Lost City, Found Pyramid is about understanding and engaging what Kenneth Feder (following Glyn Daniel) affectionately terms “bullshit archaeology.” (I am more polite than Feder, so I'll use the term “pseudoarchaeology.”) It's timely and relevant: while current events have focused the public on the importance of actively defending our system for creating an evidence-based reality, those of us who track pseudoarchaeology know that “alternative facts” and “fake news” are not new at all.
A look around will show you that pseudoarchaeological claims are plentiful and proliferating like rabbits. Despite this evidence that nonengagement hasn't worked, most of us still decide to do nothing. Denis Gojak's chapter reports a very low response rate among professional archaeologists to a mass e-mail about a purported giant face carved into the Australian desert. Gojak attributes our collective inaction to lack of clarity: when we don't know what we should do, the simplest course of action is inaction. The results of that inaction are hippety-hopping all over the place.
The strength of this volume is its probing of the “how” and “why” aspects surrounding the creation, packaging, and consumption of pseudoarchaeological claims. Christopher Begley writes about the quests to find, repeatedly, the “Lost White City” of Honduras. James Bielo's ethnography of a creative team at Answers in Genesis reveals the careful crafting of messages calibrated to undermine scientific authority and create a past consistent with a literal interpretation of the Bible. Tera Pruitt explores the anatomy of the Bosnian Pyramid hoax, focusing on the performance of the main claimant and the political, cultural, and financial feedbacks that sustain the claim.
Several authors ask how we delineate “pseudoarchaeology” from “archaeology” and incorporate indigenous perspectives. Stacy Dunn discusses the intersections between archaeology and the witches, shamans, and looters making use of prehistoric remains in Peru. David S. Anderson's treatment of claims about the “race” of the ancient Olmec and Egyptians exposes fault lines in the logic of privileging the views of descendent communities and argues for a “responsibility to respond” to distortions, regardless of the source.
The boundary between pseudoarchaeology and archaeology also has a temporal/historical dimension. Jeb Card discusses a nineteenth-century “event horizon,” before which many claims about the past could be characterized as “pseudoarchaeology.” Because most of pseudoarchaeology's greatest hits predate that science/non-science tipping point, pseudoarchaeologists fail to employ the corrective mechanisms intrinsic to science, dooming themselves to perpetually tumble in their steam-powered, Victorian-era recycler of bad ideas.
But if we're right and they're wrong, why are they the ones on television? We have not effectively promoted archaeology to nonprofessionals, creating a vacuum that pseudoarchaeologists are happy to fill. Using the analogy of telling ghost stories, April Beisaw challenges us to tell stories that will compete with the tall tales told by pseudoarchaeologists. Evan Parker discusses the evolution of reality TV, concluding that the entanglement of fact and fiction is now part of the landscape: you have to either cooperate or criticize.
Cooperation is risky. Kenneth Feder, Terry Barnhart, Deborah Bolnick, and Bradley Lepper tell us about their involvement in the problematic Lost Civilizations of North America “documentary,” making lemonade from their experience by formulating guidance for the rest of us.
This volume is weakest in its treatment of the “so what” question. Illuminating the dark history of many pseudoarchaeological claims is a useful counter to the excuse that “it's all just for fun,” not sufficiently important to command the energy of real scientists. Ignatius Donnelly's (1882) reboot of the Atlantis story was, for example, crafted in support of claims about the necessity of (white) colonial empires for taming and civilizing the savage (nonwhite) world. Most of Donnelly's framework persists among today's Atlantis enthusiasts (and neo-Nazis), despite the fact that his core claims have an evidentiary basis no stronger than that of unicorns or fairies. Sure, a guy walking into your office holding a rock that he says has a face on it might not be a big deal, but what about the fraudulent use of archaeology to underpin white supremacist political agendas? Does that warrant any attention?
Overall, Lost City, Found Pyramid is a strong contribution that I hope will encourage more professionals to get off the bench and use their expertise, communication skills, and platforms to do some good. There are no silver bullets. Don't worry about adding oxygen to the fire: it's already burning out of control. Our “fake news” problem is a real problem with real consequences, and it shows no sign of improving on its own.
