Just for clarification purposes, the "in a court of law" statement is drilled into geology students as undergrads. When taking field courses (required for B.Sc. degrees in geology, but not for B.A. degrees), you are given a notebook and told to write every observation down (along with sketches of the field area) with meticulous and tedious accuracy. This is typically due to the fact that many geology majors that decide not to go to grad school will find jobs in environmental remediation. Field books are, in that case, admissable in court as evidence.

As far as forensic geology, your assessment of the field is correct -- it's used in recent, not historical, investigations. Any forensic geologist I have met has been a geologist that was asked by law enforcement to look at evidence and use their expertise (petrology, sedimentology, etc.) and interpret it. There are a few undergraduate programs out there, some through forensic schools others as a focus within the geology major. There is a sort of separate minor discipline that deals with historical or ancient investigations, aptly named geoarchaeology. This subdiscipline can use a number of other geological methods, including near-surface geophysics, paleomagnetism, petrology (petrography is just part of it), geochemistry, etc., to help archaeologists with their investigations and give some insight -- like where a grave or the foundation of a structure may be, relative ages of iron tools, even climatic/environmental changes that could have influenced the settlers in an area.

So what am I trying to say here? There are plenty of geologists with graduate degrees that have devoted a number of years to a specific discipline (i.e. geophysics, geochemistry, petrology) that could outline a scientific investigation that would give useful and reliable data for "ancient" or historical sites. The few times other geologists have been featured on this show, they were never asked for their interpretation of the data they received from their measurements. But I guess this is understandable, since only one sample was ever run on any given machine and no self-respecting scientist would declare their hypothesis to be true on such little evidence.

It's good that you'd like to see these places, but it's sad that you will be so narrow minded when you visit them. If I saw "America Unearthed" and was inspired to go to one of these places, I'd want to learn as much as I could about them and not just rely on some guy on TV to tell me everything I needed to know.

The old "jealousy" accusation is also sad. Even it it was true, which I don't believe it is, it would not mean that Jason is wrong.

There is lots of information out there on all these sites. Take advantage of that. Open your mind. Compare them all to what you know. Be open to the possibility that you might have been wrong in the past. Before you decide who to trust, ask why you trust them. Intellectual growth is an adventure. Enjoy it, but don't let anyone chase you into a dead-end alley, not in the name of the establishment but, also, not in the name of blind antiestablishmentarianism.

That word is three letters short of what I was taught in grade school was the longest word in the English language. Today, I can construct a much longer word that is still perfectly legitimate. But, before I could do so, I needed to learn and understand (the two are not the same) the rules of English grammar. The same is true of history and archeaology. In these, rather than the rules of grammar, you need to understand the rules of evidence for each field of study. These are not quite the same as the rules of evidence for court, but they are very similar.

In a traditional court of law the status quo is considered already proved. The status quo is that any citizen, including the accused, is innocent. Those attempting to change the status quo, change the status of the citizen from innocent to guilty, must prove that there is a reason to make that change and prove it to a jury of the accused's peers, who are common citizens. As we say, the burden of proof rests on the prosecution.

In science and history, the same rules apply. But in science and history, the definition of "peers" is different. As an historian, I can tell you that it's not different from the original intent of peers. Peers meant members of the same class. Upper-class were only judged by members off the upper class; middle-class were only members of the middle class; and lower class didn't count, so they were only judged against. this class structure is still maintained in military courts martial.

In science and history, the rules do not apply to criminal or even to civil behavior. The rules only apply to intellectual behavior. To change the consensus opinion of in a field, one must argue conclusively that the new idea is superior to the status quo, that it better explains the available evidence. Because there is no simple body of twelve (or fewer) people who have the absolute authority over any subject, it might take longer for a scientific or historical truth to establish itself, but, when it does establish itself, it has greater authority because it has convinced a greater majority.

Jason and Scott Wolter are not peers. They are not competing for television ratings (as your "jealousy" accusation implies). Jason does not have a competing theory that is in with competition with Scott Wolter’s. Jason is simply a reviewer Wolter’s show. He says the show is badly written and has low production values. Debate him on those terms. Tell him that each episode is better written than a Ken Burns documentary. Tell him that each episode is more beautiful than this year's Oscar for artistic design. Or, argue Wolter’s historical and scientific facts on historical and scientific terms. The burden of proof lies with him. Merely opposing the status quo and crowing "I'm Galileo!" isn't enough. Demand that he prove it. It's not up to Jason to prove Scott's wrong; it's up to Scott to prove he's right. Make him prove it. To do otherwise is to grasp conspiracy theories and to drift out into the irrelevant fringe.

I feel this way (following up on Jason's comment on MN) about the Betsy Ross House here in Philadelphia.

It's the real house, the woman was really involved in the revolution and the actual history is fascinating. But do we go with that? No. We'd rather feed people lies about the flag. Sad.

"But, like all the esoteric and occult trends, this too will cycle through and pass on in time."

I guess you haven’t paid attention….to occult trends. Children are indoctrinated into occult. Parents can buy Ouija board…….pink color for a girl.

Lynn -

I too suspect it was possible if not likely for non-Native Americans to have found their way across one or both oceans to the Americas sooner than is generally accepted. I presume most of this was one time, one way and possibly involuntary ('oops, the current has us!').

What we don't see are the sites & artifacts one would expect from sizable or successful settlements, certainly not ones that maintained trade and contact with the homeland. We don't see people able to reproduce the writing and arts they made at home. (Curiously according to AU people become idiots when crossing the ocean, unable to clearly reproduce their own alphabets.) I'm open to that but have yet to see solid proof other than L'Anse aux Meadows.

AU is doing as you say a great disservice to a serious examination of these questions. It's sticking a dagger in the back of what we do have a ton more proof of - the mound building and other cultures that flourished in N. America, that we have literal tons of proof of. No TV network is now going to touch that with a ten foot pole unless the claim is that aliens, Minoans or Vikings did it.

Can you imagine this budget for that series of shows? How awesome would that be? In fact I first tuned in to AU expecting naively that that was the sort of "suppressed" archeology I was going to see. Grrr!

Just reading through the comments on the America Unearthed Facebook page makes me feel sick. This show has (perhaps unsurprisingly) convinced people that they have been taught lies in school and that they are now getting the "truth" from Wolter. Some people claim to be educators and historians and they heartily approve of AE and Wolter. Ugh...

> Scott Wolter mentioned that in his mind the standard of evidence should be what is allowable “in a court of law”

Most fringe science proponents claim their evidence would meet court standards but, tellingly, almost never present it there (the exceptions being creationists who appear in appeals court when anti-evolution legislation is challenged, and the creationists are routinely crushed there).

If skeptics are just dirty diabolical deniers, why don't fringers take them to court for libel? Why not "test the evidence," as barristers say, and have direct and cross-examination of claimants, with testimony from expert forensic witnesses, etc?