After writing most of what follows I think it is far less optimistic or upbeat than I have any intention of being again in my posts. Please bear with me though as I think the topic is becoming more and more important for some of the reasons I give below. That said, the other posts I have planned should be a lot of fun. Better stories with interesting intellectual developments or steps along the way to our current understanding of New World Pleistocene life. I intend for them to be a combination of missives on past, current, and future research with interesting asides that might not otherwise fit in more formal publications. I think I’ll crib from the Mighty Boosh at the end of this post and go out on a high note….
One hideous product of the omnipresent digital age is fewer people read the old literature themselves anymore and instead rely on secondary sources, or worse, to tell them what is important. And no, I do not think it is a byproduct, to some degree I think it is demonstrably intentional. If you are an interested student of anything (and I mean simply anyone interested in continuing to learn): read primary sources, handle original specimens, and learn these things for yourself. What we know, and how we learned it, are both important aspects of understanding the world we live in. As a student at any level you must find a way to master the original data yourself. In science, if you don’t know how we got here, you cannot properly understand where we are, thinking of Newton’s “standing on the shoulders of giants”. I don’t want anyone to have to take my word for anything. I can show you exactly, with proper credit, where any bit of information came from though, and point you on the track to observing and deciding for yourself.
I find I am still being a bit more philosophical while setting up the website than I really intend to be down the line but while in the mood I wanted to tackle a seriously messed up area in academia today. The era of citation indices has doomed us all! Self and cohort citing cadres are legion now. If you know me you have probably heard about this before, and you know the humor, and aah, colorful language, are coming. It’s a triumphant testament of will that no bombs have been dropped this far. The internet is rife with self-proclaimed experts and the fact checking is even less rigorous online, not me of course, I would never do that /sarc. Kidding aside, if I get something wrong please let me know. It is far more important for me to be accurate than anything else. One big point of launching P2P is to systematically tackle issues that we have gotten wrong prehistorically or historically and try to right them. So this topic will be revisited in passing when the issue comes up again.
The problem is we chronically introduce or perpetuate errors by not referring to primary original sources of ideas or data. Further, the era of the citation index and analysis of your ‘impact’ is lunacy. The ONLY thing that now matters is how often your work is cited. It can be outright falsehoods and lies, but if everyone cites it, you are golden.
We have incentivized writers who use sources close to them, or themselves, to bolster their own, and their friends, citation rankings- rather than insisting on giving credit where it is due. This is utterly insane. High citation rankings do not mean the work has any merit what-so-ever. It could be unadulterated crap, and there is a lot of crap out there, but scores high, helps get performance bonuses or aids in getting tenure, for crap.
So rather than cite the author who first presented data or an idea the literature is stuffed with current reference to only the latest person to say something. A terrifying example was in a front chapter of a recent edited volume of Paleoindian papers where someone cited a fellow graduate student for the 1936 excavations at Clovis, NM. I would adamantly insist proper credit should be given for original data and ideas. Especially for the first articulation of an idea as it does not need to be re-invented again once it is in print, if you have read it, and are aware that it existed before you did. Unfortunately that is NOT what is required to slide through peer review when number of citations matters considerably more than the original quality of the work.
Because I’ve spoken with one of my author friends about this next example I don’t mind mentioning a few years ago American Antiquity published an article that said as a statement of fact that a 9 year old boy living in Paris drew the first map of Big Bone Lick, Kentucky in 1729. The authors repeated an error (almost surely an old typo) made by a historian in 1936, not realizing it meant they invented a pre-teen cartographer. In this case it’s a minor silly error, until it is repeated yet again. Once these kinds of things get into the literature they have a life of their own… Maybe we should call them Zombies because they just will not die.
Since I started with examples from 1936 I’ll stay in the mid 30s a moment longer. I would say that if you have any real interest in Paleoindian archaeology you need to read Edgar Billings (E.B.) Howards 1935 U Penn dissertation. He did an incredibly thorough job of compiling and modernizing what was known at the time and in many respects his thoughts on the topic have yet to be surpassed. I have a hard copy but not as a pdf. If you can get a pdf I’d love a copy. Howard, E. B. 1935, Evidence of Early Man in North American. Museum Journal, University of Pennsylvania Museum 24: 2–3.
E. B. Howard with one of the bone points found in the 1936 Clovis Mammoth excavation (U Penn Museum photograph that I found on line somewhere, also shown in Clovis Revisited, Boldurian and Cotter 1999).
Another side project I have involves picking up trade cards and other old advertising that use Mammoth as an adjective. I’m still working on this and will eventually do a post on it specifically. Somewhere along the line I had heard that it was first used in a derogatory sense to mock Thomas Jefferson at the time of his inauguration as President because of a “Mammoth Cheese” that was created and sent to him by well-wishers from Cheshire, Massachusetts in 1801 (see Monticello.org for this story https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/mammoth-cheese).
There are several online posts about the adjectival use of Mammoth. All purporting to demonstrate the 1st usage. One author even asserts that Jefferson himself used it as an adjective first (in a letter from August of 1801), which I thought was awesome so I started to dig deeper. Well, it’s never so simple is it? With only a quick search I found copies of period newspapers into May and even April 28th, 1801 with mammoth (the adjective) referring to a giant Ox. This means that anything you read about the use of a mammoth adjective that says it first occurred after April 28th, 1801 is wrong. And I’m sure earlier examples exist that I have yet to find. Honestly is seems this is more about aah, non-rigorous scholarship than intentional deceit. But when we all end up ‘knowing’ something that is wrong, who cares if we were misled intentionally or through laziness.
This kind of thing becomes incredibly important in relation to governance in the use of terms in biology and geology and archaeology too where a hideous (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Code_of_Zoological_Nomenclature) defamation is repeatedly occurring- Namely, someone (looking at you David Anderson), with several co-authors has got a number of people calling all Pre-Clovis Early Paleoindian and moved Clovis to Middle Paleoindian, with everything else shuffled along in tow. This should never have made it past the first editor. It has introduced completely unnecessary confusion regarding Early and Middle Paleoindian usage without telling us anything new about the Pre-Clovis progenitors. The usage of those terms has been pretty well established since Frank H H Roberts first coined the term Paleoindian in 1940. To come along and reuse the term 70+ years later is simply not acceptable and should be stricken. There are very clear rules of nomenclature and co-opting well established terms and usage is not cricket. F- to all of you. I think I will bring an airhorn to the SAA’s in Austin and hit it every time someone uses this “revised” aah equine excrement.
I’ve intentionally tried to bring up older examples of shoddy scholarship to spare current researchers (and there are 100s of examples of this just in the last 10 years) but I do feel compelled to correct such factual inaccuracies in formal publications. And fully expect others to call me out for the same. I managed to call myself out for (and thankfully correct) one stupid error in an older issue of Current Research in the Pleistocene where I used the wrong group levels and old nomenclature for four different bats at Sloth Hole (ooh no, the old lit turned and bit me). Mistakes happen, and our job is to try and figure things out and develop the best stories we can with correct information. What is not acceptable is not giving proper credit for the work of others. If you do not know the older works then you do not know what is already known- you have allowed yourself to take someone else’s word for it. Heaven help you if your interpolator made any mistakes because you are about to make them your own now. Forever.
One last example with one of my favorite finds of all time. In doing background research and collections searches as part of the underwater work at Wakulla Springs through the Aucilla Research Institute over the last couple of years I have been on the trail of all the old mastodon bone finds that happened since maybe the 1830s on. The first nearly complete mastodon recovered came up in 1850 and I’m pretty certain I figured out exactly where it went and what happened to it. But every single publication that deals with pre 1900 finds in Wakulla ends up referring to the book Florida for Tourists, Invalids and Settlers supposedly written by George M. Barbour in 1882, which in point of fact was largely re-written from Barbour’s draft by Charles H. Jones (Graham wrote about this debacle in FL Historical Quarterly in 1973).
Well the truth is Barbour had no idea what had become of the 1850 mastodon recovered by George King and associates so he made up a story about a shipwreck that has had a life of its own for 140 years, see a zombie. Now, there are two stories about phantom non-shipwrecks that occurred either off the Florida Keys or Cape Hatteras, NC. Based on several 1850 newspapers and an 1855 magazine article it appears that the King mastodon was shipped to New York City late in 1850 where P. T. Barnum put it on display in his museum and it likely perished in the awful fire of 1865 that destroyed everything in the building that couldn’t run out. The true story is far more interesting than the false narrative and yet no one alive knew the true story until earlier this year.
I’m still working on several details of the Barnum story but unlike my earlier examples that simply lacked proper intellectual rigor in fact checking of exactly what we think we know, this one is based on mendacity. When one intentionally distorts facts, whether by commission or selective omission, you are lying. And that should never be tolerated, especially when we are in the business of finding things out, and sharing them with everyone else.
Please feel free to leave comments and I am more than willing to discuss all kinds of things related to the Pleistocene. Will moderate inappropriate things and if you feel compelled to cuss me out please do it in an email. Otherwise, fire at will.
Enough talk, let’s leave on a high note. With tongue firmly in cheek I give you Dixon Bainbridge from the Mighty Boosh:
Thanks for reading, more to follow soon, Andy
Leave a Reply