Our paper is progressing!

“What if we, against all irony, create an official archaeological typology of ‘pull tabs’? It was this thought which provoked the just as much playful as serious archaeological experiment.”

These are the (current! 😉 ) opening lines of an article about our pull tab archaeology project that I have been working on for the last year or so. The idea is to attempt to get this published in a peer-reviewed archaeology journal. An exciting attempt, because even though we, pull tab archaeologists, are of course convinced of the importance of what we are doing, we don’t know exactly how the editorial board of such a journal will respond!

The word count is now close to 7500, which means it is finally getting shape and volume. Things progressed slower than I hoped for and one cause of that is my anxiety about trying to be a little more profound about things than usual. I want to say things right and preferably referenced properly.

To be clear, for a cool and exciting and fun citizen science project like pull tab archaeology, academic recognition is totally unnecessary! As long as we, and I mean YOU ALL, have fun and learn something, the main goal is completed and scr*w it what others may think! But on the other side I like to spread the word as widely as possible, because I do believe we are doing something truly important, HELL we crowdsourced the first global typology of a completely new archaeological artifact together! The whole world should know!!!

I am very happy to announce that patron Charel van Deursen on Patreon (click if you care to buy me a coffee or help keeping this website alive) has now offered to help me speed up my progress. Charel will receive a copy of the paper this week, and tell me where things come together, and where things will need improvement. I might share some more content of the article here too, but forgive me that I am a bit hesitant, because journals can be quite strict in their judgement when parts have already appeared online elsewhere.

In any case, a big thanks to Charel. It makes me really happy you offered your help, it is a big mental support and will help cut through my anxiety a little more efficiently. I hope to get the draft done with your help this spring!