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We begin this response by thanking Antiquity for hosting this debate on the current crisis in European Upper Palaeolithic cultural taxonomy, and by thanking the three commentators for their perspectives (Marwick 2019; Scerri 2019; Shea 2019). We note that our critique of the motley crew of contemporary cultural taxonomies and the plethora of practices producing them is positively received by all of the commentators. Importantly, BenMarwick, Eleanor Scerri and John Shea further note that these issues are of much broader geographic concern, extending to Palaeolithic cultural taxonomies in Africa and North America. While our primary expertise and hence the focus of our original contribution lies with the European Upper Palaeolithic, classification issues evidently also beset less well-published records such as the South American Palaeoindian period (Araujo 2015), the Mesolithic of Northern Europe (Friman 1996) and, most probably, many other regions where European approaches to lithic classification have been applied. The issues that we raise appear as widespread as they are urgent. We further note the strong support given to our call for improved data standards and data sharing. Both Scerri and Marwick rightly flag up structural issues of intellectual ownership and power in the discipline. The firmly entrenched notion that excavators or analysts own data or, even worse, actual material or the right to access it, remains widespread and is likely to change only slowly. Although it remains true that, as Scerri points out, data are a form of hard ‘currency’ for many researchers, in other fields, as Marwick observes, data sharing is insisted upon, creating a level playing field for those confronted with a highly competitive job market. It should also be noted that we are not recommending that all data are shared as soon as they are collected and before the researcher has had the chance to analyse and publish. Rather, we advocate that data are shared alongside any publications that rely upon them, and that all research projects have a strategy for storing and sharing their data (cf. the datamanagement plans required as part of projects funded by Horizon 2020). Fundamentally, as Marwick discusses, solving the problem of the availability of data about our shared human past is not just important for doing better archaeology, but is also at heart a question

Reject or revive? The crisis of cultural taxonomy in the European Upper Palaeolithic and beyond