Archaeologists claimed old findings as their own, critic says

Preston Sowell

Around Christmas last year, Preston Sowell received an unpleasant delivery.

An archaeologist who knew about Sowell’s work in southeastern Peru sent him a paper about new findings in a particular part of the country Sowell, an independent environmental scientist, was familiar with. The paper, written by several of Sowell’s former colleagues, contained a “shocking” surprise. 

“I almost immediately recognized there were errors in the paper,” Sowell said. “I recognised, literally with my first read, some of those artifacts.”

Artifacts that Sowell recognized as findings from his own projects years earlier had been published without permission. He also said the authors misidentified the location of the artifacts, and falsely claimed the objects had been collected from excavations, not obtained at the surface of the sites. 

In 2011, Sowell initiated archaeological research in the vicinity of Peru’s Lake Sibinacocha, the subject of the paper, after finding artifacts believed to be pre-Incan submerged in the lake. He also runs a nonprofit focused on the protection and conservation of the watershed. 

No one had notified Sowell when the paper had been published in May 2022. “Which is pretty disturbing,” he says. “Considering my long history at the site and how much I contributed to all this.” 

The paper, “Pastoral Paleoclimate Palimpsests of the South-Central Andes: High-Altitude Herder Dwellings in the 2nd Millennium a.d.,” appeared in the Journal of Field Archaeology and has no citations to date. Earlier this year, the journal retracted the article after the authors confirmed the work contained “fundamental errors”. Sowell says the retraction “doesn’t fully characterize the issues of the paper” and adds that he had to complain several times before the journal pulled the article. 

Sowell first decided to email a complaint about the paper to Christina Luke, editor of the Journal of Field Archaeology, in January, alleging that several artifacts included as findings in the author’s 2019 field work were not found at the sites nor on the dates listed in the paper. Instead, Sowell alleges, many of the artifacts were collected under his own projects in the area in surface collections beginning in 2015. 

He also claims the authors used data from his projects without permission, and that the paper includes a number of miscitations, misinformation and incorrect observations.

Luke wrote back to Sowell in March, informing him that an erratum would be published for the paper, and that his concerns about authorship, permissions and claims of falsified data should be directed to the home institution of the author. “It was shocking and confusing,” Sowell says of the response. 

Sowell had also been in contact with the Office of Research Integrity and Ethics at Washington University, the home institute of Sarah Baitzel, lead author of the paper. 

In March, a research integrity officer from the university emailed Sowell with his assessment of Sowell’s allegations. The officer wrote that Baitzel had agreed to publish a correction for one of the figures in the paper. The officer described the reason for the correction as “an honest error, which does not constitute research misconduct under our Policy.” 

“If this was an honest error, it would be easy to refute,” Sowell says. 

The email continues:

Therefore, I do not find that the evidence supports initiating research misconduct proceedings and the allegation is dismissed. The concerns, other than those related to Figure 8 raised in your communication, would not constitute research misconduct under our Policy and are either differences of scientific opinion or matters outside of the scope of our policies.

In May, Sowell sent another complaint to the Office of Research Integrity and Ethics. He wrote the follow-up complaint as a formal document that compiled information from several of his emails and included some additional errors and his issues with the erratum. 

In July, he received a response from the office, confirming the paper would be retracted. The email included a note from Baitzel addressed to Sowell: 

In response to your letter, I am writing to inform you that I have discovered an error in the article and as a result, I and my coauthors have decided to retract the article. I have already spoken with the editor of JFA, Dr. Luke, to initiate the process. 

The retraction notice, published in August this year, states:

Since publication, concerns have been raised about the integrity of the data in the article. When approached for an explanation, the authors checked their data and confirmed there are fundamental errors present. Therefore, they have agreed to the retraction of this article. The authors apologise for this oversight.

We have been informed in our decision-making by our policy on publishing ethics and integrity and the COPE guidelines on retractions.

The retracted article will remain online to maintain the scholarly record, but it will be digitally watermarked on each page as “Retracted”.

Neither Baitzel, Luke, nor research integrity committee members responded to a request for comment. 

A representative from Taylor & Francis, the journal’s publisher, wrote in an email: 

We were first made aware of this issue in January 2023. We followed standard COPE guidelines in looking at the claims made, working with the Editor of the journal to address the concerns raised. This ultimately led to the corresponding author acknowledging there were fundamental errors present in the paper, which resulted in the decision to retract the article.

The representative replied to a follow-up email requesting more detail: 

I’m afraid we have no further information to provide outside of what is already in the retraction notice.

Sowell, who has tried to protect the Lake Sibinacocha archaeological area from mining, says the errors are “egregious.” The area “is a blank spot on the map relative to archaeology and cultural heritage,” he says. “[The authors] have contaminated the archaeological record up there.” 

Before making his complaint, Sowell contacted Payson Sheets, a research professor in archaeology at the University of Colorado in Boulder, who has not been involved with this work. Sheets underscored the enormity of such an error, helping Sowell understand why it was important to make the complaint. 

Compared to other fields of research, “replication testing can never be done in archaeology,” Sheets says. “Once excavations are done, that can never be duplicated, it cannot be replicated, it cannot be tested. It is a moral and ethical imperative for us to be very thorough.”

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