Archaeology, hypocrisy and double standards

The myth makers.  What's good for the goose is good for the gander

This is all quite entertaining. There is a huge fuss going on right now about a charlatan who has been involved in a rather spectacular and controversial TV programme promoting "pseudo-archaeology" and "pseudo-history" in pursuit of personal glory and personal profit. He is accused of the following crimes:

1. Wildly misinterpreting or "over-interpreting" evidence in the field

2. Maintaining a pretence that he is an expert while writing in a field in which he is spectacularly under-qualified

3. Developing a ruling hypothesis and turning it into an over-arching myth

4. Cherry picking his evidence and his sites

5. Withholding or ignoring countervailing data and inconvenient evidence brought to his attention by others

6. Choosing to ignore context

7. Pandering to the public desire to believe in heroic ancestors and lost wisdom

8. Pandering to the media demand for spectacular stories and dramatic headlines

9. Failing to give due respect to the inconvenient opinions of experts in related fields

10. Failing to subject the evidence and the arguments to unbiased scholarly peer review.

11. Misrepresenting the current state of understanding in certain fields

12. Highlighting expert disagreements and using those to "demonstrate" that a certain discipline is of dubious value, being filled with "pseudo-experts"

13. Destroying respect for the truth and for science, by impairing the ability of viewers and readers to discern the true from the biased, and the credible from the false.

14.  Basing a whole narrative on a strictly personal conviction of what reality and the truth are, and framing it in such a way that people think he’s presenting something scientific.

So who are we talking about here?  Well, Graham Hancock, of course, since the newspapers and social media are full of him.  He no doubt thoroughly enjoys the notoriety, and  Netflix enjoys the polarised debate and the extensive press coverage too, because the more furious the archaeologists and historians become, the more viewers they get for their infamous TV series.

But hang on a bit.  The words "hypocrisy" and "double standards" spring to mind, because the very archaeologists who are now getting into a lather about somebody who has the temerity to promote a wildly exotic narrative or myth which is unsupported by the facts are the very same people who have turned their academic discipline into a "story telling" paradise in which facts are of only secondary importance. Post-processualism reigns, does it not?  Well, maybe not everywhere, but it has certainly been behind the development of the extraordinary bluestone myth promoted over the last decade by MPP and his team.   What was a rather sterile and admittedly speculative tale (invented by Herbert Thomas) of some bluestones being moved over a long distance by our Neolithic ancestors has turned into something far more elaborate,  presented as fact. Now we have bluestone quarries, stone trans-shipments and overland transport, lost stone circles, solsticial alignments, ancestor worship, tributes and political unification, and a lot else besides.

And take a look at those 14 criticisms levelled towards Hancock by the outraged archaeological establishment. Most if not all of them can be levelled at Parker Pearson and his team, who have been utterly dedicated to the proving and expansion of a ruling hypothesis which is still, after ten years or more,  unsupported by any evidence that withstands scrutiny.  In the process they have disguised speculations as facts and conflated technology with science.

Metaphors abound.  Red herrings, wild geese, edifices built on sinky sand, black pots and kettles....... just take your pick.  

More to the point, archaeologists should refrain from going after somewhat deranged journalists and their wacky stories without first putting their own house in order.  In other words, since we are enjoying our metaphors today, people in glasshouses shouldn't throw stones.

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PS. Let's end on a positive note.  Academically dodgy narratives and modern myths never survive for very long, since they are eventually undermined by science.  New research relating to Waun Mawn and the "bluestone quarries" has now shown that there never was a "lost bluestone circle" at Waun Mawn, that there are no Neolithic bluestone quarries at Carn Goedog and Rhosyfelin, that there are no links between these sites and Waun Mawn, and that the "lost circle" site has nothing to do with Stonehenge.  It's all in the literature.  The sad thing is that the perpetrators of the myth will probably be the last people to accept that it is dead and buried.

Craig Rhosyfelin -- an interesting site where the archaeologists have done a lot of quarrying.....