[Since one of the things that makes academic blogging so fascinating to me is the opportunity to be part of a network of interesting people working on interrelated subjects, from time to time I will post little reviews of blogs that I think might be of interest to my readership — SC]
A Very Remote Period Indeed is the brainchild of my friend Julien Riel-Salvatore, a Paleolithic archaeologist who is currently a postdoctoral fellow at our mutual alma mater, McGill University. Julien is one of those sorts of people whose career path should make one envious or infuriated, by all rights. I first met him in 1996 when he was a wide-eyed freshman in the undergraduate Prehistoric Archaeology course I was TAing, and by 2001, two years before I had published anything, he had a major article in Current Anthropology (Riel-Salvatore and Clark 2001). Nothing like being lapped to instil a little humility in you.
But anyway, the fact is that Julien is one of the humblest, nicest, and funniest future academic superstars you will ever meet, and his blog reflects that fact. His academic posts largely focus on Middle and Upper Paleolithic Europe, his area of specialty, on topics such as the relationship (or lack thereof) between Neandertals and anatomically modern humans, the nuances of Paleolithic lithic technology in Italy, or the recent controversies over the Liang Bua ‘hobbit’ hominin. He’s quite hooked into the rather specialized network of paleoanthropologists and has an uncanny ability to extract useful information from media reports and preprints, and to present it in a fascinating way to an educated but nonspecialist audience.
But like all us McGillians, Julien has the soul of a theorist, and you will find some pretty significant insights at AVRPI about why Paleolithic archaeology is important, and how it relates to our knowledge of human behavior, and more generally the advantages and disadvantages of working in an area whose database is both vital for our understanding of human biology and culture and also depressingly sparse. From my own perspective, his work leads me to think about the evidence for the evolution of mathematical capacities in relation to the early (and contradictory) evidence for Paleolithic symbolic behavior (d’Errico et al. 2003), a subject I and my students investigated last term in our bibliographic research project on Paleolithic notations. Archaeological research is at times maddeningly detail-oriented, but it is only through those details, rather than the idle speculations of armchair philosophers (not to mention evolutionary psychologists) that big questions about the evolution of human language and cognition can be addressed.
Recent posts of interest:
The unbearable lightness of the Paleolithic record
Archaeology and the public: a complicated relationship?
Works Cited
d’Errico, F., C. Henshilwood, G. Lawson, M. Vanhaeren, A.-M. Tillier, M. Soressi, F . Bresson, B. Maureille, A. Nowell, J. Lakarra, L. Backwell, and M. Julien. 2003. Archaeological evidence for the emergence of language, symbolism, and music: an alternative multidisciplinary perspective. Journal of World Prehistory 17:1–70.
Glossographia 