Category: Archaeology

Read "Secrets of the Serpent," My New Piece in "Archaeology" Magazine

6/5/2026

My new piece on the secrets of Ohio's Serpent Mound is now available in the July/August issue of Archaeology magazine in print and online for Archaeology subscribers. I examine exciting new research into the cosmology and mythology behind North America's largest effigy mound.

Serpent Mound in southern Ohio stretches some 1,350 feet from its coiled tail to its jaws, which appear to be closing around an oval mound. Archaeologists still debate when the earthwork was first constructed and by which culture. Recently, a team of researchers has suggested that the earthwork embodies a Native American creation narrative.

Read the full story in Archaeology magazine.

3 Comments

“Traces of a Prehistoric Race of Supermen”: The Real Story of the Soyopa “Giants”

5/6/2026

4 Comments

Archaeologists racing to excavate the bones of a lost race of giants in a remote wilderness. Hints of a lost civilization. An attack by hostile Natives, and sensational dispatches from a reporter on the scene. But how much of it really happened?

When the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 extended copyright protection for an additional 25 years, it had the effect of freezing the public domain for much of my adult life. As a result, material from the 1920s and 1930s was often quite difficult to access, making it hard to check on particular claims—but easy for pseudohistory writers to make claims, knowing most readers would never be able to find the truth. However, now that the public domain has been unfrozen and material from 1930 has entered the public domain, a particular claim about a race of giants in a remote part of Mexico is much easier to research to find the real story the fringe writers left out.

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Irving Finkel Claims Göbekli Tepe Plaquette Is Early Evidence of a Writing System

12/20/2025

7 Comments

Last week, Irving Finkel, the British Museum Assyriologist who made headlines in 2014 when he discovered a cuneiform text describing the Mesopotamian version of Noah’s Ark as round, appeared on Lex Fridman’s podcast and made a controversial claim that a small carved stone found at Göbekli Tepe is evidence that the people who built the site had a writing system. In so doing, Finkel, who is now a contributor to Ancient Aliens, implied that archaeologists are blind to the writing system he sees so easily and that they don’t want to admit that a Mesopotamian-style social organization and set of cultural tools would be necessary to build the enclosures at the site. However, it turns out that Finkel is the one who is blind to archaeologists’ conclusions.

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A New Rune Stone Found in Canada Is Yet Another Nineteenth Century Fake

6/18/2025

16 Comments

You wouldn’t know it from a Popular Science article deploying the familiar “archaeologists remain baffled” trope, but a recent analysis of a carved stone found in the Canadian wilderness in 2018 helps to bolster the case that the Kensington Runestone was part of a broader nineteenth-century trend of fake inscriptions.

Researcher study the rune stone. (Ryan Primrose / Ontario Centre for Archaeological Education)

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Zahi Hawass Stumbles Through a Discussion of Occult Egyptology on Joe Rogan

5/16/2025

14 Comments

This week, famed Egyptologist Zahi Hawass was Joe Rogan’s guest on his podcast, and the two spent two hours discussing the history of ancient Egypt and various conspiracy theories that Rogan had heard about Egypt from his friends in the fringe history community. It was Rogan’s first episode with an archaeologist as the sole guest, more than 2,320 episodes and dozens if not hundreds of “alternative” thinker interviews into his run. Unfortunately, it was not the most successful outing for archaeology, as Rogan asked combative questions about conspiracies and Hawass stumbled over some areas he should have recognized after all these years.

14 Comments

Josh Gates's "Expedition Files" Covers King Tut, Sodom, and Stonehenge Badly

12/12/2024

27 Comments

I don’t typically watch Josh Gates’s Discovery channel documentary series, and Expedition Files, the latest spinoff of Expedition Unknown, didn’t really appeal to me. Gates expends minimal effort standing in front of a screen and narrating segments comprised of b-roll and the occasional expert interview, and the topics are such hoary rehashes that In Search Of… had already done many of the same segments forty years ago. I decided to check out a couple of segments this week, however, because Gates touched on two topics that are extremely familiar to me.

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Graham Hancock Associate Attacks Archaeology YouTuber in Rambling Rant

5/15/2024

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â€‹In case you were keeping score, so-called "UFO whistleblower" David Grusch pulled out of the SALT conference following the flap over revelations he's been ducking invitations to testify to AARO and was replaced with another UFO speaker, Col. Karl E. Nell, who claims credit for influencing Congressional UFO legislation. Meanwhile, there are some dustups occurring as both archaeologists and fringe figures take aim at the popularity of YouTube ancient history videos, whose audiences have outstripped traditional cable TV documentaries and book publishing.

19 Comments

Graham Hancock and Flint Dibble Offer Few Fireworks in Joe Rogan Debate

4/16/2024

59 Comments

On The Joe Rogan Experience, archaeologist Flint Dibble debated Graham Hancock for more than four hours about the existence of a lost civilization. You will forgive me that I did not have the time to watch the full podcast—it is simply too long—but you are of course welcome to watch below. I watched about half, from various segments of the podcast. I noticed in the parts I did see that Hancock seemed a bit underprepared to encounter the nuts and bolts of how archaeology is actually done, leaving him to complain that archaeologists have simply missed all of the evidence for a lost civilization, despite Dibble’s clear presentation of how archaeology actually works and the methodology of science and the signatures of large-scale settlements, such as evidence of agriculture, that should survive even the most thorough cataclysm.

59 Comments

Graham Hancock Tells Russell Brand Archaeologists "Despise" Ordinary People

1/11/2023

61 Comments

In case you didn’t see it, Graham Hancock appeared on Russell Brand’s podcast this past week to promote Ancient Apocalypse and to attack archaeologists yet again for being mean to him by asking for evidence for his claims. Hancock looks tired and angry during the interview, and even Brand notes that he seems unduly dejected and downtrodden for a man with one of the world’s most popular streaming nonfiction series.

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Review of The UnXplained S03E08 "Mysterious Ancient Ruins"

4/1/2022

5 Comments

William Shatner’s The UnXplained comes to us from the same brain trust that bring us Ancient Aliens, so I did not have much faith that its episode on ancient ruins would have much value. If the show isn’t quite Ancient Aliens, it is also something a bit more dangerous. Shatner personalizes its argument—claiming that it shows the world “through my eyes”—and because it lacks an obvious sci-fi angle, its pseudoscience and extreme nonsense take on an insidious air of mainstream consensus simply because the show presents even the wildest claims without dissenting opinion, without acknowledging (as even Ancient Aliens does) that mainstream scientists have different ideas, and without Ancient Aliens’ goofy lunacy, allowing it to pass lies off as not just respectable but self-evidently true. This episode was particularly dangerous in representing extreme and false historical claims as uncontroversial fact.

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<<Previous

Read "Secrets of the Serpent," My New Piece in "Archaeology" Magazine

“Traces of a Prehistoric Race of Supermen”: The Real Story of the Soyopa “Giants”

Irving Finkel Claims Göbekli Tepe Plaquette Is Early Evidence of a Writing System

A New Rune Stone Found in Canada Is Yet Another Nineteenth Century Fake

Zahi Hawass Stumbles Through a Discussion of Occult Egyptology on Joe Rogan

Josh Gates's "Expedition Files" Covers King Tut, Sodom, and Stonehenge Badly

Graham Hancock Associate Attacks Archaeology YouTuber in Rambling Rant

Graham Hancock and Flint Dibble Offer Few Fireworks in Joe Rogan Debate

Graham Hancock Tells Russell Brand Archaeologists "Despise" Ordinary People

Review of The UnXplained S03E08 "Mysterious Ancient Ruins"

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