Well said! (And much better than me – see above, or below).
Not quite convinced about Mr. Musk though, it seems to me to be vanity rather than innovative research (and he is rich enough to be as vain as he likes), there is nothing new in moving something with an explosive. But he does seem positive and enthusiastic and I can’t condemn that attitude, especially when contrasted with the dismal negativity that has become the new norm.

Archeologists annoy racist zealots by clearly displaying that ancient civilisations and… note the word ” cultures”… yes ” cultures” could design and construct buildings and roads over a thousand years ago that Africans are still incapable of doing.

I think it’s naive in the extreme to believe the private sector is free of woke ideology and Universities are overwhelmed by it. In reality all of the organs of society are equally in thrall to it. Only recently the Nationwide asked someone on twitter to ‘review’ their comment criticising some adult baby fetishists (sorry transgender people) for being unkind. Private sector is awash with EDI statements and relentless virtue signalling.

It’s bigger than universities and academics. Unfortunately we have globalists with the same aim but who have $billions to back their cause. The battle is much bigger as it is in politics and affects everybody. I am amazed at how they are pushing myths today which most seem to believe. Look at the government in the Netherlands and Canada not to mention the USA itself..

With apologies to Winston Churchill, equity, diversity and inclusion is the equal sharing of mediocrity.

All epochal work has always been done by outsiders. University departments are set up to teach the prevailing method, to articulate it more closely, and to incorporate more evidence into its proofs. Revolutions in learning are always provoked by outsiders who show the limits of that prevailing method and propose another. But progress is never really gradual: it’s revolutionary. Look at what happened to phlogiston, or spontaneous generation, or geocentric astronomy. It’s one or the other, and a method with superior power to integrate evidence into its explanations must always obliterate the weaker. Check Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, for instance.

And of course the tenured professors of the weaker, outdated method will fight like demons to maintain their reputations and to suppress any actual innovations.

The fact that most ordinary people can plainly see that this illogical and unscientific Wokeness is infesting every scientific discipline goes a long way to explaining why more and more people are dismissive of or even antagonistic to climate change abatement measures, vaccines, even such common sense notions as using masks (voluntarily) to protect themselves from airborne illness. It’s true; we no longer “trust the science,” and for good reason.

Yes. But relinquishing the institutions? What a loss, please no.

The examiner from the Swiss patent office might agree!

This model of secret research and public suppression of research is not sustainable in archeology or any other fields. Over time, suppressing knowledge and meritocracy will destroy civilization.

There’s no room for politics in a sewage system. If it’s not set up on sound engineering, no amount of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion will make it work.

While it’s great that there’s a short term work around, in the longer run we have to fight these idiots. If we don’t, their ideology will kill our children and grand children with a civilization collapse

This is a question to the author of the article (or anyone else who can answer it). Sorry to put it in a reply, but, for some reason the site is not letting me comment directly.
Where on the Internet can one easily find this anonymous or perhaps hidden research? On blogs? On particular websites?

Let’s face the vast majority of those who “deny that English is an ethnicity at all” are just sore losers. Best NOT to ‘give them the time of day’ as we used to say.

The Maori people were also extremely warlike. In 1835 they invaded the Chatham Islands, committed genocide, and enslaved the indigenous island population.

Maybe not but it is certainly a culture that did amazingly well in the recent past.

NZ *is* not their land. As I understand it, the Crown, after a series of bloody wars, arranged a relationship between the Pakeha and the various tribal chieftains via the Treaty of Waitangi. It was signed by many chiefs, though not all. Two Treaties were signed, one in English and one in Maori and there were subtle differences between the two that may have created a disadvantage to Maori. But the Maori understanding is legitimate and hence now, via reparations arising from the Treaty, NZ has a bi cultural ownership system.

Such an excellent point. Thanks.

Austro melanisians would like to have a word with you about the Maori sir.

Brilliant, in a mere twenty one lines you have “lanced the boil”!
Well done Sir.

You couldn’t have said a truer word. One can see how communist revolutions triumphed.

As a mature postgrad, coming back into academia really has been a depressing lesson in the extent of the ideological monoculture that dominates academia, especially within humanities.

I find it thoroughly disheartening to see average quality papers on “queering” something or other being viewed as cutting edge research simply by merit of the political position being promoted, because I will not sell my personal integrity or subjugate my own political beliefs in order to further my academic career.

I can hardly wait to finish my current degree and escape from this environment, and I cannot help but wonder how many others like me, who have the desire and skill to conduct academic research, have simply walked away due to this environment.

When Dr. Robert Gallo discovered that viruses jumped species, which bucked the traditional wisdom, the new landscape took some getting used to. Academia needs some recalibration as well.
Academia has degraded itself enormously by chasing progressive values and chasing off conservatives who look today rather like the true classically liberal thinkers. When I was in University in the 1970’s anything was up for discussion. The Second Amendment was a radical tool for the protection of liberty, not a cover for weapons of mass murder. Academia has made two generations more stupid rather than more enlightened.
Rather than discard the 2nd Am, we should be thinking more critically about why violence is an acceptable tool of resistance and grievance (read Palestinians, BLM, queer and outsider revenge) than what it really is – unacceptable in civilized society. Mental illness including sex-changes, political aggression, snowflakes and outsiders who are bullied – when these are made the object of our attention and their grievances are allowed to take up all of the air in the room, no wonder they are led to the brink of mass murder.

“Academia – the modern day equivalent of the Inquisition …”
What a brilliant observation.
My favourite is:
“Remainers – the modern equivalent of Traitors to the Realm …”

Unfortunately they probably won’t. Online writing is different to paper writing. It exists only for as long as the server exists and has power, connectivity and maintenance. Yes, there are efforts like archive.org but they are expensive and centralized efforts that can be censored quite easily.
Books have a certain kind of resistance to them because once printed they can last for a very long time if well kept, and destroying one copy doesn’t destroy them all. The web was never really designed for knowledge preservation on historical timelines. Most web documents written in the past are now gone for good with no easy way to retrieve them.
This isn’t something fundamental to technology or the internet. There could be a more book-like web, in which the act of downloading a document was also the act of permanently archiving it and resharing it. There have been experiments with such things. But the inertia behind the current ways of working are enormous. People want their stuff to be read, so it goes on the web because that’s what’s most convenient, and so alternative systems struggle to take off.

Samizdat in “Western Democracies”
Just what came to my mind.

Like Canticle for Lebowitz

What Liebeschuetz writes is interesting: “Archaeology can trace cultural diffusion, but it cannot be used to distinguish between peoples, and should not be used to trace migration. Arguments from language and etymology are irrelevant.” All but the first of the indicative statements in the passage are demonstrably untrue. The only way one can agree with the passage is to take his use of the verb “cannot” as meaning that archaeologists are not permitted to use archaeology to accomplish the tasks he disagrees with, and then to agree with him about this.

Everyone inherently knows how it works. Migrant groups slaughtering, enslaving and brutalising weaker locals and outbreeding them. Just look at Africa. The Bantus were a tiny group in Cameroon millenia ago, now they dominate all of Africa and have reduced the aboriginal bushmen and pygmies to barely thousands hiding in forests and mountains. Cultural change is usually bloody, traumatic and violent.

I had to look up BP. It transpires it is a way of dating common in archeology: Before present or before physics. Now intended to be “before 1950”.

Back in the eighties there was a full Marxist take-over of a number of more social and psychological departments, with new students also in sciences (like me) being told that even here you had to be ‘socially conscious’. It would be interesting for someone to compare and contrats the current wave with the last one. Do you have someone for that, Unherd?

Well now I am confused. Did The Anglo Saxons invade England and become the English, or not? Oppenheimer suggests the English portion of Britain had “always” been inhabited by proto Germanic people, with a language akin to the Belgae (a Germanic tribe), at least according to Julius Caesar.
I quite like the idea of the English always being in England. It explains a lot of cultural differences between England and the other three British nations.

“the political madness that currently prevails is likely to be overturned in due course.” I’m afraid I’m not convinced of that, here in Australia for the last 25-30 years education has been leftist woke indoctrination, children have been fed a false perspective and not all parents will be aware of this or able to counter it. I talked to the two people who started this in the mid-’70s, Joan Kirner, then Victorian Minister for Education, later Premier, and communist unionist Laurie Carmichael.

“Collage of Art”. I like it!

” Archaeology at historic Black sites must be conducted with an explicit politics… To the field of archaeology, it serves as a moral guide with the potential to elucidate historical wrongs and explore forms of contemporary redress.”

Does sound quite a lot like the Cultural Revolution’s ‘better red than expert’ ideology. The Chinese paid a very big price before they got back on track after that disaster.

Happens to em too. I have suspected someone is sending in spam alerts on posts he does not like.

But yes, Unherd needs to do some work. Also on allowing us to comment all the time, not just some of the time.

UnHerd, please may I second Haydon Eastwood’s remarks (which, I notice, have been posted by many UnHerd users in the past).

A website dedicated to free exchange of views is undermining itself when perfectly ordinary and polite contributions are withheld for some unspecified ‘review’ process. If it is a systems matter, please attend to it. If it is human intervention, please have a little word.

“Isn’t it more likely that the newcomers took certain prime real estate for themselves and drive the survivors into the hills?” That is indeed what happened in the Americas and it was a centuries long process.

Either way why does the change in the Y chromosome mean, as the author implies, that now there was an entire different culture instead of a cultural leap. Half the population was still there, the half moreover in charge of the bulk of cultural transmission to the young. It is beyond odd to think the culture and its people’s disappeared when only its men did.

Some cultures are warlike, aggressive and expansionary and obsessively conformist others are peaceable and tolerant of difference. They can also change over time.
It is difficult to study other societies without making judgements based on one’s own culture

It is in our school curriculum too. My young daughter came home in grade 4 saying she feels terrible for being European (Here in Australia, Europeans killed the Aborigines) and she really took it to heart.
I was gobsmacked and heartbroken that our government would hurt the white kids (who don’t identify as Aboriginal and/or Torres Straight Islander) because of their woke ideology

By and large those ‘elite-academies’ are being increasingly financed by organizations who’s agenda is not that of the public interest.
At least, not in the interests of the country where the institution resides.

Some areas of science have always been politically controversial, just think of Darwin and the ructions which continued right up to the Scopes trial and until the present day.
With the recent resurgence of political ethno nationalism in many countries any scientific study dealing with a culture or ethnic group over time, (especially if it involves a particular territory), however objective and well meaning, is likely to be weaponised by one party or another.
Just look at the so called ” historical justification’ Putin uses for invading Ukraine

Actually, the first functioning steam engine was patented by Thomas Savery on 2nd July 1698. And Newcomen sold his first steam engines under Savery’s patent.
But I take your point – now that academic freedom has been destroyed by a tyrannical ideology built on lies masquerading as something “progressive”, innovation has to come from people outside the academic world.

Exactly. The most famous scientists and philosophers of the Golden Era of the Muslim world were banned, persecuted and forbidden. See ‘The Crisis of Islamic Civilization’ by Ali A. Allawi, published in 2010.

Here’s hoping who the jihadis target next. A wokeafied Middle East would be hell on earth for the jihadis. Dubai and Neom in Saudi seem like the perfect entry point for wokeism to enter into the Middle East and start to infect the minds of the young

I have a friend recently retired from university administration . He says that it is all about money now. The pursuit of it and the salaries it generates. Hence the foreign student grabfest.
Just another business now with the usual rubbish about ‘stakeholders’.

Understand what you’re saying and agree to a fair extent, which is why i remain essentially optimistic despite the current outlook. I’m convinced it will pass, as must all things. George Harrison was right.

It remains incumbent on those who can see through this nonsense to keep ploughing away; to maintain the fertile soil, as it were.

When the late Sir Mortimer Wheeler was once asked whether Archaeology was a Science* based subject or an Arts based subject, he replied “neither, it is a VENDETTA!”

(* The word STEM didn’t exist then!)

Prof. Roberts is achingly woke. She tells us that Saxon chiefs had swords as status symbols, like sports cars. She thinks there weren’t battles between the Saxons and the Celts because we can’t find battlefield graves with the appropriate archaeo-osteology in them.
In 937 Athelstan defeated the Dublin Norse, the Scots and the Strathclyde Britons at Brunanburh. He became the first king of all England.
The huge scale of the casualties is attested in the AS Chronicle, the Annals of Ulster, Annales Cambriae and the Estoire des Engleis,
Since we don’t know where the bones are I suppose it never happened.