Andy White Anthropology
  • Home
  • Research Interests
    • Complexity Science
    • Prehistoric Social Networks
    • Eastern Woodlands Prehistory
    • Ancient Giants
  • Blog
  • Work in Progress
    • The Kirk Project >
      • Kirk 3D Models list
      • Kirk 3D Models embedded
      • Kirk 2D images >
        • Indiana
        • Kentucky
        • Michigan
        • Ontario
      • Kirk Project Datasets
    • Computational Modeling >
      • FN3D_V3
    • Radiocarbon Compilation
    • Fake Hercules Swords
    • Wild Carolina >
      • Plants >
        • Mosses
        • Ferns
        • Conifers
        • Flowering Plants >
          • Grasses
          • Trees
          • Other Flowering Plants
      • Animals >
        • Birds
        • Mammals
        • Crustaceans
        • Insects
        • Arachnids
        • Millipedes and Centipedes
        • Reptiles and Amphibians
      • Fungi
  • Annotated Publications
    • Journal Articles
    • Technical Reports
    • Doctoral Dissertation
  • Bibliography
  • Data

"May the GREAT RAVEN GOD TAKE YOU STUPID" and Other Treasures from My Vacation

7/14/2015

14 Comments

 
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.
PictureMe and Laura Jane Grace of Against Me! This was the only time I have ever waited around after a concert to meet the band. If you don't know the back story of Laura Jane Grace, look into it: it's interesting and compelling.
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.

Picture
The mummy of Minirdis, which was not buried in Lowell, Indiana. (Source: http://www.ndtv.com/world-news/scientists-work-to-conserve-2-500-year-old-mummy-711422)
This embrace of the patently untrue to further a story brings us to the next vignette, another J. Hutton Pulitzer special.
PictureAllegedly fake copper knives shown in Pulitzer's "flashcard" video.
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.
Picture"This is as relevant to prehistory as about half of the stuff in this group, so I thought I'd go ahead and, you know, post it."
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.
14 Comments
Stephen J. Bridges
7/14/2015 01:52:22 am

I especially enjoyed the reader comment above...!
Stephen J. Bridges

Reply
Andy White
7/14/2015 04:24:34 am

Pretty much right on the money.

Reply
Lee Born
7/14/2015 02:15:41 am

Well written.

Reply
Gary
7/14/2015 02:52:07 am

"Elijah Woodworth (1892-1886)"

Was he Benjamin Button?

Reply
Andy White
7/14/2015 02:56:09 am

That should 1792. Thanks for the catch. I'll fix it ASAP. If the RAVEN GOD doesn't take me first.

Reply
Patricia White
7/14/2015 03:42:21 am

Yes, I was wondering about that date - guess I still have the "editor" gene working.
I don't think anyone has ever said anything to me like that - even the elite in Carmel who hated the stories/editorials we felt called to run.


"May the great raven god take you stupid - what prose, what injury that could inflict upon one's self-esteem. But I encourage you to continue in your quest to expose what ever takes your fancy.

Reply
JM
7/14/2015 04:34:24 am

Splitters be Splitn' would be a good runner up

Reply
Andy White
7/14/2015 04:42:04 am

Also on the list: "Mama said knock you out."

Reply
Jonathan
7/14/2015 04:45:17 am

Nice to have you back!

Reply
David L Ulrich
9/9/2015 02:20:18 pm

--so how old -- and when will the full report be available on the body wrappings. When will the DNA study be published and who is doing the genetic makeup on the body. Were soil samples taken and when will that report be made available.

Are you sure the current people who have the body aren't going to do one of those "Kennewick man" things. I would think a genetic makeup would have taken all of two months, it that. If this was a gruesome murder on the front pages, I bet the cops would already have the genetics nailed and arrests made....opps, forgot, this is history...???

Reply
Andy White
9/10/2015 06:28:04 am

The initial reports were that the human remains were possibly 2000 years old - that would put them in the Woodland period. If you read what I wrote and the stories I reference, you'll see that the first stories that called the remains a "mummy" were incorrect. There was/is no mummy, and there were/are no mummy wrappings (the photos that various news outlets placed with their stories were of Egyptian mummies, such as the one in the Field Museum). Believe it or not, doing DNA testing on ancient human remains is not standard procedure for every bone encountered. As for when a report will be available, you'll have to ask the Indiana DHPA (one of the regulatory agencies) and/or the firm contracted to do the archaeological work. The public quickly lost interest in this story once the "mummy" error was corrected, but the site and the remains will still be handled in the same way (i.e., according to the law, professional guidelines, etc.).

Reply
David L Ulrich
9/10/2015 09:00:48 am

Thanks -- first read (quickly of course). So the picture provided was ???? in error.

Reply
Jose S
1/27/2016 04:53:50 pm

Another link for Mr. Woodworth

https://books.google.com/books?id=q5sUAAAAYAAJ&lpg=PA422&ots=jV041KxTim&dq=Elijah%20Woodworth&pg=PA422#v=onepage&q=Elijah%20Woodworth&f=false

Reply
Tom Neal
6/12/2018 09:56:06 pm

Upper Michigan Peninsula? Did you investigate the ancient copper mines?

Reply



Leave a Reply.


    All views expressed in my blog posts are my own. The views of those that comment are their own. That's how it works.

    I reserve the right to take down comments that I deem to be defamatory or harassing. 

    Andy White

    Follow me on Twitter: @Andrew_A_White

    Email me: andy.white.zpm@gmail.com

    Enter your email address:

    Delivered by FeedBurner


    Picture

    Sick of the woo?  Want to help keep honest and open dialogue about pseudo-archaeology on the internet? Please consider contributing to Woo War Two.
    Picture

    Follow updates on posts related to giants on the Modern Mythology of Giants page on Facebook.

    Archives

    January 2023
    January 2022
    November 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    March 2021
    June 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014

    Categories

    All
    3D Models
    AAA
    Adena
    Afrocentrism
    Agent Based Modeling
    Agent-based Modeling
    Aircraft
    Alabama
    Aliens
    Ancient Artifact Preservation Society
    Androgynous Fish Gods
    ANTH 227
    ANTH 291
    ANTH 322
    Anthropology History
    Anunnaki
    Appalachia
    Archaeology
    Ardipithecus
    Art
    Atlantis
    Australia
    Australopithecines
    Aviation History
    Bigfoot
    Birds
    Boas
    Book Of Mormon
    Broad River Archaeological Field School
    Bronze Age
    Caribou
    Carolina Bays
    Ceramics
    China
    Clovis
    Complexity
    Copper Culture
    Cotton Mather
    COVID-19
    Creationism
    Croatia
    Crow
    Demography
    Denisovans
    Diffusionism
    DINAA
    Dinosaurs
    Dirt Dance Floor
    Double Rows Of Teeth
    Dragonflies
    Early Archaic
    Early Woodland
    Earthworks
    Eastern Woodlands
    Eastern Woodlands Household Archaeology Data Project
    Education
    Egypt
    Europe
    Evolution
    Ewhadp
    Fake Hercules Swords
    Fetal Head Molding
    Field School
    Film
    Florida
    Forbidden Archaeology
    Forbidden History
    Four Field Anthropology
    Four-field Anthropology
    France
    Genetics
    Genus Homo
    Geology
    Geometry
    Geophysics
    Georgia
    Giants
    Giants Of Olden Times
    Gigantism
    Gigantopithecus
    Graham Hancock
    Grand Valley State
    Great Lakes
    Hollow Earth
    Homo Erectus
    Hunter Gatherers
    Hunter-gatherers
    Illinois
    India
    Indiana
    Indonesia
    Iowa
    Iraq
    Israel
    Jim Vieira
    Jobs
    Kensington Rune Stone
    Kentucky
    Kirk Project
    Late Archaic
    Lemuria
    Lithic Raw Materials
    Lithics
    Lizard Man
    Lomekwi
    Lost Continents
    Mack
    Mammoths
    Mastodons
    Maya
    Megafauna
    Megaliths
    Mesolithic
    Michigan
    Middle Archaic
    Middle Pleistocene
    Middle Woodland
    Midwest
    Minnesota
    Mississippi
    Mississippian
    Missouri
    Modeling
    Morphometric
    Mound Builder Myth
    Mu
    Music
    Nazis
    Neandertals
    Near East
    Nephilim
    Nevada
    New Mexico
    Newspapers
    New York
    North Carolina
    Oahspe
    Oak Island
    Obstetrics
    Ohio
    Ohio Valley
    Oldowan
    Olmec
    Open Data
    Paleoindian
    Paleolithic
    Pilumgate
    Pleistocene
    Pliocene
    Pre Clovis
    Pre-Clovis
    Prehistoric Families
    Pseudo Science
    Pseudo-science
    Radiocarbon
    Reality Check
    Rome
    Russia
    SAA
    Sardinia
    SCIAA
    Science
    Scientific Racism
    Sculpture
    SEAC
    Search For The Lost Giants
    Sexual Dimorphism
    Sitchin
    Social Complexity
    Social Networks
    Solutrean Hypothesis
    South Africa
    South America
    South Carolina
    Southeast
    Stone Holes
    Subsistence
    Swordgate
    Teaching
    Technology
    Teeth
    Television
    Tennessee
    Texas
    Topper
    Travel
    Travel Diaries
    Vaccines
    Washington
    Whatzit
    White Supremacists
    Wisconsin
    Woo War Two
    World War I
    World War II
    Writing
    Younger Dryas

    RSS Feed

    Picture
Proudly powered by Weebly