The year started and ended with pseudo-archaeology, and it has been one of the main themes. I began with a reaction to CBC’s uncritical coverage of the Solutrean Hypothesis on the Nature of Things’ Ice Bridge episode, and ended with an assessment of critical thinking in Curse of Oak Island fan communities. The conclusion of…
Significant online fan communities have developed around the most popular pseudo-archaeology television series, such as Ancient Aliens and Curse of Oak Island. Far from being uncritical of the claims made on those shows, these fan communities are spaces for radical speculation, but also for rapid self-correction. They are spaces in which professional archaeologists could participate…
There was a time when well-behaved, responsible, professional archaeologists did not engage with pseudo-archaeology and its claims. For the few who did, “it is quite common for us to receive a negative response from our colleagues; We are often asked why we waste our energy thinking, researching, and writing about nonsensical claims” (Feder 1990:391). That…
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, scholars such as Charles Davenport and Karl Pearson popularized the idea of eugenics: that through careful management of our collective genetic resources, we could improve not only ourselves, but the whole of society. Classical eugenics Eugenics “promised not only an experimental understanding of mind and behavior, but…
Hot on the heels of the claim of a 16 000 year old human presence at the Gault site (Williams et al 2018) last August, Waters et al (2018) are claiming stone tools dated at 15 500 years at the nearby Friedkin site. Both of these are part of the pre-Clovis Buttermilk Creek complex. As…
