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The explosion in commercial archaeology has brought a flood of information. The problem now is figuring out how to find and use this unpublished literature, reports Matt Ford in the current issue of Nature magazine.
"I became aware that what I was teaching would be out of date without looking at the grey literature (unpublished reports)," says one professor at the University of Reading in England.
A policy shift in 1990 required all construction projects to document archaeological remains in Britain and generated an avalanche of findings that cannot be absorbed by the official academic field. The result is that our picture of the past is very much outdated. Academia is not likely ever to get caught up. Nor are academicians ever likely to warm to new theories of population genetics like diffusionism and trans-Oceanic contact and colonization, since few of those theories ever received a hearing in the halls of academe in the first place.
Read the full story in Nature, "Archaeology: Hidden Treasure."
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