Archaeology Actually

Kia ora, The research team that I am part of just last week had a new open access research paper published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. Although this is not directly related to my current PhD research, I did make a small contribution to this research, which was led by colleagues who are based at the University of Tübingen in Germany, and was kindly included among the paper's co-authors (not always a given in academia!). This blog post will give a general background and summary of the paper, which those that are interested can build upon by checking out the paper via the hyperlink above (again, it's  open access !). A couple of posts back , when I introduced my broad PhD topic (the Pleistocene/Palaeolithic archaeological record of southern Arabia) I noted that modern weather systems bring seasonal monsoon rains to parts of southern Arabia. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Dhofar mountains and Salalah coastal plains in southern Oman, where th...

Kia ora, In my last post to this blog , I noted that one of the key differences between archaeological and pseudoarchaeological interpretations of the past is that established archaeological interpretations are the result of inductive reasoning  (i.e. conclusions are built from the 'bottom-up', based on (all) the available data), while pseudoarchaeological interpretations rely on data that has been selectively sampled to support the claims that are being made.  That's not to claim that archaeological interpretations are never wrong! But there is an important distinction that needs to be made between blatantly biased data selection and/or manipulation leading to incorrect interpretations (that is, pseudoarchaeology) and an interpretation that proves to be incorrect as a result of additional research and new data. Many areas of Oceania, for instance, are largely archaeological ' terra incognita ' (unknown land) and it is expected that as these areas are explored...