Jim Vieira's Visit to "Forbidden Archaeology"

Well, that was fun!

And because I know that it's sometimes hard to reliably detect the presence/absence of sarcasm in the written word, I'll clarify and say that I'm not being sarcastic: Jim Vieira's visit to my Forbidden Archaeology class was legitimately fun. 

Class photo from yesterday: instead of "cheese" we're all saying "double rows of teeth."

Those of you who followed this blog prior to the #Swordgate debacle know that I spent a lot of my writing energy in 2014 and 2015 discussing issues related to "giants." It's a topic that has interested me since I stumbled across accounts of "giant skeletons with a double row of teeth" in the nineteenth century county histories of Indiana while preparing CRM reports in the early 1990's. The story of my arrival to the topic is not that different from Vieira's (he came across the stories by accident, also). I had recently become aware of the online newspaper archives of the Library of Congress and was working on the "double rows of teeth" issue when Search for the Lost Giants aired. It was strange for me to watch that program, because I found myself hoping that I didn't get scooped on my linguistic solution to the strange dental descriptions but also wishing that their intense focus on the topic would help dispel some of the bizarre claims about "double rows of teeth" that have been around at least since Brad Steiger's 1978 book World's Before Our Own.

I went at the issue of "double rows of teeth" pretty hard in my blog after that original post, gathering documentary evidence (primarily in the form of newspaper accounts and dictionary entries) to demonstrate how changes in the popularity of a combination of linguistic idioms explains most of the cases of "double rows of teeth." I used specific examples to illustrate my case, including several that Vieira had discussed repeatedly. I admit to being frustrated that my ideas about "double rows of teeth," which I felt constituted a well-researched, relatively elegant, and original solution to an interesting riddle seemed to go unacknowledged by Vieira. That frustration came through in my last post on the subject.

Vieira and I talked about all that and a lot more during his visit to Columbia. Some of those conversations were private and some were in front of the class. We more-or-less beat to death numerous inter-connected issues related to the topic of "giants" over the course of three days. We talked about the nature of science, the nature of evidence, the many and varied motivations and psychologies of the "fringe" world, the relationships between the "fringe" and "mainstream," strategies for communication, human anatomy, the price of tea in China, etc. In my opinion, there really wasn't much of substance about which we had significant disagreement (including "double rows of teeth"). One sticking point was my contention, in which I remain firm, that the New England Patriots are, in fact, evil cheaters. That's part of my belief system and I'm not budging. I think we did tentatively agree, however, that all New York City professional sports teams suck, and also that the Dallas Cowboys suck, have always sucked, and will suck until the end of time. I may be embellishing that a little bit.

A couple of the students in Forbidden Archaeology collected video of Vieira (totalling about six hours, including both class sessions, a one-on-one interview with him, and Vieira and me discussing various issues related to giants) for their final project. They've got control of all that footage for now. It will be really interesting to see what they produce from it. Vieira and I agreed that we both need to give their project the green light before it will be made public. I'll keep you posted on that.

In the meantime, here's a short clip of Vieira in class yesterday. I don't remember the exact question to which he was responding, but his answer speaks for itself.