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

​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.

The "Expedition Files" title card.

​In last week’s third episode, Expedition Files devoted its long middle segment to the “Curse of King Tut,” evaluating two supposedly scientific explanations for the curse. The first was the old suggestion that a fungus growing in Tutankhamun’s tomb killed several of the men who excavated it. Even Gates recognizes that this does not correlate with many of the deaths, which were decidedly non-fungal. The remainder of the segment relates a “new” claim that the tomb’s limestone walls poisoned visitors with high levels of radon.
 
The claim made headlines earlier this year when Robin Fellowes published it in the quasi-academic Journal of Scientific Exploration, but Jaime Bigu made the same claim in the Journal of Environmental Radioactivity back in 1999.
 
Anyhow, Gates correctly notes that radon does not explain those who died of gunshots, suicide, or, in one case, asphyxiation by pillow. There is also no evidence that radon directly contributed to any deaths.
 
The curse narrative is especially weird since it folds in deaths that occurred over a decades, a period of time when hard-living middle-aged men do typically begin aging and dying off. It’s not much of a curse if it takes longer to enact that Tutankhamun actually reigned.
 
But most disappointingly, Gates neglected to even pay lip service to the well-known fact that the “curse” was made up by Marie Corelli from a half-remembered passage from Murtada ibn al-’Afif’s medieval history of Egypt and the more than one hundred fictional stories of vengeful mummies published in English in the years before the opening of Tut’s tomb. I covered this in detail back in 2016.
 
This week, in episode 4, all of the stories are archaeological. I’m not very interested in Roanoke, so I’ll skip over the familiar narrative. The second segment plunges into the Biblical story of Sodom, rehearsing the passages from Genesis and then falsely claiming as a new revelation that the show can only now reveal evangelical archaeologist Stephen Collins’s long-ago claim that Tell al-Hammam (also transliterated as Tall al-Hammam) was Sodom and had been destroyed by an asteroid. Collins first made the claim in 2006. The claim appeared on The Universe back in 2014, and Collins made headlines promoting it again in 2021 and again about a year ago.
 
As I wrote at the time: “The claim Tall El-Hammam was destroyed by an air burst is disputable. Its identification with Sodom is unproved and dubious, and no one has provided any evidence that an event supposedly transpiring in 1600 BCE was preserved accurately down to the composition of the first written account of Sodom in the surviving Genesis narrative, typically ascribed to the period around 500 BCE or later.” You can read more detail in the links above. Gates, of course, offers no hint that anyone disputes Collins’s claims and leaves the audience believing it had been proven conclusively.
 
The final segment delves into the history of Stonehenge. Gates discusses the legend that Merlin brought Stonehenge to England, but he mangles the story, conflating two parts of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s story given in the Historia Regum Brittaniae (8.10-12). Gates claims Merlin brought the stones from Ireland and hired giants to set them up. Geoffrey’s actual story was that giants had carried the stones from Africa to Ireland and that Merlin, much later, used his wizardry and clever technology, along with thousands of men, to move them. I’m sure no one read Geoffrey before writing this show.
 
The rest of the episode reports, without embellishment, recent research into how far across Britain the stones that make up Stonehenge traveled. A chunk of Expedition Unknown from 2021 is grafted in to fill out the time.