Tag Archives: Pseudoarchaeology

What lies beneath Achill-henge?

Politics, The Past, , ,
Achill-henge

Achill-henge. Photo by Seequinn

It’s good to see Achill-henge being picked up by the BBC. This is a story that’s been around for a while. I think RTÉ’s video report is access­ible world­wide. The BBC just has a webpage that’s an intro­duc­tion to the story. You can also listen to the radio pro­gramme (world­wide I think) with the rel­ev­ant seg­ment at 6m04s.

It’s not a bad story, but from an archae­olo­gical point of view it misses the most inter­est­ing things. Firstly build­ing this ertsatz archae­olo­gical site may have dam­aged a real site. Usu­ally before con­struc­tion there will be test digs to check the con­struc­tion won’t des­troy some­thing of his­tor­ical import­ance. Achill is an extremely sens­it­ive archae­olo­gical site. There’s a long run­ning field school there because it has such a rich archae­olo­gical record. If you’re a fan of pre­his­toric remains, it seems a bit mad to risk des­troy­ing one to make a copy.

The second thing is the tem­plate chosen for the site. It’s Stone­henge. It’s a shoddy Stone­henge as any­one who’s been there could tell you, but it’s clearly a ring of tri­lithons. You don’t get those in Ire­land. There’s a romantic ideal that the pre­his­toric Brit­ish Isles were all Celtic but, as we learn more about sites, it’s becom­ing clear that there are dis­tinct­ive dif­fer­ences in tra­di­tions around the islands.

Tomnaverie Stone Circle

Tomnav­erie Stone Circle. Photo by Cameron Diack

This is Tomnav­erie Recum­bent Stone Circle. The recum­bent bit is the low stone in the middle, flanked by two tall stones. There’s plenty of stone circles like this around Aber­deen­shire, but you don’t get so many of them any­where else. There is a pos­sible astro­nom­ical align­ment. These circles tend to be set up so that the sum­mer full moon appears to roll across the top of the recum­bent stone every 18 years or so, due to the way the Moon’s orbit wobbles.

Drombeg Stone Circle

Drombeg Recum­bent Stone Circle. Photo by Todd Slagter

This is Drombeg Recum­bent Stone Circle. It’s com­pact and tidy, but the tallest stones are on the oppos­ite side to the recum­bent stone. This is more typ­ical of Irish circles. The tall stones can be seen as a delib­er­ate a portal for entry. The astro­nom­ical align­ments are dif­fer­ent for Irish circles. They tend to be facing south-westish and this could be an align­ment to winter sol­stice sunset.

Even though they look sim­ilar, these stone circles could be telling us very dif­fer­ent things about belief. If we trust the pat­terns emer­ging from study­ing groups of monu­ments, not just the ones we like, then they’re almost oppos­ites. The key event in Scot­land seems to hap­pen with the Moon in sum­mer. In Ire­land they’re look­ing to the Sun in winter.

There’s an ongo­ing argu­ment about whether sum­mer sun­rise or winter sun­set was more import­ant at Stone­henge. I favour winter sun­set, but to some extent this is just as reflect­ive of how you view pre­his­toric life as it is about the data. In addi­tion there’s plenty of evid­ence show­ing that Stone­henge was repeatedly remod­elled, includ­ing a pos­sible shift from lunar to solar alignments.

In any event whatever the tra­di­tion was at Stone­henge it’s a massive leap to think what happened there was reflect­ive of beliefs across the Irish Sea. Stone­henge is so embed­ded as an iconic brand for pre­his­toric archae­ology in the Brit­ish Isles, that Brit­ish pre­his­tory is now col­on­ising per­cep­tions of what a pre­his­toric Ire­land would look like.

I don’t know to what extent that’s a good thing. Mod­ern states are recent inven­tions, and some archae­olo­gists will cringe at the idea of a pre­his­toric Ire­land or UK. Recog­nising mod­ern bound­ar­ies don’t apply to the past is a sens­ible fea­ture. At the same time an appeal­ing com­mon past does risk los­ing some of what makes places loc­ally distinctive.

Pho­tos:
Achill-henge. Photo by Seequin. Licenced under a Cre­at­ive Com­mons BY-NC licence.
Tomnav­erie Stone Circle. Photo by Cameron Diack. Licenced under a Cre­at­ive Com­mons BY-NC-ND licence.
Drombeg Stone Circle. Photo by Todd Slagter. Licenced under a Cre­at­ive Com­mons BY licence.

Cliopatria Awards 2008: Best Series of Posts

Politics, The Past, ,
pyramidiot

Here we’re mov­ing out of my depth slightly. I haven’t been fol­low­ing enough blogs that intently to men­tion more than a couple of series of posts.

So instead of a com­pre­hens­ive over­view, I’m going to grab the ‘high­light work that oth­ers might not have seen’ baton and point to Le Site d’Irna as my nom­in­a­tion for Best Series of Posts. I’m nom­in­at­ing with mixed feel­ings, because I’m not really inter­ested in giv­ing the sub­ject any more pub­li­city. So the write-up is oblique to try and avoid a cer­tain phrase and draw­ing in more vis­it­ors who get angry when you rule out alien inter­ven­tion as an explan­a­tion for archae­olo­gical remains, purely due to lack of evid­ence. To a large extent the world is bored. It’s old news. Yet still he keeps dig­ging and des­troy­ing more and more of the irre­place­able past. Irna with her series of posts has kept a chron­icle of what has been going in the Balkans (clue if you don’t know what I’m talk­ing about). It’s a thank­less task, at least for now but I’m entirely ser­i­ous when I say her posts are of his­toric import­ance. This will be valu­able mater­ial when someone wants to talk about the ‘equal valid­ity of dif­fer­ent ways of know­ing.’ It’s the only place I know of where the extra-terrestrial hunt­ing pseudoar­chae­olo­gists have been given carte blanche on a site of archae­olo­gical importance.

The posts are:

It’s a shame she’s had to write them, but she has writ­ten them well and they deserve recognition.

Is reality the second best option?

Politics, , , ,

Puma over Visoko
A Brit­ish Puma flies over Visoko. Photo by Torbein.

I wasn’t too sur­prised by some of the responses to the Bos­nian Pyr­amid posts, though the quant­ity was high. One reason for not writ­ing more on it was the sheer num­ber of vis­it­ors. I’ve had to pay for increased band­width which I can’t really afford to do again. There were a few people that noted I was an idiot, which told me noth­ing I didn’t know already, but no flaws in my reas­on­ing. I assume that means that every­one accepts that the press releases com­ing out from Visoko are so non­sensical even an idiot can spot the errors. There­fore if you want to archae­olo­gic­ally exam­ine the hill to find out what happened there in the past then the dig is prob­ably a bad idea. There are lots of import­ant things on the site and Osman­agić doesn’t seem to be aware of the prob­lems he has record­ing it. Or else doesn’t care. But is the dig really about find­ing his­tory or cre­at­ing myth?

“And if it’s not a pyr­amid, then we make one,” said a man from Visoko after we asked him what he thinks of the pyr­amid shaped hill.

Nearby, the man­ager of a food fact­ory was flog­ging “Bos­nian Sun Pyr­amid” pralines. Hawkers sold hast­ily prin­ted T-shirts and brandy in pyramid-shaped bottles while crafts­men turned out pyr­amid souven­irs. Retiree Rasim Kilalic turned his week­end home near the dig into a café. “Please God, let them find a pyr­amid,” he said, rush­ing to serve crowded tables.

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Could Kendo Nagasaki smack down Alternative Archaeology?

Politics, The Past, , ,

There’s never enough time. There was a write up of what soun­ded like an incred­ibly use­ful drug in New Sci­ent­ist recently of a pill that allows you to pull 48 hour shifts with no side-effects which would be a help. I could spend so much more time read­ing and think­ing as well as writ­ing. A week later in the let­ters sec­tion it was poin­ted out there is a slight side effect. It causes pre­ma­ture death in lab mice, which could be a draw­back should I ever want keep mice. Per­haps it’s just as well I’ve for­got­ten the name of the drug.

The reason I might want to do this is that there are inter­est­ing things to read like Cor­nelius Holtorf’s paper in World Archae­ology “Bey­ond cru­sades: how (not) to engage with altern­at­ive archae­olo­gies”. It’s very good, though the price of $28:32 would seem like a bit of a bar­rier to any altern­at­ive archae­olo­gists. I found it men­tioned on the Hall of Ma’at while look­ing for some­thing else. There is some use­ful debate there but you’ll have to sift through it because there’s also some pos­tur­ing of the like I last saw on a Sat­urday after­noon with my Gran­cha. The paper argues that an aca­demic smack­down is not a help­ful way to engage with altern­at­ive archae­ology and talks about other ways of enga­ging with the fringe.
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Giza: The Truth by Ian Lawton and Chris Ogilvie-Herald

Politics, The Past, , , , , , ,

I didn’t buy this book — it was bought for me. From the cover it looks like yet another ali­ens built the pyr­am­ids book. As it hap­pens they do dis­cuss ali­ens, but they do ration­ally and with a simple logic. Take for instance the claim by Robert Temple (The Sirius Mys­tery) on the weath­er­ing of the Sphinx. Temple argues that the erosion was caused because the enclos­ure of the Sphinx was filled with water for ali­ens, who were amphi­bi­ans, to swim in. My ‘refut­a­tion’ would prob­ably go some­thing along the lines of “Don’t be so bloody stu­pid”. This is not help­ful. Law­ton and Ogilvie-Herald approach it with a lighter touch. “Since the water would drain away without con­stant refilling, we do not regard this as very likely.”

Like the anti-archaeology books it tackles, it’s bit of a door-stop at over 550 pages. It is rather dry in places, but it is a use­ful dis­sec­tion of the deceit prac­ticed by anti-archaeologists in Egypt. It also reveal how the deceit spreads in to the polit­ics of work on the Giza plat­eau.

Mean­while we have already seen in Chapter 10 that Bauval and Han­cock had ori­gin­ally been invited to join the Schor exped­i­tions, but refused on the basis of West;s exclu­sion and the require­ment that they should sign non-disclosure agree­ments. These were the two major bones of con­ten­tion that they exploited to the full in their pub­lic utter­ances… Not only were they intent on halt­ing Schor’s mis­sions, but they also wanted to ensure any of his team’s find­ings were brought to the atten­tion of the pub­lic as soon as pos­sible. In this they were aided by Said, who released a copy of the Secret Cham­ber promo to Bauval — who in turn milked Hawass’s ‘Indi­ana Jones’ quip for all it was worth…
Schor him­self has informed us that, as he was fin­an­cing the mis­sion, he wanted the oppor­tun­ity to recoup his invest­ment by hav­ing the first oppo­tun­ity of releas­ing the findings.

Later they talk about Bauval and Hancock’s recon­cili­ation with Hawass and quote Bauval “…we will not allow this to degen­er­ate again into a mor­ass of polit­ical con­fu­sion and media hype. The stakes are too high for egos to get in the way of the search for truth”.

Is it suc­cess­ful? Well let­ters like this one on Ian Lawton’s site would sug­gest that he’s an irrit­ant to Bauval at least.

On the down­side it looks like sens­ible books on Egypt are dif­fi­cult to sell. Law­ton has now foun­ded the Rational Spir­itu­al­ity Move­ment “…an emer­ging world­wide asso­ci­ation of like-minded indi­vidu­als who share a com­mon spir­itual world­view based on the dual con­cepts of rein­carn­a­tion and karma. This world­view is fun­da­ment­ally dif­fer­ent from any that has gone before because it is pre­dic­ated on ration­al­ity and ana­lysis of mod­ern evid­ence, not on faith and belief in ‘revealed wisdom’.”

Oh dear.

Write your own Alternative Archaeology book

Politics, , ,

How do you fight ‘Altern­at­ive’ archae­ology? The obvi­ous answer would be with the facts, but is that a good idea? A lot of the read­ers aren’t really that inter­ested in the facts. They don’t want to read round books that might chal­lenge their assump­tions, they just want their pre­ju­dices con­firmed. Sup­port­ers of the Kens­ing­ton Rune Stone aren’t going to be bothered by the fact that there’s not a shred of evid­ence for Vik­ings in that part of Min­nesota, nor that the runes are inac­cur­ate for the period it’s fak­ing. As for the unde­cideds who see one group claim­ing one thing and the other group claim­ing another, how do you get around that potato / po-tar-to problem?

A thing that is slowly gath­er­ing bytes on my hard drive is some­thing inspired by the KLF. Loosely it’s “How to Write Altern­at­ive Archae­ology the Easy Way”. Rather than say X is rub­bish and Y is non­sense I won­der if it might be inter­est­ing to gather inform­a­tion about some of the staples of altern­at­ive archae­ology and show how this rub­bish is put together.

Giant's CausewayTake for instance the Bimini Road, which proves the Ancient High Ones built roads or whatever. You could say that it’s not a road and give the geo­lo­gical evid­ence as to why. If you think the Bimini Road is man-made then pre­sum­ably you’ll be astoun­ded by the Giant’s Cause­way (photo by Mrp­at­ter­sonsir right). Any­way you could do that. Might it be more help­ful to get a mys­tery, work on the assump­tion that it’s a geo­lo­gical fea­ture from the start, rather than dis­prove it’s art­fi­cial ori­gin, and then show how you can twist data to make it look man-made. Point out that arti­facts could be found on it, or by it. It’s a safe bet this is true as any­thing washed over­board would get sink to the seabed. By doing this you can then show why genu­ine archae­olo­gists won’t believe it, the arte­facts lack con­text, but how altern­at­ive archae­olo­gists weasel their way out of this prob­lem. Not only are you high­light­ing the archae­olo­gical and his­tor­ical issues, you also expose how the ‘altern­at­ive’ decep­tion is done.

Talk to a pro­fes­sional magi­cian. They won’t mind someone stand­ing up and telling the audi­ence that it’s impossible to pull a rab­bit out of a hat, but they’d hate it if someone explained how the decep­tion was done. There is a danger that by explain­ing how to fake his­tory that you give someone the weapons to pro­duce more junk. But at a basic level the pro­fes­sional char­lat­ans already know the tricks. Dis­cuss­ing how mis­dir­ec­tion works in anti­science may alert people more to how frauds try to pull the wool over their eyes.

The aim of the pro­ject, if it ever hap­pens, will be to try and reduce the effort in writ­ing an altern­at­ive archae­ology novel. To help I have a tool which gen­er­ates altern­at­ive archae­ology titles. If I’d real­ised how pop­u­lar the Vik­ing Name Gen­er­ator would become, then I’d have prob­ably put this up earlier instead. I’m baffled. I can’t work out why so many people are pleased to be Serial Arson­ist. As for this one, the databank is smal­ler and it’s more satir­ical than funny.

Enter the Author Name:

Would you like my honest opinion or would you prefer the alternative?

Politics, , ,

Athena has put up a post on Pseudo-science and Archae­ology which I like. It has two par­tic­u­lar good points. Firstly she defines what she means by pseudo-science and then she explains why it mat­ters. The quibble I would have is one which could be applied with far more force to me. Is Pseudo-science the right word? I think it is in Athena’s case, because she defines what she means. How­ever Phil Plait at Bad Astro­nomy has argued that the term pseudo-science is mis­lead­ing because it gives the impres­sion that pseudo-science is almost sci­ence. There’s noth­ing sci­entific about it. It’s anti­science and that’s the term he’s using.

He points out that the label we give to a pos­i­tion defines its oppon­ents too. So if you plant a car-bomb out­side an abor­tion clinic you’re “pro-life”, thus imply­ing the guy or guyess you’re try­ing kill is anti–life. Does this have reper­cus­sions for his­tory or archae­ology?
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If I had a subscription to Focus I’d cancel it

Science, , , ,

This isn’t an entry I par­tic­u­larly wanted to write, but another sci/tech magazine has bit the dust. I had bought every copy of Focus up till a couple of months ago. It star­ted as an intel­li­gent sci­ence magazine, but after the onslaught of the Loaded era it dumbed down some­what. Sadly it has now skipped out of sens­ible sci­ence altogether.

I can’t com­ment on last month’s issue (cover story the Secrets of UFOs), because I’d decided to skip buy­ing it after they prin­ted a piece that claimed the Mitchell-Hedges Crys­tal Skull was an unsolved mys­tery for Mayan archae­olo­gists. Cer­tainly one unsolved mys­tery is why did Mitchell-Hedges claim to have found the 19th cen­tury Ger­man crys­tal skull in a Mayan city, when he had in fact bought it from Sotheby’s. That took 30 seconds to find on the inter­net. In the same issue the Op-Ed column sagely berated those who spouted junk rather than spend a brief time check­ing the facts first which, they noted, was even easier these days thanks to the internet.

So what per­suaded me to buy it this month? The cover. Amaz­ing New Dis­cov­ery: The Lost Ark of the Cov­en­ant: It van­ished over 2000 years ago but now experts think they’ve found it.
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