Pseudoarchaeology
Pseudoarchaeology consists of attempts to study, interpret, or teach about the subject-matter of archaeology while rejecting, ignoring, or misunderstanding the accepted data-gathering and analytical methods of the discipline. These pseudoscientific interpretations involve the use of artifacts, sites or materials to construct scientifically insubstantial theories to strengthen the pseudoarchaeologists' claims. Methods include exaggeration of evidence, dramatic or romanticized conclusions, use of fallacious arguments, and fabrication of evidence.
There is no unified pseudoarchaeological theory or method, but rather many different interpretations of the past which are jointly at odds with those developed by the scientific community as well as with each other. These include religious philosophies such as creationism or "creation science" that apply to the archaeology of historic periods such as those that would have included the supposed worldwide flood myth, the Genesis flood narrative, Nephilim, Noah's Ark, and the Tower of Babel. Some pseudoarchaeological theories concern the idea that prehistoric and ancient human societies were aided in their development by intelligent extraterrestrial life, an idea propagated by those such as Italian author Peter Kolosimo, French authors Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier in The Morning of the Magicians, and Swiss author Erich von Däniken in Chariots of the Gods?. Others instead argue there were human societies in the ancient period which were significantly technologically advanced, such as Atlantis, and this idea has been propagated by some people such as Graham Hancock in his publication Fingerprints of the Gods. Pseudoarchaeology has also been manifest in Mayanism and the 2012 phenomenon.
Many pseudoarchaeological theories are intimately linked with the occult/Western esoteric tradition. Many alternative archaeologies have been adopted by religious groups. Fringe archaeological ideas such as archaeocryptography and pyramidology have been endorsed by religions ranging from the British Israelites to the theosophists. Other alternative archaeologies include those that have been adopted by members of New Age and contemporary pagan belief systems.
Academic archaeologists have often criticised pseudoarchaeology, with one of the major critics, John R. Cole, characterising it as relying on "sensationalism, misuse of logic and evidence, misunderstanding of scientific method, and internal contradictions in their arguments". The relationship between alternative and academic archaeologies has been compared to the relationship between intelligent design theories and evolutionary biology by some archaeologists.
Etymology
Various terms have been employed to refer to these non-academic interpretations of archaeology. During the 1980s, the term "cult archaeology" was used by some people such as John R. Cole and William H. Stiebing Jr.. "Fantastic archaeology" was used during the 1980s as the name of an undergraduate course at Harvard University taught by Stephen Williams, who published a book with the same title. During the 2000s, the term "alternative archaeology" began to be instead applied by academics like Tim Sebastion, Robert J. Wallis, Cornelius Holtorf, and Gabriel Moshenka. Garrett F. Fagan and Kenneth Feder however claimed this term was only chosen because it "imparts a warmer, fuzzier feel" that "appeals to our higher ideals and progressive inclinations". They argued that the term "pseudoarchaeology" was much more appropriate, a term also used by other prominent academic and professional archaeologists such as Colin Renfrew.Other academic archaeologists have chosen to use other terms to refer to these interpretations. Glyn Daniel, the editor of Antiquity, used the derogative term "bullshit archaeology", and similarly the academic William H. Stiebing Jr. noted that there were certain terms used for pseudoarchaeology that were heard "in the privacy of professional archaeologists' homes and offices but which cannot be mentioned in polite society".
Description
Pseudoarchaeology can be practised intentionally or unintentionally. Archaeological frauds and hoaxes are considered intentional pseudoarchaeology. Genuine archaeological finds may become the subject of unintentional pseudoarchaeology by persons unwittingly employing flawed interpretive methods.The difficulty of dating clay tablets has enabled widespread archaeological forgery and associated fraud, especially in the Middle East. "By 1904, during the early period of cuneiform tablet collecting, J. Edgar Banks, a Mesopotamian explorer and tablet dealer, estimated that nearly 80% of tablets offered for sale in Baghdad were fakes. In 2016, Syria's Director General for Antiquities and Museums reported that approximately 70% of seized artefacts in the country are fakes."
Especially in the past, but also in the present, pseudoarchaeology has been affected by racism, which can be suggested by confirmation-bias-influenced attempts to attribute ancient indigenous cultural sites and artefacts to non-indigenous creators such as ancient Egyptians, Hebrew Lost Tribes, civilizations that allegedly succeeded in Pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact, or even extraterrestrial intelligence.
Practitioners of pseudoarchaeology often criticise academic archaeologists and established scientific methods, claiming that practitioners of those methods have ignored or even conspired to suppress critical evidence.
Cornelius Holtorf states that countering the misleading "discoveries" of pseudoarchaeology creates a dilemma for archaeologists: whether to attempt to disprove pseudoarchaeology by "crusading" methods or to concentrate on better public knowledge of the sciences involved. Holtorf suggested a third method involving identifying the social and cultural demands that both scientific archaeology and pseudoarchaeology address, and identifying the engagement of present people with the material remains of the past. Holtorf presents the search for truth as a process rather than a result and states that "even non-scientific research contributes to enriching our landscapes."
Characteristics
William H. Stiebing Jr. argued that despite their many differences, there were a set of common characteristics shared by almost all pseudoarchaeological interpretations. He believed that because of this, pseudoarchaeology could be categorised as a "single phenomenon". He then identified three main commonalities of pseudeoarchaeological theories: the unscientific nature of its method and evidence, its history of providing "simple, compact answers to complex, difficult issues", and its tendency to present itself as being persecuted by the archaeological establishment, accompanied by an ambivalent attitude towards the scientific ethos of the Enlightenment. This idea that there are common characteristics of pseudoarchaeologies is shared by other academics.Lack of scientific method
Academic critics have stated that pseudoarchaeologists typically neglect to use the scientific method. Instead of testing evidence to see what hypotheses it satisfies best, pseudoarchaeologists selectively interpret, otherwise distort, or even outright falsify archaeological data to fit a "favored conclusion" that is often arrived at through hunches, intuition, or religious or nationalist dogma. Pseudoarchaeological groups have a variety of basic assumptions that are typically unscientific: the Nazi pseudoarchaeologists, for instance, invoked the claimed cultural superiority of the ancient Aryan race as a basis for their theories and for their rejection of those theories' rivals, whilst Christian fundamentalist pseudoarchaeologists conceive of the Earth as being less than 10,000 years old and Hindu fundamentalist pseudoarchaeologists believe that the species Homo sapiens is much older than the 200,000 years old it has been shown to be by archaeologists. Despite this, many of pseudoarchaeology's proponents claim that they gained their conclusions using scientific techniques and methods even when it is demonstrable that they have not.Academic archaeologist John R. Cole believed that most pseudoarchaeologists do not understand how scientific investigation works and that they instead believe it to be a "simple, catastrophic right versus wrong battle" between contesting theories. It was because of this failure to understand the scientific method, he argued, that pseudoarchaeological arguments were faulty. He went on to argue that most pseudoarchaeologists do not consider alternatives to whatever explanation they wish to propagate and that their "theories" were typically just "notions", not having sufficient evidence to allow them to be considered "theories" in the scientific, academic meaning of the word.
When pseudoarchaeologists lack scientific evidence, they commonly invoke other types of justifications for their arguments. For instance, they often use "generalized cultural comparisons", using various monuments and other artefacts from one society, and emphasizing similarities with those of another society to conclude that the two artefacts had a common cultural origin, typically an ancient lost civilisation like Atlantis, Mu, or an extraterrestrial influence. Such comparisons involve examinations of the respective artefacts or monuments entirely outside their original contexts, a practice anathema to academic archaeologists, for whom context is of the utmost importance.
Another type of evidence used by a number of pseudoarchaeologists is the interpretation of various myths as representing historical events, but in doing so these myths are often taken out of their cultural contexts. For instance, pseudoarchaeologist Immanuel Velikovsky claimed that the myths of migrations and war gods in the Central American Aztec civilisation represented a cosmic catastrophe that occurred during the 7th and 8th centuries BCE. This was criticised by academic archaeologist William H. Stiebing Jr., who noted that such myths only developed during the 12th to the 14th centuries CE, two millennia after Velikovsky claimed that the events had occurred, and that the Aztec society itself had not even developed by the 7th century BCE.