Mighty White Mighty Wrong

Kris;

I read Alex's comment on Hitt's article and have to respectfully disagree. "Mighty White of You" (Jack Hitt, Harper's Magazine, July 2005) was at best a poor piece of research and reporting and very misleading.

Just for an example, I was contacted by the magazine's fact checkers in regard to his information about Gault. They could not (or would not) tell me in what context the facts were to be used so I could only reply to their direct questions (and most of their facts were wrong). Much to my surprise, considering the long conversation I had had with them, I find they finally got the numbers right but still used the information wrong!

He uses Gault's 600,000 artifacts as proof that Clovis is commonplace even though we told the magazine that this site represented approximately 60% of all excavated Clovis in North America. Hardly the same thing....

Being very intimately tied to the ongoing debate, my colleagues and I surmise that most of Hitt's information came from Chatter's and Adovasio's (very quick) books for the general public which frankly are neither scientific tomes or the best they could be. Hitt also quotes press personalities as experts in anthropology and makes the claim that somehow archaeology/anthropology are different (his example was physics) in that the amateurs and kooks get equal hearings - Huh? If Hitt knew how to use the Web he might find that every science (try "Physics" and "aliens" in Google some time) has it's hangers-on, nuts and blatant mis-users of information.

Nuff said -

Clark

D. Clark Wernecke
Project Director
The Gault Project
Texas Archeological Research Laboratory

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