Category: Archaeology

Review of America's Lost Vikings S01E06 "The Alaska Enigma"

3/25/2019

If you can believe it, we made it!

After five fairly pointless outings of America’s Lost Vikings, we have finally come to the sixth and final episode of this misbegotten series, the misnamed “The Alaska Enigma.” I have relatively little stay about this episode except that until its final few minutes, it was distinctly out of character for the series in that it did not involve Vikings or the United States. The topic was almost wholly unconnected to Viking expeditions to Vinland, and it had nothing to do with the search for Vikings in the continental U.S. Indeed, if the episode’s conclusions are correct, it would seemingly contradict much of what the series had attempted to use cutting-edge speculation to fantasize.

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House of 500 Corpses: FBI Raid of Illegal Artifact Collector's Home Uncovers 2,000 Human Bones in Private Museum

2/28/2019

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Don Miller filled his Indiana home with parts of around 500 corpses, nearly all belonging to Native Americans, representing a total of more than 2,000 bones. However, because the bones were ensconced in a homemade amateur museum of 42,000 artifacts, half of which were pre-Columbian, and most of which had been obtained illegally, the media considered the morbid piles of human remains to be little more than a curiosity. The CBS News report documenting the FBI’s raid on Miller’s home literally placed the 2,000 bones halfway down the article, having written that the FBI considered the museum itself to be the most surprising part of their investigation, which was handled by the “art crime” unit.

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Trevor Noah "Accuses" Archaeology and Paleontology of Simply Making It All Up

1/26/2019

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This weekend I am taking some time away from blog writing to work on my new books. It turns out that there are only so many hours in the day and not enough of them to do everything at the same time. So, this weekend, enjoy a break from fringe history and instead watch The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah deliver some embarrassing remarks about archaeology in which he berates Scottish archaeologists for not recognizing that a “ancient” stone circle was actually built in the 1990s, accuses archaeologists of simply making up the story of humanity’s past, and confuses archaeology with paleontology, which he also alleges is a conspiracy built on fraud. I know they’re meant as a joke, but the remarks made on Thursday’s episode too nearly reflect the kind of mistrust and ignorance we see out in the “wild.”

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Viking Women, Archaeology, and the Value of Literary Sources

1/11/2019

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For a show that almost literally no one watched—averaging only around 500,000 viewers across its four-episode run, fewer than syndicated reruns of off-network sitcoms—Megan Fox’s Legends of the Lost has inspired a lot of discussion and upset online, particularly around the question of Viking women warriors. Frankly, I find this to be the least interesting “mystery” on Fox’s show, but it raises a fascinating question about archaeological vs. historical knowledge and how an idea does or does not become a consensus concept in the creation of our story of the past.

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Archaeologist Challenges My Review of Megan Fox's Viking Women Episode

1/3/2019

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It feels like a lifetime ago that Megan Fox launched Legends of the Lost with an episode devoted to the question of women’s roles in Viking society, and it is just possible that the number of articles and reviews devoted to the show outstripped the number of people who actually watched the series. Indeed, if December hadn’t been such a slow month, I’d have probably ignored the show entirely. But I reviewed that first episode, and archaeology professor Howard M. R. Williams of the University of Chester, who specializes in mortuary archaeology, particularly in Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian contexts, has posted a lengthy rebuttal to my review, and those of other critics of Fox, accusing me of not fully appreciating the depth of originality in Fox’s depiction of Viking life, calling my review “completely wrong.”

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BBC Journalist's Error Sparks Claims of Ice Age Migration from Africa to India

10/4/2018

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Recently, Maharashtra state archaeologist Tejas Garge announced that his team had uncovered petroglyphs depicting humans and animals. “Our first deduction from examining these petroglyphs is that they were created around 10,000 BC,” Garge told the BBC. When the BBC reported on the discovery of 12,000-year-old petroglyphs in the Konkan region of the western Indian state of Maharashtra, a strange choice made by BBC Marathi reporter Mayuresh Konnur (or whoever translated his work in to English) has led to a hyperdiffusionist claim that Ice Age Indians traveled from Africa and brought knowledge of animals like rhinoceroses and hippopotamuses with them. Consider this reaction from the fringe: “So, how are archaeologists going to explain the thousands of rock carvings discovered on hillocks in the Konkan region of western Maharashtra that show images of hippos, rhinos and other never-seen-in-India creatures interacting with humans 12.000 years ago?” Paul Seaburn of Mysterious Universe ignorantly asked.

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Review of "Spooky Archaeology" by Jeb J. Card

9/29/2018

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In H. P. Lovecraft’s 1927 novella The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, the warlock Jedediah Orne of Salem provided some sage advice for anyone who would attempt to resurrect the past: “I say to you againe, doe not call up Any that you can not put downe; by the Which I meane, Any that can in Turne call up somewhat against you, whereby your Powerfullest Devices may not be of use.” This sense that the past is a dangerous territory that can disturb the present is an essential element of Gothic fiction, but it is also an underlying tension that has troubled the field of archaeology since it began to separate from antiquarianism in the nineteenth century. What would unearthing the past reveal, and how might it challenge the assumptions of the present?

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Thursday Odds and Ends: History Channel Ratings, Dating the Thera Volcanic Eruption, and Hermes' Receipt of Angelic Knowledge

8/24/2018

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Today I have a few brief topics to discuss as we await tonight’s broadcast of Ancient Aliens. The first is an update on the ratings for Ancient Aliens and its lead-out, In Search Of. According to figures released by Nielsen, Ancient Aliens is trending downward, sinking since the start of the current run of episodes to just 1.075 million viewers, a loss of about 10 percent of its audience from the start of the current half-season. I wonder if the new, slower format and primary focus on one ancient astronaut theorist and one location or “quest” per show is boring some of the audience. Meanwhile In Search Of pulled a surprising reversal. While it has not improved its ratings over its run, it did outdraw Ancient Aliens—just barely—this past week, bringing in 1.090 million viewers. A modestly larger number of men and older people watched In Search Of than Ancient Aliens. The two shows are now running neck-and-neck, but largely due to Ancient Aliens’ declining ratings than any particular momentum behind In Search Of.

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Friday Roundup: ABC News Endorses Ancient Astronaut Theory, King Arthur Identified (Again), and More!

4/6/2018

6 Comments

It’s been a busy week in the world of the weird, so today I thought I’d do one of my periodic news roundups. Let’s begin with ABC News—the U.S. one, not the Australian one—and a horrid clickbait article I came across yesterday. The article was published over the weekend under the byline of Morgan Winsor, one of ABC’s digital breaking news writers. The piece purports to be a report on the many ways that UFOs have captured the human imagination since ancient times. Instead, it’s poorly researched clickbait cobbled together from reruns of Ancient Aliens (a corporate cousin since the History channel’s parent company is partly owned by Disney, the parent of ABC) and Google searches.

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Review of "The Secret Token" by Andrew Lawler

3/20/2018

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A recurring theme in fringe history is anger at the scholarly establishment, which tends to manifest as the conviction that academics have something to hide about history. But the roots of that rage are more frequently found in the difference between what the public wants to know about history—stories of triumph and tragedy, grand historical narratives, and the actions of sainted heroes and ancestors—and what academics want to study about history—the holy trinity of race, class, and gender; the minutiae of daily life; and anything that calls grand narratives into question. Neither approach is prima facie wrong, but the difference produces an uncomfortable tension between what popularizers want to write about and what scholars think they should be writing about.

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