Archaeologist Elizabeth Weiss’s new book, On the Warpath, is an autobiographical account of her illustrious career on the front lines of the culture wars in our colleges and universities. Her opposition to the reburial of Native American skeletal remains, her insistence that indigenous knowledge is not science but myth, and her fight against wokeism and political correctness in science brought her into numerous controversies and cancel culture campaigns, as well as a lawsuit.

A photograph of Weiss holding a skull—as common to anthropologists as a doctor with a stethoscope—led her university to exclude her from the collection and change the locks. This became an international headline, as did the American Anthropological Association, which canceled one of her lectures because she declared that a skeleton’s gender was binary, not genderfluid.

This unsparing and often humorous book tells the story of Dr. Weiss’s fight for science against superstition and her attempts to promote free speech and academic freedom. It also exposes the current rot in today’s universities through the lens of her struggles against everyday absurdities. These include an attempt to exclude “menstruating staff” (formerly known as women) from the board of trustees, a campaign to ban research on ancient Carthaginian remains because the individuals in question never consented to being photographed, and a plan to declare X-rays sacred so they could be returned to Native Americans (who may actually be Mexican) before being burned or buried.

Elizabeth Weiss is a controversial and world-renowned anthropology professor specializing in the analysis of human skeletal remains. She spent much of her career at San Jose State University, where she oversaw one of the largest collections of skeletal remains in the United States. She is the author of numerous books and articles and played an integral role in the Smithsonian’s “What Does it Mean to be Human?” exhibition in the San Francisco Bay Area. She has been featured in the New York Times, Science, and USA Today, and has been interviewed on Fox News and Newsmax. She currently lives in New York City, where she is a visiting scholar at the Heterodox Academy.

Shermer and Weiss discuss:

• How she became interested in archaeology and when her field became politicized

• What happened to the Kennewick Man and who was he anyway?

• Why gender is binary when examining bones

• How Wokeness ruined anthropology and archaeology

• The Anthropology Wars of the 1990s and the Archaeology Wars of the 2020s

• Why science is never complete and burying fossils after preliminary scientific analysis is therefore inappropriate

• Why the fossil remains of most Native American sites have little or no connection to modern tribal peoples living nearby

• There is consensus about the settlement of America and how long ago the migrations took place

• Alternative archaeology and how scientists deal with anomalous finds (e.g. 130,000-year-old mammoth fossils in San Diego that suggest they may have been dismembered by human hands)

• Why archaeologists who support cultural relativism and respect for other people’s origin stories do not apply this attitude to, for example, Christian creationists or Mormon creation stories

• How she was discriminated against as a researcher by some Native American groups (and why her otherwise liberal or progressive colleagues do not defend her here)

• Her lawsuit against San Jose State University for defaming her as a “racist” and preventing her from continuing to scientifically study the fossil collection she has been caring for for 17 years

• What is behind cancel culture and identity politics

• The future of archaeology and its current development towards the politicization of science.

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