Not the Next Book: Recent Advances in Pseudoarchaeology

I’m just about done the book project that I’ve been toiling on since before the pandemic, and I’m recovering from a mild case of burn out. I’ve started to get the itch to think not about not the next book, but the book after that. (The next book has to be finishing the publication of our excavations at Pyla-Koutsopetria on Cyprus). 

Anyway, to keep me motivated to do anything and not to descend the ominous spiral of burn out once again, I have to think about what’s next. Here’s my current next idea and its origin story. 

A few years ago, I started a project on Sun Ra and pseudoarchaeology called “Not All Ancient Aliens.” I had this idea that it might be a good fit for Near Eastern Archaeology but the editor didn’t really think that it worked there. Since then, I spun the literature review off as a review essay in North Dakota Quarterly and the main paper just kind of sat in a folder on my laptop. A chat with my buddy Kostis Kourelis convinced me that this paper could every easily become a paper on time in pseudoarchaeology and unpack a bit what non-pseudoarchaeologists could learn from the way in which other modern traditions think about time.

The next chapter would be about space and it just so happens that I have another article rejected by Near Eastern Archaeology moldering in a folder on my laptop. This paper thought a bit about space and consider how the concept of Babylon had become unmoored from its historical location and may be following the flows of oil around the world. You can read a draft of that here. This would be the second chapter.

The final chapter is a bit more nebulous right now, but I have this idea that I could maybe wrangle some of my various writings on Philip K. Dick into a chapter on pseudoarchaeology and the future. I’m still sketching out how this might work, but the plan might be to use his writing (and perhaps the writing of Samuel Delany) to talk about how things can embody futures lost in the past. This would allow us to use pseudoarchaeology as a more than just a whipping boy to demonstrate how racists use problematic rhetorical strategies, unsystematic augmentation, academic mimicry, and other problematic approaches to attempt to breath new life into long rejected (or never accepted) arguments.

The goals of this book are threefold.  

First, I want to encourage people to take pseudoarchaeology more seriously as a way of thinking about time and space and the foreclosed futures. This isn’t just to be contrarian (although that’s part of it), but to remind archaeologists that our disciplinary anxieties are as likely to produce the kind of blinders that makes it hard to discern the character of the supermodern world. If nothing else, it contributes to the ongoing conversation about how we represent a past that is useful for our vanishing present. 

Second, I have this vague idea that archaeologists might benefit from reading more broadly and approaching their work — at least sometimes — in a more playful manner and seeing in some of the more opaque and confusing work in the past a sense of hope and perhaps even joy at seeing the world in unconventional ways. There’s something about the relentlessness of hope, joy, and play that can disarm even the most blustering polemicists. 

Finally, I want to produce something more speculative. I wonder whether University of Minnesota Press’s Forerunner Series might be a destination for this book. If I understand its remit, it is to promote books that celebrate speculative and thought-in-process scholarship.