Overlooked Archaeologists

From Stoachastic, via Afarensis:

Which scientist (in your field or beyond) has been most seriously shafted? This could be taken two ways: * Who deserves to be more recognized, revered and renowned today than he or she is? * Who got passed over, ridiculed, etc. the most while he or she was alive?

This is a difficult question. My vote in archaeology would go to Ben Sandford Cullen who wrote the book Contagious Ideas. It drew praise from widely differing viewpoints. Editors of the book included prominent archaeologists like Renfrew and Shanks. Unfortunately it needed editors because it was a posthumous book by someone who died at the age of thirty-two. I plan to blog about it at some length some time in the future, but briefly it’s an exploration of Cultural Virus Theory.

Cultural Viruses are very similar to memes except they’re more obviously useful to an archaeologist. The concept of Memes was created to demonstrate the power of replication in genes for the Selfish Gene. Cultural Virus concept, which is very similar, was invented to model the spread of ideas. Archaelogists often ask the question “How do ideas spread?” they rarely ask the question “What would a theory of culture be like if we modelled it on a selfish gene?” which is the staple of pop memetic books.

I’d say he’s been overlooked as there’s very little reference to his work and comparatively few people working from the same perspective. Stephen Shennan has written Genes, Memes and Human History, but there’s something that Cullen had no that’s wrong, that Cullen omits in his work that makes it challenging. Reading the book for the first time I thought “That’s like a meme… that’s like a meme… that’s like a meme.” But that’s the point, Cultural Viruses are like memes, but they don’t cling to the same conceptual scaffold. Cullen was aware of memes, but if a very selective fire burned all books on popular memetics his work would still stand with little loss of context.

Impressive as his work is, since he’s dead I’m not sure what can be done to improve his visibility. He didn’t get chance to develop his ideas more fully and it’s simply not going to be possible for someone to write the papers that he didn’t. I can’t be Ben Cullen 2.0 and it would be foolish to try.

Classically I’ll stick with Anaximander. I know I could try and discuss a classicist who hasn’t has the respect they deserve, but Anaximander still remains the classical name who should be mentioned alongside Einstein and Newton in my opinion.

Out of my field Alfred Wegener‘s work on Plate Tectonics comes to mind.