Back from the SAAs

Pretty exhausted, thought I'm actually in better shape than I am after most meetings. Don't know how I feel about Sacramento, but the meetings themselves were pretty good. Blogistically, I was really bummed out not to be able to attend the Blogging Archaeology session which ran (of course) exactly at the same time as the session I was in. On the other hand, I did get to have a nice lunch with John Hawks, engage in a roast pig-side chat at the Cotsen reception with Mike Smith, and get the chance to meet Colleen Morgan, three of my favorite bloggers, along with a long-time commenter on this very blog, so that was all very nice. If you want a flavor of what went down at the meetings, you can track down some Twitter feeds of the whole thing by going here.

I'm feeling revved up after these meetings, so let's see how productive I can be until I jet out to the Paleos in Minneapolis a week from now...

Hearth stones, four of them!

Greg Laden has the latest edition of the Four Stone Hearth anthro blog carnival up at his neck of the interwebs. Check it out, if you like your blogging anthropological in any way, shape, or form.

New Four Stone Hearth Up at Ad Hominin

That emptiness you feel in your soul? Time to fill it up with the latest in anthropology blogging - to do so, simply hop on over to Ad Hominin where Ciaran has artfully compiled a hearty buffet of tasty anthro tidbits from all subdisciplines and fro all over the web. The next 4SH will be at Greg Laden's Blog (March 31). Happy reading!

Welcome Neatorama readers

Pretty cool (not to say neat): my post on mammoth remain hunting has been featured on Neatorama, which has been sending a decent amount of traffic this way. If you've landed at A Very Remote Period Indeed by way of Neatorama, welcome to AVRPI, and feel free to explore the archives... there's lots of stuff in there.

Research Blogging Awards 2010

You may have noticed a new widget on the right side-bar of this blog, one linking to the 2010 ResearchBlogging Awards, where I was shocked to see I had been nominated as one of the finalists for best social sciences and anthropology blogs, along with several other blogs some of which are on the AVRPI blogroll. This came as a humbling surprise, albeit I suppose also a flattering one

Regular readers will know that I usually append a ResearchBlogging vignette to the posts in which I discuss peer-reviewed papers. In their own words, RB is "a system for identifying the best, most thoughtful blog posts about peer-reviewed research. Since many blogs combine serious posts with more personal or frivolous posts, our site offers a way to find only the most carefully-crafted posts about cutting-edge research, often written by experts in their respective fields."

Basically, it's a neat system to diffuse the results of blogging on peer-reviewed research, that ensures that the reviewing is done by people with relevant background and qualifications. It also distinguishes bloggers that actually discuss the meat of given studies rather than just linking to or reposting press releases. As I've mentioned before, I think that this kind of quick and in-depth discussion is one of the aspects that make blogs so important and relevant. Plus, it can provide the seed for work that ultimately gets published.

Thinking about it a bit more, I'm very happy about this nomination, given that the time I devote to this blog is time I don't get to devote to A Very Remote Wife Indeed, my students, or my research. So, it's nice to have some kind of external recognition, and a thousand thanks to whomever nominated AVRPI. If you're interested in seeing the nomination go to the next level (i.e., for this blog to nominated as best social science/anthropology research blog of the year), you can vote at Research Blogging, from today until March 23. Here's how:

Voting: Voting for the winners will be conducted by invitation to bloggers registered with ResearchBlogging.org. Invitations will be sent on Thursday, March 4. If you're registered with us, you may want to check your account to make sure your email address is up-to-date. If you're not registered (and you blog about peer-reviewed research), you still have time to register so you can vote. Visit this page for more information.

Awards: The awards will be announced on March 23, 2010.

Housekeeping January 2010

I'll soon be doing a bit of housekeeping here at AVRPI. That will mainly entail cleaning the blogroll section to the right-hand side of the blog. As part of this mid-winter cleaning, I'll be removing dead links, and links to blogs that haven't been active in a while. Also, if you have an archaeo/paleo/anthro themed blog and you'd like to see it included in the blogroll, feel free to contact me or leave a comment here. And speaking of comments, the blog's been getting quite a bit of spam lately, which is why I will keep comment moderation on for the time being, even if this slightly slows down some of the stimulating discussion that's been going on in several threads, especially the prehistoric ballistics and the Paleolithic island colonization ones.

Looking for contributors

The upcoming Four Stone Hearth anthropology blog carnival will take place here, at A Very Remote Period Indeed on Wednesday February 27 2010. Fell free to get in touch with me if you would like to contribute any anthropology-themed posts for inclusion.

Blogging for Science

Here's my quote of the day, courtesy of PZ Myers:

Peer review is only a first, preliminary hurdle for a paper to cross; passing peer review and getting published does not mean that your work is right. Some incredibly awful papers get through the review process, somehow. Getting published only means that now your paper is going to be opened up to wider criticism. Don't take the attitude that publication means vindication; I know reviewers, and I've reviewed papers, and I know that reviewers are sometimes lazy, sometimes susceptible to croneyism, and always overworked, and that publication doesn't mean you are right. (my emphasis).

Boy, don't I know it! Publishing paleoanthropologically-themed research can sometimes feel like you're entering the Thunderdome, a lesson I learned first-hand in my very first peer-reviewed publication! And Myers makes a good point: when something gets published, it only means that it's serious enough that other experts in the field recognize it's worth discussing, that other professionals can now have a go at it, if you will. Actually you should read the whole post, which is about how people think of blogs, comments on blogs, and the contribution this can make to scientific discourse. It's a thoughtful piece, and one in which PZ - whose writing style can occasionally be, errr, fiery - cogently lays out the case for the usefulness of blogging to make scientific research and its conclusions accessible to a wider audience.

And as for the writing style of blog posts, I also especially liked this quote (which came in second place for quote of the day): "Explain your answers as you would to an undergrad or bright high school student. If you can't, it implies that you aren't looking for an equal opportunity, you are looking for a way to avoid probing questions." Now, that doesn't mean you need to 'dumb it down' or that everybody needs to do this. In my view, it highlights how the web can be used to democratize and favor the diffusion of science. After all, in a time when funding for scientific research increasingly comes from public agencies, it is important to present our work in a manner that is accessible to a well-educated public. This is part of why I have this humble little blog here.

And because common ideas seem to strike different people at the same time, check out John Hawks' recent post on the issue. His take? "I wanted to point to Orac's post, since it is what the blogosphere is the best for: clear, factual critiques that focus on methods." And it's fitting that I mention Hawks here, since he was one of the parties in one of the best 'real-time' virtual debates on Early Upper Paleolithic chronology, a topic near and dear to my heart. On January 12, 2007, John blogged about a new Science paper on the EUP chronology of Kostenki, Russia, criticizing some aspects of the paper's conclusions. Four days later, on January 16, 2007, one of that study's authors, John Hoffecker wrote a reply to Hawks' post, posting it on Kris Hirst's Archaeology Blog, addressing in a detailed manner some of John's critiques. And two days later, on January 18, you guessed it, Hawks had also posted a lengthy reply to some of the points raised in Hoffecker's guest post, situating the debate in a broader context to highlight the significance of the paper he originally blogged about.

OK, lengthy summary to basically highlight that, in the span of just over one week (literally, a blink of an eye in 'journal time'), you had a serious, thought-provoking and scholarly back-and-forth debate on a paper that had just been published. If this had taken place in Science itself, it would have probably taken at least 6 months to get published, far after the paper had faded from public consciousness. Now, this would be all and well for the paleoanthropological community, but for the public at large who might have been interested in the issue, it probably provided a rarely seen instance of how scientists can disagree on details (the specifics of the chronology of the 'transition') while nonetheless agreeing on fundamental issues (that the transition was an important process in recent human evolution). So, yes, blogging can and does serve a very useful purpose in the discourse of science.

New blogs on the block

About ten days ago, I attended a little function here at McGill to honor the teaching skills of my friend Stephen Chrisomalis, now an assistant professor at Wayne State University. The reception was held because Steve was awarded a McGill Arts Undergraduate Society Excellence in Teaching Award at McGill, where he worked until this summer.

And I have to say, it's richly deserved. Beyond being an original thinker whose archaeological research is strongly and profitably rooted in comparative approaches, Steve (who incidentally was my TA in my very first archaeology course when I started out as an impressionable BA student at McGill back in 19coughcough) approaches teaching with more enthusiasm than I've seen in pretty much anyone involved in academia and, with his 'Cartesian' mindset (i.e., non-linear, which I definitely mean as a compliment!), he has the knack of coming up with innovative ways to get archaeological and anthropological matters through to students in ways that are both innovative and grounded in easily relatable topics and forms of material culture. It's a rare ability indeed, and one that I envy quite a bit now that I've started teaching on something resembling a regular basis. Habitual readers of AVRPI may remember that I had mentioned his Dollarware Archaeology website a few months back. Well, not only does he have a couple more such websites (here, here and here) where he compiles information and papers produced by the students in some of his courses, one of these is the topic of a talk he recently presented on the social underpinnings of stop signs in Montreal.

And, for another 'not only', it was my great pleasure to see recently that Steve has started his own blog, Glossographia, since blogging and new media through which to communicate anthropology writ large to a broader audience was a topic which we often discussed last year, as I was starting my postodc at McGill. Now, you'll have to excuse him if he tarnished what is otherwise an outstanding blog by talking about yours truly in one post, but I highly recommend checking it out and commenting on his posts. You won't be sorry!

Now, I've added a link to Glossographia in the links section of this humble blog, so you have no excuse not to check it out. But, I also want to point out two recent additions to the blogroll: Publishing Archaeology, by Mike Smith (a professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University - where I got my degree) who champions the causes of open-access publishing in archaeology and of how to disseminate archaeological literature as widely as possible (among other topics); and Middle Savagery, the brainchild of Berkeley PhD student Colleen Morgan, who devotes a lot of time and energy to how digital technologies can serve the needs and further the goals of archaeology and rendering accessible to a wider audience. Check out all three blogs, people! You'll come out of the experience a better person, if maybe one with slightly less free time.

Well, look at that...

Most of the feedback I've gotten about this blog over the past couple of years has been generally positive, thought most of it is usually qualified with formulas to the effect of "I don't know where you find the time" and "What concrete purpose does it serve?"

Well, over the summer, a commentary of mine came out in the journal Medical Hypotheses. It's entitled "Mad Neanderthal disease? Some comments on "A potential role for Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies in Neanderthal extinction" (Riel-Salvatore 2008). Regular AVRPI readers might find that title sounds familiar, and they would be right. "Mad Neanderthal Disease?" was also the title of a post I wrote last winter in reaction to the publication of a paper by. S. Underdown (2008) and the considerable media buzz it generated.

After I wrote that post, a reader - who happened to agree with me - asked me what the point of posting this (and other things) only to the web was, since, in practice, my comments left no durable trace in 'The Literature' (y'know, the stuff that leaves a tangible papertrail). I've always said that I think of blogging first and foremost as a way of forcing myself to articulate first reactions to articles and newsreports that I read, and to engage a wider audience in debates over archaeology, anthropology, and other topics. This post was a case in point. I received several comments on it, including one that pointed me to a reference to Homo sapiens cannibalism/handling of the dead that I'd overlooked in my original post, and - very recently - another one that brought to my attention an old paper on a very similar model (Wolbarsht 1975) (in fact an extremely similar model, down to the virus, ethnographic comparisons, and mode of transmission).

So, having taken the time to write the post anyway, all I had to do was pull up the file that contains its text (I save all of my posts as individual text files, should Blogger ever decide to cancel this fair blog), add the missing ref, format it for length and style, write a short cover letter to the editor, log on the Medical Hypotheses online submission service, and voila!, a submitted paper. In all, it took maybe an extra hour of work. Funny thing is, had I not blogged about this, I don't think that I would have bothered to write a comment on the Underdown paper in the first place, probably reserving my thoughts for 'over beer' discussions with colleagues.

Arguably, this is not exactly a full-blown peer-reviewed publication. However, it goes to show two things: first, blogging is useful as a catalyst to write, engender debate and refine one's ideas. In my case, this is further demonstrated by another paper of mine (this one currently in press in a bona fide peer-reviewed archaeology journal) that incorporates edited passages of an earlier post; in this case too, the time that elapsed between my writing that post and my writing that academic paper (along with the discussion that post generated) was crucial in helping me develop ideas I originally put together over two years ago now. This ties into the second thing I want to say about blogging: it can have a very real, tangible academic output. Between converting/adapting/incoporating blog posts into 'proper' (or rather, standard) academic papers and helping one to develop thoughts without actually setting out to write in the formal, somewhat more rigid style and structure of an academic paper, blogging can certainly be a stimulus for one's academic output. And this, of course, is in addition to the benefits of making academic literature accessible to a larger public, providing a critical assessment of discoveries that are 'published' only through press releases (*cough*cultofthepython*cough*), and other benefits discussed by Hawks in a thoughtful post about two months ago (John, if you read this, congrats on the tenure, btw!).

Now, I'm not saying this will be true for everyone, and I'm definitely not saying that all my posts are 'papers in becoming' or inherently worthy of publication in peer-reviewed venues (far from it). However, I would argue that it is certainly not a waste of time that might have been devoted to other pursuits, which I think the rest of my academic and personal record demonstrate (this is in addition to the fact that it actually doesn't consume as much time as many people seem to think). Obviously, this approach means that I'm occasionally blogging about 'work in progress' and one might rightfully argue that this exposes me to a form of intellectual 'sniping.' But, beyond the fact that I don't think too many people would want to do that in the first place (especially with my position on some debates!), the beautiful thing about blogs is that everything is neatly chronicled online, with dates and all - if one adds to that the occasional mention of my posts by other bloggers, what this all amounts to is what I think is a fairly secure barrier against sniping, should I ever need one. Plus, most of these ideas I've already presented at meetings anyway, so it's not like they've been exactly secret!

References:

Riel-Salvatore, J. 2008. Mad Neanderthal disease? Some comments on "A potential role for Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies in Neanderthal extinction." Medical Hypotheses 71:473-474.

Underdown, S. 2008. A potential role for Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies in Neanderthal extinction. Medical Hypotheses 71:4-7.

Wolbarsht, M. L. 1975. The Demese ef the Ne'enderthels: Wes Lengege E Fecter? Science 187:600-601.

Call for contributions - Four Stone Hearth #38

Back from the meetings in Vancouver, so back to teaching, back to writing, and back to posting. If you haven't already, you should most definitely check out the 37th installment of the Four Stone Hearth (Pulp SciFi Edition!) at Hot Cup of Joe. If this kinda stuff gets your gollies going, you should also most definitely consider submitting one of your own posts to me (julienrs at hotmail dot com), so they can be included in the 38th installment which will be hosted by yours truly here at A Very Remote Period Indeed. I've already gotten a few submissions, but in blogging as in experiencing new foods, more is always better!