Cornwell: preconceptions can distort fieldwork; reproducibility often absent 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, while the trenches revealed a corner and another wall meeting at a different angle.
• Cornwell said the name of the Noah's Ark project reveals its built-in bias and advised seeking truth, not proof.
• Dan Richards argued that cultural resource management, rather than research, is archaeologists' main employment and that CRM contractors have a financial incentive not to 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, a cornerstone of the scientific method, often absent.
• The panel cited Carl Christian Rafn as an example of a biased researcher who still produced sound results, arguing that Rafn's assumption that Indigenous people could not carve rock led him to identify evidence of Norse presence in the Americas.
• The video presented Ben Van Kirkwick's claim that his vessel studies indicate Egyptians used lathes about 1,600 years earlier than previously believed.

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