Reviewing Pseudoarchaeology (Part 1)

Over the weekend, I had the pleasure of Sean Rafferty’s latest book on pseudoarchaeology: Mythologizing the Past: Archaeology, History, and Ideology (2025). It was a fun romp through some of the more egregious and nefarious examples of pseudoarchaeology and the kind of book that will sit next to Garrett Fagan’s Archaeological Fantasies: How Pseudoarchaeology Misrepresents the Past and Misleads the Public (2012) and Kenneth L. Feder’s Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology (now in its 10th edition!). This is good company to keep, in my opinion, and ensures that the pseuodarchaeology barrel will remain pleasantly devoid of fish.

Rafferty’s book, then, should be praised for its timeliness and its commitment to an approach to pseudoarchaeology that values debunking above everything else. As readers of this blog know, this is not my take on pseudoarchaeology—even as I recognize and despise the use of pseudoarchaeology (and even archaeology proper) in the hands of racists, white supremaciest, Nazis, and grifters. My rather lengthy, non-review of this book then should not be read as a critique of Rafferty’s goals, but as an alternative perspective that seeks to keep some the pseudoarchaeology baby despite the murkiness of the bathwater. 

I’d be remiss not to mention that the book has one particular cringeworthy moment (and this is my gesture toward a trigger warning for anyone looking to read this book). It is regrettable that Rafferty used the word “bullshit” to dismiss the claim by pseudoarchaeologists that that the Smithsonian has lost or destroyed the bones of “giants. The sole and profoundly cringeworthy use of profanity in the book occurred at a time when all but the most casual reader would  remember that the Smithsonian continues to hold over 10,000 indigenous ancestors in its storerooms. It seems like a bad idea to point out that the Smithsonian would never hide, lose, or otherwise obscure the bones when the same institution refuses to comply with Federal law and return the ancestors to their homes.    

Beyond that I mostly have some of my conventional quibbles. Some are disciplinary (e.g. Rafferty is probably a better archaeologist than he is a historian) and some are probably because there is some irony (and perhaps even some gently self-deprecating humor) in the book that I’m not quite catching. This is to say,  In any event my review is too long for a single blog post, so I’m breaking it in two.

As the renown pseudoarchaeologist hunter Flint Dibble says: buckle up!

Here’s my warm-take on the book:  

1. As with many recent books on pseudoarchaeology, Rafferty seems to be a far more sensitive reader of archaeological artifacts than historical texts. While I cannot comment on all the works he references, if he treatment of Ignatius Donnelly is any indication, I am inclined to take lightly his calls for attention to detail.

Alleging that Donnelly was a racist seems to misunderstand Donnelly in a significant way (here’s my take on Donnelly). After all as a Radical Republican and a strong advocate for the Freedman’s Bureau, Donnelly carried on the traditional of abolitionism in the US and was advocated for opportunities and equality for newly freed Blacks. This fit his broad progressive agenda which challenged the interests of wealthy coast coast elites, corrupt politicians, and the institutions that bolstered their prestige in American society to the detriment of immigrants, minorities, and working classes.

While his books are not tidy social metaphors, it is significant that he saw the destruction of utopias such as Atlantis (or late-20th century New York in his novel Caesar’s Column) as both tragedies because of their unrealized potential as egalitarian societies, but also as creating opportunities for a clean slate where long held prejudices and privilege were washed away (for more on this, go here). Overlooking this context for Donnelly’s work is not simply a matter of being careless with important contextual data (something that even the best archaeologist will occasional do), but impoverishing the significance of the Atlantis story (and pseudoarchaeology more broadly) for socially disadvantaged groups.

The same carelessness with the Kensington Runestone (despite a number of very good historical works that contextualize this very object; here’s my take) reduced Scandinavian immigrants in Minnesota to either fools or racists (or both) rather than understanding how the Runestone represented a growing concern for the radical sense of displacement brought on through industrialize displacement on a global scale. Again, this isn’t meant as an apology for fabricated Runestone or for the racism inherent in its text. Instead, I’m suggesting that, like the random sherd on the floor of the storeroom, without context these episodes become MORE susceptible to the very abuses that Rafferty decries in addition to new ones that reduce past distinct experiences to manifestations of modern ills. 

2. This leads to my second concern with this book. Rafferty’s eagerness to connect all pseudoarchaeology to fascism, white supremacy, and right wing ideologies is transparent enough to be almost unworthy of critique (although I do appreciate what is likely an intentional inversion of the kind of over-the-top approach common to pseudoarchaeological claims. I am capable of seeing the playful irony here, but skeptical that is effective). In other words, for Rafferty to make this approach work, he had to engage in a particularly selective reading of pseudoarchaeological evidence. In general, it requires that we see the contemporary uses of these pseudoarchaeologcal arguments as the only way that they can be read (and perhaps even the intention of the original authors even when they are quite remote in time and context).

This rather ossified view of pseudoarchaeology leads Rafferty to overlook the way in which notions of Atlantis, for example, and Mu or even ancient aliens took root in the African American community and became ways to understand their own sense of displacement on account of the Middle Passage and, later, the Great Migration (e.g. Sun Ra’s Atlantis). As Rafferty almost certainly was aware Vine Deloria (who he cites approvingly; for more go here), for example, showed a willingness to adopt the ideas of Zecharia Sitchin in his work alongside those of Immanuel Velikovsky. 

These uses of pseudoarchaeological ideas suggests that it is possible to strip them of white supremacy, anti-indigenous, anti-black, and other nefarious implications repurpose them to produce anti-racist and anti-colonial arguments. There enough well-known examples of this to mitigate against any reading of pseudoarchaeological texts that supposed an essentialized view of their meaning and ignores the plurality of their reception. A quick skim of a hoary old classic like Scott Trafton’s book Egypt Land: Race and Nineteenth-Century American Egyptomania (2004) would be enough to make this clear.

In fact, if we’re willing to give Rafferty a bit of leeway (and credit him with just a bit of ironic intent), we might see his willingness to repurpose some of the very fallacies that he deploys as critiques of pseudoarchaeological reasoning in his work as an example of how certain ways of thinking can be reused for good and for evil goals depending on context. If cherry picking evidence is good for the goose, then it must also be good for the gander.

I’ll continue my review tomorrow where I conclude with the same question that Rafferty concludes with in his book. What is the harm of these kind of barrel-fishing expeditions in our discipline? After all, since we can all agree that Nazis, racism, and white supremacy is bad, isn’t it worth going scorched earth here?