Pseudoarchaeology

ASOR 2025 Recap

I had a nice time at the 2025 ASOR annual meeting. It was a good chance to catch up with friends, scheme some schemes, and hear some papers. In hindsights, I’d have liked to spend more time in sessions and less time in meetings, but at least the meetings that I had were broadly productive. 

I walked away from the meeting with three things rattling around in my head.

Thing the First

I attended a couple of panels that had papers focusing on post-destruction activities at sites. It’s almost too easy to speculate on why post-destruction activities might be a point of interest at this years gathering of Near Eastern archaeologists, but whatever geopolitical motivation existed for this interest, it is nevertheless a regular concern for most archaeologists. 

I was particularly intrigued by the critical attention that “squatters” received. Not only was this group theorized in some useful ways — for example, how do you distinguish a squatter from, say, the seasonal reuse of a building — but also situated squatting in historical contexts.

This was relevant to my research in Greece partly because the Byzantine Dark Age settlement in the Roman Bath at Isthmia has sometimes been described as a “squatter settlement.” The reasoning seems largely to be that the folks who settled in the bath didn’t own the building or were in no way related to the building’s builders. This is probably accurate, but perhaps burdens the Dark Age settlers with unnecessary baggage as squatting has a reputation as transgressive behavior. The Dark Age settlers at Isthmia may have not had any transgression in mind when they availed themselves to ruins of the Roman Bath. Moreover, the relationship between 6th or early 7th century burial activity at the site and the Dark Age residents is hardly clear cut. It may be that by the 7th and 8th century that the ruins of the Roman Bath had acquired new symbolic significance and even ownership by these residents.

Thing the Second

Late Roman Cyprus is always interesting. First, there are catastrophic events that seem to punctuate the chronology of the island starting with the earthquake of 365 and ending with the Islamic raids of the late 7th century. While scholars have questioned the significance and consequences of these events (and other earthquakes including the famous 551 tremor that appears to have destroyed the entire Eastern Mediterranean and recently the impact of the Justinianic plague), they still serve to frame not only the chronology of the period, but also the character of the social and economic life on the island.

Curiously, the long shadow cast by these events has led scholars to overlook more typical topics of interest to Late Roman historians and archaeologists. For example, the end of paganism on the island (and the rise of Christianity) remains rather obscure and understudied compared to elsewhere in the Mediterranean. It was fascinating, then, to see a paper on Late Roman statue of Artemis from Kourion and associated with a building that appears to have collapsed in the 365 earthquake (adjacent to the famous “Earthquake House”). The excavators date the statue, probably manufactured in Aphrodisias, to the middle of the 4th century which would make it a rather late example of Artemis and offers another example of the continued manufacture and export of statues of gods and goddess from this famous production site in Asia Minor. 

It seems likely that the owners of this house (and the statue) was a pagan presuming that the date of the collapse of the house of remains mid-4th century. This would provide us with another unsurprising benchmark for the persistence of paganism on the island among elite households. Of course, it is possible that the owner of this statue appreciated it for its (somewhat dubious) style rather than its religious significance. It seems less plausible to imagine that someone imported a 4th-century statue of Artemis onto the island for aesthetics alone.

Thing the Third

Readers of this blog know that I’m very interested in pseudoarchaeology. Unlike some of my “debunk it all and let God sort it out” friends, I’m more interested in the reason for the persistence of pseudoarchaeology and the interesting ways in which it develops to both reflect disciplinary practices as well as trace deeper currents of popular thought. 

I had some productive conversations on a pseudoarchaeology book that instead of being (yet another) half baked monograph takes on the form of a dialogue (modeled loosely on Gavin Lucas and Laurent Oliver’s Conversations about Time (2021) or Raphael Greenberg and Yannis Hamilakis, Archaeology, Nation, and Race (2022)). This would allow my casual bloggy style to come to the fore and leave room for differing opinions. 

More on this project next week, I think, when I write up some thoughts on what this book might look like (and who has volunteered to co-author it with me)!

Two Thing Tuesday: Esoteric Orientalism and Reparative Reading

This weekend, I read Mandarin Dubey’s short book in the Cambridge Elements series titled Esoteric Orientalism (2024). Being a Cambridge Elements title, this book offered a minimal commitment to helping my contextualize Blavatsky a bit more clearly in the 19th century context and offered an opportunity for a more sympathetic reading of her work which often stands as a kind of origin point for critiques of pseudo-archaeology. 

Thing the First

Esoteric Orientalism offers what Dubey sees as a reparative reading of Blavatsky that sought to unpack her ideas of race, language, culture, and religion in the context of late 19th century Orientalist thought. Dubey sets Blavatsky in opposition to German Orientalist Max Müller and argues that Blavatsky’s rejection of racial and linguistic categories as the basis for understanding religion offered an alternative to the emerging work on scientific linguistics and religious studies pioneered by Müller. Even the casual reader of Blavatsky will understand that she rejects the methods and conclusions associated with scientific linguistic and studies of religion. In their place, she proposes both the need to acquire esoteric knowledge and a mythic cosmology of race, language, and religion that is universal and totalizing. A reparative reading of Blavatsky allows one to see in her work a narrative that subverts the emerging discourse of scientific linguistics (and religion) which becomes an unfortunate basis for scientific race theory of the 20th century. For Blavatsky, scientific notions of race (as well as caste) were as irrelevant to her esoteric Orientalism as the unenlightened theories sprung forth from German university campuses. 

Thing the Second

Dubey’s reading of Blavatsky pushed me to return to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s brilliant 1997 paper “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction is About You,” which she published as the introduction to her edited volume Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction (1997). In this well-known essay, Sedgwick challenges the prevalence of paranoid reading. For Sedgwick paranoid reading privileges the revealing of institutional power both in the present and in the past (and its looming danger in the future). In its worst form, the result of this is that readers retroject the abuses and injustices of the present back onto texts of the past through genealogical analysis and this renders the present situation not only inevitable but also suggests that future injustice is essentially unavoidable. This allows the paranoid reader to remain unsurprised by the problems of the present that because they recognize that they have always already existed. Sedgwork is clear that such readings are often justified, accurate, and significant. Moreover, she is deeply sympathetic to many of the political positions of the authors whose work embraces paranoid reading. That said, she advocates for a form of reparative reading that goes beyond revealing the roots of institutional and structural injustice and instead emphasizes the power of texts to create new meanings, new positions, and by extension, new futures.  (This is a very ham-fisted reading of what is an incredibly rich and deeply sympathetic article).  

Dubey’s unorthodox reading of Blavatsky and her work to demonstrate how the esoteric texts of Theosophy offered (and offer?) a counter current to both 19th century scientific racism but also tacitly offered a position from which to critique various forms of contemporary social and cultural “exotericism” grounded in persistent Orientalism.

This resonated with me in part because it seems to me that 20th-century pseudoarchaeology offers any number of perspectives susceptible to genuinely reparative reading. An appeal to Sedgwick’s ideas allows me to recognize the value of paranoid readings (and the political and disciplinary positions that these reading occupy) while still offering a productive alternative to their perspectives. For pseudoarchaeology, this may be as simple a continuing to recognize the impact of pseudoarchaeological ideas on the production of disciplinary knowledge as a way to remind ourselves that such contributions are possible in the present and future.

Post Script

For various readings I read Dubey’s Esoteric Orientalism as a paper book. This was a miserable and slightly bizarre experience. First, the font was tiny and produced a massive text block on each page. This was not inviting to read. Second, the book itself was thin, cheaply made, and a rather unfriendly size. Finally, and most bizarrely, the bibliography was alphabetized by FIRST NAME. This is not standard in the Cambridge Elements series and suggest haste or simple carelessness in production.

I’m not naive and recognize that the Cambridge Elements series is designed to make profits for Cambridge University Press and mostly as a digital subscription service for libraries. This doesn’t even really bother me, but I do with that they did a bit more to obscure the corner cutting. This book had too much “Routledge” in its Cambridge.

Difussionism and the Future

If I was at home this summer and had unlimited time to think and write, I might be working a bit on my little pseudoarchaeology book. One of the things that has struck me lately is how much science fiction is vaguely dependent on diffusionist views of the future. 

Difussionism, loosely, is the largely discredited idea that culture spread from a single source to the entire world. In the hands of pseudoarchaeologists, diffusionist ideas have helped explain the appearance, say, of pyramids in Central America and Egypt.

Reading Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time, for example, we encounter a future where all of humanity survives in a since massive spaceship (appropriately called the Gilgamesh). In a similar vein, Becky Chambers’ novel Record of a Spaceborn Few in her Wayfarer series focuses on the residents of the “Exodus Fleet” which carried the rest of the human race away from a dying earth. Of course, similar themes appear in shows like Battlestar Galactica, as just one example, where humanities is confined to a fleet of ships who escape from a destroyed world.

Of course, these images of a unified humanity bound by a common culture conflate our species with our society in a way that only science fiction can. I wonder how much these visions of our future have drawn influence from discredited views of the past and continue to infuse these views with a kind of plausibility.

Archaeology and Afrofuturism at Franklin & Marshall

As many readers of my blog know, I’m currently at Franklin & Marshall College enjoying some great fellowship with F&M students and colleagues. I’ve already become excited about some of the ideas that students discussed in Kostis Kourelis’s course on music, place, and Philadelphia. More on this next week, I think.

The campus is stunning in a very particular, history drenched, small liberal arts college way:

My talk is titled Sun Ra: Afrofuturism and Archaeology and if you can’t make it to F&M today, you can read a copy of it here and you can check out the soundtrack for the talk here.

Three Things Thursday: Talking Pseudoarchaeology with Flint Dibble

I learned a few things from going on Flint Dibble’s YouTube channel last week and had a fun time chatting with Flint and the audience (which at one point was over 1000 viewers). Since then, over 4000 people have watched the video and it has generated some thoughtful conversation in the comments. This conversation and some of the comments during the video have helped me think about not only my argument, but how to make it more interesting and compelling. If I had to do it over again, I would have probably take a slightly different approach which I’m still struggling a bit to sort. My work on pseudoarchaeology is still very much a work-in-progress.

Anyway, here’s what I learned: 

1. It’s hard to build arguments during a conversation. One of the main critiques of my position that pseudoarchaeology can teach us something about the past is that I didn’t do enough to substantiate my position. Any argument that is unexpected or unconventional carries requires more patient explanation and a more deliberate approach to connecting the dots. It’s clear that the very idea of pseudoarchaeology was “triggering” (which as not meant to trivialize the response of Flint’s very engaged and interested audience) and that meant I had to push through the some sincere skepticism in the audience.

Flint did his part to keep the conversation moving which was great, but it also made it harder to connect the dots in my argument and introduce nuance. To be clear, I’m not complaining, but I would do things differently next time.   

2. People really like the idea of TRUTH. I have to admit that this caught me off guard. The audience and most of the commentators had a rather narrow view of what constitutes “truth.” In particular, there seemed to be a willingness to accept that if pseudoarchaeology does not produce “true” understandings about the past, it is impossible (or at least very difficult) to talk about it in a truthful way.

As a result, it became difficult to use pseudoarchaeology to introduce the idea of epistemological pluralism within archaeology. To be honest, some of the narrowness of the audience made me nervous. It made me feel like the efforts to promote and celebrate “big tent” notions of archaeology remains a very much inside the discipline. 

This got me wondering how much the resistance to pseudoarchaeological ideas has shaped outside perspectives on the discipline. One of the main critiques of pseudoarchaeology is that it is unscientific and it ignores or distorts standards of empiricism developed in the discipline. While this is undoubtedly true, most archaeologists recognize that strict adherence to empirical argumentation is only one aspect of disciplinary knowledge making. Archaeologists regularly rely upon all sorts of other knowledge to construct our arguments and as a result, tend to be pretty open minded when it comes to engaging with other ideas and ways of seeing the past. This doesn’t mean that we necessarily have to accept all views of the past as equally valid or “true” in an absolute sense, but it does encourage us to engage with them critically.   

3. The marketplace of ideas is a moral marketplace. Finally, I was surprised to see how much the commitment to a fairly narrow conception of truth became a moral imperative. Because those who promoted pseudoarchaeological views could be grifters, racists, or colonialists, those who accepted their views become dupes or co-conspirators. While even a cursory understanding of pseudoarchaeology (and broader pseudoscience) can demonstrate the problems with these assumptions, the moral stigma of attached to the ideas themselves contaminates not only those who accept these views, but also those who try to understand them.

What took me a bit by surprise is that many of the people saw that archaeologists with strong commitments to empiricism were engaged in morally good work. While there is no doubt that archaeologists with strong commitments to empiricism do good work and work to do good, I don’t know as if a commitment to empirical knowledge making is necessarily morally good on its own. 

In fact, exclusive commitments to particular ways of producing truth (whether it is empirical or mystical) and the truths these systems produce have often do a good bit of harm. Indeed, archaeologists often used the sanctity of their truth (and truth seeking methods) as an excuse to violate indigenous rights, disregard cultural (and political) identity, and attack the belief systems that produced rival claims. Archaeology’s disciplinary pivot to pluralism represents an effort to prevent the emergence of this type of epistemological (and disciplinary) tyranny. As much as I dislike the world of grifters and racists in pseudoarchaeology, I see the continued popularity of these beliefs not a bug that archaeology has to fix, but a hedge against the past becoming beholden to the exclusive authority of experts.

Finally, I want to thank Flint and all the folks who watched and made comments on the video. They were inspiring and thought provoking and fun!

Random Writing Wednesday: Edgar Cayce and Oil

Every now and then, especially when I’m trying to cram more into a week than there is time and also try to recover a bit for the final push of the semester, some bizarre coincidence captures my attention. This week, I was reading a bit about Egar Cayce, the famous early 20th century clairvoyant who died in 1941.

His legacy is particularly important in pseudoarchaeological circles in part because he claimed to channel the voice of Ra Ta an ancient Egyptian. He then did a series of “readings” which described life in ancient Egypt and offered controversial dates on the various monuments, including the Sphinx. The best summary of Cayce’s readings was edited by Mark Lehner in the 1980s. Cayce’s organization, the Association for Research and Enlightenment (A.R.E.), ultimately funded various efforts to date the Sphinx and to conduct remote sensing on the monument in an effort to determine its age and whether it contains a passage to a secret archive (as described in Cayce’s readings). Needless to say, these efforts have proven inconclusive. That said, Cayce’s organization, the A.R.E., supported the work of Mark Lehner and the education of Zahi Hawass, whose many media appearances and position as Minister of Tourism and Antiquities gave him global renown. 

My post today isn’t about pseudoarchaeology, but about Cayce’s efforts to use his powers of clairvoyance to discover oil in the central Texas town of Desdemona. Sidney Kirkpatrick’s book, Edgar Cayce: An American Prophet, offers a good oversight of his time as in the oil industry. In 1918, he and business partner invested in a dry well that Cayce, in a clairvoyant trance, identified as being able to produce oil. He instructed the driller the exact depth to drill and then recommended that they frack the well using nitroglycerin charges. While this first well never came in, Cayce and his partner’s experiences in the Texas oilfields emboldened them to start Edgar Cayce Petroleum Company in 1920. This company included Major Edwin Wilson who was a cousin of Woodrow Wilson. It is through this family connection that Cayce did a reading for the President after he had suffered his debilitating stroke. Cayce had built his reputation on readings that helped guide doctors to cure ill patients. Unfortunately, Cayce’s readings were not sufficiently precise to allow this company to turn a profit in the oil fields and time away from his family and more consistent (if not more potentially lucrative) opportunities pushed him to give up on his effort to find oil in 1921. Interestingly, some contemporary acolytes of Cayce’s teachings attempted to return to his readings to find the location of the oil fields that Cayce predicted in his readings. They formed a company, Integrative Energy.

Elia Vargas’ article “Field Notes for Future Petropractices: Refiguring Oil and/as Media.” Media+Environment 3 (1) from 2021 is the only piece I’ve seen that has dealt specifically with this Cayce’s involvement in petroleum extraction. I blogged about it a bit yesterday. Vargas’s short article is provocative and evokes some of my ideas about how the very profanity of petroleum grants it sanctity which, like Vargas, I drew partly from my interest in Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (Negarestani 2008). I had not anticipated Cayce and my interest in pseudoarchaeology to crash headlong into my interest in petroculture, but here we are.

Finally, one thing that carries of from yesterday is the idea of oil as sacred. Of course, people will object. After all, it’s black, it’s opaque, it’s associated with dirtiness, and the profane goals of making money. At the same time, its utter profanity endows it with a particular power. Cayce’s ability to predict the presence of oil at a particular depth and accessed through particular methods has little to do with its sanctity, but the presence of oil as something primordial, autochthonous, and powerful remains deeply compelling. 

Two Article Tuesday: Sun Ra and Edgar Cayce

Over the weekend, I got a bit of reading done. Perhaps not as much or as systematically as I would have liked, but still reading none the less.

Article the First

The first piece I read as a study of oil as media that drew on concept of agential realism: Elia Vargas, “Field Notes for Future Petropractices: Refiguring Oil and/as Media,” Media+Environment 3 (1). This article came to my attention because the author, Elia Vargas, mentions Egar Cayce and his efforts to use his clairvoyant abilities to discover oil. More on this tomorrow!

Vargas argues that we should regard oil as an agent rather than as merely a tool for industrial activity (and capital deepening) or as a displaced environmental hazard introduced to the world through human efforts. For Vargas, who is an artist, oil is a medium through which our world is made and media have agential power. The ubiquity of oil, however, obscures its role in our world and blinds us to its material power.

In my simmering book project, I am trying to consider the relationship between photography and oil. Much like oil, the ubiquity of photography and its deep roots in certain epistemologies and methods makes it easy to see as an inert medium for an underlying material reality. Of course, archaeologists, artists, and media scholars have pushed back against this and argued that photography co-produces knowledge. 

Looking at oil in the same way is difficult because unlike photographs, its status as a medium is less clear because the influence of oil on our daily lives is less bounded. As Reza Negarestani argued in his Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (2008) oil is complicit in our spiritual, economic, political, and historical lives. The way that oil takes solar energy and turns it into something that we can store, distribute, and concentrate. Oil produces light, it is the medium for anointing, and a vehicle for our transcendence.

A photographic survey of work force housing becomes a survey of oil as a medium for social and environmental transformation. Just as seeing the photograph allows us to unpack the agential authority of photography as a way of seeing the world, seeing oil becomes a way of understanding both our dependence and its ubiquity in our lives.

Article the Second

Anna Gawboy’s “Theosophy and the Esoteric Roots of Sun Ra’s Afrofuturism” in Marjorie Roth’s and Leonard George’s Explorations in Music and Esotericism (Rochester 2023) is the best study of the esoteric and theosophical roots Sun Ra’s thought. It connects not only his music, but more importantly the broadsheets produced by Thmei Research, Ra’s group of friends and thinkers in Chicago. Gawboy shows that the Thmei group modeled text in their broadsheets closely after passages in Helena Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine. There is a clear indication that Thmei Research showed particular interest in passages pertaining to Egyptian Orienatalism in Blavatsky’s work. Moreover, Gawboy traces the influences of esoteric thinking on Sun Ra’s speculative geographies and “UFO Spirituality” as well linking thinkers to his musical output and his writing.

What Sun Ra and his fellow travelers did that was distinct was to integrate Theosophical and esoteric ideas into their music and to their racial consciousness. As her conclusion argues, Theosophy proposed a “universal brotherhood,” Sun Ra and his fellow thinkers sought to extend this to include Black people.  

Pseudoarchaeology Thursday

A little self-promotion today to round out spring break. I’m having a conversation tomorrow afternoon (CDT) with Flint Dibble.

As many of you know, Flint is among the most affable of the anti-pseudoarchaeology crowd. He is bright, social-media savvy, and more than willing to laugh at himself for the good of the cause. After all, he went on Joe Rogan to debate Graham Hancock. 

Flint and I plan to discuss the sometimes contested relationship between pseudoarchaeology and archaeology and the place of pseudoarchaeology in the ever growing tent of disciplinary archaeology.

He asked that I come up with some bullet points to discuss tomorrow. Here’s a rough draft of some ideas:

  • Archaeology and pseudoarchaeology have always been deeply intertwined. How have the two branches of the same disciplinary tree shaped one another?  
  • How do pseudoarchaeological (and archaeological) ideas travel in contemporary society? What cultural phenomena contribute to creating the most fertile ground for more diverse archaeological approaches to understanding the past?
  • What can we learn from the reception of pseudoarchaeological and archaeological ideas? What does their reception tell us about the role our disciplines play in society?
  • What does pseudoarchaeology tell us about the limits to archaeology (and more broadly to “science”)? How does and can pseudoarchaeology represent an important critical position both within and outside of the contemporary archaeological conversations?
  • As contemporary society has come to recognize a series of pressing challenges (sometimes called wicked problems) — from globalization to racial inequality, large scale displacement, environmental degradation, and catastrophic climate change — communities have explored how new approaches to understanding their past can create new ways to living in the present and future. Archaeology and pseudoarchaeology can both play a part in these conversations.

My goal is, as much as possible, to avoid the debunking discourse so beloved by many of the anti-pseudoarchaeology crowd and focus on positive aspects of the pseudoarchaeology-archaeology conversation, the potential of welcoming pseudoarchaeologists into big tent archaeology, and what we can learn from the reception of pseudoarchaeology in the past. 

Three Things Thursday: NDQ, The Digital Press, and Writing the Lede

This week involved lots of little things which is both fun and frustrating for any efforts at productivity, but useful for a Three Things Thursday.

Thing the First

On Monday, issue 92.1/2 went to press featuring a great little editors’ note from our student editorial assistant. For the last two months, students in my Practicum in Writing, Editing, and Publishing read the accepted contributions from NDQ and selected from 57 authors from these that fit together into something coherent. For students, this is fun and little bit frustrating, but it gives them hands-on experience with putting together an issue of a literary magazine.

Thing the Second

I’m also very excited about a project from The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota: Michael Michlovic’s An Archaeology of the Red River Valley of the North. It should come out next week, ideally on Tuesday. I’ve posted about in the last week or so.

This will be the third book to appear in 2025! Check out, Jack Russell Weinstein’s Israel, Palestine, and the Trolley Problem: On the Futility of the Search for the Moral High Ground and Eric Burin, ed. Picking the President: Understanding the Electoral College. Revised and Expanded Edition.

Thing the Third

For lots of reasons, I started thinking about the lede to my talk at Franklin and Marshall at the end of the month. My paper is going to focus on Sun Ra and pseudoarchaeology. Readers of this blog likely know what I going to say and argue.

I have the core of the paper sort of sketched out, but I wanted to get the lede right. I’ve been itching to give a highly polemical paper where I attack the anti-pseudoarchaeology in a playful, yet sincere way. As our world has devolved into a routine of polemic-per-day, I have begun to feel a bit uncomfortable even playfully contributing to this.

The second option is something more hopeful. One of the big pivots that I’m trying to make in this project is away from the rather simplistic position that many of the arguments made by the anti-pseudoarchaeology crowd are facile and even counter productive, toward a more positive argument based on the idea that pseudoarchaeology has particular and valuable insights into offer to the 21st century world. As I’ve said variously on this blog, I can see how pseudoarchaeology can contribute to more thoughtful understandings of expulsions and displacements, catastrophes, and even the development of disciplinary knowledge.

A final option for a lede is to talk about my particular areas of specialty. As a student of Late Antiquity and contemporary America, I am used to studying periods of time where the end of the world is imminent. These periods produced creative critiques not only of their own time, but also of their past. While embracing the creative potential of chaos may seem a bit tone deaf when people are suffering (and no less tone deaf than playful polemic in a world burdened by almost overwhelming sincerity), it could help frame the work that I’m doing within particular intellectual traditions that have continued relevance for today.

Reviewing Pseudoarchaeology (Part 2)

Over the weekend, I had the pleasure of Sean Rafferty’s latest book on pseudoarchaeology: Mythologizing the Past: Archaeology, History, and Ideology (2025). It was a fun romp through some of the more egregious and nefarious examples of pseudoarchaeology and the kind of book that will sit next to Garrett Fagan’s Archaeological Fantasies: How Pseudoarchaeology Misrepresents the Past and Misleads the Public (2012) and Kenneth L. Feder’s Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology (now in its 10th edition!). This is good company to keep, in my opinion, and ensures that the pseuodarchaeology barrel will remain pleasantly devoid of fish.

My review is mostly about me rather than this book. And it probably will be useful to read the first part of this blog post. As I wrote yesterday, my review today concludes with a brief reflection on whether book’s like Rafferty’s do any real harm. I am willing to suggest that they might, but I also want to be clear that that if there is any ideology that it is worth going scorched-earth on, it is racist, Nazi, white supremacist nonsense. If this approach ends up catching some harmless grifters or clumsy late-19th century progressives, well, when you use a drag net you’re bound to catch some dolphins (as the old saying goes). Or, to channel Ignatius Donnelly, sometimes its worth promoting a myth about the past if it shows the potential of burning everything down.

Here’s the rest of my review:    

3. This eagerness to discredit and debunk results in a kind of blindness to the value of these pseudoarchaeological narratives. The unwillingness to see how pseudoarchaeological narratives could have value to people in the past (beyond advancing ideas that were generally as aberrant then as they are now) also meant that he doesn’t see how the careful treatment of these narratives, in their various historical contexts, can continue to teach us something today.

This is unfortunately a common conceit of archaeologists and regrettable. As we confront the unprecedented challenges of a looming climate catastrophe, it would at least suggest that a sensitive understanding of the Atlantis stories might offer us ways to process and understand our present peril. Similarly diffusionist (and hyperdiffusionist) narratives—parallel in contemporary science fiction from Battle Star Galactica to Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series and Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time—present an inverted narrative to Atlantean catastrophism (or our own extinction anxieties). As we confront human migration on a planetary scale and reel from the global impact of COVID pandemic, exploring the potential of diffusionist narratives to help us understand our interconnected present seems to have potential, at very least. 

To be clear, I’m not advocating for the veracity of Atlantis or diffusionist theories understanding of human culture, but rather for the value of these narratives. As I have noted, there remain things to learn from how populations adapt to globalization, displacement, and alienation from the study of the Kensington Runestone. Dismissing its authenticity, even if a necessary first step, should not be a dead end.  

4. Seeks in some ways to argue that archaeology is devoid of ideology. This is a desiccated view of archaeological epistemology and history. Part of the challenge of this book for me is its simplified view of archaeological epistemology and history. As a simple example, Rafferty noted that the growing interest in spiritualism emerged after the Civil War in the US as people sought to reconnect with their deceased relative. This is a fine line of reasoning, but Rafferty overlooks the fact that this is also when archaeology begins to coalesce as a discipline. Moreover, archaeology is hardly so removed from spiritualism. Even a casual scholar of the history of archaeology (like myself) recognizes the deep commitments to modernism (and its spiritual elements) in, say, Arthur Evans, excavator of Knossos. In fact, just last year, Kostis Kourelis and I traced the entanglements between Greek archaeologists and parapsychologists. In the same paper, we noted both the role that dreams have played in archaeological discoveries as well as the close relationship between spiritualists and the Great Palace excavations. Of course, my point here isn’t to somehow recommend “dream archaeology” but rather than retrojecting epistemology standards associated with New Archaeology back onto 19th century practices, a more sensitive contextual reading of pseudoarchaeology and archaeology would take into account the often close relationship between the two especially in the first 80 years of the discipline. It is hardly revelatory to observe that archaeology continues to enjoy a wide range of influences including those that are as much ideological as philosophical including nationalism, Marxism, colonialism, and (most recently and famously) anarchism. 

While it obvious why Rafferty might not want to celebrate these connections, it nevertheless might benefit the reader to at least explain that scientific archaeology is one strand of archaeological knowledge making. The rational fallacies trotted out to challenge pseudoarchaeological thinking could equally apply to indigenous archaeology or various phenomenological approaches associated with post-processual practices, as two examples. More broadly, scholars of who study archaeological epistemology have repeatedly demonstrated that complexity of archaeological knowledge making practices and resisted efforts to reduce it to a kind of slavish rationalism or scientific paradigms. Again, none of this is particularly obscure and it would be common to introduce it to students as undergraduates.   

5. In the end, we may wonder (along with the author) what is the harm of a book like this? After all, we can generally agree that Nazis and white supremacy is bad and pseudoscience (writ large) can be incredibly destructive. On the surface, it would seem that any effort to discredit these ideas is good.

Unfortunately, the issue is not that simple. Books that seek to decontextualize pseudoarchaeology and reduce “the pseudo”  to “the bad” as a way to promote “the Real Archaeology” as “the [moral] good” traffic in essentialized perspectives on both disciplinary and non- (or even anti-) disciplinary knowledge. Over the pas fifty years, archaeologists, historians, and other scholars deeply concerned about the human past and present have come increasingly to recognize the limits of scientific knowledge as tool for understanding communities. We’ve come to marvel at the complex epistemologies and ontologies that structure how groups understand their world and the powerful knowledge produced by communities cut off from access to scientific, academic, and disciplinary practices. Reducing this kind of knowledge to the “pseudo” risks doubling down on the very colonialist, classist, and even racist practices that this work often seeks superficially to challenge.

This is a particularly dangerous time to do this as many people—including admired disciplinary practitioners—have come to consider scientific knowledge as inadequate for understanding the past and producing actionable knowledge for a present threatened by the existential crises of global climate change.