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Josh Gates Launches New Show, Same as Old Show

1/17/2020

Last week, I discussed Expedition Unknown host Josh Gates in his role as a trustee of the Archaeological Institute of America, a nonprofit which “promotes archaeological inquiry and public understanding of the material record of the human past to foster an appreciation of diverse cultures and our shared humanity.” I criticized the AIA for giving a prominent role, both administratively and in terms of public events, to Gates because his program had included some dubious content and awful guests. Gates has occasionally spoken in glowing terms about the ancient astronaut theory, and his show airs on a network owned by Discovery Communications, a conglomerate responsible for some of the most damaging pseudoscientific series of the past few years, such as Legends of the Lost.

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Geologist Robert Schoch Claims to Be Able to "Translate" Alleged "Writing" at Göbekli Tepe

1/11/2020

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So, my hard drive failed for the second time in three months. My computer is still functional, to a point, so I can use it intermittently while I wait for HP to send me a box to ship it back for more repairs, including the fault sound, flickering screen, etc. They informed me that the hard drive has to die three times before they will admit that this computer is a lemon and replace it. So, stay tuned for hard drive failure number three later this spring.

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Review of Unexplained + Unexplored S01E07: "Egypt's Land of the Gods"

12/23/2019

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Note: I am taking time off for the Christmas holiday, so this will be my last post until this weekend.

I will give Unexplained + Unexplored credit for finally breaking out of the America Unearthed mold in episode 7, traveling to Egypt and Ethiopia in search of what they term a “lost civilization” that gave rise to ancient Egypt. Sadly, though, they do so only because they are following a different playbook: Graham Hancock and those in his orbit, such as Robert Schoch, John Anthony West, and Robert Bauval. Following Hancock’s lead, hosts Justin “Baron Ambrosia” Fornal and Emiliano Ruprah claim that ancient Egypt “seemingly rises out of nowhere” and that its development has “baffled” archaeologists. This is, of course, not true. Preceding cultures, particularly the Naqada II and Naqada III cultures that immediately preceded dynastic Egypt, are well-known, and in them we find the elements that gave rise to dynastic Egypt. Early archaeologists thought of Egypt as emerging all at once and fully formed because these prehistoric cultures had not yet been excavated and explored, but that was a century or more ago.

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Review of Unexplained + Unexplored S01E06 "Mystery of the American Maya"

12/16/2019

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Every episode of Unexplained + Unexplored remakes an episode of America Unearthed, for reasons known only to the Discovery Networks and the production companies they pay to remake bad shows time after time. This episode stretches all the way back to the pilot episode of America Unearthed, in which Scott. F. Wolter attempted to find evidence that the Maya colonized the southern United States. Here, our hosts, Justin “Baron Ambrosia” Fornal and Emiliano Ruprah, follow his footsteps in taking a potentially interesting question and turning it into a colonialist-style treasure hunt. I will give them credit, though, for not simply repeating America Unearthed uncritically and instead finding their own, slightly less ridiculous, evidence for American Maya.

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Review of Unexplained + Unexplored S01E05: Hunt for the Ark of the Covenant

12/9/2019

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Watching cable television today, it’s easy to think that the search for the Ark of the Covenant has dominated archaeology and historiography for the past 2,500 years. Yet a review of the Euro-American literature finds that this wasn’t really the case at all. The Ark is rarely mentioned down to the twentieth century except in religious discussions of Old Testament times. Indeed, Anglican clergyman William Henry Havergal’s sixth lecture on the Ark of the Covenant, presented in the 1860s, “In the total loss of the ark, and in the entire demolition of the Jewish system, let us discern the low estimate which God sets upon his most exalted institutions, in comparison with the living realities, which they were intended to foreshadow” (emphasis in original). In other words, Christians believed that the Ark wasn’t important because it was a mere forerunner of Christ, who replaced it. Indeed, in the 1890s, writers made fairly frequent reference to the Ark of the Covenant being kept in Axum, Ethiopia, and basically nobody cared. Even when Fascist Italy conquered Ethiopia, they did not bother to go after the Ark.

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Graham Hancock Reacts to SAA Archaeological Record Articles on "America Before"

11/26/2019

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I’ve told this story before, but it is worth repeating here. When I was in college, a Jewish classmate angrily refused to ride in, or consider purchasing, a Chrysler PT Cruiser because he considered its 1930s-style aesthetics offensive. He thought it looked like a “Hitler car.” Instead, he was inordinately proud to have purchased a brand new, apple green Volkswagen Beetle, ignorant of the fact that it was almost literally a Hitler car. Hitler personally sketched a rough concept for the Volkswagen Beetle, and the Nazis founded Volkswagen to build them (though World War II prevented actual production). I was reminded of this story when Graham Hancock reacted to last week’s special issue of The SAA Archaeological Record, which devoted a lengthy, multi-article section to Hancock’s America Before, including an article by me.

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Frank Joseph and the Conference of the Crystal Skull

10/9/2019

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I am indexing again today, but I wanted to share with you this post from the Ancient Artifact Preservation Society annual meeting in Michigan this week. In the picture, you’ll see the former head of the American Nazi Party, Frank Joseph, posing with a fake crystal skull that he and his friends believe dates back to the Atlantean age. For all the Indiana Jones cosplaying that you see in the world of pseudoarchaeology, it’s rare to see a real-life Indiana Jones villain. I think, though, that the movies got a bit mixed up. I’m pretty sure the communists were the villains in the Crystal Skull movie.

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Vandal Damages "America's Stonehenge" Cider Press Known as "Sacrificial Table"

10/8/2019

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I am really starting to feel the pressure of trying to proofread and index one book while writing a second as the deadlines for both loom. I find indexing and proofreading to be slow-going, particularly squeezing it in among other work. I hate to do it, but I’m going to have to rely on computer assistance to index proper nouns to save time. It’s problematic because it can introduce mistakes due to spelling and/or random similar names that then have to be manually reviewed, but it’s the only way to get through the book quickly enough given the minuscule time given to me. I have to learn to write books that are less fact-dense so each page has fewer indexable terms.

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Andrew Collins Is Having Trouble in Turkey

10/1/2019

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Proofreading and indexing is slow-going work, and I’m finding it challenging to fit enough of it into my workday to meet the deadline after the publisher delivered the page proofs late, cutting the indexing time way down. As a result, I am not going to be doing much blogging until the indexing and proofreading are done. The good news, for what it’s worth, is that indexing goes faster the deeper into a book I go because most of the index terms will have already been entered into the list, so by the time I am halfway through, it will mostly be autopilot.

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The "Antediluvian" Osirion at Abydos: A Century of Deceptively Copied Claims

9/20/2019

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Yesterday, Tom DeLonge of To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science announced that the History Channel had renewed TTSA’s Unidentified series for a second season. The final episode of the first season drew just 926,000 viewers, or 0.28% of the U.S. population. For all the people not watching the show—some 99.72% of Americans—the series and its media co-conspirators have an outsize influence on public discourse thanks to the complicity of the news media.

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