Does an opponent exist to prove you right?
Since the 1990s and much to the disgust of the archaeological establishment, an alternative explanation about prehistoric times has been emerging in public discourse. A journalist named Graham Hancock has led the way with a series of books that have asked questions about the traditional historical narrative.
As Hancock puts it, our culture has amnesia about what happened in the distant past. In a nutshell, he presents considerable arguments that there once was, before us, a world mapping civilization that left as a legacy immense architectural stone works of similar form and structure (think pyramids, for one thing) all over the Earth. These people (assuming they were homo sapiens sapiens) were destroyed in a global cataclysm. This happened possibly 12,000 years ago.
In 2022, Netflix released an 8-episode series called Ancient Apocalypse that features Graham Hancock presenting his ideas. Normally, the disdain of the archaeological establishment goes without saying. However, in this case, they spoke up.
In an open letter to Bela Bajaria, Head of Global Television for Netflix (and Rachel Corp, Chief Executive Officer of ITN), the Society for American Archaeology (SAA, established 1934) got something off their collective chests. Ancient Apocalypse just will not do.
After puffing up their self-importance as gatekeepers to the sacred grove of archaeology, including how they know better because it is their professional club after all, they called for the Hancock series to be labeled as fiction. They trot out the old nag of shaming his hypothesis as pseudo-archaeology.
SAA offers their three main issues with the show:
- "the host of the series repeatedly and vigorously dismisses archaeologists and the practice of archaeology with aggressive rhetoric, willfully seeking to cause harm to our membership and our profession in the public eye;
- "Netflix identifies and advertises the series as a "docuseries," a genre that implies its content is grounded in fact when the content of the show is based on false claims about archaeologists and archaeology; and
- "the theory it presents has a long-standing association with racist, white supremacist ideologies; does injustice to Indigenous peoples; and emboldens extremists.
Does Hancock point out that the existing archaeological narrative could be a couple cans shy of a six-pack? Yes. Is he rude about it? Not really, he just states, spot on, the attitude of academics toward his ideas. He says archaeologists don't want to listen, don't want to engage with evidence contrary to their traditional view, and dislike him for messing with stuff they prefer to keep to their own ministrations.
The SAA letter confirms his presentation perfectly.
SAA asks that Netflix not call Ancient Apocalypse a documentary, and instead make it out to be imaginary. Do they engage with the ideas and evidence presented by Hancock? No, that is beneath them because they most certainly don't have to being who they are (so they think anyway, yet they do by writing a letter). Never mind the wonderful photography and high resolution video of archaeological sites that happen to support Hancock's suggested perspective.
And the third point? Well, if there is anything that "has a long-standing association with racist, white supremacist ideologies; does injustice to Indigenous peoples; and emboldens extremists", it is the history of the archaeological profession (ever hear of the Ahnenerbe?). Look into how well Indigenous people have succeeded in getting their stuff back from museums before you decide.
Since the release of Ancient Apocalypse, some corners of the media have been busy with denouncing Hancock's work. One article appeared in The Guardian and was titled "Ancient Apocalypse is the most dangerous show on Netflix." The subheader went straight to the point:
A show with a truly preposterous theory is one of the streaming giant's biggest hits — and it seems to exist solely for conspiracy theorists. Why has this been allowed?Ja vohl, Kommandant.
The key word is "allowed". As if the exploration of an alternative view, an examination of anomalous evidence, and the consideration that academia might have missed something is simply not to be permitted.
Because the public is incapable of considering any idea without approval and supervision?Why It Matters
A story is not about what happens, but who is served by the outcome.
The human race is presently exiting one framework of understanding reality and taking up a new one. Welcome to the New Paradigm, which is still working its way of out the eggshell.
You may be among those people who have observed there is a profound shift now underway about what is thought possible. The acceptable parameters of reality by consensus are undergoing deep transformation. Shockingly, this shift is affecting perceptions about the past as much as the future.
This makes some folks upset.
Subjects that were once smugly consigned to the dumpster of discarded ideation have refused to stop twitching and die. Intellectual dogma has been enforced for decades to tamp down these unholy zombies of thought, but they keep rising back up. People continue to have experiences and encounter evidence that fail to match the narrative they are handed by cultural authorities.
Take, for example, thinking in terms of tens of thousands of years.
The vast majority of people consider the reach of time as whether or not they have enough to swing past the drive thru for a latte on the way to wherever they are going — and they are already late. Mostly, there isn't time to care about the long gone.
People who do exercise themselves a lot in considering what happened during distant centuries and millennia are called archaeologists. Archaeology as an academic enterprise came into being in the 19th century.
At first, the European spawned endeavor was largely dedicated to finding physical evidence for events mentioned in Judeo-Christian scripture. The thick scholarly books from this period teem forcefully with fanciful contortions to make the connection. Filled with loquacious interpretations of scanty information and a bottomless cornucopia of speculation over very limited and often obscure evidence, early archaeologists wanted to make history as presented in the Bible objectively real.
You don't hear about this phase of archaeology much anymore, but the underlying attitude is still in operation. They have a story amongst themselves and they are sticking to it. Just need to dig a little deeper and validation is going to be somehow on the plate.
On the side, though, they assisted in pillaging countries for their historical artifacts, including nearly endless — and still ongoing — grave robbing. Out of this they evolved a professional discipline, and filled a host of universities, museums, and archives in which they could murmur amongst themselves about their reputations. They are happy to let you in the public galleries, but the door to the backroom has a sign that says Private.
What is this, Critical Archaeology Theory? Don't go woke on me.
Toward the end of the 19th century, however, archaeologists introduced some intellectual rigor into their investigative methodology. Thank you, Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie (1853-1942). Since then, they have worked mightily to raise a conceptual edifice that defined the human history you were taught in school. They are scientific now (as long as it is convenient).
At last, something we can agree on. <coy smile>
You really do know the story. Civilization as people have been taught to think about it began around 5,000 years ago with the advent of writing systems in the Middle East. Everything that occurred before the written record is called prehistoric.
Prehistory is a loaded term that means since nothing was scrawled down, what happened is anyone's best guesstimate (or wish). The results of archaeological digs are predestined to fit into a set of assumptions that accumulated — or perhaps, fossilized — into the belief that our whiz bang culture is the only one that really has made any real progress (difference) for humanity.
We are the bestest ever! Everyone else was just a failed rehearsal.
The thinking is linear, not cyclical (someone should point out to these people there is no escaping the fact that the Earth and everything on it goes around in circles). Older is always less complex, newer is inevitably more sophisticated. There is no room in this narrative structure for a now vanished civilization in the past that had knowledge and technical capacity similar or greater than our own.
Why is that not "allowed"? Why cannot an interesting and plausible idea be examined by the general public without denigration from the academic establishment? Are academics really that insecure about their knowledge set? Hancock acknowledges their perspective, but just disagrees. The Society for American Archaeology and the establishmentarism they represent do not return the courtesy.
So they had to write a letter to object that someone wasn't taking them as seriously as they take themselves.
The lesson here?
Don't say it. Don't say Atlantis! Or the archaeologists will have to complain you are stepping on their toes.Here's another account of how Graham Hancock has moved the needle and gotten dismissed for his efforts: The Greatest Buried Mystery on Earth
Mark Hammons is an archivist, historian, IT systems architect, scryer, apprentice of cognitive dissonance. Medium tells me I am a Top Writer in Science, too. Thank you for that.
The orthodoxies of the sciences often mimic the inflexibility of the religious orthodoxies of old.