Headline: Scholar Holds Out Against Creeping Commercialization

News Flash: The owner of the web log, "Publishing Archaeology" stated today that he turned down a lucrative offer ($100) to commercialize his blog with third-party advertising. Dr. Michael Smith noted that he agonized over the attractive offer for about five seconds. "It was a tough decision," the archaeologist told our reporter, "I could have used those funds to pay for one-tenth of the author fee of an author-pay open access journal article. Now I will have to continue publishing in old-fashioned scholarly journals."

With this ground-breaking decision, Smith has countered the forces of commercialization that are infecting every aspect of life on the planet today. Whether it be billboards in public spaces, vending machines in the schools, advertising in the internet, the tide has now turned. Scholarship, freedom, local expression and cultural authenticity will now reign supreme as the forces of neoliberalism come to a grinding halt.

Well, maybe not.
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Historians Admit To Inventing Ancient Greeks

WASHINGTON—A group of leading historians held a press conference Monday at the National Geographic Society to announce they had "entirely fabricated" ancient Greece, a culture long thought to be the intellectual basis of Western civilization.

The group acknowledged that the idea of a sophisticated, flourishing society existing in Greece more than two millennia ago was a complete fiction created by a team of some two dozen historians, anthropologists, and classicists who worked nonstop between 1971 and 1974 to forge "Greek" documents and artifacts.

Just one of the "ancient" artifactsdreamed up in a basement in Somerville, MA

"Honestly, we never meant for things to go this far," said Professor Gene Haddlebury, who has offered to resign his position as chair of Hellenic Studies at Georgetown University. "We were young and trying to advance our careers, so we just started making things up: Homer, Aristotle, Socrates, Hippocrates, the lever and fulcrum, rhetoric, ethics, all the different kinds of columns—everything."

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"Way more stuff than any one civilization could have come up with, obviously," he added.

Read more, from The Onion....
  

"Archaeologists Unearth Lousiest Civilization Ever"

The Onion just published a great send-up of archaeology publicity. Don't you get sick of those press releases and newspaper articles that sensationalize archaeology and gush over minor finds? If so, check out the item in The Onion (subtitle: "What a Bunch of Losers," Researchers Say). One of my favorite publicity overkills was a press release saying that archaeologists had discovered a pyramid far older than any previously known at a site in Mexico. After several excited emails from National Geographic and other reporters asking for comments, I checked it out. Turns out that a particular Aztec pyramid was known to have many construction stages. The earliest stage (buried under the later stages) had been located in the 1950s, but was never excavated. Now, archaeologists looked for, and found, that earlier stage. Wowie-zowie.

And if you haven't seen "Beatles 3000", another great archaeology spoof, you need to view it now. This one contains a more serious and troubling critique of archaeological interpretation, and is hilarious.

Wordle

I've just been playing with Wordle, the internet java program that makes word images. You've seen these - they represent all of the words in a document or domain, with the size of the word proportional to its frequency of usage in the document. This is both fun and instructional. Here are a couple of images: my CV, my Calixtlahuaca blog, and a paper I am writing on neighborhoods in preindustrial cities: