Ron and Stan,
Thanks for the additional info. When I was at Catholic, Bill Gardner was 
still working at Thunderbird, and provided extensive discussions of Paleo 
and pre-Paleo in his class sessions and informally in the field. He paid 
particular attention to pre-Paleo research that he, Dennis Stanford, and 
others reviewed on a regular basis, and provided details about what they 
regarded as flaws in most of it, both in field technique and interpretation. 
I'm pretty sure he never mentioned the case you described, though it was a 
long time ago.

If he ever had any contact with Wenner-Gren (as a peer reviewer?) he never 
mentioned it. As I did not pursue this line of Archaeology, I cannot speak 
with authority about what these folks did or didn't sanction beyond what 
they spoke of at the time, but they were always very vocal about the cases 
they criticised, and never appeared to be 'sweeping anything under the rug', 
or ignoring any cases that they didn't agree with.

Beyond that I suppose an inquiry to editors (from that time) at Wenner-Gren 
might reveal their reasoning, but that's beyond my level of interest. None 
of this is to deny that academic politics and fashion are potent forces in 
the publishing game, but it seems to me that a more thorough investigation 
of cases and 'what went wrong' in the process would be more helpful than 
personal anecdotes. Quite likely, something did go wrong, but while 
prejudices on the part of unspecified "thems" may be the answer, there's got 
to be more to it that. "Who done it and why?" (in detail) -- not for the 
blame game, but rather to remedy future breakdowns in the system.

The case of Piltdown looks closely at how the review process failed, in 
detail, and is, or ought to be required reading  at the undergraduate level 
-- it was at the University of Florida when I was there. The scientific 
system isn't flawless; like democracy, it's just the best one we've got.
Tim T.