Short thread on indigenous knowledge & science. This is not my specialty, and there are many who can address this issue far better than I can. Here are 3 concepts of science. (1) Most restrictive, science is random controlled trials and other formal experiments. 1/9 @Noahpinion 2/ This definition leaves out most of biology and the social sciences, so its not a very useful concept of science; See Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought. (2) Science is a system of knowledge generation based on experiments and objective methods that began with the Greeks.

Thread: “Early cities in the Dawn of Everything: Shoddy scholarship in support of pedestrian conclusions.” Paper to appear soon in a special issue of Cliodynamics. This is a paper, not a book review. I’ll mainly use a bunch of quotes from my paper. #DawnOfEverything 1/13 2/ “The book of full of errors of citation and argument, which suggests that authors are more interested in persuasion – pushing a set vision of the past – than in scholarly or scientific analysis and argumentation.”

I just cited a student for the "Identity in archaeology" infraction. Here is a short thread about my beef with how the concept of identity is used by archaeologists, and what I insist my students do if they want to use the concept. 1/ First, I make them read and understand and cite Brubaker and Cooper 2000. Students have to distinguish their 3 domains of social identity: (1) Identification and categorization; (2) Self-understanding and social location; (3) commonality, connectedness, groupness.
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Quick thread about Kim Bowles's paper, "When Kuznets went to Rome" @WalterScheidel @Nakhthor @bernard_prof This is an odd paper. The basic structure is the following. Scholars are working on topic A. I don’t like the way they are doing it (based on some solid reasons and 1/ 2/ some spurious reasons). In spite of a well-published body of research that many find valuable, this topic should be abandoned (yes, that is implied on page 28, in the baby/bathwater metaphor). Instead, Romanists should pursue topic B, which is much better.

Thread - fun class on Aztec money! Just recorded my lecture on Aztec money. So, the last time I tried to post this photo on twitter, it was flagged as in appropriate. Maybe they thought it was a handful of turdlets?? But these are cacao beans - Aztec money! 1/ 2/ The Aztecs had money, merchants, and markets. But was it a capitalist economy? I talked about the critique I got from the Trotskyites in "The People." I was criticized for portraying the Aztecs like the Flintstones - attributing modern practices to an ancient society!

Thread: Marshall Sahlins critique of space and place (which parallels precisely my own views on abstract social theory). This is from an interview Sahlins did with Adam T. Smith, (Journal of Social Archaeology.vol. 2, 2002) 1/ The diagrams I include show how silly this concept of space and place is. Perhaps it is ok for psychology or philosophy, or some humanities fields. But for empirical science – PARTICULARLY for archaeology – it is vacuous. Sorry, we just can’t do this archaeologically. 2/

Thread: Why are some archaeologists afraid of population data? I will destroy two common but entirely bogus arguments why someone is not concerned with population in the past. Then I will state the REAL reasons. Few archaeologists will openly state that population data are not important. We all know that they are of utmost importance for understanding all kinds of social, economic, and political phenomena. The bogus objections are methodological.

Thread: Why I love Mexico. Part 1: The music. It’s the Cinco de mayo, Cindy and I are drinking margaritas, so we put on the Netflix bio series on Luis Miguel. The first episode features his early hits, “Cuando calienta al sol” and “Ahora te puedes marchar.” I still love his version of “Cuando caliente al sol” (). It’s a fast, hard-charging rock song. We had a cassette copy of his album, “Soy como quier ser,” that we played in the car in Cuernavaca in 1987. The Netflix bio really brings back memories.

Thread: More is Different. I just heard that physicist Philip Anderson passed away a month ago. I knew him from his paper, "More is Different" (Science, 1972). This was one of the foundational papers for complexity science. 2/ Anderson was one of the founders of the Santa Fe Institute. See their obituary: santafe.edu/news-center/ne… The basic point of "More is different" is that increases in size or quantity bring about qualitative differences. I use this principle in my book #PastUrbanLife

Short thread: The "urban prestige effect." For whatever reason, cities, urbanism (and social complexity) are seen as realms of prestige by some archaeologists. This leads them to think that if they can call their sites "urban", that is some kind of positive result. 1/ 2/ But how does this help anybody? It make comparative analysis more difficult, since the category "urban settlement" now includes smaller or simpler sites. Now, there is nothing wrong with using "urban" concepts to analyze "non-urban" settlements. I do this a lot.