The six paintings found in the Nerja Caves, 35miles east of Malaga, are at least 42,000 years old and are the only known artistic images created by Neanderthal man, scientists believe.

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Archaeologists and technologists develop supercomputer-powered solutions to protect and preserve ancient sites and artifacts.

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AN activated  an exciting new feature – Anthropology News Online Calendar. This new feature allows our members to submit events to our calendar. As a result, we encourage our membership to take advantage of this opportunity. Be sure to book mark the link to our calendar page: http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/calendar/ Upon landing on this page, there will be a link which states, “Click here for instructions for adding to this calendar.” To save our blog readers an extra click, here are  show all text

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Anthropological publishing is undergoing rapid change as digital technologies, new forms of presentation, and an increasing desire to move to the free distribution of knowledge unfold. Whether existing models of publishing can be sustained is questionable. The AAA is currently assessing its own publication program and seeking to understand how that articulates with the wider realm of anthropological publishing. We need to understand current and emerging trends in the dissemination of knowledge ...  show all text

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Thanks to everyone to read and contributed to last week’s reinauguration of our ‘reading circle’ feature. This week I’d like to showcase some more great open access work by asking people to read an article from the open access serial Pacific Asia Inquiry: Voyaging for Anti-Colonial Recovery: Austronesian Seafaring, Archipelagic Rethinking and the Re-Mapping of Indigeneity by Vincente Diaz. Diaz is the author of Repositioning the Missionary published by the Pacific Island Monograph Series at the...  show all text

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Closer Blog: On France24 Annette Young meets John R. Bowen, anthropologist and author of "Can Islam be French?" Islam is the second most widely practised religion in France, but how do Muslims live their religion in a country which is known for its fierce secularism? Read more: Anthropologist John Bowen – Islam of France

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An open course consisting of a close reading of the text of Karl Marx's Capital Volume I in 13 video lectures by Professor David Harvey.

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Edited transcription of an improvised talk for a seminar, “Social movements and the solidarity economy”, organized by Jean-Louis Laville and Geoffrey Pleyers, EHESS, Paris, 2 February 2012. I was asked to report on the project I am involved in which has the same name as The Human Economy book; but, given this course’s focus on social movements, I decided that I should try to insert the perspective on economy I have developed into contemporary political processes and events. I have been writing,...  show all text

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I’m currently on a committee which has been tasked with developing a set of ethical guidelines for visual ethnography in Taiwan. While I agreed to take part in this process because ‘image ethics’ are something I take very seriously, I am also very skeptical about the application of a medical ethics model to anthropology. For this reason I was happy to come across a paper by Bill Simpson entitled “Ethical moments: future directions for ethical review and ethnography” which is a free (if not “ope...  show all text

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Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has been under fire from world leaders to step down this week. He’s also under fire from hacktivist group Anonymous, who leaked hundreds of his office’s emails on Monday. While Anonymous is infamous for its hacking know-how, it doesn’t take a genius computer programmer to guess one of the passwords commonly used by Assad’s office accounts: 12345. The string of consecutive numbers is the second-weakest password according to a 2011 study. Anonymous broke into the ...  show all text

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It occurs to me that academia is being ‘disrupted’ (as the digerati like to say) in the same way that the music industry once was. As open access, the Internet, and DIY publishing opportunities proliferate, the old system of prestige and recognition is breaking down. How today can we judge that our assistant professors are deserving of tenure? The traditional answer is that they have been signed to a major label: they have published with big-name journals and big-name presses. With the brand of...  show all text

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Recent comments on Hau and the opening of ethnographic theory remind me of what I always think of when I hear about the Bongobongo: The time is gone when anthropologists could find solace in the claim that our main civic duty–and the justification for our public support–was the constant reaffirmation that the Bongobongo are “humans just like us.” Every single term of that phrase is now publicly contested terrain, caught between the politics of identity and the turbulence of global flows. Too ma...  show all text

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The Association for Feminist Anthropology welcomes sessions to be considered for inclusion in AFA’s programming for the 111th AAA Annual Meeting, to be held November 14-18, 2012 in San Francisco. The AAA meeting theme this year is “Borders,” so AFA particularly welcomes panels that take up “borders” from a feminist anthropological perspective. Various approaches to the theme include papers and sessions that might explore: Borders/collaborations/intersections between feminist anthropology and ot...  show all text

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The American Anthropologist (AA) seeks applications for the position of book review editor. The AA, the longtime flagship publication of the American Anthropological Association, is one of the most influential and prestigious journals in the discipline. The AA publishes approximately 100 book reviews annually in all subfields of anthropology. The book review editor is responsible for choosing books to be reviewed and selecting reviewers.  The editor is responsible for overseeing the contents of...  show all text

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The American Anthropological Association, responding to controversy over a January 12th letter sent to the White House opposing further federal support for open access, has issued a new statement that removes that opposition and embraces a diversity of publishing models moving forward. The Association’s Executive Board announced yesterday: Acknowledging the Association’s commitment to “a publications program that disseminates the most current anthropological research, expertise, and interpretat...  show all text

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Ok, a little less politics on this blog and a little more anthropology. Hopefully some of you have looked at the introduction to HAU and want to start talking about it. The title of the piece is “the return of ethnographic theory” but I’ve titled my post the ‘opening of ethnographic theory’, and for good reason. A quick look at the bios of the contributors and editors to HAU will reveal that it is in many ways a Chicago-Oxbridge production, but with a continental twist. In many ways, HAU repre...  show all text

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Preface In the wake of the SOPA/PIPA protests, debate over the Research Works Act, the growing boycott of Elsevier by scholars in many fields, and more local discussions of the ways that various scholarly societies in my own fields of interest (anthropology, folklore studies) responded to the recent call by the [U.S.] White House Office of Science and Technology Policy for comment on public access to federally funded research, there is a great deal of additional attention being given to the cha...  show all text

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The AAA’s role is to be vigilant when it comes to proposed legislation that aims to limit dissemination of research, and that may disproportionately protect private over public interests. At the same time, AAA’s role is to protect the sustainability of our publications program, for anthropology as a whole and for individual authors.  We continue to investigate models that both support broad dissemination of knowledge and a sustainable publishing program. To this end, the Executive Board has ado...  show all text

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One of the problems plaguing anthropology today is its state of perpetual indecision. This is probably not a new problem, but it does have serious consequences for how we write and publish. What is the center of sociocultural anthropology today? Where is the discipline going? What standards can we use to assess the work of young scholars? No one has the answer to these questions, or at least not enough people have the same answer. We are resistant to rely on quantitative measures of citations b...  show all text

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Back in November, the US government's Office of Science and Technology Policy solicited comments on potential policy surrounding public access to scholarly work.  All comments were accepted through January 12 and were recently released. The statement released by the American Anthropological Association can be read here, and the Archaeological Institute of America statement is here.  In short, both statements insist that there is no problem with public access to scholarly output. The anthro-Tw...  show all text

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