There Ya Go Again! Part One--The Putative 500,000-Year-Old Hafted Spear Points From Kathu Pan 1 VS Reality: What's the DIF?

It's now officially an international media feeding frenzy.
CBC.ca -  Stone-tipped spears used by human hunters much earlier in time
National Geographic -  Stone Spear Tips Surprisingly Old—"Like Finding iPods in Ancient Rome"
Science News - Oldest examples of hunting weapon uncovered in South Africa
New Scientist - First stone-tipped spear thrown earlier than thought
Daily Mail - The birth of weapons: Researchers discover man began hunting with stone ...
Voice of America - Archeologists Identify Oldest Spear Tips
Scientific American - Human Ancestors Made Deadly Stone-Tipped Spears 500000 Years Ago
Christain Science Monitor - Gone spear hunting: Ancestors used stone spear tips 500000 years ago
Times of India - Man began spear-hunting 200000 years earlier than believed
U.P.I. - Stone-tipped weapons older than thought
Vancouver Sun - Scientists spear animals to make point [my home-town newspaper. *sniff*]
China Post - Early human beings used stone spear points at least 500000 years ago: experts
Windsor Star - Spear study gets to the point
The Independent - Prehistoric arms race started earlier than previously thought
The Daily Telegraph - Man hunted with spears half a million years ago
News 24 - SA spear tip made by earlier ancestor
The Seattle Times - Prehistoric man became deadlier earlier than previously thought
HuffingtonPost.com - Stone Spear Tips Suggest Weapons Were Developed Much Earlier Than Previously Thought
Science News - Archaeologists Identify Oldest Spear Points: Used in Hunting Half-Million Years Ago
Business Week (!) - Prehistoric Man Was Deadlier Earlier Than Once Thought
Salon.com - Study: Stone spear tip made by earlier ancestor

From Wilkins et al. 2012

This is beginning to feel like one of those squirmily popular horror series like Hallowe'en. You know? Freddie of the long fingernail knives. A tip o' the hat to Physorg for pointing us in the the direction of the November 16 print edition of Science, where one finds this:

'Evidence for Early Hafted Hunting Technology,' Jayne Wilkins, Benjamin J. Schoville, Kyle S. Brown, and Michael Chazan. Science 338, 942-946, 2012; DOI: 10.1126/science.1227608

Yes, sports fans, the same Jayne Wilkins who gave the Subversive Archaeologist fits a while back [here, here, here, and here] with her claim of a 'blade industry' at Kathu Pan 1 in South Africa. It's also the same Kyle Brown who was the lead author on the Pinnacle Point microliths and ancient heat-treating of lithic raw material. [South African archaeology is obviously a closely knit community.] These latest claims from Kathu Pan 1 are made for stone tools recovered from the same site as the earlier 'blade industry,' an infilled sinkhole, or doline. This time around, some pointy artifacts with step fractures on the distal (pointy) end and huge proximal (butt) ends are claimed to be evidence for, as the title would suggest, composite tools. And, once again, the claim is made for a VERY early date, and I quote '~500 ka, coeval with H. heidelbergensis [or H. antercessor, if you prefer].'
     I hope you'll forgive what will undoubtedly end up being a very long blurt this time around. It's dead necessary. If your Subversive Archaeologist is going to spot shortcomings that undermine the arguments made in a paper like this, he's going to have to spend way more time, and marshall ten times the breadth of expertise than did the referees. And, remember, these are Science referees. There're no flies on them [at least in the opinion of the Science editor(s)]! So, this is not a task that lends itself to brevity.

Vicinity of Kathu Pan 1 (from Wilkins et al. 2012). 

The authors are well aware that such claims cannot be made simply by bold assertion. In today's case, the extraordinary conclusions are accompanied by some truly impressive morphological and metrical analysis, and actualistic experiment with a purpose-built crossbow, some hafted spear stand-ins, and a deceased wild springbok [small ruminant artiodactyl]. Unfortunately for the clever archaeologists, the basis of their claim rests not in their analysis, but rather in their arguments. It's the same old story that the Subversive Archaeologist has told before. Funny thing is...few, it would seem, are listening. Maugre their ultra-scientistic approach.

Notice the veritable totem pole used to 'analogize' a throwing weapon. The 'business end' is a flake hafted to a 1-1/8" (2.8575 cm) clothes-closet dowel, inserted into a piece of 1" galvanized pipe joined to a piece of 1-1/4" pipe. Not that it makes any difference to their conclusions, but this is less analogous to a javelin than it is a small tree-trunk! (From Wilkins et al. 2012)

I'll save my mirthful response to the use of a springbok for such an experiment for a quiet moment alone in my mother's basement. But, seriously, unless the thing were lying dead on the pan, can you imagine H. heidelbergensis [or you or me, for that matter] sneaking up on a nimble beast like this one and driving home such a weapon? They might as well have chosen a dead elephant [but that might not have impressed the authorities].
     This article has two major shortcomings, as I see it. The first is in convincing a sceptical archaeologist that the dates are from contexts in which the association with artifacts is well-warranted. Their second mistake comes in the background knowledge that they draw on in making their claim that the only way their bits of stone could have been modified in the way they were because they were hafted to a stick and poked into an animal. I'll deal with the dates in this part; the stones themselves will have to wait.
     Wilkins et al.'s troubles have their origin in the Kathu Pan 1 doline's depositional history, and in their evidently weak expertise in interpreting the depositional agents of various sized clasts. There is no indication that the authors are even aware of the potential for mixing in a sediment trap like the one in which they're excavating, much less the action of the occasional spring that came into being during the site's depositional history. The authors appear to treat each excavated artifact and sand grain chosen for OSL [yup, again] as if they had been, for all time, temporally associated. How else could you explain their naïve acceptance of the OSL age estimates?

Filled circles are OSL age estimates; filled triangle is U-series/ESR age estimate. From Wilkins et al. 2012.

To get the critical ball rolling, check out the schematic excavation profile above. The authors describe the sediments thusly:

From top to bottom, stratum 1 [not shown] is characterized by 1.5 -2 m of interdigitating calcified sand and organic peats. Stratum 2 [not shown] is characterized by well-sorted aeolian sand that becomes increasingly calcified toward the top. Artifacts in strata 1 and 2 are very sparse, but Beaumont tentatively suggests a ceramic LSA or Iron Age designation for stratum 1 and potential Robberg affiliation for stratum 2.

In other words, too young to be of interest to the authors.

Stratum 3 is ... gravel with sub- angular to sub-rounded pebbles in a greyish sand matrix. 

Stratum 3 is dated at 291 ka.

Stratum 4 consists of two substrata, 4a and 4b, which are distinguished from each other based mainly on the lithic and faunal assemblages, though Beaumont ... also reported a thin pebble lens that divided the substrata. The artifacts were recovered from a yellowish sand matrix.

Stratum 4 sounds like well sorted sand. Most probably wind-borne. In fact, I'd bet my lower central left incisor that these are fine to medium-sized sand grains, typical of aeolian transport and deposit. [I should tell you that I can make good on this bet. The orthodontist that the tooth be extracted before they put braces on my pearly whites, and I still have it under my pillow, waiting for the tooth fairy.] Moreover, I'd bet that the period during which the sands were deposited was an extraordinarily dry and windy one. That's because there is evidence of what could only have been scouring out by wind in the non-conformity between 4 and 3. Stratum 3's coarser, unsorted sediments bespeak a later, wetter period when surface water flow was transporting a range of small-sized sedimentary grains into the doline.
     But, here's the kicker. The really old dates are from an intrusive geomorphic feature, one that would undoubtedly have brought older fine sediments up to the level of the excavations, and described by the authors as follows.

In the process of cleaning the section, two well-defined vertically-oriented spring vents in stratum 4a were revealed and described as the ‘Upper Vent’ and ‘Lower Vent’. The Upper Vent, which is in the uppermost levels of stratum 4a and truncated at the top by Stratum 3, is densely packed with lithic artifacts and fauna, and the area outside the vent contains few, if any, artifacts. [The 464 ka sample] was recovered from sediments in direct association with the concentrated lithic artifacts and faunal remains within the vent. 

What does this tell us? And how does this relate to the veracity of Wilkins et al.'s claims? Plenty.

A brief accounting of karst features.

To begin with, think of how a big hole in the ground [the doline] came to be, and then filled up. There's a clue in the name of the site, Kathu Pan. A 'pan' is what would be called a playa in North America. It's a broad, nearly horizontal valley bottom that seasonally collects water from precipitation, hosts a shallow lake for a time, then dries up and awaits the next wet season.
     For a doline to form, the pan must be underlain by lithified fine sediments, such as limestone, siltstone or mudstone. These are the kinds of geological strata that are susceptible to karst processes--cave formation, among others. The illustration above is a succinct depiction of the kinds of geomorphic features that can occur in areas of karst. Those below are real-life dolines.

Guatemala City, Guatemala, 2007. A 'swallow hole.' It will need to be bridged. Filling it in is out of the question.

Florida. This is more of a 'sink' than a sinkhole. But just as devastating. 

A doline [or sinkhole] is the surficial expression of a subsurface void, or cave, the 'roof' of which became too thin near the surface and collapsed. Sinkholes are common in the middle of the US, and anywhere that the bedrock can be dissolved by surface water percolating downward. [The Santa Cruz campus of the University of California, where I've worked for the past 8 or so years, is built on mudstone that hosts a cave system, and in many places there are sinkholes at the surface.]
     So, once formed, the Kathu Pan 1 doline and its associated solution features began to fill in with any sediments that were transported by wind or water to its gaping maw. According to the authors, the pan in question is still somewhat depressed relative to the surrounding surface, and is thus still filling in. [It's likely that, as the underlying bedrock evolves, voids get larger, leading to settling of the fill material. Thus, a feature like the Kathu Pan 1 doline will always be a dynamic sedimentary environment, and might never be, truly, filled in.]
     The basal geology of Kathu Pan 1 would be of no intrinsic value to this discussion of the OSL age estimates were it not that Wilkins et al. observed 'spring vents' in their site. Your subversive imagination should, upon hearing such a statement, see a red flag. A spring vent is an opening in the surrounding sediments that concentrates ground-water discharge to the Earth’s surface. In other words, it's like a do-it-yourself geological pressure release valve. In the case of Kathu Pan 1 these spring vents could only have occurred at a time when the underlying karst system was chock full of water under pressure from the local water table. Some of that pressure was relieved through a 'vent' that formed in the unconsolidated sediments of the doline's fill. Think of it. Everything in the vent would be turned into a slurry as the water passed through it toward the surface. As in any transport process involving moving water [even water moving vertically through sediment] the smaller and lighter clasts would be more mobile, and the heavier pieces would tend to form a lag deposit. [Exactly fitting the authors' description: 'concentrated lithic artifacts and faunal remains.'] In a vertical column that contains fines like sand and larger pieces like stone artifacts, the heavier artifacts would literally sink as the smaller grains were randomly removed from beneath them--just the way your feet sink when you're standing on a beach and a wave washes ashore and then recedes.

     It simply can't be argued away or ignored. The authors' concentration of artifacts and faunal remains is almost certainly the result of the these processes I've described. I'm not makin' this stuff up! Karl Butzer, one of the lions of geoarchaeology in the early days, thought that a spring vent was an important enough disturber of archaeological traces that he put a wonderful illustration in Archaeology as Human Ecology, shown below.
     So, quite apart from the claims of hafted stone artifacts, the authors have a big problem with their dates. If it isn't already patently obvious [and there's no reason it should be] the dates from Stratum 3 and the spring vent are suspect. We have no way of knowing the stratigraphic origin of the coarser sands and pebbles in Stratum 3. All we know is that they came from somewhere else further up the fluvial train. They could have been eroded from the older sediments in which the doline formed, or any deposit created since then. How to know? [More OSL mathematical flim-flammery, I suspect.]
     In a different way, but with the same result, the fines selected for OSL dating from the spring vent were undoubtedly a porridge of old and young clasts. Since the water was pushing upward through older sediments, we can have NO WAY OF KNOWING where they came from or indeed how and if they are related temporally to the artifacts that almost certainly derived from a younger level or levels. The spring vent could be as recent at Holocene in age, given the other uncertainties raised by the depositional circumstances in Stratum 3. Bottom line: we could never know the true age of any artifact in the spring vent that passed through Stratum 4 (a and b).

There is no question that a spring vent, such as that occurring at Kathu Pan 1, would wreak havoc with the sediments in its path, and those nearby.

I've raised a lot of questions in this piece. So, to summarize, the OSL dates from Kathu Pan 1 cannot be relied upon. Because of the depositional environments--a sinkhole and a spring vent--there are too many unknowns when it comes to the association between the artifacts that interest the authors and the sediments selected for dating. Too. Many.

     I'm truly sorry if this comes across as a harangue. I get so frustrated by the way people working in my business are so concerned to get a spectacular result that they ignore very basic principles of stratigraphy and geomorphology, to say nothing of informal logic. The present authors are no exception [as we've seen before].
     Watch this space for a discourse upon the stones, coming soon.

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The Acheulean in Arizona: More Bizarre News From the Dark Side of Archaeology

It really doesn't get any better than this. And mind, I wouldn't normally expend much energy dispelling incipient myths like this one, were it not that in this case there's a real danger of it sprouting legs and moving under its own power thanks to a daft academic archaeologist in Boston.

We won't be so crass as to point out the misspellings, 
erroneous capitalization and poor punctuation. Will we?

My dad used to say 'A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.' The only serious danger in the field of archaeology [aside from liver disease and arthritic knees] is that a patently false claim--however well-intentioned--becomes received knowledge. In other words, an erroneous claim that becomes an archaeological myth. In this instance, the danger to archaeology is being multiplied by a gullible Phoenix media hungry for an interesting story and, in an unusual turn of events, a truly credulous and misinformed 'professional' archaeologist, Curtis Runnells, from Boston University.

A putative Acheulean site in Pheonix, Arizona (Photo credit)

      The story goes like this. Mr. Ken Stanton, Amateur Archaeologist, thinks he's found an Acheulean archaeological site. The Acheulean, previously known only from Europe, Africa and southern Asia began about 1.5 Ma. This isn't the first time that such objects have come to light in the southwestern United States. Indeed, the Arizona story is virtually identical to that of the Calico Hills site, famed for having fooled Louis B. Leakey into thinking that Homo erectus had somehow made it to the Americas in the Early to Middle Pleistocene. His attention was drawn to the site  in the late 1950s after broken rocks similar to those Mr. Stanton has lately found compelled archaeologist Ruth DeEtte Simpson to announce her interpretation--that the site contained very old, very crude, stone tools like those that had been known in Europe and Africa for nearly a century. The Calico Hills' proponents are still making those same claims fifty years on, even though they've been thoroughly and rigorously refuted by archaeologists who know a great deal about the geological processes and their expectable outcomes in the production of a desert alluvial fan--C. Vance Haynes, for one.

Ruth 'Dee' Simpson and L.S.B. Leakey at the Calico Hills Early Man site.
(Photo credit)

     But what are the claims, Rob? We wanna see!
Behold and be dismayed. First, photos of Stanton's finds and a cross-section of the sedimentary context, all kindly provided by Mr. Stanton, himself.

An amorphous lump of 
angular vein quartz

A pointy lump of angular vein quartz.

A tiny piece of angular quartz

As one can plainly see from these illustrations, this is vein quartz, which while being very hard, is also quite brittle. And, while some forms of quartz fracture conchoidally, this type does not. Its material nature aside, the geological context is most important in this instance. That these artifacts are found in a desert alluvial fan should be a red flag for any archaeologist, especially one who's geomorphologically aware or is in fact a geoarchaeologist. Alluvial fans develops as a result of the intense, but infrequent, rainstorms that are characteristic of desert climates. The rain falls upslope and quickly entrains every loose bit of rock and dirt that has, through colluvial action, come to rest in the dry course of the newly active ephemeral stream since its last activation. Depending on the energy level of the flow and the nature of the rock being carried along, the overall result is what you see in the profile below.

A cut through the alluvial fan, with quartz geofact visible in the centre.

This high-energy alluvial phenomenon is more appropriately called a debris flow, rather than an ephemeral stream, because the water represents just one component of the stream, the majority consists of sedimentary clasts of various sizes that collide forcefully with one another to produce what in some cases may be seen to resemble chipped stone artifacts that humans or human ancestors have made. This kind of object is called a geofact because it was created by geological processes, but nonetheless fools a naive observer because they appear to have been chipped in a manner that broadly resembles early hominin stone technology. And Rule #1 states that if something that you think is made by people, but that could just as well be made by other natural processes, you can not give priority to people, but must instead show cause as to why we should think anything other than that these are geofacts! 

     The kind of deposit shown in the profile is a diamicton--comprising an unsorted (or at best poorly sorted) mélange of newly angular bits of rock as well as sand, silt and clay, not all of which are clast supported. Such deposits are very UNlike the ones that a permanent stream produces in its path. In the Arizona case the quartz stands out from the rest of the material in the fan because it happens to be of a type that's analogous to that of the finer-grained rock that makes good stone artifacts. I wonder how many bits of vein quartz Mr Stanton passed up because they didn't look like 'good' artifacts!

     Aside from the attention that Stanton's claims received in the Phoenix media, news of his 'discovery' reached an academic archaeologist who is, unfortunately, credulous and is giving these naturally broken rocks more attention than they warrant. The following three passages are messages that archaeologist Dr. Curtis Runnels of Boston University has sent to Mr. Stanton, which have given the Arizona man no reason to suspect that his claims are theoretically unsound.

 These are extremely interesting artifacts and the context is very interesting too. I am not an expert in Arizona desert geology, but the the [sic] deposit looks like a cemented debris flow or perhaps a lake-margin deposit. It could very well be Pleistocene in age. It should certainly be possible to date that context if you can get a knowledgeable regional geologist to look it over; for instance by a technique like Infrared Stimulated Optical Luminescence on the sand grains I can see in the surround [sic] matrix.

We can only guess about the nature of Pleistocene humans: our own species, Homo sapiens, is dated securely at sites like Herto (Ethiopia) to 200,000 years ago and would certainly be a candidate, as well as Homo heidelbergensis (a hominin grade that dates to ca. 400,000 years ago). Without fossils there is no way to tell because these kinds of tools were probably made by more than one hominin grade, perhaps by as many as four or five! 

My summary is that you have early looking artifacts in a definite geologic context that might help pin down their age.

and

Dear KC,

Thank you for showing me the photographs of the lithic artifacts and their findspot from the site that you have discovered near Phoenix.

My specialty is the Palaeolithic of the Old World in the eastern Mediterranean and SE Europe, and not the American SW, but the artifacts that you have shown me would be considered as Lower or Middle Palaeolithic if they were foud [sic] in my area.

They are definitely artifacts [emphasis added], and the typological and technical characteristics that I see in the photographs are consistent with their identification with Pleistocene industries (modes or technocomplexes).  Similar artifacts are widely distributed in the Old World, and have been reported also in the United States over the past century or so. Unfortunately they are rather hard to date: in the Old World such industries have a wide chronological span, ranging from 1.6 myr to ca. 0.175 myr (and some similar forms occur in the Middle Palaeolithic or Middle Stone Age in Europe and Africa much later, down to ca. 50 kyr). Therefore, it is of particular importance that your finds appear to be in a datable geologic context. The photographs you showed me appear to show artifacts in situ (geologically speaking) in a cemented breccia or debris flow. This suggests two things to my mind. The original sites, in the sense of living floors or occupation areas, have no doubt been destroyed by erosion and the artifacts have been redeposited downslope.  Dating the breccia/debris flow would, therefore, give a minimum age for the artifacts, but that would be an important start. My geological training is in the Mediterranean in regions (e.g. Greece, Albania, and Turkey) with similar arid conditions to the American SW, and from what I can see in your photographs I would consider the artifact-bearing deposit to have considerable age, probably Pleistocene.

A more precise estimate In short, I would accept as a working hypothesis to be tested by further research in the field that these artifacts are of Pleistocene age and likely to pre-date, perhaps by a considerable margin, the earliest accepted industries such as Clovis and Folsom in the SWof their age or the affinities with other industries would not be possible at this stage of research.

Good luck! Sincerely yours, Curtis

Curtis Runnels, MA, PhD, FSA, Professor of Archaeology, Archaeology Department, Boston University, 675 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston MA 02215

Editor, Journal of Field Archaeology

and later on

Here is a longer message than I could manage yesterday on my phone in the train. No need to send me the Washington Artifacts; let's not risk getting them lost in the mail. I want to concentrate on the Arizona stuff for the moment. My plan is to discuss the artifacts you already sent me with a geoarchaeologist who is familiar with Arizona geology and get his opinion on the context.

My other plan is to write an essay in the Journal of Field Archaeology as Editor-in-Chief (co authored with my contributing editor Professor Norman Hammond, who is also the Archaeology Correspondent for the Times of London and the editor of the Times Literary Supplement). He is a New World specialist and we have already talked about how the Pre-Clovis picture is becoming clearer. We will call for a total reexamination of the old sites (e.g., George Carter's Texas Street Site and Calico among others) and a new open minded approach to the Pre-Clovis question and invite contributions of manuscripts on the subject for publication. I think the timing is right. The Stanford and Bradley book, Across Atlantic Ice, will be published in January and in it they make their case for the movement of Solutrean people by boat across the Atlantic in the Palaeolithic to the east coast. If one group of Palaeoliths could make the trip, then anything is possible and a complete restudy of the archaeological record is warranted.

All this takes time and don't worry about your priority (i.e. credit for your discovery). I have the evidence before me that you found this stuff first and am willing to say so whenever and wherever necessary.

Best wishes,

Curtis

I ask you, 'How lame can this guy Runnels be?' He recognizes that this is a debris flow, but somehow fails to make the connection between the nature of an active debris flow and the concomitant and expectable damage to, in this case, vein quartz. I will be very surprised if, when Runnels approaches the 'geoarchaeologist who is familiar with Arizona geology' he is told anything other than that these are perfectly good geofacts and not, as Runnels proclaims, 'definitely artifacts.' [By the way, I'm guessing that the above-mentioned geoarchaeologist is none other than Paul Goldberg, whose academic appointment is also at BU. Paulie, you still haven't responded to my Wonderwerk Cave take-down. Clock's ticking...]

     Nitey, nite!

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Does a Bear Shit in the Woods?

I visited Pod Hradem Cave today for, I think, the first time this year. The weather has been so [forgive me for this and the above use of a scatological expletive] shitty that the path was too treacherous for my archaeologist's knees to attempt. By the way, the meaning of the rhetorical question that is the title of today's blurt is to be gleaned later on, and, oddly enough has nothing to do with bears. So...on we go.


I took some piccies at the cave that I'll share with you. The first is a view to the right of the entrance. The cave is about 470 m asl, and the highest point of land uphill is about 570. Thus, the cave is formed in what amounts to a promontory in what would otherwise be a very steep talus slope, very near to a precipice with a much steeper [plus or minus vertical] pitch. The precipice lurks where you can see daylight above the talus slope that develops on either side of the cave. This one on the right and the other on the left side of the cave entrance [shown below it] comprise sediments from higher up the slope. [duh!] The two coalesce in front of the cave, which, barring recent clearing to access the cave, produces something akin to a baby's bib, collecting coasts from directly above and directing them into the cave mouth.






It's possible to see a portion of the talus slope to the left of the cave entrance in the photo above. This geomorphological situation is critical to accurate interpretation of what's in the cave in the entrance tunnel, the slope of which is between 20 and 30 degrees downward as you move into the cave. I can't emphasize enough, and I've discussed this with the PI, Lad Nejman, that anything small enough to be transported on 20-degree slope when it's bucketing rain could have, and very likely did enter the cave from outside. Clasts such as burned and charred bone, charcoal, organic matter of every other sort, even the bones of little creatures nesting in the small solution crevices that occur above the entrance in the cliff face, visible in the shot below.



This view includes the LED lighting array that we're using for illumination. I took my iPad into the cave hoping to take a piccie or two, but after one I realized that, while our primate eyes are able to make sense of the dim light, my 21st century marvel couldn't. Here's a view of a cave bear tibia in situ. It's the blur in the middle of the larger blur.




I've prolly bored you enough with my tame existence here in the Moravske Kras. So, I'll finish up with my thought for the month [perhaps the first ever and the only]. Somewhere in this subdued diatribe is the answer to the question of why I titled this blurt as I did.

It follows as the night the day. Wild fantasies about the abilities of pre-modern human Hominidae keep piling up. And there's no end in sight. Whether the extreme claims derive from genetics, geomorphology, geochronology or plain old, garden-variety 'dirt' archaeology, there seems to be no limit to the imagination of the practitioners, nor to the credulity of the editors, referees, and the overwhelming majority of the discipline's members. My suspicion is that even the most well-meaning scholars are either too busy or too limited in their understanding of the totality of scientific knowledge that goes into making knowledge about the past.
I have personal experience to bear this out [not mentioning any names]. One, for whom I have great respect, and who investigates cognitive evolution, is already busy enough wrestling with the ins and outs of brain function and how each corresponds with changes in the hominids to spend time critically examining each outrageous claim that comes down the pike. This archaeologist has also allowed that geomorphological subtleties are lost on him. Another, a geoarchaeologist whose analytical work I have no quarrel with, seems content to let the archaeologists make sense of his findings as they relate to hominid behaviour. As you can imagine, I believe this has led to some quite erroneous claims for hominid behaviour in the Pleistocene [Lower, Middle, and upper].
I strongly suspect that these are not isolated cases. Only a very few archaeologists that I know possess the intellectual propensity, the diversity and depth of cross-disciplinary knowledge, and the wherewithal to be critical of all but the most mundane archaeological inference. As a result, every new [and usually startling or spectacular] claim is accommodated within a previously formulated working theory. How can I expect the rest of them to exercise their critical faculties when, to my way of thinking, the best of them are so credulous? I can't! And, obviously, the work of any unsuspecting archaeologist will either perpetuate an old erroneous theory or, sui generis, create a new one. I flatter myself in presuming to call this blog The Subversive Archaeologist, because in reality I am anything but a subversive. I seek only a reasoned approach to archaeological observations, one that's based on well-warranted assumptions and the widest range as possible of modern analogues against which to compare those observations.
[As the Subversive Archaeologist's readers will already know, I'm hamstrung by an abysmal grounding in chemistry and physics. Thus I'm unable to examine the technical claims made by practitioners of those sciences and must rely on my understanding of geomorphology, and a good encyclopaedia, to have any hope of being critical of an archaeologist's erroneous claim made on the basis of chemical or physical analysis.]
Most of the time it seems like an exercise in futility. [Which, as it happens, is a phrase that once graced the first and, alas, final draft paper I was going to write with Diane Gifford-Gonzalez on the vicissitudes of using measures of utility in zooarchaeological studies. That pesky R. Lee Lyman beat us to the punch, as it turned out.] In all seriousness, there are so many claims that are all but wild speculation that I am discouraged by the magnitude of the job ahead for the discipline, much more for a purportedly more objective archaeologist who presumes to refer to himself as subversive.
I'll leave you to ponder.
By the way. I was unable to steal the time to blog while I was lately ensconced with my Czech family. I hoping that you'll understand, and accept that my aim of 'live-blogging' my experiences here has fallen flat on its face.
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