Farewell to WordPress
I’ve decided, after much deliberation, to move this blog to my academic website, ianwnjones.com. For the moment, at least, I’m going to leave the WordPress version up, but won’t be updating it. You can find the new (and hopefully more frequently updated) version here.
An Early Islamic papyrus fragment from Faynan
I promised previously that I would discuss Hannah Friedman and colleagues’ paper, “Fragments of an early Islamic Arabic papyrus from Khirbet Hamrā Ifdān” — published in the same issue of Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy as our paper on Khirbat al-Manā’iyya — in more detail. Since then I’ve been distracted by several projects (more on which soon eventually), but wanted to return to this paper, as their conclusions are relevant to some of the points I make about Khirbat Hamra Ifdan (KHI) in my dissertation, and the find itself is quite fascinating.
The key find discussed in the paper is, as the title suggests, a poorly preserved four line papyrus fragment with an Arabic inscription. There isn’t much to say about the content of the inscription, because it’s quite fragmentary, with only one complete word preserved: “Allah.” (Given the content, it’s worth noting that I don’t find their suggestion that “it is highly probable” the author of this text was a Muslim [Friedman, et al. 2017: 291] compelling, for reasons I’ll discuss below.) On paleographic grounds, they date the inscription to somewhere between the late 7th and mid-8th centuries AD. I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, a papyrologist, so I can’t comment on their paleographic arguments, but I can comment on the archaeological context. They were working in the northern portion of KHI, to the north of the large Early Bronze Age settlement that makes up the most famous component of the site. By contrast, my work with ELRAP has concentrated on the southern portion of the site. The primary feature relevant to the discussion here is Area L, a large square structure excavated in 2000 and, unfortunately, still essentially unpublished (I’m working on it, though). It was identified at the time as a caravanserai, but I think it’s more likely to be a farmhouse reusing portions of an earlier Roman tower, a point I discuss in my reevaluation of this material in my dissertation (the papyrus fragment doesn’t necessarily point to one identification over the other). In Figure 1 (the image quality for this portion of Wadi Fidan in Google Earth is unfortunately rather bad), the black patch south of the red pin is Area E, a copper slag mound dating primarily to the Iron Age II, and the square structure barely visible to the north of the pin is Area L.
Figure 1: Google Earth image of Khirbat Hamra Ifdan.
The Barqa Landscape Project team, in addition to the papyrus fragment, claims to have found “Roman, Byzantine, and Islamic pottery” in the northern, thinner portion of the site, although the ceramics aren’t yet published and the exact location of their excavations isn’t clear from the published report. The basic claim isn’t surprising, though, and is consistent with what we know of the site. In our 2014 chapter we refer to a late 8th-late 9th century AD radiocarbon date from Area L — which has since been properly published in a chapter in Mining for Ancient Copper: Essays in Memory of Beno Rothenberg I’m mistaken and must apologize; we took this out of the submitted version — to which Friedman, et al. (2017: 292) refer. In addition to this, the 2000 excavations in Area L produced pottery dating to the late 8th or 9th century, and a surface collected coin likewise dates to the 8th century. This material is unpublished (but written up in my dissertation and in my publication queue), and I point it out not to critique Friedman and colleagues for not being aware of something I didn’t tell them about, but rather to point out that their interpretation fits what we know from the southern portion of the site. Certainly I’m surprised to read that they found a papyrus fragment since, as they point out, papyri from this period in southern Jordan are exceedingly rare, but I’m not surprised that they found Early Islamic period material at KHI. I’m curious to read more about the context they excavated, and in particular the depth of the later occupation, however. Many of the primarily Early Bronze Age areas in the central portion of the site had fairly shallow Byzantine and Early Islamic reoccupations above, but only Area L had relatively deep Early Islamic period loci. It will be interesting to see how the northern building compares to these. (MacDonald [1992: 252] also noted slag in the northern part of the site, and while I’d love to be proven wrong on my assertion that there isn’t any Early Islamic period copper smelting in Faynan, this is probably something they would have mentioned if that were the case.)
Comparison to Khirbat Faynan
Later in the paper, Friedman, et al. discuss the broader Faynan region, and particularly Khirbat Faynan, a large site in the eastern portion of the Wadi Fidan/Faynan system. Khirbat Faynan was the Roman and Byzantine town of Phaino, site of an imperial metallum, and was certainly occupied into the Early Islamic period. In general I think this discussion is sensible, but one part of it took me by surprise. On pp. 291-292, Friedman, et al. state that “Khirbat Faynān … has never been excavated.” Part of why this surprised me so much is that the citation following this statement includes “Jones et al., 2014: 184,” where I make reference to the ELRAP excavations at Khirbat Faynan. In fact, as shown in Figure 2, ELRAP conducted excavations in 2011 and 2012 in three areas of the site. You can even make out the step trench we excavated in 2011 in Area 16 on the satellite imagery (the portion to the left of the “Area 16” pin is particularly easy to make out).
Figure 2: Google Earth image of Khirbat Faynan
In fairness to Friedman and colleagues, these excavations are not as well published as they should be. I do, however, refer to them in our 2014 chapter, and the 2011 excavations are discussed in a paper in the Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan, a scan of which is available here. The ADAJ paper only discusses earlier occupations at Khirbat Faynan, but even without the Early Islamic area we excavated in 2012 — Area 18 — it would be incorrect to say the site had never been excavated. Nonetheless, Friedman and colleagues correctly note that the site continued to be occupied into at least the later 8th century. This is basically consistent with the dating of the Early Islamic phases in Area 18, although the latest of these contained several forms that continue into the 9th century, as well.
The Islamization of Faynan: An Early Islamic Mosque in Wadi Fidan?
I should now return to the point I brought up above concerning the religious identity of the author of the inscription, which isn’t the critical point of the paper, but is the major point I disagree with. Friedman, et al. (2017: 291) point out that the content of the inscription does not actually point to an identification of the author as a Muslim. As the Arabic word for “God,” “Allah” appears in Arabic Christian texts of this period (and later, of course), as well. Friedman, et al. provide some examples, to which more could certainly be added. Nonetheless, they also think it is “highly probable” that the author was a Muslim, apparently on the basis of the archaeology of the site.
What about the archaeology makes them say this? On pp. 285-286, Friedman and colleagues note that one of the authors, Russell Adams, visited the site in the mid-1980s as part of Burton MacDonald’s Southern Ghors and Northeast ‘Arabah Archaeological Survey (SGNAS) and observed a structure that looked like an open-air mosque, but with its mihrab facing Jerusalem, rather than Mecca. They go on to say that when he and my advisor, Tom Levy, began excavating the site in 1999, the structure was gone. It’s unclear what this structure is, as it was apparently never mapped. I would note, however, that this sounds rather like a structure visible on a map of the excavations published by Levy, et al. (2002: 434, Fig. 5A), which was assigned to site Stratum II, dating to the Early Bronze Age IV. This isn’t an exact match (the “mihrab” faces slightly northeast, more or less toward Damascus, rather than Jerusalem), but it’s pretty darn close, considering the reconstruction is based on memory. Friedman and colleagues, rightly, don’t seem to regard this as evidence that there was a mosque on the site. It is perhaps also worth noting WFD 105, published by Levy, et al. (2001: 176, Table 2) as an Islamic period cultic site. If that identification is correct, it would also be quite odd, as that structure oriented to the west, rather than the south. (To this discussion we could also add FJHP Site 136, a structure near Petra with a niche in its eastern wall [Kouki 2013].) The discussion of whether these structures, particularly FJHP Site 136, could be mosques revolves to a large extent around the mosque or musalla built of copper slag at Be’er Ora, which seems to have niches in its eastern and southern walls, although the eastern one is less clear. I don’t really want to get into this in much detail. The key facts are that this mosque was suggested to have an east-facing mihrab later converted to a south-facing one, and that the excavations did not actually produce evidence that would support (or, to be fair, rule out) this claim (Sharon, et al. 1996). In short, there isn’t a lot to go on here. It’s not possible to rule out the possibility that WFD 105, FJHP 136, or the now-missing structure at KHI could have been mosques, but that isn’t the same as being able to say they are.
Back to the point. Why do Friedman, et al. think the author of the papyrus was likely Muslim? The beginning of their discussion is not promising: “Archaeological suggestions of an early Islamic mosque at KHI dating to the seventh or eighth century are supported by the find of the papyrus” (Friedman, et al. 2017: 292). This is, of course, circular reasoning. The papyrus is likely to have been written by a Muslim if there is a mosque at the site, which in turn is likely if there’s a papyrus written by a Muslim at the site. I’ll return to this briefly, but first let me lay out the rest of their argument. They first suggest the “Negev desert mosques” as a model, and place the hypothetical mosque near ‘Ayn Fidan, the spring to the south of the site. In the next paragraph, they suggest that “structures surrounding the missing mosque functioned as a venue for economic or social purposes,” citing the farmstead at ‘En ‘Avrona (in the southern Wadi ‘Araba, near ‘Aqaba) as a parallel (Friedman, et al. 2017: 292). I don’t think both of these models should be applied to the same site, and I would suggest that ‘En ‘Avrona, Nahal La’ana (Nahlieli, et al. 1996] and a number of other sites — which have rooms that served as mosques inside structures that look rather like KHI Area L — are probably a closer parallel to KHI than the hilltop Negev mosques. In other words, further excavation in Area L could probably tell us whether there is a mosque at the site or not. Which brings us back to their initial reasoning. The idea that there should be a mosque at the site assumes more about the Islamization of Faynan than we actually know. What we can presently say is that the region continued to be occupied well into the Early Islamic period. That doesn’t, however, tell us much about the religious identity of the people living there. One can assume that these people were either early converts or Muslim newcomers to the region, but at our present state of knowledge, this is an assumption. Looking to Petra rather than the Negev may caution against this, as excavations at Khirbat al-Nawafla in Wadi Musa demonstrated that the population was either primarily Christian or confessionally-mixed into at least the late 8th century, and probably rather later (‘Amr, et al. 2000). It’s also possible that KHI and Khirbat Faynan don’t follow the same pattern. Further excavation could very well find a mosque at KHI and continued use of churches at Khirbat Faynan. Presently, we simply don’t know.
That said, however, I should reiterate that this is a really incredible find, and I’m definitely looking forward to hearing about the rest of the material they’ve found.
—
Friedman, Hannah, Tasha Vorderstrasse, Rachel Mairs, & Russel Adams (2017). Fragments of an early Islamic Arabic papyrus from Khirbet Hamrā Ifdān Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy, 28, 285-296 : 10.1111/aae.12099
Other Works Cited
‘Amr, Khairieh, Ahmed al-Momani, Naif al-Nawafleh, and Sami al-Nawafleh
2000 Summary Results of the Archaeological Project at Khirbat an-Nawāfla/Wādī Mūsā. Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 44:231-255.
Jones, Ian W. N., Mohammad Najjar, and Thomas E. Levy
2014 “Not Found in the Order of History”: Toward a “Medieval” Archaeology of Southern Jordan. In From West to East: Current Approaches to Medieval Archaeology. S.D. Stull, ed. Pp. 171-206. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.
Jones, Ian W. N., Mohammad Najjar, and Thomas E. Levy
2018 The Arabah Copper Industry in the Islamic Period: Views from Faynan and Timna. In Mining for Ancient Copper: Essays in Memory of Beno Rothenberg. E. Ben-Yosef, ed. Pp. 332-342. Tel Aviv University Sonia and Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology Monograph Series, Vol. 37. Winona Lake, IN and Tel Aviv: Eisenbrauns and Emery and Claire Yass Publications in Archaeology.
Kouki, Paula
2013 Site 136, an Open Mosque? In Petra — The Mountain of Aaron: The Finnish Archaeological Project in Jordan, Volume III: The Archaeological Survey. P. Kouki and M. Lavento, eds. Pp. 317-321. Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fennica.
Levy, Thomas E., Russell B. Adams, Andreas Hauptmann, Michael Prange, Sigrid Schmitt-Strecker, and Mohammad Najjar
2002 Early Bronze Age metallurgy: a newly discovered copper manufactory in southern Jordan. Antiquity 76:425-437.
Levy, Thomas E., Russell B. Adams, Alan J. Witten, James Anderson, Yoav Arbel, Solomon Kuah, John Moreno, Angela Lo, and Mark Wagonner
2001 Early Metallurgy, Interaction, and Social Change: The Jabal Ḥamrat Fīdān (Jordan) Research Design and 1998 Archaeological Survey: Preliminary Report. Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 45:159-187.
Levy, Thomas E., Mohammad Najjar, Aaron D. Gidding, Ian W. N. Jones, Kyle A. Knabb, Kathleen Bennallack, Matthew Vincent, Alex Novo Lamosco, Ashley M. Richter, Craig Smitheram, Lauren D. Hahn, and Sowparnika Balaswaminathan
2012 The 2011 Edom Lowlands Regional Archaeology Project (ELRAP): Excavations and Surveys in the Faynān Copper Ore District, Jordan. Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 56:423-445.
MacDonald, Burton
1992 The Southern Ghors and Northeast ‘Arabah Archaeological Survey. Dorchester: The Dorset Press.
Nahlieli, Dov, Yigal Israel, and Yehudit Ben-Michael
1996 The Nahal La’ana Site: An Early Islamic Farm in the Negev. ‘Atiqot 30:67*-78*, 130.
Sharon, Moshe, Uzi Avner, and Dov Nahlieli
1996 An Early Islamic Mosque near Be’er Ora in the Southern Negev: Possible Evidence for an Early Eastern Qiblah? ‘Atiqot 30:107-114.
Some shameless self-promotion
Posts have been a little light here for a while as I finish my dissertation, but enough things have come out in the last month or so that I should really mention them here. First, and certainly most excitingly, I was profiled in the Jordan Times on December 9 in an article by the amazing Saeb Rawashdeh. Saeb did a great job of presenting the key arguments of my dissertation research and the significance of that research for Jordanian archaeology. I’m somewhat biased, but I think you should check it out!
In the realm of peer-reviewed, unfortunately closed-access work, my co-authors and I published a paper in the most recent issue of Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy (if you don’t have access to AAE and would like an offprint, please feel free to contact me). In it, we report on ELRAP excavations at a site in southern Jordan called Khirbat al-Manā’iyya in 2012. As I point out in the abstract, Khirbat al-Manā’iyya is exciting because (among other things) it’s the first Early Islamic period copper smelting site known in the southeastern Wadi ‘Araba (actually, in the entire eastern Wadi ‘Araba). In addition to reporting the site, we also discuss how Khirbat al-Manā’iyya fits into the system of industrial settlements, including other copper smelting sites, in the southwestern ‘Araba, and how this system articulates with Early Islamic mining in northern Arabia, expanding on arguments we first made in our “Not Found in the Order of History” chapter. I should also note that Brita Lorentzen,” who I’ve mentioned previously on this blog, analyzed the charcoal assemblage from the site and found evidence for the use of deadwood, which tells us some interesting things about how the sparse wood resources of the southern Wadi ‘Araba were managed during this period. I was quite excited to be able to work on this site, and I’m even more excited that the publication is out. Note also that it came out in the same issue as David Kennedy’s paper on the “gate” features in Saudi Arabia, which got a bit of press, and a very interesting paper by Hannah Friedman and colleagues about an Early Islamic papyrus from the Faynan region, which I hope to discuss in slightly more detail in an upcoming post.
Lastly, I’ve been co-editing a book called Cyber-Archaeology and Grand Narratives: Digital Technology and Deep-Time Perspectives on Culture Change in the Middle East with my advisor, Tom Levy, and it has also just come out in the Springer One World Archaeology series. It’s a cool volume, based on a session at the 7th World Archaeological Congress and a workshop at UC San Diego (the chapters have been updated since then, of course). The idea was that contributors would consider how digital archaeology can contribute to investigations of archaeological “grand narratives,” and the contributions both explore the potential of new methods and provide insightful critiques of existing methods (you can check out the table of contents here). In addition to being one of the editors, I’m also first author in the intro chapter, which I think is worth a read (as is the entire volume!).
That new coin hoard from the Sasanid invasion
Hello, and welcome to the latest installment of “Ian rambles about the latest archaeology news.” I’ve seen this story shared in various forms on the various Near Eastern archaeology social media thingummies, and I’ve read it with interest each time. This is, in part, because much of the reporting on it has been . . . rather strange. The gist of the story is that archaeologists from the Israel Antiquities Authority found a hoard of nine 6th and early 7th century AD copper folles in salvage excavations at ‘En Hemed, and based on the dating of the latest coins have suggested that they were hidden prior to the Sasanid invasion of 614.
It’s been reported in the Jerusalem Post (use an ad blocker!), which seems mostly to rely on the IAA press release, and a much stranger article has also appeared in the Washington Post. I’m sure there are other versions out there, too, though I can’t imagine any are quite as strange as that one.
First, the less strange one. As I mentioned, the Jerusalem Post story mostly seems to repeat the IAA press release, but with nicer photos. The major contribution seems to be that in the JPost story the hoard is called “rare,” which is probably not the word I would use, as quite a few hoards can be attributed to the Sasanid invasion. In fact, to quote Alan Walmsley (2007: 324), “Quite a few hoards can be attributed to the Sasanid invasion.” Beyond that, it’s a bit weird that both the JPost article and IAA release give dates of birth and death for each emperor, which, when discussing coins, is somewhat less useful than regnal dates. (It would, indeed, be quite rare to find a coin of Phocas dating to 547 AD, as that’s 55 years before he became emperor. . .) This isn’t a huge issue, though, and the rest of the release seems pretty straightforward.
The dating issue is corrected, at least for the reign of Phocas, in the Washington Post version. Sort of. They give the dates as 604-609, which is not quite right for the reign of Phocas, but I suspect the archaeologist, Annette Landes-Nagar, has narrowed this down on numismatic grounds. I’m not a numismatist (and the coins are, as would be expected in a news story like this, not presented in much detail), so I’m not totally sure. I am, however, more sure that it is not accurate to say that Landes-Nagar “estimated that the coins were minted sometime between 604 and 609 because they bear the faces of Byzantine emperors of the time,” considering that the hoard also contained issues of Justinian and Maurice, neither of whom was Byzantine emperor at that time.
I imagine that at this point you’re saying to yourself, “I don’t know. That doesn’t seem that weird.” Agreed. That is just me being nitpicky. What’s weird is that, of the 18 paragraphs that make up the article, only five are about the ‘En Hemed excavations. The rest seems to be about the archaeological evidence for early Christianity in Israel and, uh, the existence of Jesus, for some reason. The first, we’re told, is “a potent point, offering proof of the Christian connection to the Holy Land and the Middle East, alongside that of Judaism and Islam.” This seems fairly obvious, but on the other hand, I don’t think anyone who follows the archaeology of Israel will be surprised to see the phrase “proof of the X connection to the Holy Land” in an article. So, fair enough?
Stranger is the point that archaeologists haven’t found “physical evidence of [Jesus’] existence.” True, but . . . what does that have to do with a hoard of 6th and 7th century coins? I think the idea here is something to do with the development of the Christian community, but it seems like a strange way of introducing this coin hoard, especially since that connection is never made very clear.
None of that is, of course, a critique of the excavations, and I’ll be curious to see the publication when it comes out. Considering that the hoard was found in collapse, I’ll be interested, in particular, to see if they consider the possibility that it might actually have been dropped during the earthquake of 633, as Russell (1985: 46) suggested for three houses at Bet She’an (where the latest coins, it turns out, were also issues of Phocas). That does seem less likely in this case, but still possible.
Works Cited
Russell, Kenneth W. 1985. “The Earthquake Chronology of Palestine and Northwest Arabia from the 2nd through the mid-8th Century A.D.” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 260:37-59.
Walmsley, Alan. 2007. “Economic Developments and the Nature of Settlement in the Towns and Countryside of Syria-Palestine, ca. 565-800.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 61:319-352.
The “world’s oldest Qur’an manuscript”
You may recall seeing, back in July, the news that radiocarbon dating showed that a Qur’an manuscript at the University of Birmingham was one of the oldest, if not the oldest, in the world. The parchment evidently dates to 568-645 AD at 2-sigma, or 95.45%, accuracy. I was somewhat surprised to see, a few days ago, that it was back in the news. I’m not sure whether this second wave of media attention has anything to do with the upcoming exhibition of the manuscript in October, but it seems like it might.
The twist this time around, though, is the idea that the fragment may predate Muhammad. Keith Small is quoted in the Independent piece and states that the date
gives more ground to what have been peripheral views of the Koran’s genesis, like that Mohamed and his early followers used a text already in existence and shaped it to fit their own political and theological agenda.
Admittedly, I’m not exactly an expert on the history of the Qur’an’s composition, but nonetheless this surprised me a bit, because I hadn’t heard this idea before. I’ll also point out, before moving on, that this date doesn’t really seem to me to support this very strongly. If, to use Edwards, Lindman, and Savage’s famous phrase, “probability is orderly opinion, and . . . inference from data is nothing other than the revision of such opinion in the light of relevant new information” (full, embarrassing disclosure: I first encountered this phrase on the dreaded Wikipedia), this new date gives us little reason to prefer this theory or the traditional one, as most of the more balanced stories have already pointed out.
It’s strange, though, that none of the pieces I’ve read mentions the “revisionist” history I’m more familiar with, as that seems to me to be what’s really “destabilized” (as Tom Holland phrases it) by this date. The tendency among the revisionist historians has not been to argue for an early dating, but rather a late one. Nevo and Koren (2003: 11), for example, argue that the Qur’an “was not canonized until the end of the 2nd century A.H. or perhaps early in the 3rd” (that would be the late 8th to early 9th centuries AD). While their view is fairly extreme, some degree of “late” dating is standard in the revisionist view (Motzki wrote an article in Der Islam that summarizes many of these and which is, happily, available here on his Academia.edu page). These ideas have been debated for decades (see, for example, Whitcomb’s archaeological consideration of earlier works by Nevo and Koren, also happily available on his Academia.edu page), but this new date is a pretty big problem for the “late canonization” camp. It’s still possible, I suppose, that fragments existed earlier but weren’t codified into the Qur’an until much later, but this view doesn’t seem very tenable in light of the Birmingham Qur’an. Perhaps this isn’t a big deal because there isn’t anyone who thinks this these days, anyway?
Alternative archaeology update
Well, what do you know? The title of this Forbes story that’s been going around today seemed awfully familiar, and it turns out it’s actually a review, of sorts, of the recent American Antiquity book reviews section on alternative archaeology. The SAA has, in fact, made the entire section open-access. That’s awesome, and if you don’t already have an AmAnt subscription you should go out and download it. It’s definitely worth a read!
Alternative archaeology and American Antiquity
I don’t, admittedly, always read the reviews section of the SAA‘s flagship journal, American Antiquity. I am, however, quite glad that I did last month (or, more accurately, this month, since I didn’t open the July issue until just a few days ago). That is because the current reviews section is devoted entirely to reviews of “alternative archaeology” titles, in a special reviews section, titled “Talking to the Guy on the Airplane.” These are worth a read for a few reasons. First, many of them are quite funny, especially if you find “alternative archaeology” entertaining anyway, as I do. Second, many of the reviews make important points about why it is that people are much more interested in alternative archaeology than they are in actual archaeology (for lack of a better word). Stephen Lekson’s review, in particular, has some good points about why “all archaeologists not named Brian Fagan” tend to be much less successful than alternative archaeologists at writing for a popular audience. Third, for archaeologists, who often tend to ignore this sort of thing, it’s an interesting overview of what’s actually out there in terms of alternative archaeology. For example, William Conner’s Iron Age America gets a review. I occasionally see him posting to the ARCH-METALS mailing list, and have often wondered what he was all about. Well, now I don’t have to wonder anymore!
I do find one thing very strange, though. One of the stated purposes of this special reviews section was to provide laypeople with an overview of what archaeologists actually think of various alternative archaeologies and why we reject those ideas. To quote, “Accordingly, the main intent of these reviews is to offer the silent and curious majority that is interested in these works a professional perspective on them” (Holly 2015: 616). This is, I think, a good goal, especially because, as Holly implies, most of the people who consume alternative archaeology are probably not “true believers.” I’d argue, however, that the best way to engage this audience is not to bury these reviews in a closed-access PDF labeled only “Reviews” that only SAA members can download. This seems to me to miss the point. I should note that Holly has uploaded his introductory piece to his Academia.edu page, but maybe if the goal was to reach a wide audience of non-archaeologists, it would have made more sense to make the entire thing open-access to begin with? Or to make all of them open-access at all? Or to advertise this at all? To be fair, this is not the first time the SAA has done a less-than-stellar job of disseminating information to all of the people who might be interested in it. Still, it’d be nice if they did this time!
EDIT: In the course of my Googling on this topic, I’ve discovered that Jennifer Raff already wrote a better post on this a month ago. She’s asked people to pester the SAA about making all of these reviews open-access, but this doesn’t seem to have had much success yet, unfortunately.
Works Cited
Holly, Donald H., Jr.
2015 Talking to the Guy on the Airplane. American Antiquity 80(3):615-617.
Dug-up Commonplaces 