in the very interesting and enlightening paper on archaeologists and looters by John Dorfman:

Dorfman, John   1998    Getting Their Hands Dirty? Archaeologists and the Looting Trade. Lingua Franca 8(May-June):28-36.

One might expect that magazines by and for wealthy art dealers might publish looted objects without a second thought. But Smithsonian Magazine is supposedly a legitimate source of news about natural history and related topics, associated with the premier museum in the U.S. Their inclusion of photos of looted objects is deplorable, a real ethical lapse.

For some context on the antiquity trade and its negative impact on the archaeological record, see these blogs: Looting Matters blog, Illlicit Cultural Property blog, or some of these works:

Atwood, Roger
2004    Stealing History: Tomb Raiders, Smugglers, and the Looting of the Ancient World. St. Martin's Press, New York.

Brodie, Neil, Morag M. Kersel, Christina Luke, and Kathryn Walker Tubb (editors)
2006    Archaeology, Cultural Heritage, and the Antiquities Trade. University Press of Florida, Gainesville.

Brodie, Neil and Colin Renfrew
2005    Looting and the World's Archaeological Heritage: The Inadequate Response. Annual Review of Anthropology 34:343-361.

Renfrew, Colin
2000    Loot, Legitimacy and Ownership: The Ethical Crisis in Archaeology. Duckworth, London.

Is there archaeology in Pasteur's quadrant?

2011-05-19T08:49:00.000-07:00

I’ve been working with a group of colleagues from many departments and disciplines to plan a research center that relates social science to contemporary problems. There has been much discussion about “Pasteur’s quadrant,” a concept I was not familiar with. This project is positioned to be in Pasteur’s quadrant, and it has led me to think about whether there is archaeological research in this domain.

The concept of Pasteur’s quadrant was introduced by Donald Stokes (1997) as an improvement over traditional conceptions of applied vs. basic research. Previously, these approaches were seen as a one-dimensional continuum, with pure or basic research at one end and applied science at the other. Niels Bohr and Thomas Edison are often taken to exemplify these ends of the spectrum. In this formulation, as research becomes more applied in orientation, it must become less basic. Stokes produced a more complex, 2-dimensional scheme, that examines both the drive for basic understanding and considerations for use outside of science. His framework is typically portrayed as a four-part chart:

Diagram based on Stokes 1997

The research of theoretical physicist Niels Bohr is clearly in the upper left quadrant: pure research (for basic understanding), with little concern for social use. Inventor Thomas Edison is in the opposite corner: applied science and technology for social use. These scientists fit well in the old pure/applied science continuum. But the research of chemist/microbiologist Louis Pasteur, in the top right, is not well captured in the old unidimensional scheme. Pasteur clearly carried out basic research, designed to advance scientific knowledge and understanding, but the focus of his research—human disease—was chosen for its social use or relevance. As for the bottom left quadrant, I haven’t seen anyone come up with a reasonable interpretation, and its typically left blank.

So, how does archaeology fit here? Most traditional scientific or academic archaeology fits pretty snugly in Bohr’s quadrant, and most salvage archaeology goes with Edison. Is there archaeology in Pasteur’s quadrant? When I first asked myself this question (driving to work this morning), I wondered whether postmodern archaeology’s infatuation with heritage issues might be an example. But on second thought, this work is not basic research to increase scientific understanding, and it probably doesn’t fit in this scheme at all.

One tradition of archaeological research in Pasteur's quadrant is Marxist-inspired work, designed to shed light on modern issues and to play a role in their transformation. I am thinking of Randall McGuire's long series of theoretical, methodological, and thematic works (e.g.,McGuire 1992, 2008), as well as a number of other Marxian archaeologists.

Another kind of archaeology that might fit in Pasteur’s quadrant is the burgeoning field of human-environmental research done from a sustainability approach. Indeed, sustainability science is often explicitly positioned within Pasteur’s quadrant (Clark 2007). I think many of the archaeologists working on the IHOPE project (“Integrated History of People on Earth”; see papers in Costanza et al. 2007)—which is part of the emerging field of the archaeology of sustainability (see papers in Fisher et al. 2009 or Sinclair et al. 2010)—probably see their work as fitting comfortably in Pasteur’s quadrant.

I wonder, however, about the extent to which archaeologists who are interested in the social or non-archaeological usefulness of their work use those concerns to design and guide their research. This seems different from doing basic or pure research, and then looking around for possible applications or connections. I know that some archaeologists working on agricultural systems in South America (e.g., Clark Erickson or Christian Isendahl) have long positioned their fieldwork and research within Pasteur’s quadrant, seeing archaeological knowledge of ancient agricultural systems as having potential benefits in the modern world, and using this notion as a factor that generates and shapes their fieldwork.

In my own work on comparative urbanism, however, those parts that would fit into Pasteur’s quadrant do not include my basic fieldwork-based research in Mexico. I have argued that knowledge of ancient cities may have relevance for an understanding of modern urban processes (Smith 2010; York et al. 2011), but in making this claim I refer to a body of comparative knowledge of ancient and premodern cities, not (only) to my own fieldwork in Mexico. It is not that my fieldwork is irrelevant to such concerns, but my projects have not been motivated by, or designed around, this approach. Will my work on comparative urbanism have an impact when I plan and carry out my next fieldwork project? Although this sounds logical, I can't yet say just how it will affect my field research.

Perhaps the difference between these two examples lies in the levels of complexity of their subjects and their relative abundance of data. It is easy to see how one or two archaeological projects could illuminate the construction and use of a particular premodern agricultural field type, thereby producing knowledge that can be applied to modern farming in a relatively direct fashion. On the other hand, I find it difficult to imagine how a similar number of excavation projects in ancient cities could produce enough information to directly illuminate modern urbanization processes. For the latter task, a much larger sample of ancient/premodern cities is needed, and the direct relevance of any individual project is much less. But if a particular fieldwork project is devoted to, say, economic processes and standard of living in an urban context, I can envision a number of points of relevance for modern urbanism. In contrast, a project devoted to topics like the meaning of material culture and social identity would seem to have fewer points of relevance or usefulness. Anyway, I'll stop meandering here.

The concept of Pasteur's quadrant is an interesting way to think about the broader context of archaeological research and knowledge. These are just some quick thoughts, and it would be useful to follow this up with a more extensive study of the literature.

References:

Clark, William C.
2007    Sustainability Science: A Room of its Own. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104:1737-1738.

Costanza, Robert, Lisa J. Graumlich, and Will Steffen (editors)
2007    Sustainability or Collapse? An Integrated History and Future of People on Earth. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Fisher, Christopher T., J. Brett Hill, and Gary M. Feinman (editors)
2009    The Archaeology of Environmental Change: Socionatural Legacies of Degradation and Resilience. University of Arizona Press, Tucson.

McGuire, Randall H.
1992    A Marxist Archaeology. Academic Press, New York.

2008    Archaeology as Political Action. University of California Press, Berkeley.

Sinclair, Paul, Gullög Nordquist, Frands Herschend, and Christian Isendahl (editors)
2010    The Urban Mind: Cultural and Environmental Dynamics. Studies in Global Archaeology, vol. 15. Department of Archaeology and Ancient History, Uppsala University, Uppsala.

Smith, Michael E.
2010    Sprawl, Squatters, and Sustainable Cities: Can Archaeological Data Shed Light on Modern Urban Issues? Cambridge Archaeological Journal 20:229-253.

Stokes, Donald E.
1997    Pasteur's Qudrant: Basic Science and Technological Innovation. Brookings Institution Press, Washington, DC.

York, Abigail, Michael E. Smith, Benjamin Stanley, Barbara L. Stark, Juliana Novic, Sharon L. Harlan, George L. Cowgill, and Christopher Boone
2011    Ethnic and Class-Based Clustering Through the Ages: A Transdisciplinary Approach to Urban Social Patterns. Urban Studies (in press).

Will transdisciplinary work destroy anthropology?

2011-05-13T15:51:00.001-07:00

When the Department of Anthropology at Arizona State University was planning its transition into the School of Human Evolution and Social Change in 2005, a member of the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association said in an interview, "This kind of program isn't going to strengthen anthropology, its going to destroy it." A bunch of non-anthropologist faculty positions were added to the program, mostly new hires, and bunch of new anthropologists were hired (including yours truly in 2005). Now that the new school is five years old, has anthropology been destroyed?

Not according to an article in the current issue of Anthropology News ("Transdisciplinary Anthropology at Arizona State" by Alexandra Brewis, Christopher Roberts, Rhian Stotts, and Amber Wutich, Anthropology News, May 2011, page 21). This group of faculty and students conducted a network analysis of faculty collaboration within the school, gathering data on research collaboration and communication among faculty within the school.

Figure 1 reports research collaboration on formal projects, and Figure 2 shows communication (email, phone calls, etc.). It is interesting that the non-anthropologists, group 5, are in the middle of the anthropological subdisciplines. Archaeologists (group 1) collaborate most often with bioarchaeologists and non-anthropologists. I collaborate on research projects with a few archaeologists and a few of the non-anthropologists (e.g., see our transdisciplinary urban project, a funded research project within the school. This is one of a group of transdiscplinary research project in the school, called "Late Lessons from Early History"). As for communication patterns, it looks like physical anthropologists and bioarchaeologists are always yakking (while the rest of us are too busy doing research...... ha ha, only kidding!).

The results of the network study confirm my own subjective impression of the School of Human Evolution and Social Change. Anthropology is alive and well here, but many or most of us anthropologists are also engaged in transdisciplinary work and collaboration that both extends and strengthens anthropology. The fact that all of our faculty are empirical scholars with a scientific epistemology certainly helps processes of interaction and collaboration.

I can't link to the Anthropology News article because its not posted online yet. I find it very frustrating that they don't get around to posting their issues until after the paper copy has been distributed (I got my copy today). I'll try to add a link after the AAA gets around to posting the issue. On the other hand, since AN is not open access, many readers will not be able to access it. So maybe I'll download the article and post it on my website. The things one has to do to get around AAA publication policies!

PNAS peer review issues

2011-05-07T16:35:00.001-07:00

The journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) publishes papers in all the sciences, including archaeology. I have long wondered whether the peer review process of PNAS us up to snuff. It seems that a good number of papers published in the journal fail to cite relevant sources on prior research. PNAS members can publish in the journal, and I'm not sure if their papers are peer reviewed or not. Non-PNAS members evidently can have their papers reviewed by a single PNAS member, who may be a good friend. Hardly a rigorous review process, but then perhaps that is not the goal.

I just read John Hawks's blog entry on this (from January, 2011), "Membership has its privileges." He takes a paper by Erik Trinkaus on Neanderthals in the PNAS to task for ignoring prior research very similar to Trinkaus's. Interestingly, Hawks publishes his own email correspondence with Trinkaus about the issue. It is worth reading.

A similar case occurred more recently, when a paper in PNAS on agricultural intensification failed to cite the literature on the topic. Sam Bowles shows that agriculture is calorically less efficient that hunting, something I learned as an undergrad more than thirty years ago. I complained to some people in the NAS about this, and had a short email exchange with Bowles. There is quite a large literature on this in anthropology, archaeology, and geography, much of it in the 1970s and 1980s (Boserup and her implications, pretty basic stuff in archaeology), but Bowles presented his findings as if he were the first to figure out the energetic costs of intensification:

Bowles, Samuel
2011    Cultivation of cereals by the first farmers was not more productive than foraging. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108:4760-4765.

I was tempted to fire off a letter to the journal, but desisted for two reasons. First, intensification is not my own specialty, and I thought there might be complexities and literature I am not aware of. Second, my previous letter to the editor was not very satisfying. In that case, I criticized a PNAS paper by economic historians for sloppy terminology and concepts:

Basu, Sudipta, John Dickhaut, Kristy Towry, and Gregory Waymire
2009    Recordkeeping Alters Economic History by Promoting Reciprocity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106:1009-1014.

The authors claimed that the results of a modern economic game explained past developments in economic history. I pointed out that several intermediate inferential steps had been left out; one cannot read ancient history from the results of a modern game. This is my letter:

2009    Modern Behavioral Experiments are not Economic History (response to S. Basu, J. Dickhaut, K. Towry, & G. Waymire, “Recordkeeping Alters Economic History by Promoting Reciprocity,” PNAS 106: 1009-1014). Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences 106 (16), p. E39.

Like John Hawks, I am dismayed that prominent scholars are permitted to publish papers in a prestigious journal like PNAS without citing the relevant literature. If I tried to do that in a basic archaeology journal, I'd almost certainly be shot down by the reviewers.

How useful is Academia.edu ?

2011-04-23T22:01:00.000-07:00

I've been on Academia.edu for a year or two now. Sometimes I am on the site several times a week, sometimes not at all. I initially joined as an experiment, and I have gained some things from it. A number of people have asked my opinion, so here it is. You should know that I am not an active user of Facebook, and I don't have a Twitter account; thus I can't really compare Academia.edu to the main social media sites.

Academia is useful for networking. I have been exploring other disciplines recently, as well as the archaeology of regions outside of my specialty, and I've made some useful contacts through Academia.edu, and I've found some useful papers posted. I don't use Academia.edu like Facebook to be "friends" with a bunch of people. On Academia, you elect to "follow" people, but the relationship is not reciprocal. I only "follow" a few people, mainly interesting scholars in fields distant from my own. I get a notice when people sign up to "follow" me, and I usually look at their pages to see if they are someone I might want to know about (I've met a couple of interesting people this way).

Here are some things I like and dislike about Academia.edu:

Mechanics: Pro

It is easy to set up a page, and to modify and update your page.
It is fairly easy to post papers.
You can post "status updates." These are sort of like tweets (short statements), but perhaps less intrusive.
Academia.edu pages and papers turn up very high on Google searches. Academia tracks these cases, and you can see how people are searching and how they find your stuff. There must be lots of term papers about Gordon Childe and the urban revolution, since my paper on that topic turns up in lots of Google searches. I learn interesting things, such as:

Today: "45 people from United States found your page on Google, Bing, and Yahoo with the keywords: "ancient places starting with", "how did the military expansion of the aztecs impact their society", and "the expansion of urban commercial centers in the Aztec Empire "

Two days ago: "48 people from Finland and Sweden found your page on Google and Yahoo with the keywords: "Foundations of Social Archaeology. Selected Writings of V. Gordon Childe", "+spiro interpretation +"the grid" +"grand manner " -book -bok", and "+"the grid" +"grand manner " -book -bok" and 45 more."

Mechanics: Con:

Papers are posted using scribd. This is an awkward interface, both for posting and particularly for viewing and downloading. One's papers are not listed in a convenient format.
There is no way to link dynamically to blogs. I would think that the kind of people who might follow me on Academia.edu might be interested in my blogs. I have generic static links on my "about" page, but I can't get dynamic linkages to current posts.
There is a "news feed" when I visit the site. Some of this is activity by people I follow, but most is not. These must be second-order linkages, or people who follow me, I don't know. Some of this information is useful, but there is far, far too much junk that I don't care about. It's nice that people are posting papers on weird and obscure topics, but if they are not MY weird and obscure topics, I'd rather not have to wade through this stuff while looking for something that I might be interested in.
People can post generic questions, that others can respond to. This is a good idea, but the format in which these are listed in the news feed prevents rapid checking of whether the question or answers are of interest or not. I usually assume the latter.

Intellectual Aspects: Pro

Academia.edu is an excellent way for students to set up a quick website and establish an online presence (posting papers, research interests, activities, etc.)
It is easy to include links to your main website, or other places.
There is a nice element of serendipity in finding odd interesting things.

Intellectual Aspects: Con

There doesn't seem to be a way to form interest groups, like on the Open Anthropology Cooperative. This feature could provide a solution to the problem of junk in the news feed.

Use by Departments

I'm not sure what to think about this. I've seen cases when a large number of people in a department all sign up at the same time, probably in response to some central call to action. This could be an answer to one or both of the big problems with academic departmental webpages. The first problem is outdated pages. Departments don't have the resources or expertise to maintain their websites, and most examples are out of date. Don't you hate it when you visit someones university website to see what they are up to, only to find that their latest publication listed dates to 2006? Also, some departments have website nazis who control and restrict information to the detriment of scholarship. Having pages on Academia.edu can get around bottlenecks like this.

It's less clear to me whether Academia.edu can address the second big problem in academic websites: the lack of posted papers and information. It is easy to post your papers on Academia.edu, whereas it can be a hassle on a centralized academic website. But the root cause of the problem is apathy by faculty members (and grad students). Most people simply don't want to take the time to post their papers. When that is the case, having a site on Academia.edu is not going to change things.

I think that if I was a faculty member, or better yet a project or research group, trying to set up a website more accessible and updatable than an unwieldy departmental site, I might start a site using a Wiki platform. When the website for one of my projects got too unwieldy and complicated, we moved it to a Wiki, which is easily updatable by anyone on the project - you can see it here.). But that isn't the purpose of Academia.edu.

I don't know why any graduate students would NOT want to establish a page on Academia.edu, and I think it is useful for others to do so also. Look at it as a courtesy to your colleagues. If your departmental webpage is not what you want or need, then set up a page on Academia.edu. I happen to have a responsive and efficient department website, and I maintain my own university site. My usage of Academia.edu continues to be experimental, but the more people who join, the more useful it will be.

Write us an article, and pay us for the privilege!

2011-04-18T12:42:00.000-07:00

The author-pay model is one approach to open access journal publishing. It makes sense and seems to work in the hard sciences, where researchers can put article fees into their research grants. For the social sciences and humanities, where most authors would have to pay the big fees (ca. $1,000 and more), this model is more problematic. But it only makes sense for peer reviewed journal articles, not for other types of publication.

I have just been invited to contribute to a scholarly encyclopedia that advertises itself as "open access," and they want me to pay about $1,000 for the privilege of publishing with them. Normally, scholarly encyclopedias pay authors for the hassle of writing articles that are not peer reviewed and not very valuable (for scholarship or for career building). A typical deal gets the author X amount of dollars (I've seen between $50 and $2,000 for encyclopedia entries), or twice that amount in books published by the press.

This encyclopedia is called "Urban Planning," published by "Intech," a Croatian company. They claim to have an editorial board of experts, but their listing of editorial boards includes fields like biology, engineering, and medicine, nothing in urban studies or social sciences. Their website gives these reasons to publish with them:

High quality publications
High impact and visibility
Worldwide readership
No copyright transfer
Efficient publishing process
Free access to research

Sounds like a scam to me. If I want to write something that is not peer reviewed, and I want it to have wide distribution on the internet, I'll just post it on my website.* I certainly won't pay a Croatian company big bucks to put it in an internet book of possibly dubious quality.

* NOTE - I did this for once for an "anti-Wikipedia" article. The Wikipedia entry on the Aztecs was quite bad, almost beyond redemption, and the people who worked on it were defensive and hostile to my involvement. So I wrote a summary of Aztec culture and posted it from my home page. Later a Wikipedia editor contacted me and praised my summary. He claimed he was prevented from using it, however, since it did not have an official affiliation or citation! I guess wrong information from amateurs is fine for Wikipedia, but not correct information from scholars.

18,000 references !!!

2011-04-14T19:08:00.000-07:00

My Endnote bibliography database now has 18,000 references. I periodically merge new references from a holding file with the main database, and after the merge just now, the total is 18,000! It's almost as good as seeing the car's odometer change over from 99,999 to 100,000, or perhaps the Mayan calendar going back to 0.0.0.0.0 when the world ends in 2012.

I'm a bibliography nut. If I don't have it in my Endnote file, it doesn't exist in my personal world of scholarship. I don't import massive numbers of irrelevant references - only things that I will use, or am likely to use someday. It all started early in graduate school, when Clark Erickson showed me his library card catalog drawers full of references written on 3x5 index cards. How cool was that! I immediately started my own program of price supports for the index card manufacturers. Clark and I would make cards for each other when we came across appropriate references. I think I had between 15,000 and 20,000 cards in all. In the 1980s I got up to 1,000 or so citations into the Minark database. What a klunker! OK for very early PC days, I guess, but I soon switched to a bibliography program (I forget which one). Then Endnote came along and blew the other program out of the water. I've upgraded a bunch of times now. Students are using Zotero, Refworks, and other things, but they don't have the control and versatility of format/style found in Endnote.

I still have a couple of cartons full of those old index cards somewhere. I long ago dumped the nice wood library catalog drawers I got on surplus, but I still have the cards. I should pull them out - just think, grocery lists for the rest of my life!

Theory, theory, theory: What do we mean by "theory"

2011-04-12T18:52:00.000-07:00

I thought I had made some headway in sorting out types of theory in my paper, Empirical Urban Theory for Archaeologists. I distinguished "empirical theory," or what social scientists outside of archaeology call "middle-range theory," from high-level social theory. But I've just read a very interesting paper by sociologist Gabriel Abend called "The Meaning of Theory" (Abend 2008) which identifies no less than seven (7) distinct meanings that sociologists give to the word "theory." These categories apply (almost) equally well to archaeology:

Warfare, stimulated by environmental and social circumscription, causes the rise of states. Carneiro's well-known theory for the origin of the state is an example of Theory-1, a general proposition about a relationship between two or more variables.
The impact of Aztec imperial conquest in Morelos, Mexico, was determined by the interaction of two Aztec imperial strategies (enrichment of the capital through taxation, and co-option of local elites) with local social structures. This account, from several of my publications, is an example of Theory-2, an explanation of a particular social phenomenon. This kind of theory is also a proposition.
Ceramic decorative styles in a particular region expressed world-view and ethnic identity. This kind of theory, Theory-3, is a hermeneutical interpretation about meaning, not a proposition about causality.
What did Marx really mean when he described precapitalist modes of production? Or, how can we understand Bourdieu's concept of doxa in relation to the archaeological record? Theory-4 is concerned with how we understand the great thinkers today. Most courses on "anthropological theory" are in fact courses about the historical development of theory, understood as Theory-4.
Theory-5 is an overall perspective from which one sees and interprets the world. It is not theory about the social world itself, but rather about how to understand and represent it. Abend lists a number of types of Theory-5: postmodern theory, poststructuralist theory, feminist theory, queer theory, critical theory, Marxist theory, structural-functionalist theory, and rational choice theory.
Theory-6 is concerned with how the world should be. In the language of all of the social sciences except for archaeology, Theory-6 is called "normative" theory. Critical theory, feminist theory, and postcolonial theory are often examples of Theory-6, which often rejects the fact/value dichotomy. This kind of theory is often called "social theory."
This kind of theory concerns large fundamental problems about the nature of knowledge, language, and reality within a discipline. For archaeology, Theory-7 might include issues of time and formation processes, in addition to broader questions about the nature of data and explanation, or the role of theory. Abend notes that his article is an example of Theory-7.

How is all this related to publishing in archaeology? People publish works on "theory" that might deal with any of these seven concepts. Without some kind of roadmap, this can be confusing, not just to students but to long-time archaeologists like me. Abend talks about the importance of distinguishing between these different conceptions of theory. He does NOT essentialize "theory" by saying that there are seven distinct types of theory out there, and that sociologists pick one to use. Rather, these are seven labels for overlapping domains of knowledge, and that writers mean different things when they invoke different meanings of the word "theory."

Archaeologists with a more philosophical and interpretive bent (postprocessualists and social archaeology types) tend to use the term theory to mean Theory-3 through Theory-6. Nuts-and-bolts archaeologists (scientific and materialist types like me) tend to emphasize Theory-1 and Theory-2 meanings. This is the domain I call "empirical theory" (Smith 2011), something that doesn't find much expression in the literature on "archaeological theory."

I sometimes find it bizarre that I have found more conceptual clarity about ideas, goals, and understanding, — about ontology and epistemology — from the discipline of sociology than from anthropology or archaeology. Check out Abend's paper, or my 2011 paper for more.

Abend, Gabriel
2008 The Meaning of "Theory". Sociological Theory 26:173-199.

Smith, Michael E.
2011 Empirical Urban Theory for Archaeologists. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 18:(in press).

Types of Archaeological Blog

2011-04-04T12:34:00.000-07:00

Colleen Morgan and the folks in the “Blogging Archaeology” session at the SAA meetings last week were wondering what to do next – how to follow up the session. Well, we followed up the session right away at the Pyramid Bar. Unfortunately I had to leave the bar early for a board meeting, so I don’t know whether more pitchers of beer led to profound bloggistic insights. I enjoyed the symposium and meeting the other bloggers. It was also great to meet John Hawks at the session and at the bar, certainly the king of anthropological bloggers.

My recommendations on what to do to follow up the SAA symposium are based on two observations:

1. Archaeological blogs are not a thing. There was quite a bit of diversity among the papers, and among blogs that I know. I have trouble thinking of blogs as a coherent category of archaeological production. There are some methodological commonalities, of course, but perhaps the diversity is more significant than the similarities.

2. Blogs play roles in several types of archaeological discourse, and those categories make more sense for further exploration than the category of “archaeological blog.”

Here is my provisional classification of archaeological blogs:

A. Blogs for rapid communication to involve the public in fieldwork.

The talk by Sarah Nohe and Terry Brock on “Social Media as Public Archaeology” fits here, along with Terry’s talk on the campus archaeology program at Michigan State University. Facebook and twitter are generating almost real-time public involvement with archaeology in the cases discussed by these authors, and blogging is part of the program. This work is quite exciting, bringing archaeology into the contemporary social media world of students and much of the public in the U.S. (I must admit, though, that this work doesn’t resonate much with the realities of archaeology in Mexico). I think this is Sarah's blog (couldn't tell for sure): Gettin' Dirty Brfore 10:30.

B. Blogs for less rapid communication of the results of fieldwork and scholarship to the public.

John Lowe’s use of blogging in CRM archaeology is a great example here (see his blog, Where in the Hell Am I?), and this seems to be the motivation for many project blogs, including my Calixtlahuaca blog. Your Aunt Mary wants to know just what it is that you do with this archaeology thing. Your blog not only shows where you are and what you are doing now, but also explains archaeological methods though examples. Many of Chris Hirst’s pages on About Archaeology fit here.

C. Blogs for communication of broader ideas and themes to the public and/or media.

This category is similar to B., but the themes are more general, less dependent only specific fieldwork contexts and projects. Johan Normark’s discussion of the public view of the Maya is relevant here, as are many of Kris’s About Archaeology entries. The best anthropological blogs (in my opinion) fit here: John Hawks Weblog (mostly physical anthropology, but regularly spilling over into archaeology and cultural anthropology), Neuroanthropology, Rosemary Joyce’s blogs. But what about archaeology? Why don’t we have more blogs explaining our larger themes and ideas to the public and to the media? I see this as a major lack. My new blog, Wide Urban World, fits somewhere in this category. It’s not limited to archaeology, but one of my goals is to bring archaeological work on urbanism to a broader audience.

Given the staggering ignorance of the public and other scholarly disciplines about the ancient past, we should really be pushing this area. Rosemary Joyce’s blogs are mostly about cultural anthropology, or perhaps general anthropology, but less about archaeology. What were early humans doing? Why did they move around the world? Why did they start domesticating plants and animals, and what happened as a result? Were ancient peoples constantly at war? Did the Maya really predict the end of the world in 2012? How do we know about these things, and why are they important? And why aren't more archaeologists blogging about them ?

D. Blogs for communication and discussion of professional topics with a professional audience.

This blog fits here, and there are many others within more limited domains: Blogging Pompeii, Digging Digitally, and lots more. Shawn Graham’s presentation about “Signal versus noise” dealt with meta-communications issues relevant to all types of archaeological blogging; see his blog, Electric Archaeology: Digital Media for Learning and Research for more.

E.Traditional author-centered blogs.

Colleen Morgan's Middle Savagery is my favorite example of this form. When the author is an archaeologist who does interesting things and has insightful comments (and excellent photographs), a traditional author-centered blog can be quite good, a real joy to read.

F. Blogs for teaching and student training.

I don’t know much about this, but Sarah and Terry made a case for the value of having students write blog entries as part of fieldschools and regular college courses.

I don’t claim that this classification is definitive, and I would guess that people who have more experience and have thought more about archaeological blogs could refine this or devise a better scheme. Nevertheless, as a scholar I believe that tightly focused research and scholarship is usually more productive than diffuse, unfocused work (the exceptions, of course, lie in the exploratory phase of research). So my recommendation for following up the SAA session would be to focus on one or more these domains to explore, and perhaps to explore the domain on a larger scale than just blogging. Again, I am struck with our lack of progress in category C. We need more creative solutions to the problem of public ignorance about the past.

Ian Morris writes big history

2011-03-28T13:08:00.000-07:00

I have always been drawn to books about "big history" -- books that explain major developments in human history. It seems to me that big patterns and major developments are things that archaeology has data on and should make contributions to general knowledge about. The problem, of course, is that most books that try to explain big developments in history and society are not written by archaeologists, and they tend to be either so simplified or so full of errors (conceptual and empirical) that they are worthless. So over the years I have paid less and less attention to such works.

Sometimes books about big history make a real stir. Jared Diamond's two books (Guns, Germs, and Steel, and Collapse) are recent examples. The first of these won a Pulitzer Prize, and both are bestsellers. Scholars have weighed in about both, some praising Diamond and some attacking him. Some archaeologists got so upset at his book Collapse that they compiled a whole edited volume (Questioning Collapse) that critiqued Diamond's book. I am more than a little skeptical about their critique, but it is easy to understand its motivation. Diamond is encroaching on our turf, he makes mistakes, and he has some negative things that we don't like.

A typical reaction to Diamond's books, which I share, is to ask why scholars who really know something about the topic don't write this kind of big history. Well, now Ian Morris of Stanford University has done just that. His book Why the West Rules--For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future was published in October, 2010. Morris argues that much historical change is generated by the actions of ordinary people, and that major developments (such as the current dominance of the West) are not at all inevitable. He says, "Change is caused by lazy, greedy, frightened people looking for easier, more profitable and safer ways of doing things. And they rarely know what they are doing."

I haven't read the book yet, but I plan to read it soon. You can find some very nice reviews in places like New York Times, in The Economist: and in Foreign affairs. It's about time that a productive and respected archaeologist steps out of the trenches to become a public intellectual. You can find video and print interviews with Morris around the internet, and I'm sure that lots more buzz will be generated by this. I have always been a fan of Ian Morris's scholarly work, and I have found him a helpful, and generous colleague. Unfortunately his Stanford Webpage does not have his articles posted, but it does have his CV, or some searching on Google-Scholar will turn up a bunch of papers. But it is especially gratifying to see such an outstanding scholar jump into the public ring and really try to bring some archaeological insights to the field of big history.

I am quite a bit less sanguine about Morris's Stanford colleague in Political Science, Francis Fukumana, who has written another book of big history: The Origins of Political Order From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution. This book has not been published yet, but I did read a review in the NY Times by Nicolas Wade. While I am willing to see what Fukuyama's ideas are and give them a chance, I am brought up short by the statement in Wade's review that "Dr. Fukumana emphasizes the role of China because it was the first state." Huh? Come again? Sounds like the old archaeological cluelessness again (if that is indeed what he claims.....).

Anyway, now that I have thought a few big thoughts (or at least I've talked about some authors who think big thoughts), I will head off to the SAA meetings in Sacramento and think small detailed archaeological thoughts for a few days (although after a few beers, some big thoughts will probably emerge from the aether).

Print publication of oral presentations about blogs ?????

2011-03-24T21:17:00.001-07:00

Colleen Morgan asks us to cogitate about how the presentations at the SAA blogging symposium might be published. I've said a number of times that most edited volumes in archaeology are close to worthless. And it seems absurd to publish a formal book of oral presentations about blogs. In my own case, I don't read papers at meetings (I talk from slides), so I won't have a written paper to submit.

Some of the first things to consider in thinking about a publication, or a public presentation of some kind, are:

Who is the audience?
What is the purpose?

I find myself wondering about the level of "blog literacy" within archaeology. Not among the people who are reading this, or those who are writing or reading the other blogs Colleen is bringing together, but among those who choose not to get involved. In the case of cultural anthropology, it is quite clear that there is a major strain of cluelessness among senior anthopologists. This came out in a review in American Anthropologists of some anthropological blogs (Price 2010), and it came out in the AAA Executive Board's response to the flap over the elimination of "science" from the Association's long-range plan.

How common is such blog-cluelessness ("blogistically challenged"?) among influential archaeologists? Would it be helpful to somehow reach and influence such people? What might be a good way to do that? Rather than think: "Here are some works about blogs. What can we do with them?", it would be more productive to think: "What do we want to accomplish? What is the best way to do this?"

Price, David H.
2010 Blogging Anthropology: Savage Minds, Zero Anthropology, and AAA Blogs. American Anthropologist 112:140-142.

Why don't people publish articles from their dissertation !!!

2011-03-20T16:53:00.000-07:00

This is a pet peeve of mine. Somebody writes a dissertation, and then does not publish journal articles from the dissertation. Perhaps they drop out of the field, or perhaps they publish only chapters for edited books. But a dissertation doesn't really exist as a professional publication; although dissertations have to be approved by a committee, they are not peer reviewed. There are some real stinkers out there.

In the past few days I've come across two more cases of this. One is a dissertation on a theme that I have long been interested in, but have been disappointed that there was not a detailed targeted study of the phenomenon. So I see a citation to a dissertation on just this theme, by a student of one of the archaeologists to popularized this theme. I can't get the dissertation online, and various searches turn up no publications by the author. Arghhhhh....... The second example was a text in which a young professional archaeologist (Assistant Professor, PhD ca. 5 years ago) waxes poetic over the important advanced he or she made on a particular topic in their dissertation. OK, let's take a look. There are a few book chapters on other topics, but no journal articles and nothing at all on the particular topic in question. Arghhhhh........

Perhaps I am running up against people who wrote their theses following the "dissertation as process" viewpoint, in place of the "dissertation as product" viewpoint that I favor. The first views dissertation work as a learning experience; a student learns to set up a research design, gather data, analyze it, write it up, etc. It is not important whether the topic is important or not, or whether anyone cares about the research, or whether it gets published. Adherents to this approach think that graduate students should not waste time publishing articles - that takes precious time away from reading everying published in the field.

The "dissertation as product" viewpoint suggests that a dissertation is a professional work that should be judged in the same way that a published book or journal article is judged. The topic should be relevant to current disciplinary concerns, and the work should be an important contribution to knowledge. If one follows these concerns, then the student will learn to do research along the way. And when the dissertation is done, it should be easy to crank out a few journal articles in rapid succession

The "dissertation as project" approach sounds crazy to me. I can't imagine writing a dissertation merely as an exercise to learn methods. As a professor, I can't imagine accepting a dissertation on a non-important and irrelevant topic, so long as the student learned something along the way. But at a former university I had some colleagues who believed in this approach. I was completely baffled when they would say that students should not publish articles, but then reading Krathwohl helped put this into perspective; Krathwohl was where I found this terminology (diss as project and diss as product) (and Krathwohl is the best guide I know to organizing a social science research proposal).

Krathwohl, David R.
1988 How to Prepare a Research Proposal: Guidelines for Funding and Dissertations in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. 3rd ed. Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, NY.

Anyway, if you write a dissertation, please please publish some articles. Some of us out here might be interested in what you are doing. (and please keep this in mind for MA papers too).

Risks and unexpected consequences of blogging

2011-03-08T13:19:00.001-07:00

Responding here to another of Colleen Morgan's queries about archaeological blogging, leading up to the SAA session in a few weeks (a few weeks? wow, I'd better get to work...). This week's question is about the risks and consequences of blogging.

Putting one's ideas out in public is always risky. I'm a tenured full professor, and I'm pretty secure about my abilities and contributions. I don't have many of the worries and risks that students, junior scholars, and others may face. I often shoot from the hip on this blog, and when I say stupid things, sometimes I get called on it. That's fine with me. But younger and more vulnerable archaeologists often think twice about making public statements that aren't fully insulated with academic context (that is, conference papers, journal articles, etc.). I can't seem to get my students and colleagues to contribute to my project blog about Calixtlahuaca, which in turn reduces my own contributions, since I view it as a PROJECT blog, not as a personal blog. The end result is a somewhat desultory entity that I'm not too proud of.

Or to take another example, many of the more interesting comments on this blog are posted by "Anonymous," who is either a busy person, or a bunch of different people. I guess some folks do not want to risk exposing their identities, even on something as transitory and trivial as a blog comment. Perhaps some of these people are students in a politicized department, or perhaps they are just busy professionals who don't want to spend the time to register for comments.

There are some very real risks to blogging from agencies and governments that are responsible for funding and overseeing archaeological research. And to prove my point that these are real risks, I will say that I don't feel comfortable talking about this issue in public. Sorry, but transparency only goes so far. Wow, this is starting to sound like a redacted text.

Here is another kind of risk. I finally started a blog that deals with my research on comparative urbanism. My goal is to promote a comparative, historical approach to cities and urban phenomena, and I think this will interest various people. This isn't a single academic discipline, though, and I can't predict much about the size or nature of the audience. Maybe nobody will care about this stuff. Maybe I will be sorely disappointed that my work in this area, which I consider interesting and important, is just not something that others want to hear about. In this case the very fact of starting that blog is something of a risk for me.

As for unexpected consequences, one things stand out. When I started Publishing Archaeology, I focused pretty heavily on open access issues. I was very pleased when Steven Harnad and Peter Suber, my two heroes of the open access movement, both commented on my posts. Harnad has continued to post comments occasionally, usually to set me straight when I say something bone-headed about open access.