It is my distinct — if somewhat exhausting — pleasure to welcome you to this latest installment of The Journal of Antipaleontological Studies. As the newly minted Editor-in-Chief, a title I accepted only after several pints and a rather persuasive bit of arm-twisting from the board, I find myself perched upon a somewhat wobbly pedestal.
Before you lot dive headlong into the nitty-gritty of this issue, I hope you’ll indulge an old man’s ramble about a rather sweltering summer I spent in the high Andean plateaus back in the late eighties. I was there to consult on a bit of lithic analysis, and I found myself observing a local festival where the village elders were displaying a series of ancestral masks. One particular mask was treated with such immense reverence — passed down through generations as a depiction of a benevolent mountain spirit — that no one dared mention the obvious. To any trained eye, the material wasn’t local volcanic stone at all, but a fragment of an eighteenth-century Spanish vessel’s ballast that had been reshaped. The community’s entire foundational myth was built around an object that was, quite literally, a piece of colonial refuse.
It was a proper muddle, but it’s a cracking example of how we often approach our own scientific machinery. We build these magnificent, intricate frameworks — our theories, our institutions, our very histories — and we become so chuffed with the narrative we’ve spun that we refuse to see the material reality sitting right under our noses. Whether it’s a dodgy bit of bias we’ve inherited from our predecessors that colors our view of ancient cultures, the sheer blinkeredness of clinging to a theory because it feels comfortable, or the hush-hush tendency to ignore evidence that doesn’t fit the established “ancestral” story, we are all, at times, like those village elders. We prefer the mask to the stone it’s actually made of.
In this issue, we’ve gathered a collection of articles that aren’t afraid to get their hands grubby by looking for the reality behind the masks. We explore the wonky foundations of our historical practices, the psychological mind-games we play when our beliefs are challenged by inconvenient data, and the rather cloak and dagger instances where the truth was tucked away for the sake of institutional appearances. It’s a bit of a heavy lift, but as I learned up in those mountains, you’ll never truly understand the spirit of the thing if you’re scared to admit what the stone actually is. As you turn these pages, figuratively speaking, I expect you to get a bit of dirt under your fingernails and perhaps a bit of a headache to boot. We’ve spent far too long pretending our field is a polished marble floor, when in truth, it’s a bit of a swampy track; but it is only by wading directly into the muck and the muddle of our own making that we might finally stumble upon a path worth following.
Barron Goodfellow
Dr. Barron Goodfellow
Editor-in-Chief, The Journal of Antipaleontological Studies