Real Pseudoarchaeology

This is a contribution to the #RealArchaeology festival on October 25-October 27, 2024.

Like so many archaeologists, my first encounter with the concept of archaeology came from pseudoarchaeology. I read with enthusiasm and curiosity von Daniken’s work, thrilled at the adventures of Indiana Jones, and pondered the power of mummies, curses, and haunted and forgotten ancient burial grounds. These experiences stayed with me even as I began to explore the realm of more formal archaeological practice and aspired to do “real archaeology” (whatever that meant or means). There were even times when I was content to regard my work as “real” and my earlier dalliances with pseudoarchaeology to be the distractions of a misguided youth.

My contribution to the #RealArchaeology discussion will focus on “Real Pseudoarchaeology.” This post will excavate the levels of pseudoarchaeology not to find its origins so much as to discern the contours of what “real archaeologists” call depositional processes. In archaeology these are the processes that create the sites that we excavate and document and allow them to tell their story through time. I want to propose a view of pseudoarchaeology that considers more fully the complexities of its depositional processes and argue that some of our contemporary ideas about pseudoarchaeology may be useful for defining it as something other than “real archaeology,” but not as useful for understanding why it continues to have an appeal to audiences. In the following post, I want to suggest that the appeal to audiences stems not from it being different from “real archaeology,” but because pseudoarchaeologists and “real archaeologists” care about the same things more often than not. This is what allows me to proudly declare my commitment to “real pseudoarchaeology” while still — occasionally — doing “realarchaeology”  as well.  Hopefully the excavation below will help to reveal a pseudoarchaeology that is perhaps unfamiliar (and maybe even exciting) and maybe convince some of you to read pseudoarchaeology with a bit more sympathy than some of the “real archaeology” crown would want to allow. 

Throughout this post there will be links to papers that I’ve published and some of these links will lead to a paywalled article. If you want a copy of any of the things that I link to here and can’t get it, drop me an email at billcaraher at gmail dot com and I’ll send it to you.

But first, some backstory….

From my earliest days doing “real archaeology,” I regularly encountered zealous archaeologists eager to introduce me to the limits of the discipline. In some cases, they were quick to assure me that I was not a “real archaeologist” by dint of my training (I have a PhD in history), my methods (I am a “survey archaeologist” rather than an excavator), my area of study (Mediterranean archaeologists are often regarded as too posh and “unscientific” to be “real” archaeologists), my interests (which often strayed toward architectural history), and even the periods that I studied (first, Late Antiquity, which was too debased to warrant serious consideration and then the contemporary world, which is altogether too recent). Eventually, I embraced this criticism and turned to celebrating the affinities of between archaeology and punk practice and eventually the anti-modern critique of the slow movement. In fact, the more time I spent doing archaeology, the more I came to admire those who promoted a big tent vision of the field where punk practices, survey archaeologists, architectural theorists, mystics, dreamers, indigenous elders, grifters, poets, musicians, and even the odd scientific archaeologists rubbed shoulders with one another. It reminded me that my fascination with pseudoarchaeology as a young person was not only pretty common, but also paralleled the emergence of the field more broadly.

I soon became fond of saying “if you scratch an archaeologist, you’ll likely find a strata of pseudoarchaeology just below the surface.” Or, you’ll at least find someone who has been told that their work is not “real archaeology”. In my sub-field, Mediterranean archaeology, it was hardly a century ago when certain prominent archaeologists regarded dreams as a viable form of remote sensing and when magic bowls guided stratigraphic excavators to discover important Early Byzantine sites. Historically, it has always been possible for archaeologists to expand the “real archaeology tent” enough to make room for pseudoarchaeology. More recently, this tradition has seemed consistent with the growing enthusiasm for methodological and epistemological pluralism (or at least poly/multivocality) within the discipline. To be clear, I’m not interested in making much room for grifters seeking to profit by peddling pseudoarchaeological ideas for political or financial gain. Nor am I inclined to critique self-professed “real archaeologists” who have turned efforts to preserve the epistemological purity of our discipline into a moral crusade. Many of these individuals do good work and have found ways to leverage the highest profile pseudoarchaeologists — Graham Hancock and his ilk — to advance archaeology and develop their personal brand. I find their efforts a bit misguided, but that’s fine. There’s room in the big tent of archaeology for them too. Finally, I have little interest in racist or hypernationalist uses of the discipline in the past or in the present whether this comes from archaeology or pseudoarchaeology.

That all said, I do want to advocate for and celebrate the quieter forms of pseuodoarchaeology that persist, evergreen, throughout our culture. Maybe I want to do what E.P. Thompson famously offered to the “poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the “obsolete” hand-loom weaver, the “utopian” artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott” when he sought to rescue them from the “enormous condescension of posterity.” 

My return to pseudoarchaeology started not with Graham Hancock but when I began to notice deep currents of pseudoarchaeological thinking in Afrofuturism. The growing interest in Afrofuturism came to public attention with the release of the first Black Panther film in 2018. The release of this critically acclaimed and highly profitable film rode a crest of interest in Afrofuturism in academic circles, in the museum world, and in other popular media including novels and music. Afrofuturism has roots in the early 20th century with popular novels such as Pauline Hopkins’ Of One Blood locating an advanced, but hidden and highly advanced African society accessed by descending through secret passages in Egyptian ruins. Hopkins’ work leveraged a long standing fascination with Egypt in American media throughout the late 19th and early 20th century as well as within the Black community. While obviously cognizant of Egypt’s Oriental exoticism, Hopkins also recognized the contrast between the sophistication of Ancient Egypt and the Black American experience which endured Jim Crow laws and anticipated tectonic shifts instigated by the Great Migration. Moreover, she recognized that Egypt embodied both the past of the Black African experience and potential futurity as a manifestation of a spiritual or even literal homeland for alienated Blacks in North America.

The Great Migration saw millions of Black people move from the southern US (and Caribbean) to northern industrial centers starting in the 1920s and continuing into decades after World War II. This movement was not only an expression of Afrofuturism — in that it manifested the hopes of individuals and communities for a new future — but also emerged as a hotbed for new religious, utopian, Afrocentric, and Afrofuturist ideas (see Judith Weisenfeld’s brilliant 2017 book for an overview of this). These ideas drew upon long standing Black traditions and gave rise to new forms of religious and historical thinking. These ideas overlap and contribute to many key concepts at the core of contemporary pseudoarchaeological thought, reveal new trajectories (and Afrofutures), and propose new genealogies for certain key ideas. My discovery of this rich and creative vein in the pseudoarchaeological tradition came through the music of Sun Ra. For me, Sun Ra became a cypher for understanding powerful currents in 20th century pseudoarchaeology that continue to influence pseudoarchaeological thinking today.

Sun Ra was born Herman Poole Blount in Birmingham, Alabama in 1914 where he developed as both a top flight jazz musician and arranger as well as a budding, if unorthodox, intellectual (the standard biography of Sun Ra is John Szwed’s book Space is the Place which tellingly saw a new edition in 2020). In his 20s, he toured the south with a number of different ensembles and spent a year at Alabama A&M. During these years, he appears to have developed the conviction that he was either contacted by extraterrestrials or an extraterrestrial himself. This belief would shape the future of his music and his intellectual contributions throughout his career.

When he moved to Chicago after World War II, he assembled a group of musicians trained largely at the iconic DuSable High School and performed in Chicago’s thriving Browntown music scene (William Site’s recent book Sun Ra’s Chicago: Afrofuturism and the City [2020] offers many great observations about this period of his life). At this time, he also began to engage with the Chicago’s diverse intellectual and religious scene, rubbing shoulders with members of the Nation of Islam, with Moorish Science Temple devotees, adherents to Black Hebrew traditions, and independent minded thinkers like himself. During these years, he circulated a series of broadsheets which began to articulate mystical, numerological, and historical theories that showed the influence of Black religious thought of the Great Migration as well as Ra’s willingness to play the role of the trickster intellectual (John Corbett compiled these broadsheets in 2006 into a book, The Wisdom of Sun Ra,  which you can download here). By the end of the 1950s and his time in Chicago, Sun Ra had changed his name from Herman Blount to Sun Ra (or properly Le Sony’r Ra) to make more obvious his status as a visitor from another world with connections to Ancient Egypt.

While Ra never explicitly clarified his relationship to extraterrestrials or Ancient Egypt (or much else in his complex creative and intellectual life), his bands of the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, typically called the Arkestra, rose to prominence for their adventurous and meticulously performed arrangements as well as Sun Ra’s bold philosophical and intellectual statements. At Arkestra shows he frequently distributed books of poetry and essays as well as his music on his own Saturn label. When he relocated to New York, he rubbed shoulders with members of the Black Arts Movement and contributed to The Cricket, BAMs house journal, and to the anthology Black Fire edited by Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal which represents a survey of this powerful movement (see some commentary on those contributions here). In the 1970s, Ra taught a course called “Black Man and the Cosmos” at the University of California, Berkeley (and you can now listen to one of those lectures and see its reading list here), and in the 1980s, after relocating the Arkestra to Philadelphia, performed on the roof of Penn’s University Museum (which you can see here in Robert Mugge’s 1980 documentary, A Joyful Noise). He released a feature film — Space is the Place — appeared on Saturday Night Live, and toured Europe and Egypt performing his sonically adventurous music. During these years, he continued to locate his distinctive artistic and intellectual contribution at the intersection of Black, African, and cosmic imagery.

The contents of his library make clear that he recontextualized a wide range of ideas from the mysticism of Madame Blavatsky to the archaeological works of E.A. Wallis Budge, William M. Ramsay, and James Henry Breasted, as well as the pseudoarchaeology of van Daniken and Edgar Cayce, and the religious texts of Nation of Islam and Christianity (this reading list is contained in an appendix to Hartmut Grerken’s edited anthology of Sun Ra’s writing, The Immeasurable Equation). In short, Sun Ra believed (as near as we can tell for someone only too willing to embrace the trickster tradition) that contemporary and ancient aliens were part of a Black tradition.

While this may seem like a gesture of pseudoarchaeological revisionism, there are plenty of indications that the concept of ancient aliens had deep roots in particular strands of Black thought and commingled freely with the emerging ideas of Afrocentrism. One of my favorite obscure, but significant examples of this is the work of Robert Athlyi Rogers. Sometime in the 19teens, he released a book called the Holy Piby, which remains an important text in the Rastafarian tradition. This work includes a spectacular vision of space travel alongside Afrocentric themes.

Two decades later, Elijah Muhammed’s vision of the Mother Plane, a massive wheeled spaceship destined to return at the end of days to redeem Black people, connected a cosmic future to ancient Black science. Ezekiel’s wheel and Elijah’s chariot, long held up by white pseudoarchaeologists as evidence for ancient visits by aliens, become evidence for the technological sophistication of Black scientists in the distant past and space travel as a promise of new Black futures (Michael Lieb’s book on Ezekiel’s wheel is a brilliant treatment of his imagery). In the hands of Sun Ra, the Arkestra astronauts also wore Egyptianizing garb and told sonic tales of cosmic travel. In his feature film, Space is the Place, Sun Ra offered to Black people the chance to move to a different world away from the problems of Earth.

The presence of ancient astronauts as a motif in Black religious thought as well as a contributing element to Afrofuturism suggests that these staples of the pseudoarchaeological tool kit are readily recontextualized for different purposes and goals. It is easy enough to speculate on the reasons for the vitality of this motif. For Black Americans, for example, this maps onto their own sense of displacement and (pardon the pun) alienation in contemporary life. The painful legacy of slavery, forced displacement, and transport onto a hostile and unfamiliar continent creates a potent through line in a wide range of religious, political, and cultural expression. The role of extraterrestrial forces in redeeming Black people recurs again and again ranging from George Clinton’s Mothership (“we are returning to claim the pyramids”) to the technological prowess of Black Panther’s Wakandans (whose unique powers, we should not forget, derived partly from vibranium’s extraterrestrial origins) and Louis Farrakhan’s revelation that the Mother Plane would protect him (and his Black followers) from the threats of political enemies. In this context, Sun Ra appears as less an eccentric musician and more as another representative of long tradition that resonates with important threads in pseudoarchaeological thought.

The point of this essay is not to attempt to justify or validate any particular expression of pseudoarchaeological thinking. We can all understand how ideas garner meaning from their political, social, or racial context. In fact, I deliberately avoided discussing currently popular pseudoarchaeology television shows or book series. Instead, my point with this little essay is to complicate the pseudoarchaeological stratigraphy (to return to our idea of formation processes) in the hope that it encourages some of the more zealous advocates of “real archaeology” to temper their sometimes caustic polemic, but also to encourage people who are curious about pseudoarchaeological ideas to learn more. 

Since this is a festival dedicated to “real archaeology,” I want to encourage my pseudoarchaeological fellow travelers to get even MORE real by contending that pseudoarchaeological thought with its emphasis on catastrophes, displacement and migration, globalization, and race shares many of the same priorities as “real archaeologists.” The speculative, religious, fictional, and performative interventions which perpetuate stories of ancient and contemporary aliens situated Black people in a global antiquity much as the iconic vision of Earth as the “Blue Marble” compelled White people to recognize the shared fate of all the passengers on “spaceship earth.” At the same time, recontextualizing (or perhaps even introducing) the ideas of Black people’s extraterrestrial origins and aspirations explained a contemporary sense of displacement wrought more proximately through the trauma of slavery, the Middle Passage, and everyday experiences of Great Migration. It is not particularly important whether these ways of understanding the past are “true” or not. What matters is the truth that these perspectives reveal about people in the present.

With this call to archaeologists and pseudoarchaeology to get real together, I’d like to propose three things:

First, I hope that archaeologists and pseudoarchaeologists will continue to engage in respectful and constructive dialogue. One thing that is true about archaeology — and FACTUAL — is that how we understand the past is constantly changing. In fact (heh), what we know about the past at any moment is always less important than why it matters.

Second, the basis for any dialogue between archaeologists and pseudoarchaeologists is that both groups are interested in the same things. Awareness of globalization, growing evidence for climate change, conversations about migrations and displacements, and fear of collapse contribute to our shared anxieties in the modern world. While scholars like John Schofield have recent summarized how archaeology can and does contribute to the “wicked problems” facing contemporary society (as is the title of his very recent book), pseudoarchaeology pursues a path that reminds us of Carlo Ginsburg’s precocious miller Menocchio his 1976 classic, The Cheese and the Worms. In this work, Ginsburg revealed how the democratization of literacy and learning in the 16th century made possible Menocchio’s steadfast resistance to the insistent, hegemonic discourse of the Inquisition and gave birth to the modern world. Many pseudoarchaeologists continue in the tradition of Menocchio as they combine various traditions, texts, experiences, and perspectives to connect the past to the contemporary situation. Thus, their challenge to the hegemonic perspectives and the authority offered by science, disciplinary archaeology, and academic and professional conventions is not a rejection of the modern world, but a challenge to its ability to solve pressing problems. As a sometime “real archaeology” and sometime “pseudoarchaeologist,” the constant efforts of pseudoarchaeologists to figure things out is a powerful reminder that we’re all in this together.

Finally, it goes without saying that we should never ignore the bad in pseudoarchaeology any more than we should ignore the problematic practices and attitudes of past archaeologists. This means that we should confront racism, colonialism, nationalism, and other distressing ideological perspectives in our own field as well as any others that we welcome into archaeology’s big tent. That said, we should also model tolerance for the good that exists in pseudoarchaeological thinking and arguments. We should embrace the familiar, celebrate the different, and continue to find ways to combine archaeology with pseudoarchaeology as well as a history, literature, art, music, and any other creative endeavors we might be tempted to reject owing to their ambivalent relationship to the kind of “factual” and “scientistic” arguments favored by disciplinary and professional archaeology.

My hope is that essays like this will encourage more archaeologists and pseudoarchaeologists to recognize that there is greater value to reaching across the aisle than there is to continuing a century-long feud. Big tent archaeology involves recognizing the value of a wide range of perspectives, methods, goals, and epistemologies. It also postulates that conversations between archaeologist (and pseudoarchaeologists) of different predispositions has value.

For some of my efforts at pseudoarchaeology, check out this essay on the Bakken oil patch in North Dakota as Babylon, this piece on recent work on Sun Ra and Afrofuturism, and this piece on Sun Ra in an archaeological perspective.