You may have noticed that I haven't been regularly blogging about the course this year. That's by design. After wearing myself out the first time around in 2016, I decided I would put less effort into intensive public/fringe interaction. I think it has worked out well. I'm enjoying teaching the course much more. There will be still be student writing online to read eventually, and we'll be making videos this year. I'm just not killing myself to invite everyone else into the classroom.

​On Friday we finished our section on Atlantis in this year's edition of Forbidden Archaeology. We spent most of the class watching and discussing a talk by Graham Hancock titled "Is the House of History Built on Foundations of Sand?"  I wanted the students to watch carefully as Hancock made his case, asking them to think about his logic, the structure of the talk, and the evidence he presented to support his claims (many pieces of which they have already been exposed to).

I have not paid a whole lot of attention to Hancock in the past. I haven't completely read any of his books, and I think that this was the first time I have ever listened to an entire talk. He spent the first portion of the talk discussing the recent evidence for the hypothesis that an impact by a comet or meteor triggered the Younger Dryas. (The Younger Dryas is an anomalous cold period that occurred about 12,900-11,700 years ago during the transition from glacial to inter-glacial conditions.) He spent the last part of the talk highlighting some purported evidence (e.g., Gobekli Tepe, the Sphinx) supporting the claim that refugees from Atlantis occupied the Near East after fleeing their island's destruction.

The linkage that Hancock makes between the hypothesized extra-terrestrial impact that triggered the Younger Dryas and the destruction of Atlantis is, when you listen closely, peculiar. Following a quotation of Plato's description of Atlantis disappearing into the sea "in a single day and night of misfortune," Hancock describes the cataclysmic effects of extra-terrestrial impacts on the earth. He first discusses the idea that a comet wiped out the dinosaurs. He then moves on to the Younger Dryas impact research, repeatedly referring to "the cataclysm" of the impact. 

So a comet or meteor wiped out at Atlantis?

No, the dates are all wrong for that. The Younger Dryas starts at about 12,900 BP (10,950 BC). Believers set the date of the destruction of Atlantis at 11,550 BP (9,600 BC). So, apparently, all the extra-terrestrial fireworks did nothing to the Atlanteans. They prospered for another 1300 years, conquering the world and mining orichalcum while the planet suffered a return to full glacial conditions.

After all the attention paid to violent cataclysm, Hancock actually attributes the destruction of Atlantis to sea level rise at the end of the Younger Dryas. Sea levels are lower during glacial periods because more of the Earth's water is tied up in ice sheets. Sea levels rise in inter-glacial periods because more of the Earth's water is in liquid form. As far as the culprit in Atlantis demise at 9,600 BC, Hancock points specifically to "a dramatic pulse of sea level rise" known as Meltwater Pulse 1b.

It will probably not surprise you to learn that, although there is debate about the magnitude, timing, and cause of Meltwater Pulse 1b, no scientist thinks it was so sudden or so rapid that it could have swallowed up a continent "in a single day and night of misfortune." Estimates of sea level rise range from about 6 to 28 meters, occurring over a period of several hundred to over a thousand calendar years. At least one study suggests the pulse didn't even start until hundreds of years after the purported submergence of Atlantis.

The recent events in Charlottesville have amplified the dialogue about the resurgent boldness of white supremacists in this country. Condemnation of what unfolded there -- including the murder of a woman protesting against the "Unite the Right" rally -- was generally swift and strong. A notable exception, of course, was the milquetoast reaction of President Trump. He shot an air ball on the political equivalent of a layup. It's part of a pattern of top-down weakness on this issue.

Charlottesville has catalyzed a conversation that we need to have in this country. White supremacism is a scourge that's been present since before our country was founded. It's a chronic illness. While the problem isn't new, however, one could argue (persuasively, I think) that what's happening now has new elements that need to be discussed and factored into strategies for dealing with the problem. Social media is one. The current political climate is another.

It's a relatively simple thing to express disgust and outrage at the ideas, goals, and behaviors of white supremacists. I've seen it all over Facebook and Twitter, as well as in statements by officials at all levels of government. Some of the archaeologists I know have latched onto various memes showing Indiana Jones punching a Nazi.  We are forever entangled in a love/hate relationship with Indiana Jones (looting graves = bad; punching Nazis = good).

That's all well and good, but we can do much better. Sharing a meme is -- literally -- the least you can do.

I'd like to challenge my friends in academic anthropology, archaeology, and other social sciences and humanities (e.g., sociology, history, psychology, political science, etc.) to integrate discussions of white supremacism into your classrooms. I expressed similar sentiments the day after the election. I have seen nothing in the past six months that has persuaded me that I was wrong.

As an archaeologist, my expertise lies in interpreting the human past through material remains. When evaluating a claim about the past, it is always fair and necessary to ask "how do you know?" Being a good archaeologist means being able to consider multiple explanations and interpretations and generate expectations that can be evaluated based on material evidence. It's a process that can be tedious, complex, sometimes fruitless, and often unsatisfying to those who want quick, easy answers. As disappointing as it may be to those who want archaeologists to be like Indiana Jones, developing and using scientific frameworks to figure out what, why, and how things happened in the human past is central to the project of archaeology. It's how we know what we know.

So what does that have to do with white supremacism?

White supremacist ideology, like many ideologies, is warranted in part by claims about the past. For a taste of what underlies the modern Alt-right's basket of baloney, see this post I wrote in January about Richard Spencer's interview of Kevin MacDonald.  The old-school German Nazis loved Atlantis, as do modern Aryan enthusiasts (like this one and this one). Slavery in the early United States was justified based in part on Samuel Morton's polygenist racial hierarchy, which he constructed using cranial data. Colonialism, empire-building, use of the Mound Builder myth to justify the forced removal of Native American populations . . . the list goes on and on. Claims about the past are entangled with claims about the inherent superiority of white people in all of these cases.

While many of the most racist misuses of archaeology can be traced back to the Victorian era, they aren't ancient history for the white supremacists who inhabit our social, cultural, and political landscape today. As professional archaeologists, we need to understand where those ideas come from, what basis they claim in fact, and why they gained traction. And we need to be able to explain why they are incorrect, not just assert that they're incorrect.  We need to be able to teach others to independently and critically evaluate the claims about the past that are presented to them. I don't have any specific data, but when I look at pictures of the white supremacists in Charlottesville, I see a lot of young faces. Much of the crowd was of college age. That's the age demographic we interact with.  

In my opinion, it's not enough for us as archaeologists and anthropologists to simply repeat the mantra of tolerance. We need to dig in our heels and use our expertise to expose students to the information and processes that give us such confidence that white supremacism has no basis in fact. This is something that all four branches can participate in. Physical anthropology, cultural anthropology, linguistics . . . they're all relevant to the discussion and there's plenty to go around.

This is a four-field problem if ever there was one. I think Franz Boas would agree with me. I understand the visceral reaction of wanting to advertise that you'd like to punch Nazis. I'm asking you to think about your syllabus, also. Can you fit in a discussion of the the early history of physical anthropology? Can you find time to talk about one or two examples of how archaeology is abused for the sake of nationalism?

I'm not sure exactly what Papa Franz would do if he was alive today, but I'm sure he wouldn't have been silent. 

Next up in my Forbidden Archaeology class is a critical reading of the 2015 book Species with Amnesia by Robert Sepehr. I chose this book because it checked the boxes for many of the issues that I'd like to address in our section on "ice age civilization" and I could find no existing, detailed, online appraisal of its claims.

I'm quickly working my way through the book this weekend, prepping for our in-class discussions and assembling a list of topics for the students' next round of blog posts. My plan is to do a sort of distributed "group" critique of the book, assigning a small section or particular claim to each of the twenty students. While I'm familiar with many of the things discussed in the book, it is jam packed with assertions about "evidence" that I've never come across before. It will be fun to turn the students loose on a set of those claims and see what they come up with.

Another thing that I've discovered during my quick reading is . . . wait for it . . . plagiarism! This probably will not come as a shock to those of you familiar with these kinds of works, as plagiarism is endemic in the "fringe" world. I don't yet have a sense of how much of the content of the book is thinly-modified cut-and-paste, I just know that I've stumbled onto several examples without even really trying.

Here's a passage from Species with Amnesia about the Peruvian "Lady of the Mask" mummy (page 102):

"Piercing blue eyes undimmed by the passing of 1,300 years, this is the "Lady of the Mask" a mummy with striking blue eyes, whose discovery could reveal the secrets of a lost culture at the Huaca Pucllana Pyramid located in Lima, Peru."

And here are the first two paragraphs of a 2008 article in the Daily Mail: 

"Piercing blue eyes undimmed by the passing of 1,300 years, this is the Lady of the Mask – a mummy whose discovery could reveal the secrets of a lost culture.
​
She was found by archaeologists excavating a pyramid in Peru’s capital city Lima, alongside two other adult mummies and the sacrificial remains of a child."

(Note to students: adding quotation marks around a phrase ("Lady of the Mask") and deleting a hyphen does not transform someone else's work into your own work. I don't see the Daily Mail article in the bibliography, and there are no citations in the paragraph.

That's pretty clear and simple. I found a more tangled case in one of Sepehr's discussions of Cro-Magnon. He seems to have paraphrased and sometimes borrowed directly either from a piece by Carson Reed on this website (about Cro-Magnon, Atlantis, and the teachings of Madame Blavatsky) or from R. Cedric Leonard (also used by Reed).  Here is a passage from Species with Amnesia (page 49):

"Many Cro-Magnon villages consisted of houses, but we don't know what they were made of. All we have are the remains of hearths and post hole patterns."

Here is a sentence from Reed's piece:

"These cave men also had houses! We do not know what exactly they were made of but we do have the post holes."

Here is another passage from Species with Amnesia (page 45):

"Professor of anthropology at Rutgers University, Dr. John E. Pfeiffer, observes that the Aurignacian was quite distinct and that it arrived from some area outside of Western Europe; with an already "established way of life.""

And from Reed's piece:

"Dr. John E. Pfeiffer, professor of anthropology at Rutgers University observes: "The Aurignacian is quite distinct from the Parigordian" [ a separate older European style ]; they arrive "from some area outside of Western Europe"; with an already "established way of life.""

Reed cites R. Cedric Leonard at the end of this section and provides a URL. Sepehr cites Leonard's (2011) book after his sentence about Pfeiffer.  On Leonard's webpage we find this sentence:

"Dr. John E. Pfeiffer, professor of anthropology at Rutgers University observes: "The Aurignacian is quite distinct from the Perigordian"; they arrive "from some area outside of Western Europe"; with an already "established way of life.""

So it's possible that Sepehr plagiarized Reed, or perhaps plagiarized Leonard directly. I suppose it doesn't really matter.

As I skimmed through Leonard's webpage, I recognized more sentences from Species with Amnesia. Compare these two passages:

"In an article entitled "Why don't We Call Them Cro-Magnon Anymore?", K. Krist Hirst suggests that the physical dimensions of Cro-Magnon specimens are not sufficiently different from modern humans to warrant a separate designation. Leonard raises the concern that this would make it all too convenient to eliminate the embarrassing origin problem. And what about the even more important cultural differences (totally differing tool kits, settlement patterns, art impulse, etc.)? (38) Are we to simply "bland out" all these diversities under one designation? This doesn't strike me as a scientific practice."

That's from Species with Amnesia (page 48). This is from Leonard's webpage:

​"In an article entitled "Why don't We Call Them Cro-Magnon Anymore?" the author K. Krist Hirst suggests that the physical dimensions of Cro-Magnon specimens are not sufficiently different from modern humans to warrant a separate designation. My concern, of course, is that this would make it all too convenient to eliminate the embarrassing origin problem. And what about the even more important culture differences (totally differing tool kits, settlement patterns, art impulse, etc.)? Are we to simply "bland out" all these diversities under one designation? This doesn't strike me as scientific anthropological practice."

The (38) in Sepehr's passage is a citation to Leonard's book, so he is acknowledging him in some way. But any real scholar (and, indeed, any reasonably honest high school student) will tell you that dropping a citation in the middle of a paragraph copied almost word-for-word but not quoted is Plagiarism 101. A person reading Sepehr's passage is left with the impression that the idea of "important cultural differences" came from Leonard but all the the other ideas and words are Sepehr's. Obviously that's not the case.

Hopefully there are some original ideas and some original writing in Species with Amnesia. I'd rather spend my time addressing those then stumbling over sloppy plagiarism.

Update (10/8/2016): This is turning into a bummer. A passage from this webpage ("Atlantis the Myth" by  Alan G. Hefner) appears word for word in Species with Amnesia (pages 107-108):

"According to ancient Egyptian temple records the Athenians fought an aggressive war against the rulers of Atlantis some nine thousand years earlier and won.These ancient and powerful kings or rulers of Atlantis had formed a confederation by which they controlled Atlantis and other islands as well. They began a war from their homeland in the Atlantic Ocean and sent fighting troops to Europe and Asia. Against this attack the men of Athens formed a coalition from all over Greece to halt it. When this coalition met difficulties their allies deserted them and the Athenians fought on alone to defeat the Atlantian rulers. They stopped an invasion of their own country as well as freeing Egypt and eventually every country under the control of the rulers of Atlantis."

The section right after that (pages 108-109) is apparently cribbed directly from this 2013 blog post, changing a few words.

Then the section on Iran (page 109) has sections apparently from this webpage.

Update (10/8/2016):

The section on the Berbers (pages 86-87) also apparently contains plagiarized material. From Species with Amnesia:

"The Berbers are considered the aboriginals of the area and their origins beyond that are not officially known. Many theories have been advanced relating them to the Canaanites, the Phoenicians, the Celts, and the Caucasians from Anatolia. In classical times the Berbers formed such states as Mauritania and Numidia."

Here is a section from the same Carson Reed piece discussed earlier:

"From a useful traditional source:

Despite a history of conquests, the Berbers retained a remarkably homogeneous culture, which, on the evidence of Egyptian tomb paintings, derives from earlier than 2400 B.C. The alphabet of the only partly deciphered ancient Libyan inscriptions is close to the script still used by the Tuareg. The origins of the Berbers are uncertain, although many theories have been advanced relating them to the Canaanites, the Phoenicians, the Celts, the Basques, and the Caucasians. In classical times the Berbers formed such states as Mauritania and Numidia. (http://www.answers.com/topic/berber-people)"

So Sepehr apparently just copied his analysis of the Berbers from answers.com. Great.

Continuing on, part of his discussion of the Guanaches of the Canary Islands matches text on this DNA ancestry site. Here is a passage from Species with Amnesia (page 88):

"Isolated in their islands, the Guanches preserved their pristine Cro-Magnon genetic traits in a more or less pure fashion until the arrival of the Spanish."

And from Family Tree DNA: 

"Isolated in their islands, the Guanches were prevented, until the advent of the Spanish, from sexually mingling with other races. So, they preserved their pristine Cro-Magnon genetic traits in a more or less pure fashion until that date."