A decade ago, controversy erupted after it was revealed that a creationist book was being sold in six bookstores at the Grand Canyon National Park. It was a biblical explanation of the Grand Canyon. As Cornelia Dean reported in the New York Times, the book says God created the heavens and the earth in six…Continue Reading…
I have often asked myself, What was Jared Diamond thinking when he first learned that everything Easter Island symbolized to him might be wrong? Did the prize-winning, internationally celebrated writer ever look around at the accumulating evidence and think that maybe–just maybe–Easter Island isn’t the best metaphor for ecocide? By all indications, Diamond has not allowed such…Continue Reading…
E. O. Wilson and Jared Diamond have a few things in common. Both are ecologists, popularizers of science, famous best-selling authors, meme creators, and lately, objects of ridicule and academic rage. Let’s recall that Wilson, before he became the bard of biodiversity, had withstood a furious assault on his reputation after the publication in 1975 of…Continue Reading…
If you had time to read only one scholarly paper on drought, I’d suggest this one (published in 2007) by Cook et al. It’s a comprehensive, multi-disciplinary overview that amply supports this assertion made in the first sentence of the abstract: Severe drought is the greatest recurring natural disaster to strike North America. The Cook…Continue Reading…
Several years ago, a scholar wrote that the popular image of archaeology was characterized by three themes. 1) Archaeology is about searching and finding treasure underground; 2) Archaeological fieldwork involves making discoveries in tough conditions and in exotic locations; 3) Like a detective, the archaeologist tries to piece together what happened in the past. In the United States,…Continue Reading…
An archaeologist is peeved about the “craze over the supposed Maya prophecy of the end of the world in 2012,” which he says “is based on bogus, commercialized, fake claims.” Well, blow me down, are there any rational-minded people who would seriously entertain such a prophesy even if it came straight from a Carlos Castaneda…Continue Reading…
And they have a message: Researchers say they have found new evidence of prolonged drought in parts of the West, suggesting megadroughts are not the rarity Westerners would like them to be. Of course, there is already ample evidence for Westerners not to think this, but c’mon, who remembers what they had for dinner on Tuesday,…Continue Reading…
I’m just catching up with this story from the Salt Lake Tribune: During [Utah] Gov. Gary Herbert’s visit to Blanding, one of the poorest regions of the state, residents pleaded with him to keep open the Edge of the Cedars Museum State Park. The ancestral Puebloan site and official archaeological repository houses one of the largest…Continue Reading…
What does the theory of punctuated equilibrium have to do with modern-day American politics? Dan Vergano of USA Today has an intriguing piece that makes the connection: In the 1990’s, amid widespread complaints of “gridlock” in Washington, the notion of political punctuated equilibrium “was born from dissatisfaction with the idea of everything being fixed and…Continue Reading…
Five years ago this September I was fortunate to spend a week with a team of archaeologists who were surveying remote stretches of Utah’s Desolation Canyon. Half the crew set off on the Green River and the other half on horseback, working their way down the Tavaputs Plateau. (I’ll get back to those horse guys in…Continue Reading…