Editorial standards & corrections

Archaeology Teahouse translates peer-reviewed archaeology into stories anyone can read. Getting the science right is the whole point, so this page sets out how the work is done: who writes it, what each story rests on, how mistakes are put right, and where — honestly — a machine is and is not involved.

Who writes here

Every story is written by one archaeologist and carries her byline. There is no anonymous content and no guest-posting operation behind the scenes — you are always reading a named person with training in the field. Her background is on the about page.

How a story is sourced

Each story is built on published, peer-reviewed research, and it says so. Where a piece rests on a specific paper, that paper is cited and linked — usually by its DOI — so you can go straight to the source and check the claim for yourself rather than taking ours for it. A story that compares more than one study links each of them.

The Key findings box at the top of a story is a plain-language summary of what the research actually shows — not a stronger claim than the paper makes. Where the evidence is tentative, the writing says it is tentative.

Accuracy and corrections

We would rather be right than first. Even so, mistakes happen, and when one is pointed out it is fixed promptly. Small things — a typo, a broken link — are simply corrected. Where a correction changes the meaning of a story, the change is made openly and the story's “Updated” date moves to reflect it. That date tracks the writing itself, not routine housekeeping, so when you see it you know the words genuinely changed.

If a claim turns out to be wrong rather than merely unclear, the correction says what was wrong, not just what it now reads — a quiet edit that hides an error is not a correction.

How to report a mistake

If you think something is inaccurate — especially if you are the researcher whose work a story is about — please tell us through the contact page. Point to the story and the specific line, and, if you can, the source that settles it. Corrections from the people who did the original research are especially welcome, and are acted on quickly.

Independence and funding

The Teahouse takes no advertising, runs no sponsored posts, and lets nobody pay to shape coverage. It is funded directly by readers who choose to support it — that is the whole business model, and it is deliberately a simple one, described on the support page. A subscription buys access to extra writing; it never buys influence over what a story says.

The site also carries no third-party advertising trackers or analytics profiles. What little data it keeps, and why, is set out in the privacy policy.

Where AI fits — and where it does not

No story is written by AI. The articles are researched and written by a human archaeologist, start to finish.

There is exactly one place a language model is used: as a drafting aid for the “Common questions” at the foot of a story. It suggests questions from the author's own finished text; she then edits or discards them, and nothing is published until she has approved it. No reader's data, and no comment, is ever sent to that model — only the story text she wrote.

Changes

If these standards change, the date at the top of the page changes with them. The commitment behind them — accuracy, transparency, and independence — does not.