1st August 2006, 11:16 AM
It's all in the presentation.
The reason why so many people read and believe Dan Brown's work compared to, say, mine is that he is so partisan and selective.
The three facts you allude to are written on the first page of DVC in plain type with the word 'FACT' in big letters across the top. This little psychological trick seems to work on most people, but often leaves those it doesn't in a state of apoplexy.
Archaeologists generally lead with the methodology, describe the evidence in minute detail, present tentative and very broad conclusions and finish with a bunch of caveats to those conclusions. It isn't hard to see which is going to fly off the shelves. So should we write in a more blockbusting style, consign the argument to the archive and only publish exciting conclusions?
Although it has many virtues, post-modern, liberal, ('anything goes') discourse is even more subject to the mechanisms of power (rather than reason) than the scientific way of thinking. There are plenty of university departments where one powerful group has used the rhetoric of multi-vocality and post-modernism to marginalise another group, characterising their enemies as reactionary, elitist or worse. Such an environment doesn't mean that people all just sit back and allow others to express contrasting views; not when there's books to sell and professorships to attain. Anything doesn't go, as it turns out. Far from it.
With all this in mind, it is no surprise that, without the muscle of a major publishing house, archaeologists tend to adopt the 'ignore them and they'll go away' approach. We can't compete, but wait twenty years and no-one will be reading Dan Brown. All I take away from this problem is that the dry reportage so common to archaeology needs an overhaul. If we can put technical data on the ADS now, why publish it in limited run monographs when we could use the space to make more interesting comments and speculations about the past? This distinction would have the happy side effect that people would no longer be able to simply present data without any interpretation. They would have to come up with something interesting to say.
'Have a good plan, execute it violently, do it today'.
General MacArthur
The reason why so many people read and believe Dan Brown's work compared to, say, mine is that he is so partisan and selective.
The three facts you allude to are written on the first page of DVC in plain type with the word 'FACT' in big letters across the top. This little psychological trick seems to work on most people, but often leaves those it doesn't in a state of apoplexy.
Archaeologists generally lead with the methodology, describe the evidence in minute detail, present tentative and very broad conclusions and finish with a bunch of caveats to those conclusions. It isn't hard to see which is going to fly off the shelves. So should we write in a more blockbusting style, consign the argument to the archive and only publish exciting conclusions?
Although it has many virtues, post-modern, liberal, ('anything goes') discourse is even more subject to the mechanisms of power (rather than reason) than the scientific way of thinking. There are plenty of university departments where one powerful group has used the rhetoric of multi-vocality and post-modernism to marginalise another group, characterising their enemies as reactionary, elitist or worse. Such an environment doesn't mean that people all just sit back and allow others to express contrasting views; not when there's books to sell and professorships to attain. Anything doesn't go, as it turns out. Far from it.
With all this in mind, it is no surprise that, without the muscle of a major publishing house, archaeologists tend to adopt the 'ignore them and they'll go away' approach. We can't compete, but wait twenty years and no-one will be reading Dan Brown. All I take away from this problem is that the dry reportage so common to archaeology needs an overhaul. If we can put technical data on the ADS now, why publish it in limited run monographs when we could use the space to make more interesting comments and speculations about the past? This distinction would have the happy side effect that people would no longer be able to simply present data without any interpretation. They would have to come up with something interesting to say.
'Have a good plan, execute it violently, do it today'.
General MacArthur