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Graham Hancock Doesn't Quite Square the Circle When Discussing Earthworks

4/27/2019

It’s been a very long week for me, made longer by the three hours I spent listening to Graham Hancock basically read his new book to Joe Rogan while discoursing on his respect for psychedelic drugs. Because I have been a bit too busy this week to do much writing, today I’d like to turn over my blog post to a video that archaeologist Andy White made to explain why Graham Hancock is wrong when he misuses the term “squaring the circle” to describe circumscribing a circle with a square. It’s a small but important detail that demonstrates how Hancock’s fact-checking (and the fact checking of his paid research assistant and his British and American publishers) continuously misses easily correctable errors.

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Graham Hancock and Joe Rogan Discuss "America Before"

4/24/2019

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On Monday night, Graham Hancock appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience to discuss his new book, America Before. The interview lasted nearly three hours in length and in large measure consisted of Hancock delivering a series of monologues summarizing most of the major points of the book. Because so much of the interview is essentially identical to the book, I will refer you to my review of America Before for my take on the majority of Hancock’s claims. Instead, in this discussion of his Joe Rogan interview, I will look at some of the claims that are either not in the book or that Hancock and Rogan discuss in ways that go beyond what Hancock says in the book

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My Review of "America Before" by Graham Hancock

4/23/2019

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Today marks the U.S. publication of Graham Hancock’s new book America Before. Last night Hancock appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience to discuss the book, but I can’t say that I was going to turn over three hours of my evening to listening to it. I will review the recording and discuss it later this week. In the meantime, to mark the launch of the book, my review is now available. You can read it on Skeptic magazine’s website, in this week’s eSkeptic newsletter, or in the forthcoming edition of Skeptic magazine in print. By arrangement with Skeptic, it also appears here on my website.

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Science Magazine Discusses Pseudoarchaeology and Racism, and I'm in It

4/11/2019

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If you are a subscriber to Science magazine, you may have seen Lizzie Wade’s article “Believe in Atlantis? These Archaeologists Want to Win You Back to Science,” which ran online on Tuesday and will appear in the print version of the journal. The article features a number of archaeologists that regular readers of this blog will be familiar with and (I hope) fans of, as well as a few comments from me, too. In lieu of a blog post today, I urge to you give Wade’s article a read. In it, she discusses the continued popularity of pseudoarchaeology and its dominance in popular culture. It covers the racism of pseudoarchaeology and its connections to nineteenth century colonialism and imperialism.

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Graham Hancock Describes the Telekinetic Powers of His Lost Civilization

4/10/2019

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I wasn’t going to say anything about the ending to Graham Hancock’s America Before until the book is released here in the United States on April 23, but Skeptic magazine publisher Michael Shermer spilled the beans on Twitter and shared Hancock’s speculative description of the lost civilization. So now that it’s in the open, I feel like we should talk a little about how Hancock views the imaginary lost civilization that he believes occupied North America down to a 21-year period surrounding the year 10,803 BCE. Frankly, it’s a bit of a doozy.

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A Blast from the Past: "America Before" vs. "Atlantis: The Antediluvian World"

4/4/2019

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As I work my way through Graham Hancock’s America Before this week, I can’t help but share with you some thoughts I had in reading a long chapter comparing Native American spiritual beliefs to those of ancient Egypt. The Old Kingdom of Egyptian history flourished around 2500 BCE, while the Native American practices Hancock cites range from archaeological evidence dating back thousands of years BCE all the way down to nineteenth century oral accounts recorded by ethnologists. The similarities are, to my mind, unconvincing: bird iconography, an interest in the belt stars of Orion, monuments in geometric shapes, a concept of life after death, and fashion trends for astronomers involving clothes marked with stars. Hancock concedes that Native Americans and Egyptians were never in direct contact with one another, but this gives him the license to suggest that a lost civilization like Atlantis gave this spiritual knowledge to both.

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Graham Hancock to Archaeologists: "You Guys Are the Pseudoscientists"

4/3/2019

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With the publication of America Before this week, Graham Hancock has launched a major publicity push, larger than the one accompanying Magicians of the Gods four years ago and rivaling his media ubiquity in the late 1990s. According to his U.S. publisher, St. Martin’s, the American part of his marketing campaign will include an initial print run of 125,000 copies, a fourteen-city national book tour, a national media tour, a marketing campaign aimed at scholars and college instructors (!), a featured-title selection at TheHistoryReader.com, and “extensive history blog outreach.” They even offer mail-in prizes, giving early buyers an enamel lapel pin of the book’s logo. No mainstream archaeology title that I have received press materials for has had a similar rollout.

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In "America Before," Graham Hancock Attacks Archaeology

4/2/2019

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Today, Graham Hancock’s new book America Before is officially published in the United Kingdom. I am currently reading the book, and my review will be published by Skeptic on the book’s U.S. publication date of April 23. While I can’t share my review before Skeptic releases it, I can share with you some of what Hancock wrote in America Before. Today I’d like to highlight the major theme of America Before, which is Hancock’s deep sense of aggrievement against archaeologists. His upset and outrage at the workings of archaeology permeates nearly every chapter, at times distracting from the story he’s trying to tell. Nothing, I think, better sums up Hancock’s view of how he thinks science works than his prescription for how he would do real archaeology:

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New Journal Article Concludes Cerutti Mastodon Bones Broken Recently by Construction Equipment, Not Hunters 130,000 Years Ago

3/27/2019

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On Tuesday, Graham Hancock will launch his new book, America Before, in which the alternative history author will claim that human beings have been in the Americas for 130,000 years—a claim he says “rewrites prehistory.” He will base this claim on the so-called Cerutti Mastodon. In 2017, a report in Nature alleged that the bones, found near San Diego, showed evidence that they had been intentionally butchered with stone tools, implying that an unknown human species was responsible. However, after the claim received widespread media coverage and featured as evidence that “history” as we know it is wrong in both Legends of the Lost and America Before, a new paper published a few days ago in PaleoAmerica entitled “The Cerutti Mastodon Site Reconsidered with Reference to Freeway Construction Plans and Methods” concludes that the “evidence” for human butchering is in fact nothing more than damage done during road construction at the site.

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Review of America's Lost Vikings S01E05 "Curse of Death Island"

3/19/2019

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From the time of the Romans through the Middle Ages, any legendary paradise worth its salt had to have wild grapes growing freely. Pliny the Elder in his Natural History (6.37) said as much about the Fortunate Islands, as did Isidore of Seville in his Etymologies (14.6.8) and Rabanus Maurus in De universo (12.5). The Voyage of St. Brendan, from around 900 CE, reports that the legendary monk discovered a paradisiacal island covered in grapes on his fictitious voyage across the Atlantic. It was therefore no wonder that when the Vikings told the story of Vinland, the same people who proclaimed the icy Greenland to be lush and green also used the language of paradise to describe what is believed to be the mainland of the United States. The oldest reference comes from Adam of Bremen, written around 1075 CE. “Vines grow there naturally, producing the best of wines. That unsown fruits grow there in abundance we have ascertained not from fabulous reports but from the trustworthy relations of the Danes” (Gesta Hammaburgensis 4.38, my trans.).

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