Cornwell: preconceived goals corrupt fieldwork; reproducibility missing in archaeology

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Key facts

• University of Glasgow archaeologist David Cornwell said archaeologists who enter a site with a preconception will find only what they were looking for
• Cornwell described a York excavation where he moved his trench plan to fit an expected wall, and the trenches instead revealed a corner and another wall meeting at a different angle
• He said the name of the Noah's Ark project reveals its built-in bias and advised seeking truth, not proof
• Dan Richards argued cultural resource management, not research, is archaeologists' main employment, and that CRM contractors have financial incentive to not report artifacts such as arrowheads
• The panel defined archaeology as the study of the human past through material remains and said conclusions rely on informed guesswork, with reproducibility — the cornerstone of the scientific method — often absent
• Carl Christian Rafn was cited as an example of biased researchers who still produced sound results, his assumption that Indigenous people could not carve rock having led him to demonstrate Norse presence in the Americas
• Ben Van Kirkwick's vessel studies were cited as evidence that Egyptians used lathes about 1,600 years earlier than previously believed

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