AlunSalt

Michael E. Smith lays down an interesting challenge at Publishing Archaeology: What are the hard problems in Archaeology? What questions haven’t archaeologists answered and aren’t likely to answer any time soon? A couple of ideas come to mind. I’ll start with the easier problem to express. Is an ancient history or archaeology of religion a [...]

This time in support of Simon Singh. I thought quite a bit before putting this up. While I support Simon Singh, I have doubts about Sense About Science. Sense About Science is loosely connected with Spiked Online through Living Marxism, which seems to think Christopher Monckton is a credible speaker on climate change. The climate [...]

Here’s an oddity I started thinking about following a tweet by Dr Kiki who pointed to this article Return of the Neanderthals: If we can resurrect them through fossil DNA, should we?. The strange thing was my reaction to this. The answer seems obvious. I thought I’d missed the boat on this when The Philosophers’ [...]

Duane Smith put up a post about what he called Intellectual Monuments which he thinks everyone should visit. By this he meant that there were some ideas so important that people should make the effort to engage with them the same way they would with historic monuments. No so much by buying a ticket to [...]

Following Yvonne’s comment, I’ve uploaded the two podcasts I recorded on Pagan reburial in the UK to Box.net. You should be able to access them at: http://www.box.net/shared/z5k2bv7ao9 http://www.box.net/shared/sa1ojvzmnl The reburial of remains issue is live again and it’s interesting for a couple of reasons. One is the ethics of studying and storing human remains and [...]

2008 was a lousy year. 2009 continues in the same way. I haven’t put anything about what happened in 2008 online yet. I’d skip the current problems too were it not for an article in the Times Higher Education this week recently: “It is monstrously wrong that patients cannot ask for euthanasia“. I’m tackling a [...]

Whitley’s paper is interesting because he hits the gap between the empiricists and relativists in the centre. In doing so he argues that cognitive archaeology need not be subjective and relativist but also that logical positivism is not enough for some archaeological questions.

What is it that makes a happy life? People have been asking that for millennia and I have a few minutes while I wait to collect someone, so I might not have a comprehensive answer.

Julian Baggini has a new game poking fun at certain critical postures in academia: Žižuku. It’s a satirical game, but could it also produce genuine ‘Critical Theory’?

Everyone else is linking to the trailer, so I’ll link to a paper from The Norwegian Archaeological Review, ‘Why Indiana Jones is Smarter Than the Post-Processualists‘ by John Bintliff. The most remarkable feature of this latest conference was the way in which speaker after speaker, British and Continental, displayed a total disregard for affiliation to [...]