A New Video Asks: How Bad Is Graham Hancock at Research? Worse Than You Know

​Last week, the Veritas et Caritas YouTube channel posted a video exploring reasons Graham Hancock is bad at research and calling out Dan “Dedunker” Richards for his defense of Hancock’s bad research. The video is worth a watch, but I want to quibble a bit with the complaint that Hancock is at fault for citing Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s Royal Commentaries on the Incas in his discussion of whether Moctezuma believed that Cortez was the returning “white god” Quetzalcoatl.

I don’t think any mainstream historian would seriously doubt that the claim that the Aztecs believed Quetzalcoatl was a bearded white man is by and large a Spanish invention, and even Richards concedes that the claim is outdated. Richards had argued that Hancock could not have known its falsity when writing Fingerprints of the Gods in 1995, as there was no way to have discovered this fact without Google. As the video shows, that isn’t true, and Hancock’s primary sin was relying on 1950s and 1960s books rather than then-current scholarship.
 
However, the video then goes on to criticize Hancock for also citing the claim to de la Vega, from a 1961 paperback translation by Maria Jolas (made, incidentally, from a French translation and not the Spanish original). The video puts it this way:

But again, with a little research, we find the situation is worse than it appears because Hancock doesn't tell readers this is a 1961 publication of the original work by Garcilaso de la Vega written in 1609. This is actually one of the 17th century Spanish works responsible for perpetuating misleading information about the Inca myths in the first place.

That’s not, strictly speaking, true since Garcilaso de la Vega was widely respected then as now as an accurate reporter of traditions current at the time he wrote about his native country—but he wrote a century after the Conquest.
 
Now, the bigger problem is that primary sources are actually a good thing. Hancock was in no way trying to pass off Garcilaso de la Vega as a modern scholar. He explicitly describes him as a native Peruvian writer of the seventeenth century. If Hancock were citing contemporary evidence of a living tradition from an original source, that would be stronger than a scholarly opinion, even one from the modern era. We want to have archival evidence from close to the time in question. The problem is that Hancock doesn’t exactly know what he’s citing.
 
De la Vega, of course, was a Peruvian writer and did not have firsthand knowledge of Mexican traditions, and Hancock knows little of the content of his book. Therefore, Hancock cited a passage on Peruvian tradition, but Hancock omits (or never read) the explicit citation De la Vega gives to the author and chapter from which he took the information: Francisco Lopez de Gomara’s Historia general de las Indias (1553).
 
In the translation Hancock cites, the passage is given as follows:

Francisco Lopez de Gomara, in the one hundred and fifteenth chapter of his book, relating a conversation between Huascar Inca, Pedro del Barco, and Ferdinand de Soto, at the time of their first visit to Cuzco, tells it in the following terms: “The prince explained that he was the only legitimate lord of the Empire and that Atahualpa was nothing but a tyrant and a usurper, which was why he, Huascar Inca, wanted to speak to the captain of the Christians and ask him to help recover his freedom and his kingdoms: ‘Because my father Huaina Capac,’ he explained, ‘ordered me, on his death bed, to become friends with the white, bearded men who were going to come, and who would establish themselves as the lords of this land.’”

As you can see, there is a clear citation, and it would have been important for Hancock to review the reference and cite the original.
 
Gómara, unbeknownst to Hancock, was the primary source for the claim of an Aztec prophecy of returning white gods, which Hancock was trying to prove through a Peruvian intermediary. Gómara is fairly explicit: “Also they had a certain prognostication and forewarning by their priests of the coming from the east parts a strange people, white of color and bearded men, who should win and rule that country” (trans. by “T. N.”, 1578, adapted).
 
Now, it happens that Gómara was heavily criticized even in his own day for the inaccuracy of his work, and most modern scholars believe the “white gods” refrain to be a falsehood invented either by Gómara or by his Conquistador sources.
 
That’s neither here nor there for our purposes except to note that Hancock has no idea about the primary source and did not take the basic steps to look for one even when the citation was spelled out for him.
 
Indeed, it’s an open question whether he actually read his supposed direct source, Garcilaso de la Vega, at all or simply borrowed citations from other secondary sources. In Chapter 7 of Fingerprints, he quotes what he says is a passage from Garcilaso, whom he knows from a 1961 paperback translation; however, in his end note he cites only “Royal Commentaries of the Incas” as his source with no book, chapter, or page. Why might that be?
 
In Chapter 7, Hancock writes:

Garcilaso de la Vega, the son of a Spanish nobleman and an Inca royal woman, was already familiar to me from his Royal Commentaries of the Incas. He was regarded as one of the most reliable chroniclers of the traditions of his mother’s people and had done his work in the sixteenth century, soon after the conquest, when those traditions had not yet been contaminated by foreign influences. He, too, confirmed what had obviously been a universal and deeply impressed belief: ‘After the waters of the deluge had subsided, a certain man appeared in the country of Tiahuanaco ...’ That man had been Viracocha.

​The quoted line, as it turns out, is not from the 1961 translation used in Hancock’s bibliography. Indeed, they aren’t Garcilaso de la Vega’s words at all. They are taken, without credit, from a paraphrase/summary in Alexander W. Bradford’s 1841 book American Antiquities and Researchers into the Origin and History of the Red Race: 

Are we to consider the tradition of Manco Capac as an idle invention of later times? So bold an idea could scarcely be ventured; but as it has already appeared, that the same ancient tradition under other forms was common to many of the aboriginal nations, so, even Garcillasso (sic) affords evidence of its existence among the very tribes he brands as uncivilized. The Indians to the south and west of Cuzco, he observes, say that after the waters of the deluge had subsided, a certain man appeared in the country of Tiahuanaco. He divided the world into four parts which he gave respectively to four kings, the first of whom was Manco Capac, who proceeded to the north, arrived in the valley of Cuzco, founded a city, and subjugated, and instructed the neighboring people.

Now, as it happens, Bradford was paraphrasing rather brazenly, and I can’t find this particular story anywhere in the book. Cited to vol. 1, p. 39-40 of an unnamed edition, Bradford’s summary conflates two stories, the birth of Manco Capac in Book 1 (where he is the son of the Sun, descending from heaven to Lake Titicaca) and a reference in Book 3 to the temple on Titicaca being the first place to emerge after a great flood. The story had nothing to do with Tiwanaku, which Garcilaso de la Vega does not relate to the gods but rather, in Book 7, to specific (if fictitious) architects from antiquity.
 
If I had to guess, Hancock never read Garcilaso de la Vega and probably didn’t want to cite a book about the “Red Race” in his bibliography, so he fudged it.
 
And that is what a little research can show!