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Two New Videos Related to Graham Hancock's New Book

5/1/2019

My copy of America Before should arrive tomorrow. I can't promise I'll dive right into it, but I have found myself getting drawn into thinking about Graham Hancock's broader message as well as the specific claims I've heard him make during recent interviews. Perhaps what he writes is more nuanced (and more accurate?) than what he says. So far, listening to his performances on YouTube I am struck by the combination of hearing someone who is simultaneously very well-spoken and so very often so very wrong. Ultimately it doesn't matter how slippery you can be, however -- facts are facts.

Anyway, I've made a couple more videos reacting to components of Hancock's argument. The first is my reaction to his contention that archaeology is not a science:

The second addresses the contention that finding true north requires "advanced astronomical knowledge." I've heard this claim many times and I've never understood it: Anyone who lives/works outside experiences and understands the linkages between the movements and angles of the sun, changes in the length of the day, and the annual tempo of the seasons. Finding and marking the solstices and the equinoxes is not at all difficult if you observe the horizon in the morning from a fixed location, and ancient societies would have had many reasons to do that. The "mystery" of finding true north is really no mystery at all. What's really a mystery is why so many people invested in "alternative" archaeology assume that ancient people were as ignorant as they are of the way the natural world.

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"Squaring the Circle" in the Amazon: Graham Hancock Got It Wrong

4/25/2019

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Yesterday on my walk home I listened to another chunk of Graham Hancock's appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast. Most of what I listened to was about the new discoveries in the Amazon, which Hancock claims include large geometric earthworks (aka geoglyphs) produced by "squaring the circle." Hancock misuses/misunderstands the term (which refers to constructing a square the same area as a given circle, not just drawing a square around a circle), and consequently concludes that the societies who made the structures had advanced geometrical knowledge.

Rather than write about it, I made a video to demonstrate my point:

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Is Graham Hancock's New Book Really as Much of a Yawner as it Sounds Like It Is?

4/24/2019

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If you're interested in pseudoarchaeology, you probably know that Graham Hancock's new book America Before is now out. I haven't read it yet. I will probably take at stab at it at some point over the summer, but I have to face the reality that I'm just not excited.

This is my "I'm getting too old for this crap" face.

My lack of enthusiasm stems mostly, I think, from a gut feeling that there is not a whole lot in the book that is particularly new, thought-provoking, or even interesting. The summary reviews I have read so far bear that out (you can read Jason Colavito's review here, and Carl Feagan's take here). I already knew Hancock was going to going to claim that a comet wiped out some kind of fantastical "advanced civilization" that existed during the Ice Age, and I already knew that he would try to connect his claim to the archaeology of North America in whatever ways possible. I predict anyone who has any legitimate expertise in this region of the world can see through Hancock's game in two seconds. I guess if you're blissfully ignorant maybe it all sounds very exciting . . . I wouldn't know: as someone who has been doing real archaeology in North America for 25 years now I can hear the sound of this book ringing hollow before I even crack the cover.

I listened to the first half hour of Hancock's recent appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience this morning on my walk to work. After opening with a book-selling pitch, Hancock discusses the Cerutti Mastodon (the 130,000-year-old remains of a mastodon near San Diego, CA, that Steven Holen and colleagues claim were modified by humans using stone tools) as an example of both the great age of the human occupation of North America and the "dogmatic" (take a drink!) approach of archaeologists to their beloved Clovis-first model. Hancock's willingness to misunderstand and/or misrepresent reality is on full display with statements like this one (about 23:30 in):

"Suddenly we have to consider that humans have been in America for 130,000 years; we already know that a dogmatic approach to archaeology has rather refused to look at anything older than 13,000 years ago. And what it does it generates an engine of demand that we need to be looking at those missing 100,000+ years. We need to be looking at it hard. Of course the immediate reaction has not been to go looking for stuff in the other hundred thousand years. Most archaeologists have responded by saying 'this is impossible -- it can't be so!'"

What a bunch of nonsense.

I'm not sure exactly how to interpret the modifier "rather," but I can tell you that there has been no "refusal" to investigate the pre-Clovis occupations of North America for decades now. But don't take my word for it, have a look at published papers on the pre-Clovis lithics from Gault site and the Debra L Friedkin site (Texas) or the pre-Clovis occupations at Page-Ladson (Florida). Or look at the landmark 1997 declaration on the antiquity of Monte Verde in Chile. Or the many other sites that have been put forward as candidates for pre-Clovis sites in the Americas.

It is my impression that there is now neither a stigma attached to nor a "dogma" (take a drink!) preventing archaeologists from looking for and investigating possible pre-Clovis sites.

Just because pre-Clovis is a legitimate thing to investigate, however, does not mean that every site that is claimed to predate Clovis has been interpreted correctly. Figuring out which ones pass the smell test and which do not is important if you want to get the story right. As I tell my students: adding more weak coffee to already weak coffee does not make strong coffee (I stole that from someone and I can't remember who -- I apologize).

So it matters what evidence you accept and use to build your narrative. I wonder, does Graham Hancock include the Calico Early Man Site (California) in his analysis of the human occupation of the Americas? The purported "artifacts" from the site have been said to date to 200,000-135,000 years ago. The materials from Calico were vetted by none other than Louis Leakey himself. If Jeffrey Goodman is correct, humans might have been at Calico as early as 500,000 years ago.

If there were people here half a million years ago, the Cerutti Mastodon is young like Tupperware. If Hancock is not aware of Calico, he really missed something. If he is aware of it, however, he presumably had some reason for not focusing on it. Perhaps he wasn't convinced by the analysis (does he know more about Paleolithic stone tools than Louis Leakey?) or maybe he was suspicious that the people doing the work misinterpreted the archaeological/geological context of the materials.

I would guess that Hancock has heard of Calico and simply chose not to focus on it (like I said, I don't have the book yet and am just going by the reviews). So . . . he's open to the idea of pre-Clovis (obviously) but doesn't automatically accept all claimed pre-Clovis sites as legitimate, even if competent people were involved?

Guess what? That's what all the rest of us do, also. When the Cerutti paper first dropped, my response was not "oh crap, does the dogma say I have to reject this?" (take a drink). No, it was this blog post. I'm just going to quote myself at length:

The 130,000 year-old date is way, way, way out there in terms of the accepted timeline for humans in the Americas. Does that mean the conclusions of the study are wrong? Of course not. And, honestly, I don't even necessarily subscribe to the often-invoked axiom that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." I think ordinary, sound evidence works just fine most of the time when you're operating within a scientific framework. Small facts can kill mighty theories if you phrase your questions in the right way.

So how should we view claims like this one? For this claim to stand up, two main questions have to withstand scrutiny. First, is the material really that old? Second, is the material really evidence of human behavior?

If we accept the age of the remains, we're left with the second question about whether those remains show convincing evidence of human behavior. As you can see from the abstract, the claim for human activity has several components (modification of the bones, the presence and locations of stone cobbles interpreted as tools, etc.). The authors contention (p. 480) is that

"Multiple bone and molar fragments, which show evidence of percussion, together with the presence of an impact notch, and attached and detached cone flakes support the hypothesis that human-induced hammerstone percussion was responsible for the observed breakage. Alternative hypotheses (carnivoran modification, trampling, weathering and fluvial processes) do not adequately explain the observed evidence (Supplementary Information 4). No Pleistocene carnivoran was capable of breaking fresh proboscidean femora at mid-shaft or producing the wide impact notch. The presence of attached and detached cone flakes is indicative of hammerstone percussion, not carnivoran gnawing (Supplementary Information 4). There is no other type of carnivoran bone modification at the CM site, and nor is there bone modification from trampling."

My impression is that most archaeologists are, like me, skeptical that all other possible explanations for the stone and bone assemblage can be confidently rejected. I'm no expert on paleontology and taphonomy, but as I thought through the suggested scenario, I wondered how all the meat came off the bones before before the purported humans smashed them open with rocks. The authors state that there's no carnivore damage, and unless I missed it I didn't see any discussion of cutmarks left by butchering the carcass with stone tools. So where did the meat go? If it wasn't removed by animals (no carnivore marks) and wasn't removed by humans (no cutmarks) did it just rot away? If so, would the bones have still been "green" for humans to break them open?

The absence of cut marks would be perplexing, as we have direct evidence that hominins have been using sharp stone tools to butcher animals since at least 3.4 million years ago. The 23,000-year-old human occupation of Bluefish Cave in the Yukon is supported by . . . cutmarks. We know that Neandertals and other Middle Pleistocene humans had sophisticated tool kits that were used to cut both animal and plant materials.

Is it possible that pre-Clovis occupations in this continent extend far back into time? Yes, I think it is. Does this paper convince me that humans messed around with a mastodon carcass in California at the end of the Middle Pleistocene? No, it does not.

It's the evidence, stupid.

Should archaeologists shift gears and start spending their time looking at those "missing" 100,000 years? I think many of us have our eyes wide open all the time. We understand the geological and sedimentological histories of the regions where we work. We know where there are deposits that are Holocene in age, Pleistocene in age, etc. We also communicate with those in other disciplines and members of the public who are out there scouring the earth all the time. Contrary to the "total destruction" hypothesis, there are many many places where sediments that are pre-Clovis in age remain intact. Some of those sediments have been shown to contain cultural materials that presumably relate to human occupations that pre-date Clovis. Many of those sites are places of active and ongoing investigation. If successful human societies were present in this hemisphere 100,000, 50,000, or 30,000 years ago, they would have left a pattern of sites from which we could learn about them. While I think it is unlikely that such a pattern exists, I don't think it is impossible. It is going to take evidence, however, to convince me that we have really failed to recognize such large pieces missing from the puzzle as 100,000-years-worth of human occupation or the fingerprints of an advanced, telekinesis-wielding, earth-girding super civilization.

Words words words. Blah blah blah.

Just.

Produce.

Some.

Evidence.

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Saturday Morning News Dump: Art, Archaeology, Miscellany

4/6/2019

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I didn't write a single blog post in February or March. That's probably the longest I've ever gone without writing since I started blogging. As usual, it isn't because I haven't been doing stuff. If/when my blog dies it won't be because I don't have things to talk about. It will be because I don't have time to talk about them.

Here's a taste of what's been going on over the last couple of months.

"Rocket Queen" Belongs to West Columbia

I'm happy to report that my seahorse sculpture "Rocket Queen" is now the property of the City of West Columbia. It will be installed with pieces by other artists in a new sculpture park that the city is building along their riverfront. My understanding is that the park will be open this spring/summer at some point.

"Passenger" is at ArtFields

My friend/colleague Chris Gillam and I moved my 10' bear sculpture "Passenger" to Lake City last week for ArtFields 2019 (ArtFields runs from April 26-May 4). In one of my greatest engineering triumphs, I built a frame from 2x4s that allowed us to fairly easily tip the piece horizontally, load it onto a trailer, move it, unload it, and tip it upright again. "Passenger" is now bolted into the concrete in front of the old Ray's Auto Wash building at 116 N Church Street. I shot video and will get that put together at some point. As I mentioned above . . . time.

Pieces Come, Pieces Go

I've sold a couple of small pieces this spring. I really liked both of them, but I also can't keep everything. The squirrel was a commission that was really fun. I think it turned out great, and I was sad to it go. "Nemesis," I hardly got to know you.

Nipper Creek

I spent part of a day visiting the Nipper Creek site (38RD18) with Sean Taylor of the South Carolina Heritage Trust. Nipper Creek is a state-owned property on the Broad River that contains a large, stratified archaeological site. Work in the 1980's (read the report here) suggested the site may have served as an aggregation location during the Archaic. I'm interested in looking at the existing excavated materials and thinking about ways to expand my work along the Broad River by incorporating Nipper Creek and perhaps some other sites.

Larry Strong Collection: Middle and Late Archaic

With the support of the Archaeological Research Trust, I've got two undergraduate students working on inventorying more of the Larry Strong collection. Faithful readers (if there are any left) may remember that I began working with this collection by looking at some of the Early Archaic materials (there's a short article in Legacy here, and you can read one of the papers here). I'm working with one of my former undergraduate students -- Shane Biles -- to create 3D models of a sample of the Morrow Mountain points from the collection with the ultimate goal of writing a comparative paper that will hopefully help us sort out some of the variability among some of the stemmed projectile point forms we see here during the long span of the Middle-Late Archaic.

Modeling Lithic Transport

One of my main research activities this semester has been completing and experimenting with an agent-based model that will hopefully help us understand how the source-to-discard patterns that are produced by the interaction of mobility behaviors and stone tool creation/use/discard behaviors. We ask stone tools to carry a lot of water for us, so it seems to me that we should use every tool available to understand what they're actually telling us. The first version of the model is done, and the data for the first paper (which will focus on experimentation around a very simple case) are mostly generated. I hope to have a draft submitted somewhere by the end of the semester, but that may not be realistic. The model is simple, but there are a lot ways it can be augmented to address different questions. Stay tuned.

Write-Up of 38FA608

I've been working to take care of a few loose ends to help with writing up our first two seasons of work at 38FA608 (the field school site). I'm cleaning up the database and dealing with some of the stuff I did during the preliminary work, including the excavation of Feature 1 (a Middle Archaic deposit of quartz knapping debris). The lithics from the Late/Terminal Archaic (Savannah River and Mack) components we encountered in the block excavations will be central to the thesis work of one of my M.A. students (Rob Lyerly). So that will be worked on in depth this summer as I'm writing up the excavations in general.

Rabbits and a Snake

Our family got bigger this spring. We now live with three German Angora Rabbits (Eileen, Dolly, and Bruce) and a corn snake (Okie Junior). There are backstories, but those will have to wait for another time. Now I need to pack up some art for a display downtown, look over my lectures for next week, siphon the gasoline out of our old 4Runner before it heads to the junkyard, and maybe take a chainsaw to what remains of our rotted deck. And, oh yeah, Happy Holi!

And now you are up-to-date.

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Update: Friday Night Omnibus News Dump Edition

1/25/2019

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It has been a busy few weeks. As usual, I have more topics than time. At this point, I'm going to just accept that my blog sometimes functions as an open access journal. Here is the bullet point version of what I've been up to. We'll do art first, then archaeology.

Two Crows Named "Desire"

Flavia and I finished the crows we were making for each other. I love the one she made me (it's going to go in my office), and I'm pretty happy with what I made for her. Here are some pictures of my "Desire." There's a lot I could say about it, but it's Friday night and time to move on.

Me and Flavia with our crows.

The Jasper Artist of the Year Is . . . Not Me

As I wrote in December, I was one of three finalists nominated for Jasper Artist of the Year (in the visual arts category). The awards ceremony was last Friday. I did not win the award: that honor went to Trahern Cook. I met some new people, drank some wine, and had a good time (the picture above was taken there). Congratulations to all the winners!

New Pieces Over the Holidays

In addition to "Desire," I completed several other smallish pieces over the holiday break.

"Left Behind" is small rabbit made mostly from debris I collected in Gainesville, Florida, at last spring's TAG conference.

"Pretender" was a wedding gift for my friend Whitney and her new husband (congratulations and sorry I haven't mailed it yet!).

"Crow" was a quickie. As promised in my post about "Kiss Goodbye," I'm looking to move on. I threw out my rule book and I really liked the result. The king is dead, long live the king.

Fact Bucket Videos: Six Down, One to Go

I'm still working to finish up editing the student videos from my Forbidden Archaeology class last semester. I finished one on Atlantis last week and one on pyramids today. You can find them on my YouTube channel, along with videos about my archaeological fieldwork and my art.

New Grant For Collections Work

I'm happy to announce that I have received grant monies from the Archaeological Research Trust to continue inventorying and preliminary analysis of chipped stone projectile points from the Larry Strong Collection. You may remember me writing about working with the Early Archaic materials a while ago. I'm still working with those (more on that later), but now I'm going to move on in time and process the Middle and Late Archaic stuff. Part of the rationale is that I'll be dealing with those time periods in the materials we've been excavated at the field school.

South Carolina Archaeology Class: We're Making a Movie

I'm teaching South Carolina Archaeology (ANTH 321) this semester. The class is bigger than in years past. That's good from an enrollment standpoint, but a challenge from a teaching standpoint. In the spirit of experimentation, I decided to build in a class video project. We'll be making a video attempting to showcase the archaeology of this state. I've divided the students up into groups and given them topics (mostly organized chronologically) that they're responsible for. They're going to research their topics and develop proposals about what issues, artifacts, sites, and people should be included the video. Then we'll take it from there.

Go Deep!

Today I submitted a grant proposal for systematic exploratory work on the deep deposits at 38FA608 (the field school site). We know now several things about the sediments below the Middle Archaic zones: (1) they're deep; (2) they're Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene in age; and (3) they contain artifacts. I don't believe I've mentioned it publicly, but I submitted a sample for OSL data from the deepest stratum we've documented so far (about 5m below the original surface) and it returned a result around the Last Glacial Maximum. Also, we've found an Early Archaic Kirk point in a disturbed part of the site. What all that means is that the landform did indeed exist at the end of the last Ice Age and (minimally) Early Archaic peoples were using it. In other words, there's a really good potential for some very high integrity buried archaeology there. Fingers crossed.

Other News

In other news . . . our 2003 4Runner finally suffered a terminal injury. And I'm tearing out our rotted deck. And I've started working a rabbit sculpture that's big enough to sit on. It will have a tractor seat. And a gear shift. And a dashboard.

And now you are up to date.

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In Progress: Two Crows Named "Desire"

1/4/2019

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Flavia Lovatelli and I have several things in common: (1) we both live in Columbia; (2) we both do art using discarded junk; and (3) we're both finalists for the Jasper Artist of the Year award. We also both ran "summer selfie" contests last that were largely ignored by the public. The result is that we won each other's contests, which means we're making each other art.

We decided that we'd make each other the "same" thing. Flavia picked the subject: crows. I picked the title "Desire." I don't know when they'll be done, but I do know we've both started. I settled on an idea and started putting pieces together earlier in the week. I know that Flavia's got a least a couple of coats of paint down. That's about all I can say at this point. Maybe we can exchange the pieces at the awards ceremony.

A sneak peak at Flavia's crow in progress.

A sneak peek at my crow in progress.

In other news: the domestication of the dog continues unabated. Have a nice weekend!

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"Kiss Goodbye:" The Very Last One in a Very Long Line

12/25/2018

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One of the most gratifying personal aspects of moving to Columbia has been having the time, space, and resources to do art. I've got a notebook, some tools, a supportive family, a half of a garage, plenty of ideas, and a bunch of neighbors who give me their junk. In the last couple of years those ingredients have let me go places I never thought I'd be able to go. I've won things, sold things, met some great people, and had a lot of fun in the process.

When I started messing around with sculpture about ten years ago (in the capacity that I could at the time), memory and sentimentality were core components of what I was interested in. Those remained central thoughts as I ramped up here in Columbia, and were the organizing theme of the "Afterburner" show I had at Tapp's in the spring of 2017. Over the last couple of years I have continued chasing those feelings while trying to lean forward, pushing my vision, improving my technical skills, and expanding the range of materials I work with.

The end of this semester was a busy one for our family, and I found myself working more in the evenings than on the weekends. After I finished "Passenger" in November I worked mostly on two pieces I had started earlier during the summer: "Painted Swan" and a dancing fox I'm calling "Kiss Goodbye." It was while working on the fox over the course of several rainy evenings listening to the radio that I realized that I'm at a pivot point in my art: the Afterburner series is over. Fifty is a nice round number.

I based the posture of the fox on a line drawing I found online. I wanted the animal to be light, dynamic, and playful. And I wanted the base to be the opposite. The fox is springing off a dead weight (an engine block), saying goodbye to a heavy, broken mass that won't ever move again.

As an archaeologist, I take it as axiomatic that you can't understand the present without knowing something about the past. The past provides context, texture, richness, and direction. Memories of the past are important. But they can also be toxic. They can be limiting when they become an obligation. Sometimes it's best to let them be what they are and move on -- take the power but leave behind the handcuffs.

Over the last few years I have developed my own style, created a cast of characters, and scratched out -- though both creation and discovery -- a vague grammar of symbols, shapes, and colors. I have a lot of ideas and a lot of energy, and I feel like I'll be able to both harness and unleash a lot more of both if I let myself out of the memory box. And so I'm out. The memories are there, but I'm going to attempt to defang them. Let's see what happens next.

Here is a video:

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USC Article on Work at 38FA608

12/22/2018

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I wanted to pass on the online version of this article ("The Fine Scale of Time" by Megan Sexton) that ran in the USC Times earlier this fall. It's a short piece about my work at 38FA608. The photo is me examining some of the conjoining lithic debris from the Guilford-age deposit at the site. Enjoy!

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ArtFields 2019: I'm In!

12/19/2018

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I'm happy to announce that "Passenger," my 10'-story-bear-with-butterfly-wings, has been accepted into the 2019 ArtFields competition. It's an honor to be included, and somewhat of a validation of the amount of time and energy I put into the piece. The idea percolated for months (years?) before I began bringing it into reality last May. I sweated over it all summer and we went through several love/hate cycles together. I'm glad it's in.

Since I finished the piece in November it has been gathering leaves in the driveway behind my house. I walk by it almost every day and barely notice it. It's a strange feeling to go from thinking about and struggling with something almost every day to forgetting it's there. Especially when it's a 10' bear with butterfly wings.

If you like art and you live in the region, I hope you'll visit ArtFields in Lake City this spring -- it's a really cool event and you'll see a lot of fantastic artwork. I hope "Passenger" ends up somewhere in town where you couldn't miss it if you tried.

A final plug: voting is still open for Jasper Project Artist of the Year. I've been nominated in the Visual Arts category. If you like my artwork, please take a moment and vote for me!

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Swordgate Third Anniversary Super Terrific Happy Hour Celebration

12/16/2018

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Three years ago today, I was cleaning the kitchen floor in anticipation of the arrival of relatives for the holidays. Through Facebook I became aware of J. Hutton Pulitzer's ludicrous claim that a ""100% confirmed" Roman sword had been recovered from a shipwreck off of Oak Island. The debacle that followed remains, in my opinion, a great example of how facts, logic, and reality can triumph over lies, nonsense, and fantasy in real time. Swordgate remains the most fun I've ever had dealing with pseudoarchaeology online. I can't imagine it will ever be repeated, which is why it's worth remembering and celebrating.

The final chapter on Swordgate remains to be written. There are still a few swords that we're aware of that we don't have many details about, and we're still missing the real "smoking gun" to nail down exactly when and where these Fake Hercules Swords were first produced. Without a doubt, however, they are all modern creations. There is and never was a "Naples Museum sword." The sword purportedly found on Oak Island didn't come from a shipwreck, was not covered in gold, did not have magical navigational powers, and it is not made using Roman-era metallurgical methods. The sword will never appear in history books. There will never be a "White Paper," and you will probably never get an admission from the principal proponent of the sword that the whole thing was a big pile of baloney. C'est la vie.

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<<Previous

Two New Videos Related to Graham Hancock's New Book

"Squaring the Circle" in the Amazon: Graham Hancock Got It Wrong

Is Graham Hancock's New Book Really as Much of a Yawner as it Sounds Like It Is?

Saturday Morning News Dump: Art, Archaeology, Miscellany

Update: Friday Night Omnibus News Dump Edition

In Progress: Two Crows Named "Desire"

"Kiss Goodbye:" The Very Last One in a Very Long Line

USC Article on Work at 38FA608

ArtFields 2019: I'm In!

Swordgate Third Anniversary Super Terrific Happy Hour Celebration

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