A couple of days ago, I watched the TV program Unexplained and Unexplored for the first time. Although I knew the show existed because of Jason Colavito's reviews, I was unprepared for how bad it would be. It was bad. Really really bad.

I tuned into the episode "Mystery of the American Maya" because I learned that J. Hutton Pulitzer would be on the program. Given my recent interactions with him, I was curious what he would say about the Maya.  I have a few things to say about that and then a few things to say about the rest of the episode, which was just ridiculous. Seriously: it made America Unearthed look like a master class in scholarship and the scientific method.

First: the Pulitzer part.

Early in the program, Pulitzer (identified on screen as "Jovan Hutton") is introduced as "one of the most respected experts on the Maya." That's an amazing statement, and one that I'm sure will surprise many experts on the Maya. We are then told that Pulitzer has "spent a lifetime decoding the Dresden Codex." 

So what insights has this lifetime of study produced? We learn nothing about the glyphs on the codex, but are instead are told that an image apparently depicting a caracara bird means that the Maya must have traveled to Florida. Pulitzer says that

Well, if you told me that I'd tell you you were wrong. And then I'd show you why.

First, if you look at the Wikipedia page for the caracara, you will quickly see that the bird's distribution is far, far wider than just the Maya region and Florida. Look, I made a map: the dark red is the distribution of the northern crested caracara (Caracara cheriway); the Maya region is superimposed. The present day distribution of the caracara is much wider than Pulitzer tells us.

And we know something about how the distribution got that way. Spoiler alert: the birds didn't get to where they are today by being boated around on Maya canoes. The current distribution of caracara populations is reduced from a much wider distribution during the Pleistocene. Here, again, Wikipedia can shed light on what, apparently, a lifetime of study missed:

"The state of Florida is home to a relict population of northern caracaras that dates to the last glacial period, which ended around 12,500 BP. At that point in time, Florida and the rest of the Gulf Coast was covered in an oak savanna. As temperatures increased, the savanna between Florida and Texas disappeared. Caracaras were able to survive in the prairies of central Florida as well as in the marshes along the St. Johns River."

In other words, the caracara were in Florida way before the Maya existed, and, in fact, probably before any humans ever set foot in Florida. There's a fossil record of the bird in the region. Here's a story, for example, about a 2,500-year-old caracara skeleton from the Bahamas.

So, in actuality, the presence of the caracara bird in Florida says exactly nothing relevant to the claim that the ancient Maya traveled to Florida.

Following the conceit that the Maya were boating around the Gulf with eagles, however, Unexplained and Unexplored goes on to pretend to find evidence of Mayan canoes, Mayan step pyramids, and Mayan stele in Florida.  They use a drone, sonar, and LiDAR to look for Mayan sites and artifacts in various areas that, I'm sure, have all been well-mapped and explored. The canoes are cool, but I see nothing to suggest that they were made by the Maya (finds of prehistoric canoes are common in Florida relatively to other places -- the oldest dates to about 5000 BC). The "stepped pyramid" they pretend to discover near the end of the program was documented extensively in a 2016 article in American Antiquity.

Someone should invent a word for simultaneously cringing, yelling, and yawing. I actually feel a bit sorry for anyone and everyone involved in this tragicomic attempt at a television program: it is so full of misrepresentation, idiotic fantasy, and pretend "discovery" that it's hard to watch. I'd like to say that you can't really produce anything much dumber than this show, but I bet someone will find a way.

And, to be clear, I don't think it's a crazy idea that pre-Columbian societies around the Gulf of Mexico may have interacted in one way or another. They were all coastal peoples, after all, and the entire region was populated. But there is a lot of daylight between accepting the idea that contact of one form or another was possible (or even probable) and accepting as evidence the kind of baloney that this program builds its case on.

Near the end, the narrator states that "our journey has confirmed the presence of the Maya throughout Florida." Cool story, bro -- tell it again. I bet they will. Probably many more times.

I suspect that elements of my arrival story to the world of "ancient mysteries" will resonate with others in my generation: I watched In Search Of . . . on TV, was fascinated by anything weird in the various Time-Life Books we had at home, and found myself drawn to the small paranormal section in the local library.  The "information" was out there, but it was up to me to find it. Commercial media was financially motivated to lend a helping hand.

Many of you who, like me, had to actively seek out pseudo-science during your formative years will be surprised to learn that the Miami-Dade County Public Schools (MDCPS) is now apparently spoon-feeding it to high school kids in their classrooms. Here's a screenshot from the African American Voices Lesson Plan: 

Yeah, so . . . MDCPS has apparently interpreted the Florida state standard of "Recognize significant events, figures, and contributions of Islamic, Meso-American, South American and Sub-Saharan African civilizations" as a hyper-diffusionist's wet dream.  If reading through the tortured objectives, activities, and questions in this lesson plan leaves you confused about the focus, I refer you to the suggested readings: Ivan Van Sertima and Gavin Menzies. Pro tip for you MDCPS: add Barry Fell, the Book of Mormon, and some white supremacist crap about Atlanteans to round out this list. Then you'll have a unit really worthy of appropriating Native American cultures.

This is one of the four "Higher Order Thinking Questions:"

4. What peoples do the Olmec statue heads most likely represents? How can you tell?

MDCPS: leading the nation in meme-based learning?

The claim that there was any African "influence" on Olmec society is, as far as I know, not accepted by any actual scholars on Mesoamerican history and culture. In a quick search I could not find any other examples of Florida school curricula that interpreted ​SS.912.W.3.15 like MDCPS apparently has. It seems that MDCPS is alone in so baldly blending pseudo-scientific claims into its social studies program.

It's a shame for many reasons, and I hope someone in a position of authority sees fit to take a look at this. I agree completely that non-European aspects of world history need to be taught far more aggressively. But substituting a focus on European exploration and colonization with a raft of dubious claims about non-European exploration and colonization and casting it as a study of Mesoamerican civilization is absurd. I see nothing in the lesson plan that suggests fringe claims are being critically evaluated on the basis of evidence. Instead it appears that the claims are to be taken at face value and accepted as evidence that the history books are wrong.

Sound familiar?

You're not doing your students any favors. The History Channel will probably send a gift basket, though.

​I thank my friend Pablo Benavente for making me aware of this story via the Fraudulent Archaeology Wall of Shame.

Afternote:

​I found this page at Prairie View A&M University.

Followers of my blog know that my year is starting to settle into a seasonal cycle of 9 months of archaeology and academics and 3 months of art. The lines aren't that sharp, but summer is the time when I get to exhale a little bit and spend time thinking about something other than the human past. I don't get paid by the University over the summer, and it has been nice to begin getting some economic utility from my art. So far I'm nowhere near being able to live off what I make selling sculptures, but it helps.

There are many different aspects of my art that I think are worth writing about and that I'd like to write about, but I find that when I have a window of discretionary time the last thing I want to do is sit down and write. So here are a few bits of super-condensed thoughts and news items from this spring.

ArtFields 2018 Has Come and Gone

If you haven't noticed, I'm a bit competitive. One of the main reasons I was interested in ArtFields was to see if I could get in, and, passing that bar, see if my entry would win anything. I got in, but I didn't win. What I did get was a better sense of how the competition works and the space my work occupies in the context of other contemporary art.

I wish I could have spent a bit more time in Lake City while with event was in full swing, but there was just too much going on at home and at work. I did manage to spend a couple of hours in town on a Wednesday (perhaps at the mid-week low point of attendance) and check out a couple of galleries and wander around town. I saw some art that really impressed me (clearly ArtFields ain't the State Fair) and some that seemed so boring and stale that I wondered how in the hell it got juried in. Everyone is entitled to an opinion, of course. The quietness of my personal experience on that Wednesday bummed me out a bit -- the density of people was so low that I didn't really get to talk to anyone about anything substantive. The longest conversation I had was with one of the docent volunteers who seemed also to be looking for someone to talk to.

After feeling like I didn't really exist there, I was happy to see that a quick shot of my piece made it into the final official video (at 3:41). The warm feeling I got seeing a bunch of kids around "Beauty and Grace" reminded me that seeing other people engage with and enjoy what I do is far more important to me than winning anything. I got a number of shouted compliments as Chris Gillam and I were taking the piece apart and loading it onto his trailer. That makes it worth it.

TAG

As I wrote back on the 11th, I took a carload of sculptures down to this year's Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG) conference at the University of Florida. It took me about 6.5 hours to get to Gainesville from Columbia. Make no mistake: the Coastal Plain is vast.

I blasted music the whole way down, but drove most of the way back on Sunday silently. I came away from TAG with some mixed feelings, but I realized that driving silently for hours meant that I wanted to be able to think about things. Leaving a conference full of thoughts is, in my book, the mark of a good conference.

The interactions to my work at TAG seemed to me to range from indifference to aesthetic appreciation to deep curiosity.  I wish there had been more of the latter. I have a lot to say about the meaning, experience, and process of what I do, and I can speak the languages of both art and archaeology/anthropology. Fewer people than I expected seemed to want to talk about it.  The conversations I did have, though, were really nice and I learned a lot from them.

I spent my Saturday evening wandering up and down University Avenue, picking up whatever metal bits and pieces I could fit in my pocket. The campus was between semesters and eerily empty. I'm planning on making something out of the small assemblage I collected and calling it "Left Behind."

"Zero" and "One"

I finished a pair of small winged rabbits that I named "Zero" and "One." I wrote a little bit about them here. I steered myself heavily back into the music of Social Distortion as I was making them, and I think it was because those "shortcuts" of binary oppositions that we use so often to understand and describe the world loom so large in Mike Ness' lyrics. Winners and losers, good and evil, lovers and haters, strong and weak, saints and sinners, cowards and heros, angels and devils, beggars and choosers . . . you get the idea. The guy has been singing about the same things since I was in elementary school. It resonates with me since I've lately realized that I'm fixated, still, on the same themes, shapes, questions, and animals that I've been fascinated by since I was a little kid. I want to keep pushing myself to explore through art, but there is nothing wrong with being curious about long-standing questions and themes that remain relevant and slippery. When something bugs you, you get to keep poking at it. On a "Michael" continuum, I'm probably about 95% Ness and 5% Angelo. 

Here's a video showing some of the making of "Zero" and "One."

ecoFAB and Re-Current Shows

I'll be participating in the upcoming ecoFAB and Re-Current shows at Tapp's, organized by my friend Flavia Lovatelli. ecoFAB is a fashion show on June 2; the clothing from that show will be displayed in the windows of Tapp's along with related art through June and July. I saw part of the fashion show last year (Afterburner was running at the same time, which is how I met Flavia) but this will be my first year as a participant.

I'm bringing "Zero" and "One" (see above) as well as "Naked Flank." I'll post pictures of the show after it happens as well as the window displays. If you're in the Columbia area you should check it out.

I feel like I've been starting every blog post lately with "it's been a busy week." I'm too busy to go back and check. 

I'm travelling to Gainesville, Florida, this weekend to participate in the 2018 Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG) conference at the University of Florida. I'm looking forward to meeting a lot of new people and hearing about their work and ideas (many of which I suspect will be pretty far removed from what I spend most of my time thinking about).  I'm going as one of the featured artists, which means I'll be travelling with a car full of metal creatures rather than a Powerpoint. ​

When Ken Sassaman originally approached me about TAG, I strongly considered giving a paper. Even though much of what will be discussed is probably outside my theoretical wheelhouse, I thought I could contribute some insights into how/why/when materials in the "functional" realm can move into the "symbolic" one. I was planning on speaking from my own personal experience as an artist, tempered and informed by my training as someone who studies humans through their material culture. But with everything else going on this spring I gave up on the idea of doing a presentation and just decided to go with a scrap metal crow riding shotgun. 

I'm looking forward to some good conversations! Catch me early in the day for the best chance at coherence, later in the day for a more rambling dialogue.

I've loaded a pdf version of my 2016 SEAC presentation "Social Implications of Large-Scale Demographic Change During the Early Archaic Period in the Southeast" onto my Academia.edu page (you can also access a copy here). Other than a few minor alterations to complete the citations and adjust the slides to get rid of the animations, it's what I presented at the meetings last Friday. I tend to use slides as prompts for speaking, so some of the information that I tried to convey isn't directly represented on the slides. There's enough there that you can get a pretty good idea, I hope, of what I was going for.