Open Thread, 11/3/2013

After reading Ancestral Journeys, I decided to get J. P. Mallory's The Origins of the Irish. A bit on the academic side for some, but definitely a good dive into the literature. Mallory is well aware of the latest genetic research, so this is as up-to-date as it gets. It's a good case study in how multidisciplinary prehistoric studies should be done. As I've suggested earlier prehistory looks to be a good deal more complex than we had previous thought, so expanding beyond single methodological perspectives is probably essential if we really care about truth. In other news, a short piece in The New York Times refers to Salafis as 'ultraconservative.' I think this misleads most people about the nature of Salafism: it is a radical utopian system which recently arose out of Islam's confrontation with Western derived modernity. It isn't conserving anything. This aspect of Salafism explains why Saudi Arabia condones the bulldozing of Muhammed's tomb and celebrates modern monumental architecture in Islam's holy city.