“The results of archaeological discovery and analysis are important and deserve the widest possible audience,” declares an announcement from Brown University’s Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology.1 Alas, “archaeology as a discipline has done rather poorly,” the announcement goes on, “at the effective communication of its interesting and most important results.” To remedy this situation the institute is establishing a competition for the best “accessible” archaeological writing with a prize of $5,000. It wants writing that “avoids excessive simplification, speculation, mystification or romanticization.” Excluded from consideration for the $5,000 prize are articles that “tend to emphasize the sheer luck of discovery, […]