Kenneth L. Feder

Irrationality and Popular Archaeology

An important aspect of archaeology is communicating the significance of data and research results to a fascinated, although often uninformed public. However, on the basis of book sales, newspaper coverage, television programming, and film presentations, it would seem that the public is inordinately fascinated by the more extreme, speculative, and often pseudoscientific claims made by those purporting to use archaeological data. Through questionnaires distributed to undergraduate students and to professional, teaching archaeologists, I made an attempt to comprehend the nature of the publics appetite for pseudoscientific archaeological claims. The role of education in refuting or perpetuating pseudoscience in archaeology was then assessed.

Crusading against straw men: an alternative view of alternative archaeologies: response to Holtorf (2005)

This bit of silliness from the Monty Python movie, The Life of Brian, came to mind while reading Cornelius Holtorf’s (2005) recent article in these pages, ‘Beyond crusades: how (not) to engage with alternative archaeologies’. We all laugh at this scene because we know that Stan, now calling himself Loretta, cannot have babies. We didn’t reach this conclusion as the result of some socially mediated process, or by imposing the will of the ruling class, or through some cultural negotiation. There are actual, observable facts and materially testable propositions that inform our conclusion: for babies to be conceived and to gestate, there must be a womb; females have wombs and males do not; Stan is a male; Stan cannot have babies. As the old saying goes, ‘facts are stubborn things’, which, we agree, is predicated on our assumption that there are such things as independent facts and that facts matter. Is Stan-Loretta’s desire to have babies merely an ‘alternative’ to an inflexible biological worldview being imposed by Reg as a form of undemocratic, scientific indoctrination? Is Reg really oppressing Stan-Loretta? Or is that claim just silly? We think it’s the latter. We also think many of the preceding (pretty fundamental) observations can be applied to Holtorf’s article.

Fingerprints of the Gods: The Evidence of Earth's Lost Civilization. Graham Hancock. 1995. Three Rivers Press, New York. 592 pp.

Dewhurst, Richard J. 20! 4 The Ancient Giants who Ruled America: The Missing Skeletons and the Great Smithsonian Cover-Up. Bear and Company, Rochester, Vermont. Fagan, Garrett G. 2006 Diagnosing Pseudoarchaeology. In Archaeological Fantasies: How Pseudoarchaeology Misrepresents the Past and Misleads the Public, edited by Garrett G. Fagan, pp. li-Ad. Routledge, London. Fagan, Garrett G. (editor) 2006 Archaeological Fantasies: How Pseudoarchaeology Misrepresents the Past and Misleads the Public. Routledge, London. Feder, Kenneth L. 2006 Skeptics, Fence Sitters, and True Believers: Student Acceptance of an Improbable Prehistory. In Archaeological Fantasies: How Pseudoarchaeology Misrepresents the Past and Misleads the Public, edited by Garrett G. Fagan, pp. 71-95. Routledge, London.

19.95 (paperback), ISBN: 978-0-517-88729-5.

People are fascinated by antiquity: How did humanity come to be? What does the cave art of the Upper Paleolithic mean? How did ancient Egyptians build the pyramids? What was the purpose of Stonehenge? Public interest generates an appetite for solutions to these perceived mysteries and the demand for solutions creates a ready supply of researchers and writers ready to provide them, commonly by proposing highly speculative interpretations of actual data and, in the extreme, through the agency of outright fraud. Examples of archaeological frauds perpetrated in the name of religion (the Cardiff Giant) and science (Piltdown Man and the Fujimura web of hoaxes related to Paleolithic archaeology in Japan) are discussed here. Beyond mere fraud, pseudoarchaeology also involves the misinterpretation and misrepresentation of archaeological data to concoct a past that some feel is more satisfying, a past populated by greatly advanced, super-civilizations in deep time, lost continents, and even technology-proselytizing extraterrestrial visitors to our planet in antiquity. Such extreme scenarios have in common the fact that archaeological evidence lends no support to them. If, as author L. P. Hartley is correct in his characterization of the past as a foreign country, then archaeology provides our only viable passport and the extraordinary fables concocted by the pseudoarchaeologists must be rejected for the stories that only a scientific investigation of the past can provide.

PSEUDOARCHAEOLOGY AND FRAUDS

In his essay that appeared in this Journal (Egypt and European Supremacy: A Bibliographic Essay), Kwame Nantambu attempts to use the extant archaeological record to support an Afrocentrist—actually and more accurately, an Egypt-centric—view of human history. In fact, however, while the archaeological record clearly indicates the great sophistication of ancient Egyptian culture, it does not buttress the claim that ancient Egypt was the proximate or even the ultimate source of human civilization.

Archaeology and Afrocentrism: An Attempt to Set the Record Straight

The vast majority of evidence marshaled by those who support scenarios of the pre-Columbus, pre-Viking discovery, exploration, and settlement of the New World has been epigraphic. Virtually no archaeological evidence has been presented in support of such claims. Here, the historically documented, early sixteenth-century Spanish exploration of the American Southeast is used as a model for the kind of archaeological evidence to be expected for such exploration and culture contact. It is suggested that unless and until similar evidence is forthcoming for an eariler presence of Celts, Libyans, Chinese, or other visitors from the Old World, their visits remain unproved.