Category: Archaeology

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

12/20/2025

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.

7 Comments

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)

16 Comments

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.

27 Comments

Graham Hancock Associate Attacks Archaeology YouTuber in Rambling Rant

5/15/2024

19 Comments

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.

61 Comments

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.

5 Comments

Archaeologist Argues Stonehenge Was an Egyptian-Influenced Solar Calendar

3/2/2022

7 Comments

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.

7 Comments

Elizabeth Weiss Claims Protecting Native Graves Violates First Amendment

4/16/2021

23 Comments

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.

23 Comments

<<Previous

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"

Archaeologist Argues Stonehenge Was an Egyptian-Influenced Solar Calendar

Elizabeth Weiss Claims Protecting Native Graves Violates First Amendment

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