Category: Giants Of Olden Times

Happy Thanksgiving, Critical Thinkers: "The Argumentative Archaeologist"

11/21/2015

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!

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Bible Dictionaries and Augustin Calmet's Thoughts on the First Men

10/4/2015

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How tall was Adam?

If you've been following along at home, you know that Ben Carson's comments about creation and evolution have reinvigorated my interest in understanding how the history of ideas about giants articulates with religion. Right now, I'm trying to trace what I call the "degeneracy doctrine:" the idea that (1) the first humans in the biblical creation account (i.e., Adam and Eve) were significantly taller than us and (2) that the narrative arc of the human past has been characterized by a "degeneration" from those "bigger, smarter, stronger" humans to the "smaller, dumber, weaker" humans of today (to paraphrase Young Earth Creationist Kent Hovind).

The "doctrine of degeneracy" can be seen clearly in the writings of Ellen G. White (1827-1915), founder of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. White's extensive writings, based on a series of prophetic visions she reportedly received beginning in the mid-1800s, specify that Adam was about twice as tall as modern people, and that "the inhabitants of earth had been degenerating, losing their strength and comeliness" through a process of Satanic deterioration that was initiated in the Garden of Eden (Spiritual Gifts, Vol. 1, 69.2). In addition to a decrease in height, strength, and physical beauty, White's post-Fall degradation of humans included shortening of lifespans and greater susceptibility to disease.

Where did Ellen White's ideas about the height of Adam originate? The Old Testament says nothing directly about the height of Adam or the other patriarchs, placing all ideas about the stature of the first humans into the realm of extra-biblical speculation.

To the archives!

A Google Ngram of "Bible Dictionary" suggests temporal trends in the publication of works meant to thoroughly augment the Bible. These works begin appearing in relatively small numbers in the late 1700s and early 1800s, increasing in popularity from perhaps the 1830s through the 1870s. The relative popularity of Bible dictionaries appears to decline during the first half of the twentieth century. The Ngram shows a sharp increase in the representation of Bible dictionaries in 1980s and 1990s. I wasn't expecting the late twentieth century rise, but I'll have to investigate that later.

French Benedictine monk Antoine Agustin Calmet (1672-1757) is recognized as one of the first theologians to attempt to place the entire Bible in a literal (rather than allegorical and/or mystical) framework. His 1720 work Dictionnaire Historique, Critique, Chronologique, Géographique et Littéral de la Bible was translated into English by John Colson and Samuel d'Oyly and published in 1732 as An Historical, Critical, Geographical, Chronological and Etymological Dictionary of the Holy Bible. Either Calmet's original work or (more likely) the English translation formed the basis for various editions of the Bible dictionary that were produced by Charles Taylor beginning in 1797. Numerous Bible dictionaries were being produced by the mid-1800s, many reportedly based at least somewhat on the writings of Calmet.

Unfortunately, I haven't yet been able to locate a copy of the first (1732) English translation of Calmet's dictionary or the first edition (1797) of Taylor's version. The earliest Taylor version of Calmet that I have been able to find so far (and therefore the earliest example I can find of what would have been available to English-speaking audiences in Britain and the United States) is the second edition (1812) titled Calmet's Great Dictionary of the Holy Bible.

The entry for "Giants" in the 1812 edition contains the following:

"It is probable, that the first men were of a strength and stature superior to those of mankind at present, since they lived a much longer time; long life being commonly the effect of a strong constitution. Scripture says, that there were many of these mighty tall men of the earth, in the days of Noah; and that there had been some before, particularly after the sons of God had intercourse with the daughters of men."

The connection between the extraordinarily long lifespans of the Old Testament patriarchs and their health, strength, and stature is a fundamental component of the "degeneracy doctrine" seen in Ellen G. White's writings 50 years later. If Taylor's dictionary is faithful to Calmet's original, we can directly trace the idea that the first humans were "bigger, smarter, stronger" then the humans of today at least as far back in time as the early 1700s. Other authors of that time discuss the idea of human degenerating from Adam (e.g., Henrion in 1718), but it may be that copying of Calmet's work is largely responsible for inserting the idea into popular American discourse at a time when several indigenous religious sects were emerging. I have not searched systematically, but I suspect that the "degeneration" idea will be present in many of the other Bible dictionaries produced in America during the course of nineteenth century.

The 1812 entry for giants in Taylor's dictionary also contains (in addition to a section discussing Nephilim, Anakim, Rephaim, etc.) a section warranting the existence of giants through reference to the words of ancient writers and the discovery of giant skeletons:

"As to the existence of giants, several writers, both ancient and modern, have imagined, that the giants of Scripture were indeed men of extraordinary stature; but not so much as those have fancied, who describe them as three or four times larger than men are at present. They were, say they, men famous for their violences and crimes, rather than for their strength, or stature.
But it cannot be denied, that there have been men, of a stature much above that common at present. Moses, Deut. iii. 11. speaks of the beil of 0g, king of Basan, as nine cubits long, and four wide, fifteen feet four inches long. Goliath was six cubits and a span in height, ten feet seven inches, 1 Sam. xvii. 4. Giants were still common in the times of Joshua, and of David, when the life of man was already shortened, and, as may be presumed, the size and strength of human bodies was proportionably diminished.
Homer, Odyss. xi. ver. 306. speaks of the giants Otus and Ephialtes, who were nine cubits about, and thirty-six in height.
The body of Orestes being dug up, by order of an oracle, was found to be seven cubits, or ten feet and a half. One Gabbarus, at Rome, in the reign of Claudius, was nine feet nine inches high. Delrio, in 1572, saw, at Rohan, a native of Piedmont, above nine feet high.
In the year 1719, at Stonehenge, near Salisbury, in England, a human skeleton was found, which was nine feet four inches long. Gazette of October, 1719; under the date of 21st September."

In addition to repeating the idea that great height is connected to long life, this passage lists two of the "giants" (Orestes and Gabbarus aka Galbara) that end up in the "Giants of Olden Times" stories that were reprinted frequently in late nineteenth and early twentieth century American newspapers. The alert reader will have also noticed the similarity in the temporal distributions of reports of "giant" skeletons in nineteenth century American newspapers and the publication of Bible dictionaries. One can't help but wonder about what appears to be a correlation between the currently increasing popularity of Bible dictionaries and the re-emergence of interest (and apparently also belief) in giants.

Note (10/4/2015): We're currently experiencing historic-level rainfall here in Columbia, South Carolina. My family and I are fortunate to live on high ground - we're in much better shape than many others in this city and across the state. I've been working on this post for a while and wanted to be done with it one way or another, so I'm posting it now even though it is not as polished as I'd like. I need to pay attention to other stuff on the home front today and don't have time to work with it any more. It is what it is!

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The "Giants of Olden Times" Stories in 19th Century America: A Progress Report

5/22/2015

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As anyone who knows me and/or follows this blog might have guessed, I am in the midst of assembling (yet another) database relevant to understanding the "giants" phenomenon that emerged in 19th century America. I'm currently collecting examples of printings of what I call "Giants of Olden Times" stories, a handful of similar stories that contain listings of accounts of various European giants. These stories were reprinted time and time again during the "giants" craze of the mid- to late-1800s, and I would like to understand if and how these stories were related to the reporting of "giant skeletons." I've spent the better part of the last two days compiling information about the printings of the "Giants of Olden Times" stories (you're welcome), and I've noticed a few interesting things that I'd like to pass on. There are still more data to collect and lots of analysis to do, so this is preliminary.

First, a quick recap. On May 10, Jason Colavito wrote this post about a mid-1700s address by Claude-Nicolas Le Cat to the Academy of Sciences at Rouen. I recognized many of the descriptions of "giants" in Le Cat's address from my stumblings through 19th century American newspapers: portions of his address, copied from somewhere, had been incorporated into stories that were circulated and re-circulated during the later half of the 1800s. As I wrote in this post, the earliest versions of the story that I could find dated to the mid-1840s and seemed to associate the listing of European giants with a lecture by Benjamin Silliman, Jr., a Yale chemistry professor. In this post, Jason worked on tracking down what may have been the origins of the story, showing how Silliman's name may have been attached (presumably by a reporter/editor somewhere) to a story with a listing of giants that was already in circulation in the 1840s. The original giants story probably originated with someone copying a portion of Le Cat's address out of an encyclopedia or other available source (the address was also printed in a Maryland newspaper in 1765 as well as other places). As the hybrid story was passed on and mutated, Silliman's name became welded to those of the giants. Many of the giants suffered great indignity as the accumulation of copying error transformed their original names into nonsense. The grand, 25' tall Theutobochus Rex, for example, had become known as Keutolochus Sex by the time the story was printed in Idaho in 1871. More on that later.

So, three days and many hours later, I've got enough data on these "Giants of Olden Times" stories to recognize some patterns. I've compiled about 220 printings of the stories so far (there are probably three of four "main" versions) dating from 1842 to 1905. I'm recording the date, the newspaper, the state, and the occurrence/spellings of several of the names in the stories as well as several key dates associated with the giants. The errors in the stories are interesting to me because they, along with information about space and time, will help track how the stories were spread through time and across space (like mutations in DNA). Understanding the mechanisms and patterns of spread will be relevant to understanding the "giants" phenomenon in general, I think. And it will also potentially shed light on how information flowed during a really interesting period of demographic, social, and technological change in the United States. For now, though, I just wanted to take a quick look at some temporal and spatial dimensions of the data I've collected so far.

Time

The top part of the figure to the right shows the counts of the printings of the "Giants of Olden Times" stories by decade. You can see that the distribution of the stories across the decades of the late 19th century is not uniform. After the first printings of the story in the 1840s (the first "peak") there is a lull in the 1850s followed by a large number of printings in the late 1860s and early 1870s. You can't see it in this view of the data, but there is a strong peak from October of 1868 to June of 1870. Note that the peak starts prior to the "discovery" of the Cardiff giant (and perhaps reflects the context of the interest in giants that spurred the creation of the hoax) and drops off soon after it was revealed as a fake (in December of 1869). There is an apparent lull in the printing of the stories in the 1880s, followed by a strong peak in the 1890s. I have found just a few re-printings of of the stories after 1900.

The bottom part of the figure shows the bars representing re-printings of the "Giants of Olden Times" stories placed within my data of the number of reports of "giant skeletons" in my current database. Note the general similarity in the shape of the upswing curves. And note also that the reports of giant skeletons drop precipitously after 1910-1919, a couple of decades after newspapers apparently stopped printing stories with listings of European giants.

Space

Printings of the "Giants of Olden Times" stories were not randomly distributed across the county. The map below shows the counts (in red) by state in the data I've accumulated so far. A histogram of the number of re-printings by state shows most states with less than six. Nine states have six or more (shaded in the map below). With the exception of California, those states form a kind of "Giant Stories" belt stretching from the east coast into the Great Plains. This is the region of the country where these stories were printed over and over again.

There are several possible reasons, of course, for the spatial distribution of the re-printings of the "Giants of Olden Times" stories that may have nothing to do with giants. The distribution may have something to do with the distribution of newspapers (there were more newspapers in California than in Wyoming, for example) and population. And it may have something to do with the sampling of newspapers I'm using. Those are things that can be checked. I don't think that they will fully explain the distribution, however - I think it is actually reflecting, at least in part, something to do with geographic interest in "giants." And it may be related to where the skeletons of "giants" were actually being reported. And those two things are presumably inter-connected somehow.

Giant Stories vs. Giant Skeletons

Are the "Giants of Olden Times" stories connected to reports of giant skeletons? I plotted the number of re-printings of the "Giants of Olden Times" stories vs. the number of reports of giants by state that I have in my current database. The top chart shows all the data I have so far. Two things are notable: first, the points on the left side of the chart appear to show a possible positive relationship between the number of story re-printings and the number of accounts of giant skeletons being unearthed; second, there are several outliers on the right side of the chart that don't appear to fit that relationship. I've located 43 re-printings of the "Giants of Olden Times" stories in Kansas newspapers, for example, but only five reports of giant skeletons from that state. North Carolina newspapers also loved the "Giants of Olden Times" story, but the state just didn't produce that many giant accounts (at least not that I've seen so far).

If I remove those outliers, a linear, positive relationship becomes easier to see (bottom chart). The R square is 0.69, with a p value of <0.0001. The strength of the result decreases to an R square of 0.40 if I remove Ohio (the point at the upper right), but is still statistically significant. With just these values, in other words, it doesn't look like this relationship is just by coincidence: places where the story ran more often are places where there were more reports of giant skeletons.

But the identification of this correlation doesn't tell us which way the causal arrow(s) point. Did re-printing these stories "cause" people to report giant skeletons? Or did the finding of "giant" skeletons stir up public interest and prompt newspaper editors to re-print the "Giants of Olden Times" stories? Or both? That's going to be a tricky thing to understand, but I think it may be possible to figure out it. The great thing about the newspaper accounts is that they are all dated, so it will eventually be possible to understand the temporal ordering of events. It will also be possible using GIS to factor both time and space into an analysis and frame it in terms of the changing technology of media communication. This is great problem and will take some time to deal with, but I think it is probably solvable. And I think it will ultimately be an important part of the puzzle of "giants" in 19th century America.

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Happy Thanksgiving, Critical Thinkers: "The Argumentative Archaeologist"

Bible Dictionaries and Augustin Calmet's Thoughts on the First Men

The "Giants of Olden Times" Stories in 19th Century America: A Progress Report

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