One of the major things I took home from this conference was that there has been an important broadening of enthusiasm for subjects that used to be considered bizarre, baseless, unscientific, and even too political for archaeology. I got the impression that talking about ritual, symbolism, and belief systems (hot topics for decades among those who focus on the materially-rich Middle Woodland and Mississippian "florescences" of the Eastern Woodlands) is now also quite common among those who work on the Paleoindian and Archaic periods.  I saw numerous papers asking new questions about material remains, and they were fascinating.

The session that really brought the point home was a symposim titled "A Ritual Gathering: Celeberating the Work of Cheryl Claassen" (Session 3 in the program).  Claassen, a professor at Appalachian State, has been pushing the boundaries of the archaeological conversation in the Eastern Woodlands for decades (you can see some of her work on her Academia.edu page). The papers in this session (many by her students) evoked responses in me ranging from "what a profoundly interesting thought" to "are you sure about that?" to "get off my case."  It was great.

(As an aside, I wish that some of my friends on the "fringe" could have seen these papers. Perhaps if you witnessed a professional archaeologist discussing how the skeletal remains of immature bird wings in a feature were connected to the astronomical scheduling of seasonal ritual aggregation events, you'd have a better appreciation both for the kinds of questions that actual archaeology can address and the level of work it takes to convincingly address those questions. The claim that archaeologists are afraid to say anything new or different is preposterous.)

I want to state clearly that, in my opinion, the expansion of thought that was on display in the Claassen session is a positive thing with a lot of potential upside.  As an advocate of a complex systems approach to understanding human cultures in the past, it makes perfect sense to me that ritual and belief are involved in both "bottom up" and "top down" aspects of human societies. I see no logical or analytical reason to assume that ritual and belief are epiphenomenal or unimportant compared to other domains of social, economic, and political life. It all matters, and it's all fair game for trying to flesh out the past as best we can and trying to explain, using all the tools at our disposal, how those societies worked and why and how they changed. 

For me, however, my positive regard for the role of belief and ritual in human societies (and for the appropriateness of including it in our discussions) doesn't alleviate concerns about how we study it in the past tense. I know that I'm not alone here. I think several legitimate worries underlie uncertainties about both the approaches and the conclusions reached by those focused on belief and ritual.

One concern that's out there -- perhaps the major one -- is a feeling that the "ritual" people are jumping outside the established lines of scientific process in a way that undermines confidence in their conclusions. Talking with a few of my colleagues about this, I got the sense that people are not closed to the questions so much as they are skeptical of the methods (or the perceived lack of methods) used to address those questions. 

I conceive of science as an inductive-deductive loop. On the inductive side, you create an explanation to fit a bunch of data.  On the deductive side, you collect new information to test an expectation derived from your explanation. Ideally, the two sides of the loop are exploited together to create (eventually) a credible explanation that fits all the available information and makes further predictions about the world that are falsifiable but not falsified. As long as you get yourself into this loop, you're doing science. It doesn't really matter what the starting point is or where an idea comes from as long as you're willing to follow through and ride the inductive-deductive roller coaster around the track for as long as it takes.

Are there ways to skeptically evaluate ideas about Archaic ritual and belief systems and make sure we're utilizing the full power of the inductive-deductive loop?  I'm sure that there are. What I'm less sure of, at this point anyway, is the presence of an appetite for the deductive side of the loop that matches the robust enthusiasm for climbing up the inductive side. No matter how interesting or appealing an interpretation is, you still have to put on the skeptic glasses and try to find the seams you can follow to figure out whether you're right or wrong.  

The inductive-deductive loop is critical in archaeology because of all of our equifinality problems: there's usually more than one way something could have happened, so how do you know what the real cause was? You have to do the work to assemble independent lines of evidence, build theory, collect data, construct and test hypotheses, etc. You can't skip all that and just hug an assertion. Well, you can, but I won't buy what you're selling.

That leads me to a second concern: the burden of proof. Who's is it? Does it have to reside in one domain of inquiry, or is it the responsibility of the person making the claim no matter what the claim actually is? At one point in the session I heard the phrase "can you prove it's not a ritual assemblage?" I take the point of the question (which was used mainly, I think, to argue that we should always consider ritual as a possibility), but I'm uncomfortable with the notion that we should accept/assume that something is related to ritual unless we can prove it's not.  I think we all realize that people's lives are often not partitioned neatly into "ritual" and "non-ritual" components, but that doesn't mean all activities should be presumed to be ritualistic in nature unless we can prove they're not. That seems to me to be out of bounds of the way good science is done.  There has to be a positive case made for a claim, whether it's about ritual or not.

And that brings me to my third concern: the appeal to human "universals" to gird claims about past ritual behavior. Several times, in several different papers, I heard the assertion that all humans share a basic set of experiences in the material world and therefore all belief systems share a similar set of components tied to that material world: fire transforms, the sky is above and the earth is below, water goes down and smoke goes up, etc. This seems logical and may well be true (I haven't yet read through the arguments to evaluate them on my own).  My concern is not that such universals don't exist, but that playing the "universal" card as the basis for analysis rather than an empirical problem may do two counter-productive things: (1) short circuit the inductive-deductive cycle by introducing a powerful, unvetted assumption; and (2) actually bland out the kind of contextual variability that could potentially be very interesting and analytically useful.

This last point is somewhat ironic.  Many of the issues that the pursuit of ritual and belief articulates with have a particularly "post-processual" flavor. One of the main critiques leveled at the processual archaeology of the late twentieth century was that it didn't account for the meanings of objects in their contexts. Symbols and objects do not mean the same things in different cultures: context matters. It seems to me that by falling back to "universals" as explanation we're actually ignoring context altogether -- if something is present everywhere, what meaning does it actually have?

One of my professors at Southern Illinois University was fond of repeating the phrase "playing ethnosemantic tennis with the net down" (if my memory serves me right, he used the phrase in connection with criticisms of Claude Levi-Strauss).  If we lay down a foundation of presumed "universals" and then build an analysis based on those, I worry that we're lowering the net significantly if not taking it down altogether. Opening things up is great for generating discussion and new approaches, but at some point the net has to go back up so we can have some mechanism for discriminating between credible and non-credible explanations. 

I'm excited by what I saw and heard at SEAC. We've still got a long way to go to address many basic space-time issues for some of the questions that I and many others are interested in. That doesn't mean, of course, that we can't think about other additional things while that's going on. I bought Claassen's (2015) book Beliefs and Rituals in Archaic Eastern North America at SEAC. I look forward to seeing what's inside and comparing it to my own views and knowledge about the eastern Archaic. Nothing that I've said in this post should be construed as pointing at the content of the book, which I have not read yet. I anticipate the book will be a stimulating read. Should be fun!

I've spent the last several hours doing my prep for Monday's Forbidden Archaeology class. Following an introduction to the topic of pre-Columbian transoceanic contact last week (mostly an overview of the historic, political, social, and scientific debate about the "mound builders"), we'll be jumping in by discussing two classic cases of inscribed stones: the Newark Holy Stones (1860) and the Bat Creek Stone (1889).

It's been fun reviewing these two cases. In my opinion, neither is strong evidence for anything "real" other than late 1800's hoaxery. Their historic contexts are interesting, as are the differences in the motivations of the hoaxers. Both the Newark Holy Stones and the Bat Creek Stone still have their share of fans, but apparently there's some tension over what exactly the stones mean. ​

Brad Lepper and Jeff Gill have written extensively about the Newark Holy Stones, a pair of stone artifacts inscribed with Hebrew lettering purportedly "discovered" in southern Ohio earthen mounds. Lepper argues that the stones were created in attempt to show that the indigenous peoples of the Americas were related to Old World peoples as known in the Bible, thereby undermining the polygenist framework that was being used to justify slavery. After the first stone (the Keystone) "found" by David Wyrick didn't pass the sniff test of those who examined it, he miraculously found another soon after (the Decalogue Stone).Thousands of person-hours of careful excavation on Ohio Mound by people other than Wyrick has failed to produce any more ancient Hebrew artifacts. Brad Lepper, however, did succeed in finding an illustration that may have been the source of design that Wyrick used for the Decalogue Stone. 

To me, the most interesting thing about the Newark case is that the hoaxer (presumably Wyrick) was apparently attempted to "humanize" Native American populations by bringing them into a Biblical framework, rather than de-legitimize them by providing evidence that others built the mounds.​

Archaeological conferences serve several purposes. For me, there are three main attractions, all selfish: (1) meeting people; (2) learning about things I didn't know that I didn't know about; and (3) clarifying and catalyzing my own research. Conferences are fun, but they're also a bit mercenary -- I want something from them.

This year's Southeastern Archaeological Conference (SEAC) is in Athens, Georgia, which I hear is very nice. I put together a small symposium titled "Hunter-Gatherer Societies of the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene Southeast" (session 35 in the program). I originally wrote about the idea last April. We ended up with papers by seven presenters: Al Goodyear, Doug Sain, David Thulman and Maile Neel, Kara Bridgman Sweeney, Joe Wilkinson, Sarah Gilleland, and me. Here is the symposium abstract:

"Societies are groups of people defined by persistent social interaction.  While the characteristics of the late Pleistocene and early Holocene hunter-gatherer societies of the Southeast certainly varied, archaeological data generally suggest that these societies were often geographically extensive and structurally complex.  Patterns of artifact variability and transport, for example, demonstrate that small-scale elements (e.g., individuals, families, and foraging groups) were situated within much larger social fabrics. This session aims to explore the size, structure, and characteristics of early Southeastern hunter-gatherer societies, asking how patterns of face-to-face interactions at human scales “map up” to and are affected by larger social spheres." 

I decided to use my contribution to think about the issue of a possible abandonment of the deep south during the later portion of the Early Archaic period. Here is the abstract for my presentation, titled "Social Implications of Large-Scale Demographic Change during the Early Archaic Period in the Southeast:"
 
"Previous studies of radiocarbon and projectile point distribution data have suggested the possibility of a significant shift in the distribution and/or behaviors of human populations during the later portion of the Early Archaic period (i.e., post-9000 RCYBP). This paper considers the evidence for an “abandonment” of large portions of the Southeast following the Kirk Corner Notched Horizon and explores (1) possible explanations for large-scale changes in the distribution of population in the Early Holocene and (2) how those demographic changes, if they occurred, might have articulated with social changes at the level of the family, foraging group, and larger societies."  

I first became interested in the Early Archaic abandonment issue while reading Ken Sassaman's (2010) book Eastern Archaic, Historicized. Working on this presentation was fun because it forced me to try to think through some of the issues about how we would recognize a large-scale abandonment, what the abandonment process actually would have been like, and what the social ramifications might have been for the people and societies involved in that process. I'll tweak the presentation before I give it, but it's pretty close to done.

​The first question is to ask is whether or not there was a large-scale abandonment of parts of the Southeast. On the surface (at least), I think the case is fairly compelling. Following the example of Faught and Waggoner's (2012) paper about Florida, I started compiling radiocarbon data from across the Eastern Woodlands to evaluate the idea. At 9,500 dates and counting, the radiocarbon database that I'm working on clearly supports the idea that there are far fewer than expected dates from 9000-7000 radiocarbon years before present (RCYBP) in the deep south:

A chi square easily defeats the null hypothesis: there just aren't as many radiocarbon dates from 9000-7000 RCYBP below the southern corner of South Carolina as you'd expect by chance. The pattern holds when you consider the number of dates during that period in the entire Atlantic Plain vs. the other major physiographic regions of the eastern United States (the Appalachian Highlands and the Interior Plains). 

The idea of a large-scale abandonment is also consistent with the distribution of post-Kirk lobed/bifurcate projectile points, which (unlike Kirk), does not extend into Louisiana, Florida, and southern Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia.

If we presume that a post-Kirk abandonment/marginalization of the Atlantic Plain did occur, we can move on to the "why" and "how" questions. Regarding the "why" question: the limited environmental data I've looked at (e.g., the 1980 pollen core from White Pond, South Carolina) suggest that the period 9000-7000 RCYBP was one of significant change.  Oak and hickory decreased and pine increased. In simplest terms, this shift may have been related to a decrease in mast production, perhaps affecting the density of white-tailed deer (probably the primary game species for early Holocene hunter-gatherers in the Eastern Woodlands).

But how would an abandonment actually take place? I can think of several ways that populations could shift out of an area. My gut is that an abandonment of the Atlantic Plain during the late Early Archaic would have most probably involved a contraction of populations into the Appalachian Highlands and Interior Plains. One of my favorite of Lew Binford's papers is his (1983) discussion of how hunter-gatherers often make extensive use of the landscape. Keeping his examples in mind, it's easy to imagine how "abandonment" could actually be the end result of a long-term process involving segments of the population getting "pulled in" to better quality environments in the course of normal decisions about movement.

Assuming population size stayed constant, this shift would have necessarily involved changes in mobility. If (based on Midwestern data) we assume that Kirk "bands" had a group mobility radius of about 200 km, there would have been room for about 18 such "bands" in the Eastern Woodlands. If you took that same population and crammed them into an area 33% smaller (i.e., the Eastern Woodlands minus the Atlantic Plain), the scale of group mobility would have to be reduced by 17% (mobility radius of 165 km) to keep everything else the same.

That level of population contraction would have almost certainly had ramifications up and down the levels of those post-Kirk societies. Residential moves would have decreased in frequency and/or distance, there may have been shifts in logistical vs. foraging strategies, and the lowered "cost" of maintaining extra-local inter-personal relationships may have de-emphasized gift exchange and inter-group marriage as mechanism for creating and maintaining distant social ties. 

It's possible to develop a suite of hypotheses and archaeological expectations to evaluate the idea of a large scale abandonment. 

Make no mistake: these are long-term propositions.  My entire dissertation, for example, was focused on using a combination of modeling and archaeological data to try to understand how changes in patterns of variability in material culture were related to changes in the characteristics and properties of social networks. It's not trivia, and it's not easy. 

For me, this presentation was a machine for thinking. I can't "prove" anything, but going through the process of committing to an idea and preparing a presentation has forced me to attempt to think through some complex, interesting issues. I'm hoping I'll get some good feedback on my ideas ("interesting" and/or "you're full of it"), which obviously involve an extensive geographic area that I make no claim to have mastered. 

I also hope to take full advantage of my hotel and at least quadruple my supply of ink pens. Every little bit helps.

I've used my free time over the last month to work on a sculpture of a pachycephalosaurus. Why, you say? I've been asking myself the same thing.

I got the idea for this one because I had an oblong, convex piece of sheet metal that I thought looked about right for the dome. I had a few other pieces around that seemed about right for making the head. When I started looking online, there were a lot of images of these things charging, propelling themselves forward with heads lowered (hence the thick, domed skull, or so the theory goes). I liked the idea of trying to capture the dynamic, powerful posture depicted in images like this one and this one. I also liked the challenge of trying to create a big piece balanced on one leg. So the pachycephalosaurus project was off and running.

It's almost done. Here are some current photos.

There are things I really like about this one and there are things that aren't working. Starting with the good, I'm pretty happy with the pose I was able to capture. The photos don't really do it justice, but the lines of this one really do suggest a full charge, leaning into the right. The sculpture is very stable on a single brake rotor base, something I never would have been able to accomplish with my skills last year. So I think I succeeded in capturing a sense of motion while also achieving balance and stability.

In the "not satisfied" category, I'm not happy with a lot of my sheet metal work. The white pieces are from some door flashing I found in a curb pile: it's easy to shape but because it lots of long and skinny pieces it ends up looking like fabric wrapping (not the effect I want). I've been experimenting with blending the pieces together by welding and grinding, but it's not there yet. I may have to just add some other pieces of sheet metal to break up the lines. There are other places where I think some additional patches of sheet metal will help me get the sculpture closer to what I see in my head.

The tan sheet metal is from a four-drawer filing cabinet I had in the garage. The metal is a good thickness to shape and weld, and it's going a long way (it only took part of one drawer to cover much of the tail and put other pieces on the body to try to tie things together). The light green in the midsection is from some kind of seed/fertilizer spreader I bought at an antique shop on my way through Charlotte, North Carolina, over the summer. Parts of the arm and neck are the frame and runners from a sled I've been hauling around for a long time. My old tea kettle is in there, as are a bunch of things I recently got from the Midas in Cayce when we had some brake work done. The sheet metal for the dome is from the same lamp (donated by local artist Alicia Leeke) that I used to make the shoulders on the crow sculpture.

I am unaware of any other scrap metal pachycephalosaurus sculptures out there. This may be the only one.

I often post "in progress" photos of what I'm working on to this very sparsely populated Facebook page.

I've now become one of "those people" who fiddles around on his phone in the checkout line or while waiting for water to boil. I save links to interesting things I'd like to explore further and possibly write about, but I usually don't get back to them. The back-up is immense at this point. I'm going to park some of the recent ones here in the hope that others might see something of interest. And maybe I'll circle back around to some of these some day.

Lichen Growth on the Remains of Homo naledi

Discussion and debate about interpretation of the anatomical remains of Homo naledi (i.e., what is it) and the context of those remains (how did they get there) continues in both traditional scientific journals and online. This is fascinating to watch, as the online element adds a new dimension to the "standard model" of paleoanthrnopological discourse (paralleling, perhaps, departures from the "standard model" of fieldwork, publication, and analysis marked by the Rising Star Expedition).  I wrote about initial reaction to the Rising Star results here. You can get hooked into the latest debate -- concerned with whether manganese deposits on the bones show that the "chamber" the bones were found in was once open to light -- on John Hawks' blog.

What's in a Name?

Brad Lepper's column in Sunday's Columbus Dispatch discussed the Wyandotte Nation’s Cultural Center (Wyandotte, Oklahoma), describing exhibits that embrace the prehistoric cultural-hisotorical timeline developed by archaeologists but rename the periods with Wyandotte names and incorporate them into a Wyandotte narrative. Lepper writes:

"What I find particularly significant about this exhibit is that the Wyandotte Nation considers the culture history developed by archaeologists to be useful for telling their story. Also, by applying their own names to the various cultural periods, the Wyandotte take ownership of that history."

Very interesting story.

Climate Change Timeline

​This climate change timeline lets you graphically scroll through 22,000 years of human-environment interaction. It depicts changes in the mean temperature of the earth at a scale that demonstrates how abnormally sudden and severe the warming trend has been over the last 100 years. The depiction is simple, requires no advanced math or imagination to understand, and nicely makes the point. Bravo.

The Hope for Another Viking Site: Point Rosee, Newfoundland

Many of us are watching for results from excavations at Point Rosee, Newfoundland, a site identified as a possible pre-Columbian Norse habitation site based on analysis of images from satellites. The last I read, nothing that would definitively indicate a Norse presence at the site had been located. That doesn't mean it's not there, of course, and that doesn't mean that there aren't possibly other Norse in other parts of the region. This is a fun story to watch from my perspective because it's got the attention of both academic archaeologists and those on the "fringe" who are hungry for any piece of evidence that they think will legitimize their claims.  This is a good demonstration both of how actual archaeology is used to search for empirical evidence to evaluate a claim/interpretation: either the Norse were at the site or they weren't -- so how can we tell? We go and look and do the work properly, that's how.

Another Neanderthal Child

It's not my primary line of work, but I'm very interested in the understanding the deep prehistory of human families. That interest has several dimensions. While I was in graduate school at Michigan I did a project where I collected data on parietal thickness of every Late Pleistocene infant I could find to try say something about birth among those populations. I've done some modeling work (e.g., described here and here) trying to understand the relationships between fertility, mortality, and family size/composition among Middle Paleolithic humans. It's exciting when new infant/child remains are announced, such as the parietal from this 7-9-year-old Neanderthal child from Spain. There have been probably been others in recent years that I'm not aware of, so I'll have to do a drag net again if I'm able to focus on this topic in any serious way.

Knights Fighting Snails

Finally, there's this Smithsonian article about depictions of medieval knights fighting snails. It pretty much speaks for itself.

Here's some nice news for a Sunday afternoon: my crow sculpture won first place in the amateur sculpture competition at the South Carolina state fair (the judging results are here). It must have won something else as well, since the award money is listed as $1500 and the prize money for first place in the amateur sculpture class is $200.

I'm not going to spoil it by writing an essay. I'll just say that it makes me pretty happy, and I'm totally going to post a picture of me and the crow when I visit it at the fair. Thank you to everyone who has encouraged me in this hobby.

Update (10/12/2016):  It did indeed win Best of Show in the amateur division. Miller Time!

Next up in my Forbidden Archaeology class is a critical reading of the 2015 book Species with Amnesia by Robert Sepehr. I chose this book because it checked the boxes for many of the issues that I'd like to address in our section on "ice age civilization" and I could find no existing, detailed, online appraisal of its claims.

I'm quickly working my way through the book this weekend, prepping for our in-class discussions and assembling a list of topics for the students' next round of blog posts. My plan is to do a sort of distributed "group" critique of the book, assigning a small section or particular claim to each of the twenty students. While I'm familiar with many of the things discussed in the book, it is jam packed with assertions about "evidence" that I've never come across before. It will be fun to turn the students loose on a set of those claims and see what they come up with.

Another thing that I've discovered during my quick reading is . . . wait for it . . . plagiarism! This probably will not come as a shock to those of you familiar with these kinds of works, as plagiarism is endemic in the "fringe" world. I don't yet have a sense of how much of the content of the book is thinly-modified cut-and-paste, I just know that I've stumbled onto several examples without even really trying.

Here's a passage from Species with Amnesia about the Peruvian "Lady of the Mask" mummy (page 102):

"Piercing blue eyes undimmed by the passing of 1,300 years, this is the "Lady of the Mask" a mummy with striking blue eyes, whose discovery could reveal the secrets of a lost culture at the Huaca Pucllana Pyramid located in Lima, Peru."

And here are the first two paragraphs of a 2008 article in the Daily Mail: 

"Piercing blue eyes undimmed by the passing of 1,300 years, this is the Lady of the Mask – a mummy whose discovery could reveal the secrets of a lost culture.
​
She was found by archaeologists excavating a pyramid in Peru’s capital city Lima, alongside two other adult mummies and the sacrificial remains of a child."

(Note to students: adding quotation marks around a phrase ("Lady of the Mask") and deleting a hyphen does not transform someone else's work into your own work. I don't see the Daily Mail article in the bibliography, and there are no citations in the paragraph.

That's pretty clear and simple. I found a more tangled case in one of Sepehr's discussions of Cro-Magnon. He seems to have paraphrased and sometimes borrowed directly either from a piece by Carson Reed on this website (about Cro-Magnon, Atlantis, and the teachings of Madame Blavatsky) or from R. Cedric Leonard (also used by Reed).  Here is a passage from Species with Amnesia (page 49):

"Many Cro-Magnon villages consisted of houses, but we don't know what they were made of. All we have are the remains of hearths and post hole patterns."

Here is a sentence from Reed's piece:

"These cave men also had houses! We do not know what exactly they were made of but we do have the post holes."

Here is another passage from Species with Amnesia (page 45):

"Professor of anthropology at Rutgers University, Dr. John E. Pfeiffer, observes that the Aurignacian was quite distinct and that it arrived from some area outside of Western Europe; with an already "established way of life.""

And from Reed's piece:

"Dr. John E. Pfeiffer, professor of anthropology at Rutgers University observes: "The Aurignacian is quite distinct from the Parigordian" [ a separate older European style ]; they arrive "from some area outside of Western Europe"; with an already "established way of life.""

Reed cites R. Cedric Leonard at the end of this section and provides a URL. Sepehr cites Leonard's (2011) book after his sentence about Pfeiffer.  On Leonard's webpage we find this sentence:

"Dr. John E. Pfeiffer, professor of anthropology at Rutgers University observes: "The Aurignacian is quite distinct from the Perigordian"; they arrive "from some area outside of Western Europe"; with an already "established way of life.""

So it's possible that Sepehr plagiarized Reed, or perhaps plagiarized Leonard directly. I suppose it doesn't really matter.

As I skimmed through Leonard's webpage, I recognized more sentences from Species with Amnesia. Compare these two passages:

"In an article entitled "Why don't We Call Them Cro-Magnon Anymore?", K. Krist Hirst suggests that the physical dimensions of Cro-Magnon specimens are not sufficiently different from modern humans to warrant a separate designation. Leonard raises the concern that this would make it all too convenient to eliminate the embarrassing origin problem. And what about the even more important cultural differences (totally differing tool kits, settlement patterns, art impulse, etc.)? (38) Are we to simply "bland out" all these diversities under one designation? This doesn't strike me as a scientific practice."

That's from Species with Amnesia (page 48). This is from Leonard's webpage:

​"In an article entitled "Why don't We Call Them Cro-Magnon Anymore?" the author K. Krist Hirst suggests that the physical dimensions of Cro-Magnon specimens are not sufficiently different from modern humans to warrant a separate designation. My concern, of course, is that this would make it all too convenient to eliminate the embarrassing origin problem. And what about the even more important culture differences (totally differing tool kits, settlement patterns, art impulse, etc.)? Are we to simply "bland out" all these diversities under one designation? This doesn't strike me as scientific anthropological practice."

The (38) in Sepehr's passage is a citation to Leonard's book, so he is acknowledging him in some way. But any real scholar (and, indeed, any reasonably honest high school student) will tell you that dropping a citation in the middle of a paragraph copied almost word-for-word but not quoted is Plagiarism 101. A person reading Sepehr's passage is left with the impression that the idea of "important cultural differences" came from Leonard but all the the other ideas and words are Sepehr's. Obviously that's not the case.

Hopefully there are some original ideas and some original writing in Species with Amnesia. I'd rather spend my time addressing those then stumbling over sloppy plagiarism.

Update (10/8/2016): This is turning into a bummer. A passage from this webpage ("Atlantis the Myth" by  Alan G. Hefner) appears word for word in Species with Amnesia (pages 107-108):

"According to ancient Egyptian temple records the Athenians fought an aggressive war against the rulers of Atlantis some nine thousand years earlier and won.These ancient and powerful kings or rulers of Atlantis had formed a confederation by which they controlled Atlantis and other islands as well. They began a war from their homeland in the Atlantic Ocean and sent fighting troops to Europe and Asia. Against this attack the men of Athens formed a coalition from all over Greece to halt it. When this coalition met difficulties their allies deserted them and the Athenians fought on alone to defeat the Atlantian rulers. They stopped an invasion of their own country as well as freeing Egypt and eventually every country under the control of the rulers of Atlantis."

The section right after that (pages 108-109) is apparently cribbed directly from this 2013 blog post, changing a few words.

Then the section on Iran (page 109) has sections apparently from this webpage.

Update (10/8/2016):

The section on the Berbers (pages 86-87) also apparently contains plagiarized material. From Species with Amnesia:

"The Berbers are considered the aboriginals of the area and their origins beyond that are not officially known. Many theories have been advanced relating them to the Canaanites, the Phoenicians, the Celts, and the Caucasians from Anatolia. In classical times the Berbers formed such states as Mauritania and Numidia."

Here is a section from the same Carson Reed piece discussed earlier:

"From a useful traditional source:

Despite a history of conquests, the Berbers retained a remarkably homogeneous culture, which, on the evidence of Egyptian tomb paintings, derives from earlier than 2400 B.C. The alphabet of the only partly deciphered ancient Libyan inscriptions is close to the script still used by the Tuareg. The origins of the Berbers are uncertain, although many theories have been advanced relating them to the Canaanites, the Phoenicians, the Celts, the Basques, and the Caucasians. In classical times the Berbers formed such states as Mauritania and Numidia. (http://www.answers.com/topic/berber-people)"

So Sepehr apparently just copied his analysis of the Berbers from answers.com. Great.

Continuing on, part of his discussion of the Guanaches of the Canary Islands matches text on this DNA ancestry site. Here is a passage from Species with Amnesia (page 88):

"Isolated in their islands, the Guanches preserved their pristine Cro-Magnon genetic traits in a more or less pure fashion until the arrival of the Spanish."

And from Family Tree DNA: 

"Isolated in their islands, the Guanches were prevented, until the advent of the Spanish, from sexually mingling with other races. So, they preserved their pristine Cro-Magnon genetic traits in a more or less pure fashion until that date."

Four more student blog posts from our discussion of giants are now live:

• Large Adena Skeletons as a "Unique Physical Type" (by Juan Perez)
• Building with Big Stones: Ethnographic and Experimental Evidence (by GratefulGirl22)
• The Schloss Ambras Castle Giant (by Drayson Labrom)
• Neanderthals as Nephilim? (by Shaggy)

Please have a look, see what you think, and comment on the posts if you have something to say. I've instructed the students to check on their posts periodically (i.e., at least once a day) and respond to comments if appropriate. All the completed posts related to giants are listed here.  The homepage of the course website is here. A synopsis of what we've been doing every day is here.

My online friend and fellow #Swordgate warrior Pablo Benavente suggested that posting some of the blogs in the Ancient Origins Group on Facebook  would be a good way to get people engaged in reading and discussing the posts. In terms of pure numbers, all indications are that he's write:  the two student blog posts that have been shared there so far ("Building with Big Stones: Ethnographic and Experimental Evidence" and "Neanderthals as Nephilim?") have garnered far more "likes" (200 and 191, respectively, as of this writing) than the other posts that I've shared in my skeptically-oriented groups and on Twitter. There are long discussions going on both of those posts, but they're happening on Facebook (in a closed group) rather than on the blog post itself. Based on skimming the comments, it looks to me like many people engaged in the discussion may not have even bothered to read the original post: they're just reacting to the headline and to the other comments.

That's an interesting pattern that I've noticed before. I'm not sure exactly what it's telling us about how/why people communicate about these ideas online, but I'm sure it's telling us something. The "Neanderthals as Nephilim?" post has been shared 16 times from the Ancient Origins Group alone, and the discussion on the post there is currently up to 93 comments. And yet there is not a single comment on the original blog post. Interesting.  

An important part of my Forbidden Archaeology class this semester is teaching students to independently understand, evaluate, and communicate about claims concerning the human past. The topical subject matter of the course is, obviously, focused on so-called "fringe" claims that fall outside of what mainstream archaeologists typically spend energy considering but are strongly represented in popular media. The students should come out of the class having a general understanding of the tools and processes we use to learn about the past and discriminate credible from non-credible explanations.

Each student will be writing three blog posts. The topics of the posts for the "giants" section, in general, are concerned with understanding or evaluating claims, evidence, or context related to historic or contemporary ideas about giants. I tried to assign topics that would encourage students do a little online digging and, hopefully, contribute something new to the discussion.

Effective communication in a blog post is not the same as effective communication in a term paper. This is the first time that many of these students have written in this kind of format, and it is my first time working simultaneously with twenty different individuals writing about twenty different topics. Ideally the process will get smoother and faster as the course continues.

Here are the first of the "giants" posts to go live:
 

• Klaus Dona's Travelling Giant Show (by Kate)
• The Missing Morhiss Giant: Not Missing and Not Giant (by Wendy Dollar)
• Kap Dwa: The (Real?) Story Behind the Two-Headed Giant (by Tucker Kovalchek)
• Giant Mound Builders in Wisconsin…Eh (by Judy in Disguise)
• Giants: What Do People Think? (by Fred C)

Please feel free to leave comments for the students: it's in their job description to interact with people about their posts (as long as it stays constructive).

Three months have passed since the last time I asked about the long-promised release of Solomon's Secret and Commodus's Secret.  For those of you haven't been following this story, Hutton Pulitzer (now teamed up with Scott Wolter as "Xplrr") has been taking "pre-order" money for Solomon's Secret and related publications since at least November of 2014. The estimated shipping date, meanwhile, has been a moving target (you can read about that here).

I got an email from Pulitzer on July 2 with the following statement:

"With assurances, the books are real, the manufacturing in process, items being delivered and all refund requests honored and documented along with two which site YOU as the reason for the refund I (and we appreciate that, it made for good further documentation of your actions and intent)."

Several people who contacted me about difficulties getting their money refunded did, reportedly, get their money back after my last post. So that's a good thing. One of them forwarded me an email from Pulitzer with the following statement:

"We are in the midst of packaging at this very moment and getting ready to ship the increments but if you desire a refund we will honor your request.
     Since this seems to be shared around, you now represent the 3rd request for refund.  Thank you for sending the information and this will be immediately processed.
     We appreciate your patronage but it is unfortunate since the size of the Solomons Secret has tripled in content and size and the final information and discoveries are only going to be shared in the kit format."

That email was from early July, 2016. On July 22, Pulitzer commented on this post on Jason Colavito's website that "As far as Solomon's Secret, at least you know they have started to ship." A few days later, Pulitzer posted this comment on Jason Colavito's blog confirming that the books were as good as in the mail:

It's now October.  Has anyone gotten the books?

That's a serious question. 

My guess is that the answer is "no," but I'm prepared to be told otherwise and I hope I'm wrong. I'm still searching for an answer as to how Pulitzer will attempt to reconcile his various conflicting statements associated with his "Roman sword" claim.

As an interesting side note, I just stumbled across this Patreon page for the Solomon's Secret pre-order. It was published December 2, 2014, around the same time as the other websites selling the book. If you want a chuckle, read what you get at the different donation levels (I'd hurry, though, because the site will undoubtedly vanish shortly). Apparently two patrons are still contributing a total of $8.64/month to the effort.

Bless their hearts.