I've got an idea.

A common refrain among those claiming to be interested in discovering the "forbidden truths" about our prehistory is that mainstream archaeologists and academics are actively involved in a conspiracy to suppress information, hide evidence, censor ideas, and generally keep the world from knowing what really happened in the past.  The charge that mainstream archaeologists are hiding evidence to protect the status quo is not just incidental to theorists on the fringe: it is a central plank used over and over again to explain the absence of positive evidence for their claims.  The absence of positive material evidence for a claim, in fact, is sometimes used to support the contention that a conspiracy to hide the evidence exists, and that therefore the original claim must be true.  It's really bizarre.

The charge that ideas that conflict with "mainstream" interpretations of the past are actively censored is also central to the claims of fringe theorists.  Nevermind that Ancient Aliens is in its eighth season, Jim Vieria got an entire television series after TEDx took down a video of his talk, and fringe writers are selling books out the wazoo, the cry of "censorship" is common.  I think fringe theorists like to cry foul for several overlapping reasons: (1) it helps them promote the idea that the mainstream is involved in a conspiracy to keep us from knowing "the truth;" (2) it helps them explain the lack of positive evidence for the ideas they are promoting; and (3) it helps them promote themselves as mavericks who are bucking the system, fighting the power, crusading for justice, or whatever else.

The claims of censorship and suppression of evidence and ideas are as bogus as they are boring at this point.  I suggest we switch it up a little bit.

Here's my idea: why not bring the fringe into my classroom?

I'm hoping to teach a course next academic year at the University of South Carolina on pseudo-science in archaeology.  Nothing has been decided for sure yet, but it would probably be a 200-level course, hopefully taught in the Fall semester of 2016.  I'm only in the very early planning stages, but I've been thinking a little bit about how I will organize the course.  I can't think of a better way to help students understand the difference between science and pseudoscience than to have them actively engage "fringe" ideas (and the purveyors of those ideas) within a scientific framework.   

Is your specialty ancient aliens? Giants? Atlantis? Elongated skulls? OOPARTS? Mu? Phoenicians in the New World? Would you like to talk to a group of perhaps 40-50 college students and share your ideas and explain the logic and evidence behind them? Would you be willing to take questions from those same students, knowing that they will have previously made themselves familiar with your arguments and will be asking you questions? Would you be willing to have your engagement with my class videotaped and put online?

Science is built on the premise that good ideas can withstand scrutiny and challenges, while incorrect ideas can be shown to be incorrect.  Science is based on evidence.  Pseudoscience, conversely, is belief masquerading as science.  Scientists are not afraid of scrutiny: proving things wrong is what we do. Pseudoscientists hide from scrutiny, however, because being proven wrong is not good for business.

If I was an honest fringe theorist and I had an idea which I was confident I could present and defend to an audience in an open forum, I would jump at the chance to do so (just because an idea is not accepted by the mainstream doesn't mean it's wrong, of course).  Here, after all, would be a chance to leap over that wall and talk to people in the very settings from which I'm being excluded.  But if I was a huckster marketing ideas that I knew were baloney . . . perhaps in that case I would be somewhat reluctant to expose those ideas to a critique.  My impression is that many fringe theorists really like the protected spaces of radio shows, "interviews," television appearances, books, and "conferences" that insulate their ideas from the fundamental aspect of science (falsification) that makes scientific inquiry a cumulative, self-correcting endeavor.

So, while still tentative at this point, here's my offer:

• You'll get 15-20 minutes to talk to my class (either in person or via Skype) about whatever part of your work you choose;

• You'll let me know ahead of time (i.e., before the semester begins) what aspect of your work you'll be presenting;

• You'll take at least 15-20 minutes of questions from students in my class, who will have had time to become familiar with your ideas and evidence prior to your presentation;

• You'll agree that your presentation and the question/answer session will be recorded and made available to the public (via YouTube or something similar);

• There won't be any financial compensation involved.
  

I'm not yet sure how many of these kinds of interactions I will be able to fit in during the semester, but if any of you out there want to take me up on this I'd love to hear from you.  Leave a comment below, or email me at [email protected].

Update (9/11/2015): Scott Wolter is in.

Update (2/15/2016): Jim Vieira is in.

Update (6/13/2016): I set up a Go Fund Me campaign to raise travel money to bring Wolter to Columbia.

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.