Is Sociology too Activist, and not Sufficiently Rigorous?

I am entertaining myself at the hospital by reading *John Levi Martin’s critique

of *Ashley Rubin’s report on the current state of politics vs. rigor in sociology.

The short answer to my title question is, “No.” I read the original *Vanderbilt/WUSL report (Boghossian, et al. 2026) and then skimmed the Rubin report heavily. Like Martin and others on social media, I found it lacking in data and argumentation. Martin does not try to determine the degree of politicization of sociology; rather, he asks “whether she actually marshaled evidence to support her arguments" and  "whether she correctly represents her sources.” His answer to both is No, and I agree with him. Some of the content of this post is also covered in my recent book, Urban Life in the Distant Past, and in various papers. Data, arguments, rigor, and social science are central to my scholarly identity.

I’m not sure anyone cares what an archaeologist thinks about all this, but I have knowledge of some parts of sociology, a discipline I largely have great respect for. We have even more serious problems of activism/rigor in anthropology. I have spent decades fighting for rigorous social science over interpretivist archaeology in a number of publications, and I attribute my own epistemological breakthroughs (giving me the tools to properly critique non-scientific approaches) to my reading of sociology. I went to sociology for neighborhoods and cities, and came back with epistemology (and neighborhoods, cities, inequality, etc.)

My Interactions with Sociology 

Working on Teotihuacan housing and social class as an undergrad in the 1970s, George Cowgill suggested I read (Sjoberg 1960). I got a lot of inspiration from that book on approaches to social analysis of cities that could be applied archaeologically. Yeah, I can now write a serious critique of Sjoberg, but his book was formative in my thinking. George also suggested I read (Lenski 1966), which was also crucial in my learning about how ancient inequality compared to conditions in the modern world. I realized at the time that his empirical application to preindustrial cases left a lot to be desired, but it was the comparative/theoretical concepts that I drew on (and still did for a long time; generations of students had had to endure me talking about the differences between estates and castes, with slides from Lenski).

From Lenski, with modification.

Also from the old days, the ethnocentrism of Wirth set my teeth on edge. I’ve published and blogged on much of this.

When I got into transdisciplinary work on urban neighborhoods (mid-2000s) I read a lot of sociology. Sharon Harlan was part of a transdisciplinary project on neighborhoods at ASU. We got Rob Sampson to give a talk and he is someone doing important work on a topic that interests me, using data and methods that I find compelling. And, he cites me! (there is a story here). I also got insights lot from work by John Hipp, Douglas Massey, and other sociologists. Working with Sharon Harlan on the interdisciplinary neighborhoods project was great. Oh, and as long as I’m flashing the names of sociologists, when I taught at Loyola in the 1980s—in a combined anthropology/sociology department--I went to holiday parties occasionally with Jerry Suttles (too bad I wasn’t into neighborhood analysis then…). 

The Rubin Report

Rubin’s main point is that the increasing politicization of sociology (leftward) has caused a lowering of scholarly standards. Martin’s “reader’s guide” is a detailed take-down of her evidence and arguments. She does not demonstrate a leftward movement, although this is definitely a topic of debate in sociology. Nor does she provide evidence for a decline in standards. Her analysis is poorly grounded in disciplinary literature, and she makes numerous mistakes. You should read Martin, it cheered me up sitting in a dreary hospital room.

 My Two Cents

I will just give my own brief (and perhaps naïve) views on some aspects of these debates, with a couple of quick comparisons to cultural anthropology and archaeology (the parts of anthropology I know best). If you want to talk about the politicization of a discipline, it seems you need to consider at least three domains: (1) The politicization of the research of individual scholars; (2) The politicization of research topics; and (3) The politicization of major professional organizations.

The politicization of the research of individual scholars.

 Do their political beliefs influence their choice of topics to research? Do their political beliefs skew their research? Do they try to pass off political findings as scholarly findings? I know there is a non-partisan literature on this, in sociology and anthropology, but I don’t know the work of enough sociologists well enough to weigh in (although those whose work I do know, do not show excessive politicization). I do have a biased sample: when I see a sociology paper on a topic of interest, if it looks too political or too interpretivist, I just ignore it and don’t even put it in my Endnote database (Rubin’s report is not in the database). Read Martin, whose discussion here is very good.

The politicization of research topics

As Martin implies, there are topics and themes in sociology where politicization has reached farther than in others. But my impression is that sociology is far less guilty here (that is, it shows less of a pervasive political bias, in fewer fields) than anthropology. I am very interested to see that Joe Henrich comes up with in his report on anthropology. His intro in the main report is pretty brief and vague.

Parts of archaeology are deeply implicated here. For some colleagues, if a Native American myth contradicts the findings of archaeology (e.g., "we always lived here" vs. clear archaeological evidence for arrival in the past few centuries), the archaeologists defer to the myth. Such an approach may be important if you want to work with a tribal group, on their lands, but not if you want to build a scientific account of the past. These arguments have been ongoing in archaeology since the 1970s.

My own fights have been less against overt politicization/activist work in archaeology and more against postmodern-derived interpretivist and relativist approaches. These are often cloaked in political terms, though, making me think this is at least a vaguely similar or parallel development. I can say without doubt that much or most of this work does not use basic social-science scholarly epistemology. A typical paper will position itself within some abstract theoretical domain (structuration theory; new materiality; postcoloniality; post-humanist ontology; etc.), then lay out some archaeological evidence, make a few post-hoc speculative interpretations, and return to the theory in the conclusions. Concepts are not formally defined, they are not operationalized (a big task in archaeology), and there is no testing of hypotheses. These are weak papers that contribute little to the building of an empirical record.

Charles Tilly

For years I used this blog to battle these post-processualists (what we call the postmoderns in archeology, although they claim they are now so far beyond that period). I lacked the tools or concepts to take apart their work systematically. Then, I discovered a literature on epistemology in sociology (mechanisms , analytical sociology, Charles Tilly, etc.), and I immediately started publishing critiques of the postprocessualists in archaeology. Major sources I relied on were: (Abend 2006) (Demeulenaere 2011) (Sampson 2010) (Boudon 1998), and also: (Tilly 1998) (Tilly 2008) (Bunge 1999). Charles Tilly is another of my social
science heroes. Anthropology lacked the epistemological tools I needed to promote a rigorous approach in archaeology. For years, this blog was full of my ranting and raving as I worked out these ideas. I even turned three blog posts into a good journal article on epistemology (Smith 2021). Sometimes I gloss the difference in these camps as a humanities vs. social science approach to archaeology (Smith 2017), although that syllogism is not a great fit, for a variety of reasons. If you want to get me really steamed (as in writing Smith 2017), claim that archaeologists must choose between being a humanities or a natural science. Neither one! We are a historical comparative social science!

Back to the Rubin report. I don’t care if the interpretivists want to spend their time speculating like mad on their favorite topics, but I do care deeply about the negative implications for the field of archaeology. There is so much of this work that simply does not contribute to the accumulation of a body of solid empirical findings. A generation of my colleagues has taught this stuff, and it is now pervasive (although less so in the U.S. than in Britain). If we don’t operationalize our concepts, why bother? I come back again and again to the words of Steve Haber from a book review, “the fundamental question of all serious fields of scholarly inquiry: How would you know if you are wrong?” (Haber 1999). I think that the empirical adequacy, argumentation rigor, and scholarly standards HAVE declined in some major areas of archaeological research (while they have improved marginally in other areas).

I’m inclined to think that Rubin’s postulated decline in standards in sociological research is NOT correct. Martin makes this clear (although it would be good to see more data…..). As Martin discusses, methodological sophistication (in statistics, other numerical models, spatial analysis, simulation, etc.) is far higher in sociology today than 40 years ago, and far higher than in anthropology. Grab the first sociologist you see walking down the street and the first cultural anthropologist, and the former will be more sophisticated about things like sampling, data, measures, rigorous arguments. Not that we don’t worry about such things in cultural anthropology or archaeology, but the disciplinary contrast is pretty clear.

The politicization of the major professional organizations

While Martin shows that Rubin’s understanding of governance in the ASA is faulty, it looks to an outsider like the ASA is probably more heavily politicized today than several decades ago (Massey 2007). I was fed up with the politicization of the American Anthropological Association for some time (why pass resolutions on current topics that anthropologists have no special knowledge of or influence over? Virtue signaling. By the way, if you haven’t read Musa Al-Gharbi’s We have Never Book Woke, I urge you to get a copy today). The removal of the word “science” from the AAA bylaws in 2010 was the last straw, I resigned after 30 years. But, the actions of a professional organization are a very different kettle of fish than the research of its members, a point Martin makes, but could be emphasized more.

 -------------------------

Sorry to be so long-winded. I really enjoyed Martin’s paper. I would conclude that sociology may indeed be more strongly politicized today than 50 years ago, but at the same time, it is clearly more rigorous and sophisticated in its data, methods, and arguments. Too bad we don't have a more scholarly and contextualized analysis of the situation than Rubin's poor-quality report.

References

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

Boghossian, Paul, Kwami Anthony Appiah, Kit Fine, Joseph Henrich, Katherine E. Fleming, Jason Merchant, Gary Saul Morson, Gideon rosen, Ashley Rubin and Sean Wilentz  (2026)  Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences. Vanderbilt University and Washington University of St. Louis, Nashville.

Boudon, Raymond  (1998)  Social Mechanisms Without Black Boxes. In Social Mechanisms: An Analytical Approach to Social Theory, edited by Peter Hedström and Richard Swedberg, pp. 172-203. Cambridge University Press, New York.

Bunge, Mario  (1999)  Social Science under Debate: A Philosophical Perspective. University of Toronto Press, Toronto.

Demeulenaere, Pierre (editor)  (2011)  Analytical Sociology and Social Mechanisms. Cambridge Universitiy Press, New York.

Haber, Stephen  (1999)  Anything Goes: Mexico's "New" Cultural History. Hispanic American Historical Review 79:309-330.

Lenski, Gerhard E.  (1966)  Power and Privilege: A Theory of Social Stratification. McGraw-Hill, New York.

Massey, Douglas S.  (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.

Sampson, Robert J.  (2010)  Eliding the Theory/Research and Basic/Applied Divides: Implications of Merton's 'Middle Range'. In Robert K. Merton: Sociology of Science and Sociology as Science, edited by Craig Calhoun, pp. 63-78. Columbia University Press, New York.

Sjoberg, Gideon  (1960)  The Preindustrial City: Past and Present. The Free Press, New York.

Smith, Michael E.  (2017)  Social Science and Archaeological Inquiry. Antiquity 91(356):520-528.

Smith, Michael E.  (2021)  Why Archaeology's Relevance to Global Challenges Has Not Been Recognized. Antiquity 95:1061-1069.

Smith, Michael E.  (2023)  Urban Life in the Distant Past: The Prehistory of Energized Crowding. Cambridge University Press, New York.

Tilly, Charles  (1998)  Durable Inequality. University of California Press, Berkeley.

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

 

Just What we DON’T Need: A New Predatory Journal in Archaeology

I just got a notice about a new predatory journal, “Archaeological Studies,” published by the notorious predatory publisher, MDPI. I find this alarming and dismaying, a step backward for archaeology. I say this not only because there is a new predatory journal; the commercialization of scholarship and the decline in scholarly quality are forces larger than any single journal. What bothers me is that someone convinced a bunch of good scholars to serve on the Editorial Board. I am so dismayed by this development that I am bringing this blog back to life after 8 years.

 

What is a predatory journal?

In the words of (Grudniewicz, et al. 2019), an excellent paper in Nature:

·       “Predatory journals and publishers are entities that prioritize self-interest at the expense of scholarship and are characterized by false or misleading information, deviation from best editorial and publication practices, a lack of transparency, and/or the use of aggressive and indiscriminate solicitation processes”  (p.211)

·       “Predatory journals are a global threat. They accept articles for publication—along with authors’ fees—without performing promised quality checks for issues such as plagiarism or ethical approval.” (p. 210)

Other scholarly papers (and a book) on the problems of predatory journals and publishers include:

(da Silva, et al. 2022)

(Frandsen 2019)

(Nejadghanbar, and Hu 2022)

Koerber, et al. 2023)

(

If you want an introduction to the topic, Wikipedia has a surprisingly good entry on Predatory Publishing:

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_publishing

And the website, “Think, Check, Submit” looks good (see the graphic), although I have not yet explored this site in depth:

https://thinkchecksubmit.org/journals/

What is wrong with predatory journals?

- Low-quality research gets published, leading to lowered disciplinary standards.

- The reputations of authors and their institutions suffer.

 

Why do Authors Publish in Predatory Journals:

“Authors publish in predatory journals for two fundamental reasons. (1): They are unaware the journal they have submitted their article to is predatory or do not recognize what those varied tactics actually are and look like, or, (2): they are aware, but sadly they have little or no ethical qualms about doing so.”  (Linacre, et al. 2019)

See also:   (Frandsen 2019).”

 

Are MDPI Journals Predatory?

Is the Pope Catholic? MDPI is the poster-child for predatory publishers. There are quite a few blog posts, journalism articles, and scholarly papers that explain the basis for this judgment – please check them out:

Mats Widgren, “Is MDPI a serious publisher or predatory?”:

http://widgren.blogspot.com/2019/02/is-mdpi-serious-publisher-or-predatory.html

Paolo Crosetto, “Is MDIP a predatory publisher

 https://paolocrosetto.wordpress.com/2021/04/12/is-mdpi-a-predatory-publisher/

René Aquarius, “My experience as a reviewer for MDPI”

https://deevybee.blogspot.com/2024/08/guest-post-my-experience-as-reviewer.html

Fischer, Joern. ‘Why Not to Publish in “Sustainability” (and You’re Welcome to Share This Post)’, Ideas for Sustainability,

https://ideas4sustainability.wordpress.com/2020/10/30/why-not-to-publish-in-sustainability-and-youre-welcome-to-share-this-post/

Wikipedia has a lengthy and excellent entry on MDPI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDPI

Or, if you want a journal article, try (Cabezas-Clavijo, et al. 2022).

Several of these papers and posts discuss the strategy of MDPI of having a few higher-quality journals (with good editorial boards and high standards) to give legitimacy to their mostly low-quality journals. The flagship journal I am most familiar with is the MDPI journal Sustainability. But even that journal has predatory qualities and other problems (see Cabezas-Clarijo et al 2022, and the post by Joern Fischer).

 

So, What’s With the New Journal, Archaeological Studies?

 

My guess is that the editor (Mark McCoy) and Editorial Board members will claim that THEIR journal is of high quality, with real peer review and high standards. All those stories about MDPI corporate meddling in the review process, enforced acceptance of low-quality papers; such things won’t happen in OUR journal. Right. In his opening essay about the journal, McCoy (2026) seems aware of the predatory nature of MDPI journals: “But it is important to start by talking about how this new journal’s publishing model works: the good, the bad, and what some may see as predatory.” Not surprisingly, he focuses on “the good” and skims over “the bad” (such as the article processing charge). But he fails to return to explain his predatory remark. Maybe he forgot. Here is a suggestion: put in a link on the journal page to my blog post.

The Article Processing Charge (APC) is $1,250 USD. Many new journals start off with low fees, or waivers of fees, and then jack up the price later. I have to admit I once picked a journal—Discover Cities—because it was new and had no APC (Smith 2024). But APCs are a real problem for science and scholarship. (Butler, et al. 2023) is a good discussion. And for a recent hard-hitting paper, titled, “Author-Paid Publication Fees Corrupt Science and Should Be Abandoned”, see (Morgan, and Smaldino 2025). I agree completely.

Scholarly publishing is in crisis mode. It has been captured by commercial publishers who profit off the gratis intellectual work of scholars. Quality control is down. Predatory publishers and academic fraud are flourishing. Pseudoarchaeological nonsense has reached the mainstream and is becoming more popular than scholarly archaeology. The quality of archaeological publishing has been declining for some time. The establishment of one new predatory journal for archaeology will not have much of an impact on these larger forces. But this is a step backwards for our discipline. The new journal will have a negative impact on scholarship and on the reputations of the people involved. We don’t need this.

Sources

Butler, Leigh-Ann, Lisa Matthias, Marc-André Simard, Philippe Mongeon and Stefanie Haustein  (2023)  The Oligopoly’s Shift to Open Access. How the Big Five Academic Publishers Profit from Article Processing Charges. Quantitative Science Studies 4(4):778-799.

Cabezas-Clavijo, Álvaro, Yusnelkis Milanés-Guisado and Ángel M Delgado-Vázquez  (2022)  Methodological shortcomings of bibliometric papers published in the journal Sustainability (2019-2020). Paper presented at the "From Global INdicators fo Local Applications: 26th International Conference on Science and Technology Indicators, Granada, Spain.

da Silva, Jaime A Teixeira, Mina Moradzadeh, Kwabena Osei Kuffour Adjei, Christopher M Owusu-Ansah, Mulubrhan Balehegn, Eduardo I Faúndez, Manthan D Janodia and Aceil Al-Khatib  (2022)  An integrated paradigm shift to deal with ‘predatory publishing’. The Journal of Academic Librarianship 48(1):102481.

Frandsen, Tove Faber  (2019)  Why do researchers decide to publish in questionable journals? A review of the literature. Learned Publishing 32(1):57-62.

Grudniewicz, Agnes, David Moher, Kelly D. Cobey, Gregory L. Bryson, Samantha Cukier, Kristiann Allen, Clare Ardern, Lesley Balcom, Tiago Barros, Monica Berger and others  (2019)  Predatory journals: no definition, no defence. Nature 576:210-212.

Koerber, Amy, Jesse Starkey, Karin Ardon-Dryer, R Glen Cummins, Lyombe Eko and Kerk Kee  (2023)  The predatory paradox: Ethics, politics, and practices in contemporary scholarly publishing. Open Book Publishers, Cambridge, UK.

Linacre, Simon, Michael Bisaccio and Lacey Earle  (2019)  Publishing in an Environment of Predation: The Many Things You Really Wanted to Know, but Did Not Know How to Ask. Journal of Business-to-Business Marketing 26(2):217-228.

McCoy, Mark D.  (2026)  Archaeological Studies: A Journal for Open Research in Archaeology. Archaeological Studies 1.

Morgan, Thomas J. H. and Paul E. Smaldino  (2025)  Author-Paid Publication Fees Corrupt Science and Should Be Abandoned. Science and Public Policy 52(5):805-809.

Nejadghanbar, Hassan and Guangwei Hu  (2022)  Where predatory and mainstream journals differ: A study of language and linguistics journals. Learned Publishing 35(4):574-584.

Smith, Michael E.  (2024)  How Do Archaeologists Study Early Urban Life? Institutions, Generative Processes, and Urban Order. Discover Cities 1(article 26).

 

Appendix:

Here are some other predatory MDPI journals that archaeologists have published in recently (I find this depressing):

Diversity;  Heritage;  Humans;  Land;  Religions; Remote Sensing; Sustainability. 

If your research isn't good enough for a real journal, work to improve it. If it IS good enough, then why are you wasting time with predatory journals?

When big data are bad data

As archaeologists turn increasingly to the analysis of large, systematic databases, we need to confront an epistemological problem: How do we identify bad data, and what can we do about it? Economic historians and others are becoming consumers of archaeological data, and they are quick to jump on new databases. They seldom ask about the quality of the data, and this can result in sophisticated analyses of bad data. But, as we all know, “Garbage in, garbage out.”

I blogged about this a couple of years ago in reference to Tertius Chandler’s list of city sizes through history, from both archaeological and historical sources (Link is here). Those data (Chandler 1987) are considered shockingly bad and worthless by most historical demographers and historians. In technical terms, they may be "bullshit" (see my post on bullshit).

Yet some urban scholars merrily use the data for studies today. I consider this a real problem, and said so in my review of a manuscript for a journal titled “Scientific Data” (my blog post was an elaboration on that review). But data quality issues were evidently not as important to the authors and journal editors; the paper was published with only a few weak caveats about the data (Reba et al. 2016).

Another recent case focuses on the identification of the plague and other diseases in historical sources. This one focuses on a database compiled in 1975 by Jean-Noël Biraben of historical occurrences of the plague in France and the Mediterranean area. Specialists recognize numerous biases and problems with the basic data. But once the data were digitized, non-historians readily used them without question, leading to problematic results. The basic problem was pointed out by Jones and Nevell (2016), and elaborated on by Roosen and Curtis (2018).

Plague or not plague? From Jones/Nevell)

I highly recommend Roosen and Curtis (and thanks to my excellent colleague Monica Green for sending this my way). Their remarks parallel my views of the Chandler city-size data, but they do a better job of articulating the historiographical issues involved when subsequent scholars used these data (badly):

“When scholars fail to apply source criticism or do not reflect on the content of the data they use, the reliability of their results becomes highly questionable.” (p. 103).

Jones and Nevell deplore “the loosening of the rigorous standards of evidence and interpretation scientific researcher typically demand within their own disciplines.” (103)

Roosen and Curtis list three problems with recent analyses of the Biraben data (including a paper in PNAS): “First, reflection on the data collection process has been improper; second, what the data represent has not been recognized; and third, critique of the original sources has been inadequate. We argue that a critical consideration of any of these three elements would have led to the conclusion that the data set should not have been used at face value.” (105)

“However, through digitization and subsequent publication in a top-ranked journal, the 4-decade-old data set was imbued with a false aura of trustworthiness and the impression of being new historical research.” (104)

Joosen and Curtis make some recommendations for improving the systematic analysis of historical disease data. First, scholars need to employ basic historiographical techniques when they use data. That is, scholars need to subject data to source criticism, comparison of sources, contextual analysis. Second, hypothesis testing should be done on limited regions, rather than Europe as a whole (because of regional biases in Biraben’s material). And third, scholars should compile new, better databases. According to Monica Green, this is now in process with a new international collaborative project.

I think I’ve run out of steam; I’ll have to discuss Binford’s hunter-gatherer database in a separate post. This is a complicated and very troubling case, and I’ve been delaying writing about it for some time now, so I guess I’ll wait a bit longer.

So, what about big-data archaeology. Do we have any bad data? “Not me!” we all exclaim. Nevertheless, we all know that some of our colleagues are sloppier than others, and that some data are more reliable than others. Here are two suggestions.

First, take a historiographic approach to data, both your own and those of others. Historiography refers to the basic methods that historians use to evaluate their sources. Compare sources. Analyze possible biases in the sources. Analyze the context, purpose, and situation of the process of generating or gathering the data. Good metadata standards is a start, but I think we need to go further. Check out some of the methodological literature in history: (Henige 2005), (Hansen and Hansen 2016), (Kipping et al. 2014), and an old favorite of mine: (Fischer 1970); I still kick myself for not taking a class with Fischer when I was at Brandeis!

Second, archaeologists should work out methods of categorizing the reliability of our data and findings, and these should become part of the metadata of any database. There are basic methods of assessing the reliability of data and findings (6 and Bellamy 2012; Gerring 2012; Hruschka et al. 2004). The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has worked out a useful system for coding the reliability of findings by different authors. They suggest evaluating independently the strength of the evidence, and the agreement among authorities (Adler and Hirsch Hadorn 2014).

These suggestions will have to be adapted to use with archaeological data. But they can help us avoid some of the problems that have arisen with the use of the faulty databases on city size and plague occurrence described above. As archaeologist rush ahead into the brave new world of big data, we should try to fix data problems sooner rather than later. We should try to ensure that big data are not bad data.

6, Perri and Christine Bellamy

2012 Principles of Methodology: Research Design in Social Science. Sage, New York.

Adler, Carolina E. and Gertrude Hirsch Hadorn

2014 The IPCC and Treatment of Uncertainties: Topics and Sources of Dissensus. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 5 (5): 663-676.

Chandler, Tertius

1987 Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth: An Historical Census. St. David's University Press, Lewiston, NY.

Fischer, David Hackett

1970 Historians' Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought. Harper, New York.

Gerring, John

2012 Social Science Methodology: A Unified Framework. 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press, New York.

Hansen, Bradley A. and Mary Eschelbach Hansen

2016 The historian's craft and economics. Journal of Institutional Economics 12 (2): 349-370.

Henige, David P.

2005 Historical Evidence and Argument. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison.

Hruschka, Daniel J., Deborah Schwartz, Daphne Cobb St. John, Erin Picone-Decaro, Richard A. Jenkins, and James W. Carey

2004 Reliability in coding open-ended data: Lessons learned from HIV behavioral research. Field Methods 16 (3): 307-331.

Jones, Lori and Richard Nevell

2016 Plagued by doubt and viral misinformation: the need for evidence-based use of historical disease images. The Lancet Infectious Diseases 16 (10): e235-e240.

Kipping, Matthias, R. Daniel  Wadhwani, and Marcelo Bucheli

2014 Analyzing and Interpreting Historical Sources: A Basic Methodology. In Organizations in Time: History, Theory, Methods, edited by Marcelo Bucheli and R. Daniel Wadhwani, pp. 305-330. Oxford University PRess, New York.

Reba, Meredith, Femke Reitsma, and Karen C. Seto

2016 Data Descriptor: Spatializing 6,000 years of global urbanization from 3700 BC to AD 2000. Scientific Data 3 (160034).

Roosen, Joris and Daniel R. Curtis

2018 Dangers of Noncritical Use of Historical Plague Data. Emerging Infectious Disease journal 24 (1): 103-110.  http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/24/1/17-0477. 

George Cowgill's database and my introduction to scientific archaeology

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

George had a database!

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

In a remarkably bad short paper in the current SAA Archaeological Record, Ian Hodder makes a number of statements that equate to the claim that archaeology is bullshit (Hodder 2018). “Bullshit” is a term that refers to speech intended to persuade without regard for truth. Liars care about the truth and try to hide it; bullshitters don’t care whether their speech is true or false. Harry Frankfurt (1986, 2005) published the major works on bullshit, although antecedents can be found back to Plato and Orwell (1946 (1968)); see also Cohen (2002).

Hodder’s first dubious claim is that “the most important public value and function of archaeology is its role in place- and history-making” (p. 43). That is, archaeology is primarily about heritage, identity, and cultural achievement. It is about the present, not the past. Most archaeologists disagree with this. Archaeology is about the past. That is why we carry out excavations, surveys, artifact analyses and dating—to reconstruct and learn about human society in the past. Hodder’s first claim may be wrong and regressive, but it does not qualify as bullshit.

Hodder then gets to his main point: “much of archaeology uses the past to play out the contemporary preoccupations of dominant groups and to regurgitate the present in their interests … I have become tired of archaeologists just mirroring present concerns and theories” (p.43). The bad guys here are people like me, who study inequality, sustainability, or some of the other “grand challenges” we have identified for the discipline (Kintigh et al. 2014a; Kintigh et al. 2014b). Archaeologists go for headlines and not for local context, we are told; “This is what I mean by a post-truth archaeology or fake history.” (p. 44).

The concepts post-truth and fake news are typically applied to current affairs to refer to the kind of disregard for the truth captured in Frankfurt’s concept of bullshit. As Kathleen Higgins (2016) noted in Nature, “post-truth refers to blatant lies being routine across society, and it means that politicians can lie without condemnation … scientists and philosophers should be shocked by the idea of post-truth” (p. 9). So, Hodder is suggesting that people like me and my co-authors (Kohler et al. 2017), or the grand challenges crowd (Kintigh et al. 2014a; Kintigh et al. 2014b) are blatantly lying about the past. We are (knowingly, I guess) just projecting the concerns of the present—the “preoccupations of dominant groups”—back to the distant past.

I am not surprised that someone like Ian Hodder would characterize research by someone like me as post-truth and fake news. To make such an accusation, however, one must have workable concepts of science and truth in order to know that they have been violated. But, Hodder shows in this article (and elsewhere) that he has a faulty understanding of science. Like other post-processual archaeologists, Hodder thinks that science consists of discovering “universals that are singular in their unique law-like characteristics” (p. 43). In a recent paper in Antiquity (Smith 2017), I note how Hodder's post-processualist colleagues like Matthew Johnson (2010) criticize the concept of science in archaeology by employing a 50-year-old (outdated) definition of science and explanation. Science is not necessarily about universals and it is not necessarily about laws. It is about a rigorous search for evidence and explanation by constantly testing claims and hypotheses.

Contrary to Hodder’s assertion, those of us who use archaeological data to study phenomena such as sustainability, inequality, or political systems in the past do not adhere to the post-processualist caricature of science. Instead, we employ current concepts and epistemologies. These are aptly summarized by philosopher of science Daniel Little’s list of three epistemic features of science:

1. empirical testability

2. logical coherence

3. an institutional commitment to intersubjective processes of belief evaluation and criticism (Little 1995)

For additional statements of the nature of science in relation to archaeology and the other social sciences, see (Smith 2017), (Wylie 2000), (Gerring 2012:11), (Bunge 2011), (Little 2009). Or see some of my prior posts on this topic, including:

Science, social science, andarchaeology: Where do we stand?

Why is it important to strive for a morescientific archaeology?

Why is a scientific archaeology so hardto achieve?

Because Hodder has a faulty understanding of science, he has little basis for criticizing the scientific claims of other archaeologists. A look at the journals that my colleagues and I publish in (Science, Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, PLOS-One, etc.) shows that the “big question, big data approach” that Hodder dislikes (p.44) does indeed conform to contemporary scientific standards. So, just what standards are we violating that would warrant the labels post-truth and fake news? Hodder has none to offer.

I turn the tables here and characterize Hodder’s article as bullshit. He evidently does not know the nature of science, and thus his critique shows a disregard for the truthfulness or rigor of our work. His paper is post-truth, fake news, bullshit.

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