I'm about to get on airplane for some holiday travel. I'm hoping to spend much of the coming week not doing much work, but I've been working hard over the last few weeks to finish a "beta" (i.e., mostly complete) version of The Argumentative Archaeologist website. It's done!  Go have a look!  Please spread the word.

I don't have time to write much about it now, so I'm just going to paste in the content from the About page:

The Argumentative Archaeologist is a website that organizes and compiles links to fact-based information and analysis related to fantastic claims about the human past.  While not all "fringe" (i.e., non-mainstream) claims have been shown to be untrue, many have (some of them over, and over, and over again . . .).  The goal of this site is to provide road maps to information that will help you both identify what's BS and understand the history and context of some of the many claims about the past that can be shown to be false.  They can't all be true, right?.

Who Are the Intended Audiences?

This site was conceived and designed with three main audiences in mind:

• The Public. Almost by definition, most "fringe" ideas come from outside the professional archaeological community.  The marketing and selling of those ideas, not surprisingly, are largely targeted to audiences that are also outside of the professional archaeological community ("bypassing the mainstream" is a common part of the pitch). The "fringe" community has done a good job of exploiting traditional print and television media as well as utilizing the internet to uncritically spread sensational claims about the past.  While many of those "fringe" claims can easily be shown to be false, the voices of the few individuals and organizations that have made a concerted effort to address the factual basis of those claims are often drowned out the megaphones that the "fringe" community has built for itself.  This site is an attempt to assemble links to openly available, critical analysis of "fringe" claims into one central location to make it easier for interested members of the public to get the other side of the story. It wasn't aliens - see for yourself!

• Educators. College courses that engage with the history, context, and evidence associated with "fringe" claims about the past are becoming increasingly common. I know several people that teach them, and I myself am planning on teaching one in the Fall Semester of 2016. While traditional textbooks are available that cover many facets of pseudo-archaeology, I feel that much of the real work that is being to address and understand "fringe" claims as they emerge and develop is being done online in formats such as blogs.  Blogs can and have been used to address many different aspects of "fringe" claims with a timeliness and forthrightness that would be impossible in the context of a traditional textbook. I hope that people teaching courses on pseudo-archaeology find this site useful in terms of both the kinds of information it presents and the organization of that information.

• Researchers (Both Kinds). I hope the links compiled on this site will help those of you out there interested in performing research on many different facets of pseudo-archaeology: where do these claims come from? why are they popular? what do we know about artifact x or site y? I know that I have learned several things I did not know just through the process of initial construction of the site (and that is without actually reading in detail the large majority of the content to which this site links). While many claims have been addressed repeatedly and are fairly well understood, many have not and are not. I think it would also be of great benefit to "fringe" researchers to make an effort to understand the arguments against their claims.  I know that may be difficult when you really, really, really want something to be true . . . but if you want your ideas to be taken seriously you will have to someday address an evidence-based critique.  I'm not optimistic that will happen (evaluating the willingness to actually test an idea is one of the key ways to discriminate between archaeology and pseudo-archaeology), but it would be nice. Maybe try not just repeating the same dumb, incorrect thing that someone else already said? Just an idea.​​

How Do You Choose the Content?

The content in this site was not chosen to give "equal time" to skeptical and "fringe" voices.  As mentioned above, the "fringe" side of the equation has developed a powerful set of tools to communicate its various messages: it does not require any assistance.  This site is intended to serve as a counterpoint to "fringe" claims, providing links to critical analyses of components of those claims, links to critical reviews of "fringe" media, and a structure that lets the user explore and understand how various components of "fringe" claims are inter-connected.

During the initial construction of this site (October-November 2015), I mined the blogs of several of the major skeptical online voices of which I am aware: Jason Colavito, ArchyFantasies, Bad Archaeology, Glen Kuban, Skeptoid, Le Site d'Irna, Michael Heiser, Ancient Aliens Debunked, Hot Cup of Joe, and my own website (Andy White Anthropology). This site does not link to all posts on those websites, of course, but it links to many that are related to the topics of interest here. My plan is to monitor those sites and add links to new posts (and new topics) as they become available. I would love to hear about articles, posts, and other skeptical sites of which I am unaware (please use the Suggestion Box).​

Why Do You Present the Content the Way You Do?

The work of critically evaluating "fringe" claims about the human past is being done by very few individuals.  I hope that this site brings attention (and web traffic) to their efforts.  My guess is that most of us who take the time to investigate and write something about the nonsense that's being sold as knowledge aren't making any money by doing so (in stark contrast to the "fringe" side, which has a large commercial component). Credit should go where credit is due: write an email and thank your favorite skeptic for his or her hard work.

I have used block quotes to introduce many of the topics, artifacts, and sites for which I have created entries. Many of those quotes are from Wikipedia.  I chose to do this not because it is the best source of information, but because it probably reflects a reasonable consensus view.  And it's designed to be "open."  I've attributed the textual quotes that I use, and I've attributed the sources of images that I use by linking to my sources.  I have added internal links (i.e., links pointing to other pages within this website) and indicated those changes with the designation [links added]. I do not believe that I am violating any copyrights or other prohibitions by presenting the material the way I do. If you disagree, please let me know via email (aawhite@mailbox.sc.edu).​

What Do I Do Now?

Begin your search for information by Topic, by Person, by Geographical Area, by Title of a book, film, or television program, by Meme or Image, or Alphabetically. ​Please use the Suggestion Box to offer topics or links to information, and please sign the Guestbook.

​Enjoy! 

Scott Wolter, Josh Gates, and Don Wildman may be surprised to learn that, whatever else they may have accomplished, they're just not as popular on social media as J. Hutton Pulitzer (aka J. Jovan Philyaw aka TreasureForce Commander).  This is the startling yet inescapable conclusion one reaches when viewing the "social fan base" data assembled by . . . wait for it . . . J. Hutton Pulitzer. Sorry, TV personalities, you're just not cutting it: the 2015 Award for Most Socially Powerful Explorer goes to . . . wait for it again . . . J. Hutton Pulitzer! 

Well, okay, that's not a 100% accurate statement: I'm not sure what the actual title of the award is, and Pulitzer didn't formally announce that he'd won. I'm also not sure if there's a statue or a plaque or something that goes with the title.  Perhaps I can create some kind of certificate to mark this special distinction. 

I think this comparative plea for recognition (titled "Do Explorers on TV Impact Our Social Lives?"), like many things associated with Pulitzer, is pretty funny. But I also think it reveals something interesting about the struggle for credibility, influence, and identity in the crowded arena of "forbidden history." From the first time I saw Pulitzer on The Curse of Oak Island, my hypothesis about him has been that he's all about getting himself on TV. Nothing I have seen since then has changed my opinion, and this comparison with TV "explorers" reinforces it: this is a person who very much wants to be in the TV club.  But he also wants you to think he can be influential without being on TV. He's working on making his case for being on television even while pretending he doesn't want or need to be on television. It's a little bizarre.

It's fair to ask why television appearances retain such prestige in the internet age. There are, after all, now a lot of ways to spread a message that don't require an investment from a production company or a television network: blog posts, YouTube videos, podcasts, Twitter, Facebook groups, etc.  My gut feeling is that the combined impact of all of these "ground up" mechanisms and avenues for spreading ideas is probably significantly greater than television programming, especially among people in their twenties and thirties.  There is some evidence suggesting that the popularity of "fringe" television programming ( a growth industry over the last few years) may be starting to decline. Perhaps television appearances retain a special allure as a signal of success not because they are the best way to communicate an idea, but because the outside investment in that communication appears to represent an independent nod of approval.

Divorced from its "I should be in the TV club" subtext, Pulitzer's point is a fair one: influence really can't be measured simply by success on television. I don't think anyone would argue that.  But I also think it's silly to claim that "social power" can be measured by YouTube views (or Twitter followers, or Facebook group membership counts).  Taking YouTube views as the metric, for example, Pulitzer's influence lags far behind such icons of "social power" as Justin Bieber and many anonymous people who systematically reveal things hidden inside toy eggs.  By his count, Pulizer's "social power" is neck-and-neck with this guy who recorded himself in a pumpkin mask and leotard dancing to the theme from Ghostbusters nine years ago. 

But I'm not even sure Pulitzer's YouTube comparison is fair. How does Scott Wolter have a zero?  A search for "Scott Wolter" on YouTube returns a long list of videos, many of which have thousands of views.  Do those videos not count for some reason?

I'm also not sure what videos Pulitzer includes in his own total.  Does he count the 1,439 views of the "Who Is J. Hutton Pulitzer?" video where he states that his "instinct to excel" is "part of his genetic legacy"? Does he include the whopping 249 views of this video about the "Copper Culture" that includes allegedly fake artifacts? 

Lack of clarity about actual data (and what they mean) is not a surprise from Pulitzer: it's typical and, I think, symptomatic of the real reason he doesn't have his own television program.  Unlike Wolter, Pulitzer has neither an idea of his own nor the understanding of how to make a compelling argument about one.  And, in my opinion, he hasn't demonstrated the charisma, personality, or minimal expertise necessary to successfully or credibly host a travel-based program like Gates' Expedition Unknown.  But I'm not a TV producer, so what the hell do I know? I'm just a simple archaeologist who has never been on television (other than a few minutes of local news here and there) and had no part in inventing a product that contributed to the demise of RadioShack. 

I've been criticized in the past for going after Pulitzer's style rather than the substance of his ideas.  My defense to that is simple: what ideas? Show me an actual argument based on evidence and I'd be happy to have a look at it.  I have yet to see anything interesting backing up the fluff and bluster, and I think it's pretty easy to see through all the silliness (it's much easier to simply re-label photographs and do interviews than it is to actually collect data and perform an analysis).  What's left when you strip away the show business?  Not much. For me, Pulitzer's case has become an interesting one to watch to see how far the guy can get by re-inventing himself as an "explorer," growing a beard, and asserting that he is exposing "forbidden truths."  How do you measure success in that endeavor?  Pulitzer seems to be making the argument that you can measure success by "social power" (as well as, presumably, television ratings, paid speaking appearances, book sales, etc.).  There's undoubtedly something to that.  But if YouTube views are supposed to be some kind of indication of substance,  I present to you the Justin Bieber and Pumpkin Dance evidence as Exhibit A of my counter-argument.  And I still can't find Pulitzer's newly-minted term "OOP-gly" on Wikipedia.  So it seems full mastery of the online environment remains an unattained goal, with plenty of room for growth.

If you woke up this morning wondering what J. Hutton Pulitzer has been up to, you're not alone:  you've got me to keep you company! 

I lost track of our friend after he kicked me out of one his Facebook groups this summer and I quit another. Previous to that, I had written about such weighty Pulitzer-related topics as the idea of Jurassic-age "Super Ancient Copper Culture" in Michigan, an interview where Pulitzer marveled at the SECRET ARCHIVES hidden in plain sight in the Allen County Public Library, Pulitzer's use of lots of exclamation points to "prove" that Minoans discovered Tennessee, and his use of allegedly fake copper artifacts to "educate" his fans.

As the four readers of this blog may have noticed, I haven't written anything for several weeks.  I've been on vacation.  I spent a couple of weeks in Michigan's beautiful Upper Peninsula, watching lawnmower races, visiting the beach, photographing dragonflies, and spending a lot of time with my family. Then last week I took a short road trip with my daughter to see Against Me! in concert in Grand Rapids.  And we also saw "Mad Max: Fury Road" and visited the graves of Frank L. White (the man on the Cream of Wheat box) and Mr. Chicken, a rooster with plastic legs that was a blood donor to a parrot then died fighting a raccoon.  So . . . you know . . . vacation.

For better or worse, I didn't completely tune out anthropology, archaeology, and fringe nonsense during my vacation. I don't have anything ground-breaking to talk about, but I wanted to share a few vignettes that I think illustrate what goes on outside "mainstream" archaeology.

The Indiana "Mummy" That Wasn't

On June 27th, www.nwitimes.com ran a story with the headline "Ancient burial ground? Mummy found in Lake County could be 2,000 years old." Calling the remains a "mummy" turned out, of course, to have been an error: a July 2 story corrected the initial account, stating that the remains were not those of a mummy, but "just turned out to be really old."

But the fringe crowd has decided that the lack of an actual mummy from Indiana shouldn't detract from the joy of talking about a mummy from Indiana. They're milking all the mileage they can from it, and the correction to the story is now taken as evidence of a cover-up.  J. Hutton Pulitzer contacted me and asked me to be on his radio show to discuss the "mummy."  I declined.  I was on vacation watching three kids, and, believe it or not, contributing to Pulitzer's campaign of manufactured crap masquerading as an interest in history is about as low down on my priority list as it gets.  As best I can tell, much of his silliness is calculated to get him on TV or sell his treasure hunting books.  I'll pass.

Anyway, there's no mummy from Indiana.  The story is relevant to understanding fringe archaeology culture for two reasons, though:

• It illustrates how a small error ("mummy") that makes a story more sensational can encourage it to spread. The "mummy" mistake made the story  interesting to those who don't really understand prehistory and archaeology.  Without a "mummy," the story goes nowhere: the "it's a mummy!" story has been "recommended" on Facebook over 3000 times; the "oh wait it's not a mummy" story, in contrast, has been "recommended" just 188 times.

 

• It illustrates how reluctant fringe theorists are to let pesky details mess up a good story. I originally learned of the "it's not a mummy" follow-up story through a Facebook post by Pulitzer.  He has since removed the link to the actual story that says there is no mummy, presumably because it is inconvenient.  The photos of Egyptian mummies circulating with the news stories don't have anything to do with the remains from Indiana, but that doesn't get in the way of Pulitzer discussing the meaning of the "mummy's wrappings," or the RundownLive posting the pictures along with the story.  The photo attached to the WGN story, perhaps the one most commonly reproduced, was from the mummy Minirdis in the Field Museum.
  

This embrace of the patently untrue to further a story brings us to the next vignette, another J. Hutton Pulitzer special.

Fake Artifacts Are Evidence Too, Apparently

When there's a market for artifacts, fakes will be produced in an attempt to capitalize on that market.  This is true of some lithic artifacts from eastern North America (such as fluted points).  It's also true of copper artifacts: they have a value to collectors, and fakes are produced for the purposes of making money.  If I were attempting a serious artifact-based analysis of some aspect of prehistory (say, for example, trying to demonstrate that copper artifacts from North America were the product of craftsmen from the Old World), I would want to have some degree of confidence that the artifacts upon which I based my analysis were genuine.

But I guess that's just me.

Pulitzer made a video of "flashcards" to help his followers quickly recognize what a copper artifact looks like.  It turns out that some of the artifacts shown in the video were allegedly fake (i.e., not ancient, but modern reproductions that were produced to sell).  An artifact collector (Lee Born) who claims to have been defrauded brought the presence of the alleged fakes to Pulitzer's attention in a post on one of his Facebook groups. Pulitzer's response was to accuse Born (who had taken the case to court, and won) of libel, saying there was no court case. 

I got involved in the discussion and posted links to a Green Lake County, Wisconsin, court document which showed that Lee Born won a judgement in 2008 for $2,264.80 against Mary Ann Peltier. The document doesn't say what the suit was about, but reportedly it concerned the sale of modern copper artifacts that were represented as ancient.  From what I gather, there is a long story behind "Mary's Copper" (see this website, and the discussion on this forum) and the controversies about it.  I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on the legal proceedings or the story behind them, or to have the expertise to discriminate ancient from modern copper artifacts.  But it's demonstrably true that Born took Peltier to court and won damages.

A person really interested in understanding prehistory would want to know about allegedly fake artifacts that were contaminating his analysis.  Pulitzer preferred not to know, I guess, and really didn't want to talk about it (he eventually kicked me off the site, and the alleged fakes remain in his "flashcard" video).  As long as we're making videos with fake things in it, we should at least spice them up a little bit. I recommend adding some stuff about the Flat Earth.  Or maybe some pictures of unicorns.  Which brings me to my next story.

Photo Of Unicorn Barfing Rainbow Brings Out The Best In People

One of the "archaeology" groups I follow on Facebook is called Archaeology & Prehistoric& Ancient Wonders. This group has over 73,000 members, and I've learned a lot from it.  Most of what I've learned, however, has more to do with how people view the importance of the past and less to do with anything in particular about the details of prehistory.  Many of the posts in the group are related to various pseudo-science ideas about ancient aliens, Atlantis, giants, the existence of worldwide pre-Flood civilization, etc. Some people post some interesting ethnographic and historic photos, and I have learned some things about the archaeology of different parts of the world that I did not already know.

One of the most interesting things about monitoring this group is the cultural/ethnic/linguistic fault lines that are exposed in discussions about the past. Tensions among peoples who identify as southern European (Greeks, Albanians, Serbs, etc.) are especially prominent, with lengthy arguments arising frequently and seemingly out of nowhere.

This was illustrated to me yet again just yesterday.  Bored, I had posted an image of a unicorn with a rainbow and a caption saying that it was as relevant to prehistory as many of the posts in the group (a true statement). As of now, there have been 212 comments, most of them related to an ugly homophobic argument among southern Europeans.  All I did was post a picture of a unicorn with a rainbow.

I don't know if/how/when arguments like these break out in other places on the internet, but I find it interesting that a group that is purportedly about interpretations of the past serves so readily as a battleground for unleashing the tensions of the present.  If you think the past doesn't matter to people . . . my experience says otherwise.  Someday I'm going to do a quantitative analysis of the posts and the comments in this group, and I think it will reveal some interesting patterns.

"May The GREAT RAVEN GOD TAKE YOU STUPID"

Finally, my last story relates to audience feedback.  I don't get a lot of comments on this blog, but sometimes my audience really comes through and lets me know that I'm doing the right thing by taking the time to write.

As my daughter and I were visiting the cemetery in Leslie, Michigan, where Frank L. "Cream of Wheat Man" White is buried, I noticed a grave with a bronze placard next to it. It was the grave of Elijah Woodworth (1792-1886), the first European settler of Leslie.  Woodworth had written his own epitaph, which proclaimed him to be "The first itinerant lecturer in the field of modern spiritualism, and controlled to write ancient languages in the form of hieroglyphic characters; a modern seer and sage in natural and spiritual civilization . . ."  The reference to "ancient languages" piqued my curiosity, but I haven't found much about Mr. Woodworth yet (I wonder if he is somehow related to Maria Woodworth-Etter, an important person in the early Pentecostal movement).

It did get me thinking about what I would write on my own tombstone, however.  I realized the answer had already been provided to me in the form of a comment on my post about retractions of the 1885 hoax story about a city buried under Moberly, Missouri. After cutting and pasting a long story about encountering reptiles in an underground tunnel, a commenter had the following to say:

"Dear ANDY WHITE
are you fake anthropologist? NOT BELIEVING in MAGIC is SIN under ANTHROPOLOGY/FOLKLORE!
the number one rule #1 Magic is Science has Religion which is Philosophy!, ie the Occult/Metaphysics based on the teaching of houdini and buddhist and norse and egyptian all being in collaboration on telling the same story!
for SHAME ON YOU FOR failing to understand Cybernetics(cyber anthology the use of infomantics ie information technology on all the science to singletary )(? May the GREAT RAVEN GOD TAKE YOU STUPID, also i hope a lizard man eats you!"

I think that speaks for itself.