This page updated 15 October 2014
AT LAST, it's out in public! A few archaeologists are willing to join battle with the mystery writers. Or, the writers and readers that the archaeologists wish to call, "pseudo-archaeologists".
The battle call appears in the May-June issue of Archaeology magazine for 2003. Related is a call to archaeologists and cultural anthropologists to speak more openly of the realities of human aggression and the age-old problem of war in societies large and small, across the globe.
Archaeology magazine covers adventure, discovery, culture, history and travel. In a special section in mid-2003, it covers "Atlantis and Beyond: the lure of bogus archaeology". Or, "alternative archaeology: why is bad science so popular?"
Archaeology's editor-in-chief, Peter A. Young,
introduces a Dublin-born archaeologist now in the US, Garrett
Fagan, who writes on "the seductions of pseudoarchaeology". Young
writes, "Bad science is not only proliferating on television but
also in print and on the web, as other reports [in this issue] ...
make clear."
Fagan is Associate Professor of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean
Studies and History at Pennsylvania State University.
This Lost Worlds article is intended to help explain why, worldwide, the market is so large for fabulous stories - such as those on Atlantis. Fagan has found that fans of pseudoarchaeology will tell him, quite simply, that they are not attracted to his style of story-telling. They like something more sensational, more poetic, closer to mythology, and perhaps, "more inspiring".
Fagan notes of the mystery fans, "Their ancient civilizations, for instance, are better than ours, more peaceful, more spiritually attuned." Quite so. The "ancient civilizations" are often also claimed to have fascinating technology, though it remains unclear on just what scientific principles such technology was ever based. Or how, if the technology was lost, the knowledge behind it was also lost.
The result of asking such questions in the Western World seems since the 1950s to be an ongoing battle between Views on Human Aggression plus Modern Science plus Theory of Evolution plus Known Religions versus Technological Amnesia plus Unexplained Catastrophe plus Ice Ages plus Non-Aggression plus Spiritual Accord.
Modern archaeology as it tries to explain ancient cultures, societies and civilizations is constrained to abide by the general rules of scientific explanation. This can make for dryness, coldness and caution in its reports. Whereas the alternative school opts for mystery, modern versions of the magic of a mytho-poetic outlook, an inner need (however vicarious) to feel reverence, nostalgia for the idea of the sacred, and variations on the general theme of... we don't really know, but maybe...
Add in treasure hunts, the possibility of making fabulous discoveries, a sense of theatre, the joys of pointing out the things archaeologists might never be able to explain, a sense of taking on the establishment, and recipes are ripe for a publishing industry that exploits the imaginations of people who are less than familiar with the rules of scientific inquiry or inquiries into cultural ways, civilizations, economies and history.
When time turned into our millennium, the mainstream approaches to archaeology - and history - were also being challenged by a virtual new sub-discipline - archaeo-climatology - which seeks explanations for the effects on human societies of slow or abrupt climate change. Lost Worlds has lately become interested in this, the research effort is not easy. Historians of many kinds will probably have trouble for decades with assessing the deeper effects of climate change on humanity. We anyway seem to be living through our own period of climate change - the greenhouse effect!
Many of the arguments are unlikely to go away. It's entertaining to explore, why not? There are, for example, two different vocabularies to be used. The vocabulary of mainstream archaeology is circumscribed by what I'll call "the scientised outlook". Even the word "climate" has to be used within the terms of a theoretical structure which might suggest, somewhat rigorously, how a society used its resources during a period of difficult climatic conditions. Whereas the mystery fans might have only a passing interest in, say, "the climate of Atlantis", which we probably imagine to have been benign, at least till disaster struck.
In contrast to any such scientised outlook, the mystery fans are more fond of a mytho-poetic outlook. And there is room for belief that several thousand years ago, the mytho-poetic outlook prevailed for large populations living in the earliest city states.
Here Lost Worlds has been seduced by a reading of...
Henri Frankfort et al, Before Philosophy: The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man: An Essay on Speculative Thought in the Ancient Near East. Penguin, 1968. (First pub., University of Chicago Press, 1946).
This is a fascinating book, based on straightforward archaeology of Sumeria and Ancient Egypt, and particularly their religions, but attentive to the mytho-poetic outlook, which the authors call "speculative thought", and what this thought-style might have proposed to their peoples.
The mytho-poetic outlook was partly based on reasoning by metaphor and analogy, less on deduction, induction, and other operations of "rational man".
Nevertheless, Lost Worlds admires the Sumerians for inventing what we call a cooking range - which can cook different sorts of food in different vessels at differing rates.
So we might conclude, not due to the seduction of logical
thought, but partly due to humanity's preference for a predictable
result, that over long centuries, the mytho-poetic outlook did not
reign supreme - it mixed with more rational forms of thought. One
result was the cooking range. To invent a cooking range must take
quite some love of good food, of cooking, careful observation and
experimentation, testing of heat balances, curiosity about taste
balances and reasons for them.
Item: Sumerians are the first people to develop cooking ranges on
which pots and pans could be placed for a variety of cooking
purposes, from 2500BC.
Humanity has stumbled along like this for millennia, inventing, destroying, learning, forgetting, thinking, wondering - becoming rational, also being irrational, descending into perversity, becoming virtuous. There is a legend that the Greeks invented prose writing to stop people from being intoxicated by poetry, that is, being excessively influenced by the mytho-poetic outlook. (This however has little to do with historians' failures to explain the long dark ages of literacy in Greece, and how the lights of literacy were lit again!)
In ancient times, it seems, whole societies shared the mytho-poetic outlook, where, perhaps, the sky is viewed as alive by day or night, the mountain or volcano on the horizon is alive. It's a world where maybe, deep in the aliveness of the sky, gods also live. Angels (and/or demons) are known to exist, and it seems they are given specific tasks to perform by the deities who guide their activity. Shapes in the clouds may be meaningful. Demiurges worked; as the Greeks noticed, Chaos was fearful. For the Greeks, Poseidon, the god of earthquakes, lived in the sea, that is, the tideless Mediterranean.
And so on... to the formation of a distinct cosmology where everything fits, everything links, and perhaps, everything is alive as humans and animals are alive - and everything reacts holistically. If this indeed is reality, then it might be true also that the virtue of the population has much to due with continued good crops, with food supply? So the gods must be pleased and placated... suitable rituals can affect the very fertility of the earth. Obviously!
In Before Philosophy, the authors are fascinating in speculating on how the different climates of Egypt and Sumeria gave rise to differing religions. The progress of the religion of Egypt was long-lasting, stately, hard to interrupt. The progress of the religions of Sumeria was more volatile, often interrupted, dramatic, subject to surges of activity which would harm human society. (Egypt and Sumeria/Mesopotamia, incidentally, both produced early forms of Monotheism.)
Ancient beliefs about cosmology however present one sharp point of difference with today's views. IF the universe the ancient Sumerians lived in seemed itself alive, then there is nothing foreign to it - or alien.
If the gods - or the influences of the Zodiac - live in the sky, nor are they separate from the earth. That is, there were no extra-terrestrials. Whereas today, many people believe in the influence of extra-terrestrials on humanity.
To feel this way, today, one has to be able to mentally separate the surface of the earth from the atmosphere and the patterns of climate, from the edge of space, and have some view of what lies beyond the edge of space, as seen from Earth. It's possible that the Ancients never made such distinctions, more so if they did not know the Earth is round.
Which suggests that many of today's views on extra-terrestrial influences are in fact scientised, inasmuch as the extra-terrestrial is viewed as alien to the surface of the Earth we live on. The old gods were not alien in this kind of way. (Is it also noticeable that people who do talk about "aliens" do not seem inclined to discuss the usual theories about human evolution - the two approaches to human destiny are incompatible.)
Still, a rational outlook can co-exist with a mytho-poetic outlook, which is one of the joys of being human, actually. This co-existence is partly why the scientised outlook of archaeologists is in conflict the past 150 years or so with the mystery fans, the pseudo-archaeologists - the period coincides with the super-rise of Science. What is at stake is a feeling about how humanity might or should feel about its distant past and deepest origins.
It shows in choice of vocabulary. Here is what I mean, from a book for mystery fans which is also excellent, in parts, on historical fact. (See Guy Patton and Robin Mackness, Sacred Treasure, Secret Power: The True History of the Web of Gold. London, Pan/Macmillan, 2000., paperback, 330 pages)
All you need to know here is the book title - something is claimed to be sacred and associated with power and treasure, an unbeatable formula. People will kill to protect the sacred or to keep power or treasure, we know this.
Arising from the authors' sense of fairness to history in a realm of entertaining mystery, this book is laced with qualifications such as:
"probably containing the secret", "surely of great significance", "since it was claimed", "does this strange omission hide a secret agenda?", "it could very well have been", "could he not have known of... ? ", "likely to have been implicated", "it is even reported", "another curious and unexplained episode", "it is quite conceivable", "is it not also possible that?", "the implication that there were links"...
This is all merely literary device, the vocabulary of tease arising from the logic of not-actually-knowing. So naturally, the mind fills in the gaps, with wondering, suspicions that someone has something to hide, a sense of mystery, implications that no one wants to be honest about. It's very likely that with the Ancients, their lacks of rational, scientific knowledge were filled in by the propositions of the mytho-poetic outlook. They had more lacks, so they used more myth than we generally do today.
There are similar choices of vocabulary with discussion old and new of alchemy... I once headlined a review of a new book on alchemy -
"Hiding a secret openly in unclear language?"
(The book was Sean Martin, The Pocket Essential: Alchemy and Alchemists. Harpenden, Herts, UK, www.pocketessentials.com, 2001.)
I suggested that... few modern writers on alchemy will discuss topics such as hydrocarbons, benzenes, organic molecular structures (not even of alcohol); gases, fluids and hydraulics, and phenomena in fluids such as Brownian Motion. Or the circulation of blood in mammals, modern pharmaceuticals, modern views on crystallography. Why is this? What do such omissions have to do with any search for immortality, an elixir of eternal life, an elixir of youth, or for The Philosopher's Stone?
Is alchemy mostly a work of the spirit, something to do with the psychological work of individuation, as the Jungians suggest?
Was alchemy the birthplace of modern chemistry? Yes, as Encyclopedia Britannica is happy to suggest. "For many centuries the history of chemistry is the history of alchemy".
Millennia ago, alchemy probably developed, infused with ideas on linkages between macrocosm-and-microcosm, in Mesopotamia. It was thought that metals might be perfected as human souls might be. Therefore, lead might be turned into gold? That is, alchemy developed in Mesopotamia, the first seat of civilization and city-states, and also, according to Frankfort et al, a highly productive concentration of people swayed by mytho-poetic thinking
The problem here with metals/souls was the "therefore", arising from analogical or magical thinking. And with alchemy, errors in logic, philosophy, knowledge and procedure lurched along till matters were clarified in the Eighteenth Century, where we find that a "noted scientist and mathematician", Isaac Newton, was also an alchemist and a worrier over the truth of mythological matters such as the Flood of Noah.
Alchemists also invented much laboratory apparatus. Today, it is suggested by many writers, possibly with excess charity, that the alchemists, searching for "prime materials" and what could be done with them, anticipated discoveries of the structure of the atom.
Paracelsus (1493-1541), is an alchemist credited with assisting a transition (from a modern point of view), from old alchemy to pre-modern chemistry. Alchemists succeeded often in confusing issues, using misleading metaphors and analogies. Knowledge of the actual behaviour and constitution of materials (metals, gases, medicines) eluded them for centuries, as in related fields, it eluded medical practitioners. Neither the alchemists nor the doctors were using any rigorous science.
A psychologist, Stevens in his book on symbols, Ariadnes' Clue, says that alchemy was based on a projection of fantasies onto matter. This assists us to explain a major problem with alchemists - the imprecision of the language they used. More modern scientists avoided fantasies and used ever-greater precision to describe phenomena usefully so that work could progress.
Martin stresses mystical aspects held within the history of alchemy, but this is unnecessary, since all mystics tend to find that everything is related to everything else. The reason the mystics find this is that it is true, although the point is more - how one feels about the discovery as an experience - along with what one does next. How one feels in this context is far more interesting than our actual findings via rational outlooks.
Were alchemists, as Martin cites, "hiding a secret openly". Probably not - there was no secret, just a lack of ways to analyse/discuss what was being examined. There was no secret, rather, a long-term finding: that if language is imprecise, results cannot be conveyed clearly.
A similar dilemma is faced by today's archaeologists versus pseudo-archaeologists. Choice of vocabulary indicates the conflict zones for two different ways of thinking - the rational/scientific, and the mytho-poetic. The world market for New Age books in general seems to be formed by people more drawn to the mytho-poetic, one of the reasons that New Agers emphasise lifestyle and philosophies of living, and often express distaste for modern technology.
What the writers for Archaeology magazine seem to be doing is drawing boundaries where they see their territory being much-too invaded by the mytho-poeticals, the mystery fans, the speculators, "the believers in Atlantis, aliens, UFO visitors..."
It's partly a territorial dispute... as if fighting over territory was new in human history? It's also a fight over credentials and the right to comment, the roles of science, the persistence of attitudes which prevent or assist useful investigation, the philosophical and educational bases of belief.
In Garrett Fagan's view, many "speculators" (as I'll call them from now on), are somewhat anti-establishment, anti-authority, and they equate big-name professors with authority. Indulging in speculation is a way out.
Archaeology magazine has not published anything substantial on fringe-archaeology for a decade. Fagan sees little change in the output of the speculators since then, despite lack of proof arising for the existence of Atlantis, or aliens.
(In another section of the same issue of
Archaeology, Eric Powell enjoys debunking 1421
as a "bogus book"... even if it is a fun read.
See Gavin Menzies, 1421: The Year China Discovered the
World. 2002. Billed in promotional literature as: The book
that's rewriting history! - The Chinese were the first to discover
America, 70 years before Columbus - The Chinese discovered
Australia, 350 years before Captain Cook - The Chinese reached the
so-called Magellan Straits 60 years before Magellan was even born.
The Chinese discovered the vital secret of Longitude 300 years
before Harrison did.)
Fagan says, what has changed is the environment the speculators work in - particularly with the Internet and cable-TV niche channels. (Various producers of TV documentaries on "speculation topics" had been interviewed for this issue of Archaeology magazine.)
On and on it goes, The Mystery of the Pyramids and what Edgar Cayce wrote. How old really is The Sphinx? Secrets of Lost Empires. Secrets of the belief systems behind the strange statues on Easter Island?
Worldwide, there is a huge market for documentaries of any quality on such topics, partly as, it should be noted, speculation writers-erect no barriers between our physical world, their theories and "the spiritual world". Archaeologists as they seek explanations are obliged philosophically to erect barriers against any spiritual world; all they can say about "spirituality" is what they imagine some archaic people thought and felt and allowed to motivate them.
Fagan particularly points to Graham Hancock as a major
pseudoarchaeologist. Hancock's publications include:
Graham Hancock and Santha Faiia, Heaven's Mirror: Quest for the
Lost Civilization. London, Michael Joseph/Penguin, 1998.
Graham Hancock, The Sign and the Seal. Heinemann, 1992. (On
tracking down the Ark of the Covenant of the Jews of the Exodus
from Egypt)
Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock, Keeper of Genesis: A Quest for
the Hidden Legacy of Mankind. London, Heinemann, 1996. See
also, Hancock's Underworld, 2002.
With his title, Keeper of Genesis: A Quest for the Hidden Legacy of Mankind, Hancock raises another matter common with the speculation-genre - the air of the conspiracy theory. Something, it is claimed, has been going on, possibly for a very long time. There was a legacy, what were the motives of those hiding it? How did they obtain the power to keep such a legacy hidden? What has this got to do with other things in the world we might feel suspicious about? Is the Quest valid?
But really, flushing out a conspiracy and a travelogue in the one book makes for highly entertaining reading, more so if there's a rivalry-ridden treasure-hunt associated. No one asks: what happens once we all understand the hidden legacy, what do we do next? Has the legacy, like a lot of famous fortunes made in economic life, already reached its use-by date? Hands up everyone wanting to stop enjoying the use of electricity.
Here in his critique of Hancock's work, Fagan points to something he does not follow up, which Lost Worlds has noticed repeatedly. Mainstream writers on history and archaeology are obliged to consult each others' works, conduct fresh research, compare information, and weave their final argument in the light of what they find. Any conspiracy to suppress relevant information should be flushed out in the process - but the conspiracy theories regard this as merely the practise of "the accidental theory of history", where the quaint belief exists that "things just kinda happen", such as Side A losing a war to Side B. Not so for conspiracy theorists, who believe that more things in heaven and earth are-all-connected, and continue so, than anyone has yet been able to believe!
Books of New Age conspiracy theory are fascinating, in that underlying many of them seems to be an assumption of everything-being-connected; that some people know this and most do not.
Yet from reading on various sorts of mysticism, anyone can find that ultimately, as humans perceive their world, everything-is-connected. The feeling is a hangover from the worlds of mytho-poetic thought, and can be a benign appreciation of the ultimate peace to be found within an apparently conflict-ridden universe. St Paul saith on, "the peace that passeth understanding".
Then comes the modern twist in the plot - the allegation that the people aware that everything-is-connected have become feral, or power-mongers to be dreaded. "They" use their awareness against everyone who is unaware; "they" maintain or create secrets to confuse the issues, and if "they" can't be stopped, "they" should at least be slowed down. Beware also of apparent coincidences, they could be part-outcome of a gigantic, maybe unstoppable conspiracy. Some unfortunate people can be part of the conspiracy without being aware of it, they were not informed as to who they were really working for!
A great many speculation-writers head straight for the gap between the conspiracy versus accidental theories of history, on the grounds of maybe; that is, the grounds of having an each-way bet. If their bibliographies can be believed, they often don't read each other, which of course means they are also not on any pathway to forming a body of knowledge, either; merely a larger body of speculations.
And so the speculation industry thrives not on proof, but on lack of proof! One remaining mystery adroitly joined to another remaining mystery means basically a larger problem to be solved, a more important topic, a more motivated search for "evidence"; and these days an even better chance of a book being made into a documentary! Another Quest has to be launched!
Time and again, Lost Worlds has picked up, or reviewed, a recently-published speculation-topic book to find that the writer ignores, or appears to ignore, the information of a book on the same topic, published just a few years previous - and a bestseller! It becomes impossible to believe that if the newest writer on the topic was seriously interested in the topic, they would not have read EVERYTHING on the topic before they finished their own new book.
But no, it's more-than-allowable in the
Mystery-Speculation-Business to ignore other inconvenient
books.
(Except on Lost Worlds, where we deliberately
juxtapose and compare competing findings and competing viewpoints,
and come to no strict conclusion ourselves about anything. There is
always room on Lost Worlds for a meaty mystery!)
It would be fascinating, too, to see just one lone writer carefully read all the competing theories of the speculation-genre, point out their inconsistencies and other defining characteristics, and come to a conclusion of some kind. It would be helpful if humanity had one, ultra-reliable chronology for guiding how it considers its histories. Will this production ever arrive? And if so, where will the pseudo-archaeolgical dating systems fit in? Would any such ultra-reliable chronology merely be the product of "they" the conspirators?
As Fagan says, a writer such as Hancock, struggling against the unfair weights of orthodoxy, will tend to say, "yet the evidence is mounting..." We find, that whether the evidence is mounting or not, many speculation-writers prefer to ignore what their fellow-speculators might say, which of course means the evidence will fail to mount. So the mystery-genre can continue to flourish, untainted by real, multi-considered and presumably inconvenient evidence.
Do the writers of the genre have an unspoken agreement that to solve the mysteries would be to kill the Golden Goose Which Lays The Speculation Eggs? Is this is the motive for not considering competing views?
Fagan has fingered the basic syndrome. A Great Mystery is approached by a Lone Thinker who travels/researches/writes to find vindication for his ideas. There is a struggle between new ideas and mainstream archaeologists, between orthodoxy and the Lone Thinker's beliefs. (See especially, Erich von Daniken's work, up to 60 million copies sold.) Visits are made to fascinating locations. The agendas or background of commentators encountered along the way are not checked out. Meanwhile it is fun to poke the mainstream "expert" in the eye with mysteries he can't solve either. The Lone Thinker might end up vindicated, if only by a collection of enticing mysteries and possibilities moving snakelike in the moonlight under semi-sinister clouds. Given his role as The Underdog, The Lone Thinker wins some sympathy, if not the argument.
It also seems clear from the arguments, that archaeologists and speculators care about the issues in quite different ways, intellectually and emotionally. Is it also true that some mysteries are more entertaining to wonder about than to solve? A good many arguments about what-happened-in-history can be coloured by the basic attitude of those debating; a kindly or a bleak, a warm or a cool outlook on humanity and to life itself.
In public, and whatever the topic, Atlantis, or the influence of UFO-helmsmen, and with the formats of TV documentaries considered, the scenario worldwide is a contest of storytelling. Real knowledge has little part in the game. Archaeologists, who have to read and assess each other's findings, fear that the speculators will win the contest, while the speculators refrain from reading each other. Some people think the poles of the earth can shift, cataclysmically; others insist it's impossible.
Yet oddly enough, none of this seems to deter some
highly-disciplined scientifically-minded, fact-oriented writers
from producing startling books with a new theory - also
entertaining for those with the imagination to appreciate a new
view.
(See, for example, a writer unafraid of being called a heretic,
Robert Bakker, The Dinosaur Heresies: New Theories Unlocking the
Mystery of the Dinosaurs and their Extinction. New York, Zebra
Books, 1986.)
These days, it's all a noticeable contest on the Internet. It's a contest as well between at least two different types of human imagination, the poetically-possessed versus the more logically-driven. Which brings us also to Creationism versus Theories of Evolution. It is less bleak, and far kinder, to imagine that Mankind - homo sapiens sapiens - somehow sprang fully-formed and ready-for-inspiration from the mind of God, than to feel that Humanity has had a long, hard climb up the slopes of Evolution to get to a point where, whatever our other achievements, we still profoundly lament war.
Lost Worlds predicts a new twist to these arguments, to take place in the next decade or so. Creationism is not found only in the Western parts of the world influenced by Christianity, it is found in the world of Islam. It is noticeable, that in the past few years, Western media outlets have never handled such a volume of material about Islam, or material partly-inspired by views of Islam, as they now do. There are also the views to consider of the influence on world politics of countries adhering to the Islamic faith. It seems that the volume of material will not stop easily or soon, and so, cultural comment around the world may become conditioned to treating Islamic views on a widening variety of issues. There is much that Westerners can learn about, and learn from, the world of Islam.
Will archaeology and/or pseudoarchaeology be influenced by this largely unexpected trend? Will this trend help to form the boundaries of new contest-ground between Culture, Religion, Science and Freethinking Speculation? Lost Worlds suspects so.
Otherwise, Lost Worlds commends the reader here to track down the issue of Archaeology mentioned above. All sides of the arguments are entertaining, and Lost Worlds will stay interested. -Ed
Note: See also, Kenneth L. Feder, Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology. 1990.
Finis