I think Nautical *used* to be its own department, but got sucked in to anth a while ago. I don't know the whole history though. However, I am not convinced that it is the Nautical people *alone* who are pushing for this - there are some serious rifts among the 'upstairs' people, at the subdisciplinary level. Because I have no idea who came up with this idea, I can't really comment further on that. The graph definitely came from one of the non-nautical archaeologists, though.

See, if they wanted to change it to Anthropology and Nautical Archaeology, I would actually have less problems with that. Naybe that was the initial proposal, and it has since taken on a new political life :p