As an archaeologist, I am interested in culture change, and that includes changes in conventions, expectations and practices. Sometimes, these can happen over amazingly short time-spans (archaeologically speaking). One change that I’ve noticed over the past few decades, which is a short time for an archaeologist, is that especially at playoff games, almost the entirety…
William Shatner pseudo-archaeology tweet breakdown: Straight from the PseudoSciComm handbook
Last week, actor William Shatner’s twitter account posted a teaser for an episode of his series UnXplained that dealt with ancient monuments, and presumably whether they were built by aliens. Without getting into the show or the mystery itself, it is worth looking at the tweet as a very classic example of pseudo-archaeological and generally…
Oak Island Archaeology Update: Have they found FDR’s rubber boot?
Since the broadcast of Episode 15, Season 9 of The Curse of Oak Island (COOI), much has been made of the recovery of a rubber boot in the first “big can” core. The goal of putting down a core with a 10 foot diameter was of course to find evidence of the money pit, and…
Did a comet airburst destroy the Hopewell? Comment on The Hopewell Airburst Event, 1699-1567 Years Ago (252-383 CE), by Tankersley et al. (2022).
Tankersley et al. (2022) recently published a brief paper in Nature Scientific Reports, arguing that the Hopewell culture of the first half of the first millennium CE in the North American Midwest was ended, or at least severely helped along toward its demise, by a comet fragment airburst event. The paper is getting quite a…
23 k year old footprints at Lake Otero, New Mexico, Round 2
Back in October, I commented on the fairly amazing find of human footprints at Lake Otero in New Mexico, which Bennett et al (2021) argue are 23k years old. As I said at the time, whether the footprints are 23k, or 15k, or 12k years old, it is still an amazing find. However, if they…
ArcheoThoughts 