As an archaeologist, I am interested in long-term change and how it works. Given the current multiple situations around us at the moment, it isn't surprising that I have been increasingly thinking about sudden change in particular, and why it sometimes seems to come out of nowhere. One of the answers is that we live…
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…
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…
Oak Island archaeology update: Gun stones and rose gold
So far, season 9 of Curse of Oak Island (COOI) has focused on a couple of finds: Gold, sometimes described as flakes, that seems to show up as microscopic grains, or inclusions in two metallic objects, and small stone spheres, identified on the show as gun stones. According to the COOI team, the gold flakes…
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