Have you written anything or can you direct me to anything about the way David Anthony (and perhaps others) have responded to the news that they were wrong (and Gimbutas and earlier scholars were right) about migration and invasion by attempting to find new ways for the scholars they'd spent their careers denigrating to have retroactively been wrong? With Gimbutas, Anthony has tried to suggest that she's *still* wrong by suggesting she proposed a theory of sudden invasion (not true but whatever) while the real story is of multiple waves of migration.
It's a sort of interesting technique: rather than saying "new findings suggest I'm wrong" one says "new findings suggest the people I've criticized all this time are wrong in a different way than I'd previously argued". My own feeling is as the years go by we will see a lot more of this strategy in anthropology: never admitting the discipline has been wrong in denigrating many kind of earlier scholarship, but instead finding a way to say: "by golly it turns out those bad old assholes were wrong in a whole different way than we'd supposed"
Have you written anything or can you direct me to anything about the way David Anthony (and perhaps others) have responded to the news that they were wrong (and Gimbutas and earlier scholars were right) about migration and invasion by attempting to find new ways for the scholars they'd spent their careers denigrating to have retroactively been wrong? With Gimbutas, Anthony has tried to suggest that she's *still* wrong by suggesting she proposed a theory of sudden invasion (not true but whatever) while the real story is of multiple waves of migration.
It's a sort of interesting technique: rather than saying "new findings suggest I'm wrong" one says "new findings suggest the people I've criticized all this time are wrong in a different way than I'd previously argued". My own feeling is as the years go by we will see a lot more of this strategy in anthropology: never admitting the discipline has been wrong in denigrating many kind of earlier scholarship, but instead finding a way to say: "by golly it turns out those bad old assholes were wrong in a whole different way than we'd supposed"