Category: Archaeology

Graham Hancock Tells Russell Brand Archaeologists "Despise" Ordinary People

1/11/2023

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

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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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Archaeologist Argues Stonehenge Was an Egyptian-Influenced Solar Calendar

3/2/2022

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A new article published on Tuesday in the journal Antiquity offers another in a long series of claims that Stonehenge was an ancient calendar. British archaeologist Timothy Darvill says that he has decoded how the calendar worked, suggesting that its rings of stones were intended to track the twelve months of thirty days, with the largest stones standing for five intercalary days between 360-day years and four station stones helping to calculate leap years. So far, the argument is not dissimilar to a range of previous calendar claims for the monument, except for being a bit more elaborate in its mechanics. Then things get weird.

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Elizabeth Weiss Claims Protecting Native Graves Violates First Amendment

4/16/2021

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Controversy erupted at the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology yesterday when Prof. Elizabeth Weiss of San Jose State University delivered a presentation based on her recent book in which she attacked the federal law mandating the return of Native American objects and remains for repatriation and protecting Native graves. According to social media posts after the event, Weiss also attacked Native people as lacking the objectivity to perform archaeology and said they should not participate the scientific study of the past. Weiss is also the wife of Ancient Aliens star Nick Pope, whose show similarly takes a dim view of Native peoples, arguing that they are not-fully-human alien hybrids who only clawed their way up from the dirt with the help of powerful, superior outsiders.

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New Journal Article Claims Younger Dryas Comet Destroyed Ancient Syrian Village

3/20/2020

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This week, my 70-something aunt said that she and my uncle weren’t concerned about coronavirus or the precautions in place to prevent its spread because she believes it is a Democratic Party hoax to take down Donald Trump after impeachment failed. She thinks the whole world is conspiring to fake the disease to hurt Trump. My father told me that a friend of his said his ex-wife has the same belief. As my aunt and uncle aged, they moved steadily to the right, going from blue collar Democrats who proudly framed photos of themselves with Clintons in the 1990s to staunch Republicans after 9/11 and becoming die-hard Trump supporters in 2016 thanks to a combination of nationalism, xenophobia, and cultural anxieties. So that’s where we are as a country. Regular Fox News consumers have developed bizarre ideas about what the network had called the “Virus Impeachment Scam” until late last week, and now there’s no good way to undo it.

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Archaeological Institute of America Takes Cash from Cable Purveyor of Pseudoarchaeology Shows and Helps Make Josh Gates Look Good

1/7/2020

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This is another one of those blog posts where I make enemies by pointing out that corporate cash is corrupting. This past weekend the Archaeological Institute of America, a respected nonprofit archaeological organization, held ArchaeoCon 2020 in Washington, D.C. This event, which occurred alongside the AIA Annual Meeting, was intended to promote archaeology and to “showcase” both the AIA and American archaeology for a public audience. So why was the main attraction a lecture by Expedition Unknown host Josh Gates, a man who went on TV and on the radio to tell America that he was pretty sure space aliens were involved in building some archaeological sites? That answer explains quite a bit about the destructive but symbiotic nature between powerful organizations and money.

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

3/25/2019

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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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