I’ve learned such a lot from colleagues in Neolithic studies on here over the last few days. Twitter can be a great source of learning, provided we defer to expertise. No single academic has the definitive answer, but much progress is made in respectful debate between experts.

The thing about expertise is that each expert carries with them *decades* of experience, not only their own, but an accumulated knowledge of all those they learned from, they hold an ‘inherited expertise’ one that is honed with each new generation. They embody that knowledge.

When experts discuss matters, they bring that inherited knowledge to the table. It’s not an ‘individual opinion’ based on passing interest, it’s a knowledge of generations expressed through the individual. It’s dedication to a field, and recognition by peers. It’s not a grift.

It doesn’t mean any one academic is necessarily ‘right’ - knowledge isn’t produced that way. An academic adds their informed learning towards a proposition, which is then debated/discussed by other experts. Knowledge in the end is a generational product, and tied to its history.

Knowledge is never complete. It is always forming. Academic understanding is a process, a conversation, between experts, across generations. So it’s odd to expect one academic, or one TV programme, to show every aspect of that process. There is no edge to it. It’s never formed.

The way we progress is by isolating areas where experts disagree: discuss them, support arguments with more data, reject the bits that ultimately don’t hold water. It can be a ‘robust’ process, but it should always be respectful. And we should always be prepared to be wrong.

And the thing that remains fundamental to that process, through the generations, is (peer-reviewed) expertise, built out of decades of learning and experience in the data. Not the fast opinion of the non-expert.