r/Archaeology

Excerpt:

Through 28,000 dives and decades of research, the team brought up 19,000 artifacts and found 179 partial or complete remains of fallen crew. The discoveries resulted in a Guinness World Record for the most medieval weaponry recovered from a shipwreck—more than 8,300 weapons, ordnances, and affiliated artifacts were salvaged, including 10 bronze guns, nine iron swivel guns, five handgun stocks, eight gun-shields, four pieces of cast-iron hail shot, 44 linstocks for lighting gunpowder, three incendiary arts, 172 longbows, nearly 4,000 arrows, 65 ballock daggers, one rondel dagger, 177 chain-mail links, and a single complete basket-hilted sword.

Finally pulling the hull of the Mary Rose from the seafloor required a purpose-built lifting crane attached by wires to steel bolts passing through the hull at selected points. A tubular lifting frame was set in place over the wreck, supported by four legs embedded in the seabed. Hydraulic jacks on the frame raised the hull a few centimeters to reduce the suction effect of the silt. Then, the lifting frame attached to a hook on the crane barge Tog Mor pulled up the Mary Rose, placing it in a bespoke steel cradle. Towed to shore and dried, the ship now sits on display in the very dockyard where it was built over 470 years ago.

For decades, an influential theory blamed the Rapanui for their own downfall—a story made famous by Jared Diamond’s book Collapse. New evidence tells a different tale

sorry if this breaks the rules, I didn't see one regarding it

This question was prompted because we had come into possession of a field guide for 1960s archeological field practices, and the bookmark the previous owner used was the business card for a brothel ha ha

Ever since my first year of undergrad I had heard that archeologists are fairly liberal with relations with other people, and I have my own experiences and observations that can make me understand where people come from but I don't *necessarily* agree, but was curious about other people's stance

New research led by University College Dublin has rewritten a key chapter in Irish prehistory, revealing that bones long thought to mark the beginning of farming in Ireland belong to bear and wild boar, not cattle.

TL;DR: The archaeology PI and two textual specialists agreed to co-author the first publication of an excavated text under a written policy tying authorship and author order to contribution. Now, as publication approaches, the senior specialist is repeatedly questioning whether the director should be an author at all, despite the director’s contributions and the previously agreed upon policy.

An archaeological project director (Associate Professor at an R1) collaborates with a senior textual specialist (Professor at an elite Ivy) and a junior textual specialist (doctoral student) on the publication of newly excavated written material.

The director is an archaeologist and historian, and her contributions to the proposed publication include history of excavation, stratigraphic interpretation, archaeological analysis, chronology, historical geography, and historical interpretation. The textual specialists are responsible for transliteration, translation, and philological commentary on this, the first publication of a text.

The project also has a written authorship policy, circulated to collaborators, that bases authorship on substantive intellectual contribution, determines author order by contribution, requires article-specific MOUs, and provides procedures for nonperformance. The senior specialist acknowledged receipt of the policy at the time and indicated his acceptance of it.

Approximately a year before the current dispute, the director asked the senior textual specialist to clarify authorship and author order by preparing an MOU, which, under the policy, should be prepared by the intended first author. She told him that she hoped he would be first author and take the lead on the publication.

He agreed that the publication would have three authors, but said that he found it difficult to determine author order in advance because contributions might develop over the course of the work. The collaboration proceeded with three authors understood, and because author order was unresolved, no MOU in place.

Based upon the agreement, the project director dedicated time and funding to the restoration of the texts and to extensive photo documentation, successfully writing a grant for these.

When publication of an important text became imminent, the collaborators discussed a division of labor. As agreed, the director would write the archaeological context and stratigraphy and lead the historical interpretation. The textual specialists would prepare the transliteration, translation, and philological commentary.

However, during the same discussion, the senior text specialist questioned whether the director should be an author and suggested that her inclusion might be unusual enough to require explanation or justification to journal editors.

He invoked disciplinary custom, arguing that first publications of newly excavated texts are conventionally authored by textual specialists alone rather than co-authored with excavators. It is a humanities field with no written disciplinary scholarship or guidelines about co-authorship.

The project director countered that the publication policy in place gave author credit to all contributors who qualified for authorship, and suggested a specific archaeology journal where this would be a routine type of publication. She said that her policies were based upon best practices rather than customary practice.

The senior specialist then insisted that he and the doctoral student should be first and second author and still has not responded to renewed requests for an MOU. The senior specialist raises the question of whether the director should be an author in every email with the doctoral student copied.

1. What should the project director do?
2. Can a discipline-specific custom override contribution-based standards for authorship, particularly when the project itself has adopted a written contribution-based policy, that the authors received and agreed to?
3. How much weight should be given to the prior agreement that this would be a three-author publication, given that substantial work and project resources were subsequently committed on that understanding?