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I wrote Human Prehistory: Exploring the Past to Understand the Future, to provide students with a complete and easily understandable overview of the most important stages of human anatomical, behavioral and cultural evolution. Understanding the origin story of humanity offers us a new perspective on the present-day challenges facing our species, and I aim with […]
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“Not much,” might be one’s first reaction to this essay’s title question. Archaeologists are not exactly first responders. We are, if anything, last responders. And yet surprisingly, archaeology is not as odd a source of insights as it might seem. Archaeology offers a 3.5 million-year-long scientific record of human and earlier hominin problem-solving. As we […]
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On 1st June, Professor David Fastovsky, co-author of Dinosaurs, hosted in an exciting Reddit IAmA session. Users had the opportunity to ask palaeontology and dinosaur-related questions in a live Q&A. Here are the best questions and answers...
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An introduction from Commisioning Editor Michael Sharp The ancient Greek and Roman worlds were defined by their cities. Ancient Greece actually comprised a large collection of cities, some of which founded offshoots across the Eastern and Western Mediterranean and into the Black Sea region, and it was in these cities that the foundations of Western […]
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Clive Gamble, author of Settling the Earth: The Archaeology of Deep Human History, reflects on why our power to imagine was so pivotal to our evolution and global expansion.
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Koji Mizoguchi of Kyushu University and author of The Archaeology of Japan finds that a simple interest in the world around us is the starting point for archaeological inquiry. His research has led to insights into topics ranging from Japanese religious belief to the unique characteristics of the Emperor system.
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By Laura Evans, Marketing and Publicity Once upon a time, I was an archaeologist. That’s right, I, Laura Evans, once dug up the pre-eruption layers of ancient Pompeii, sifted through soil and muck in coastal Connecticut, and removed cow patties from a site in the Alps where once a Roman legion camped. For someone who loves the outdoors, archaeology is a great career. But in actuality, most archaeologists spend the majority of their time measuring, analyzing, researching, and looking for funds.
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A few weeks ago, Jared Diamond, author of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, wrote a (rather negative) book review of Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire - a critique of his own book - for Nature... without mentioning that Questioning Collapse was, well, questioning Collapse. StinkyJournalism.org laid out this conflict of interest, starting a good ol’ fashion media ethics debate. Today, the controversy comes to a head and the collected contributors of Questioning Collapse have formulated a response. -------- Requesting Full Disclosure and Correction of Factual Errors Patricia A. McAnany, Norman Yoffee, Joel Berglund, David Cahill, Frederick Errington, Deborah Gewertz, Terry Hunt, Timothy Murray, Kenneth Pomeranz, Christopher Taylor, Michael Wilcox, and Drexel Woodson. -------- The 18 February 2010 (Vol 463) issue of Nature contains a response to our recently published book entitled Questioning Collapse. Called “Two Views of Collapse,” it masquerades as an impartial book review in which the reviewer (Jared Diamond) alleges that the edited book contains serious errors of fact. This justifies his devaluation of our emphasis on human resilience and allows him to discount the importance of culture and history, including the facts of 18th-19th century colonialism. Throughout the “review”, Diamond fails to disclose that our book critically examines two of his publications: Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. The lack of full disclosure brings forth troubling questions. Readers of Nature expect a book review to include a description and evaluation of a book but not an author’s rebuttal to criticism of his own publications. We are disappointed that Nature would ask Jared Diamond to review our book. Nature is of course free to solicit an article by Diamond that considers the evidence presented in our book and/or to present new evidence. We are further surprised that the editorial team at Nature allowed the review to be published in its current form with unsubstantiated allegations of “errors and implausible extremes.” Here, we take pains to correct, once again, the errors perpetrated by the “reviewer” that again repeat over-determined and simplistic theses regarding both societal “collapse” and current global inequities in power and wealth. Read on as they dissect Diamond's argument, point by point. . . We emphasize that Questioning Collapse presents ample archaeological and historical data that contextualize how societies moved through periods of crisis. The goal of our book is to provide students and lay persons alike with an understanding of historical processes that is based upon up-to-date research. Questioning Collapse is more than a critical evaluation of Diamond’s scholarship: it is about how we understand change in the past, how we grapple with the legacy of colonialism and with inequalities in the present, and how we can move forward productively and resiliently into the future.
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