Reviewing Pseudoarchaeology (Part 2)

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.

My review is mostly about me rather than this book. And it probably will be useful to read the first part of this blog post. As I wrote yesterday, my review today concludes with a brief reflection on whether book’s like Rafferty’s do any real harm. I am willing to suggest that they might, but I also want to be clear that that if there is any ideology that it is worth going scorched-earth on, it is racist, Nazi, white supremacist nonsense. If this approach ends up catching some harmless grifters or clumsy late-19th century progressives, well, when you use a drag net you’re bound to catch some dolphins (as the old saying goes). Or, to channel Ignatius Donnelly, sometimes its worth promoting a myth about the past if it shows the potential of burning everything down.

Here’s the rest of my review:    

3. This eagerness to discredit and debunk results in a kind of blindness to the value of these pseudoarchaeological narratives. The unwillingness to see how pseudoarchaeological narratives could have value to people in the past (beyond advancing ideas that were generally as aberrant then as they are now) also meant that he doesn’t see how the careful treatment of these narratives, in their various historical contexts, can continue to teach us something today.

This is unfortunately a common conceit of archaeologists and regrettable. As we confront the unprecedented challenges of a looming climate catastrophe, it would at least suggest that a sensitive understanding of the Atlantis stories might offer us ways to process and understand our present peril. Similarly diffusionist (and hyperdiffusionist) narratives—parallel in contemporary science fiction from Battle Star Galactica to Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series and Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time—present an inverted narrative to Atlantean catastrophism (or our own extinction anxieties). As we confront human migration on a planetary scale and reel from the global impact of COVID pandemic, exploring the potential of diffusionist narratives to help us understand our interconnected present seems to have potential, at very least. 

To be clear, I’m not advocating for the veracity of Atlantis or diffusionist theories understanding of human culture, but rather for the value of these narratives. As I have noted, there remain things to learn from how populations adapt to globalization, displacement, and alienation from the study of the Kensington Runestone. Dismissing its authenticity, even if a necessary first step, should not be a dead end.  

4. Seeks in some ways to argue that archaeology is devoid of ideology. This is a desiccated view of archaeological epistemology and history. Part of the challenge of this book for me is its simplified view of archaeological epistemology and history. As a simple example, Rafferty noted that the growing interest in spiritualism emerged after the Civil War in the US as people sought to reconnect with their deceased relative. This is a fine line of reasoning, but Rafferty overlooks the fact that this is also when archaeology begins to coalesce as a discipline. Moreover, archaeology is hardly so removed from spiritualism. Even a casual scholar of the history of archaeology (like myself) recognizes the deep commitments to modernism (and its spiritual elements) in, say, Arthur Evans, excavator of Knossos. In fact, just last year, Kostis Kourelis and I traced the entanglements between Greek archaeologists and parapsychologists. In the same paper, we noted both the role that dreams have played in archaeological discoveries as well as the close relationship between spiritualists and the Great Palace excavations. Of course, my point here isn’t to somehow recommend “dream archaeology” but rather than retrojecting epistemology standards associated with New Archaeology back onto 19th century practices, a more sensitive contextual reading of pseudoarchaeology and archaeology would take into account the often close relationship between the two especially in the first 80 years of the discipline. It is hardly revelatory to observe that archaeology continues to enjoy a wide range of influences including those that are as much ideological as philosophical including nationalism, Marxism, colonialism, and (most recently and famously) anarchism. 

While it obvious why Rafferty might not want to celebrate these connections, it nevertheless might benefit the reader to at least explain that scientific archaeology is one strand of archaeological knowledge making. The rational fallacies trotted out to challenge pseudoarchaeological thinking could equally apply to indigenous archaeology or various phenomenological approaches associated with post-processual practices, as two examples. More broadly, scholars of who study archaeological epistemology have repeatedly demonstrated that complexity of archaeological knowledge making practices and resisted efforts to reduce it to a kind of slavish rationalism or scientific paradigms. Again, none of this is particularly obscure and it would be common to introduce it to students as undergraduates.   

5. In the end, we may wonder (along with the author) what is the harm of a book like this? After all, we can generally agree that Nazis and white supremacy is bad and pseudoscience (writ large) can be incredibly destructive. On the surface, it would seem that any effort to discredit these ideas is good.

Unfortunately, the issue is not that simple. Books that seek to decontextualize pseudoarchaeology and reduce “the pseudo”  to “the bad” as a way to promote “the Real Archaeology” as “the [moral] good” traffic in essentialized perspectives on both disciplinary and non- (or even anti-) disciplinary knowledge. Over the pas fifty years, archaeologists, historians, and other scholars deeply concerned about the human past and present have come increasingly to recognize the limits of scientific knowledge as tool for understanding communities. We’ve come to marvel at the complex epistemologies and ontologies that structure how groups understand their world and the powerful knowledge produced by communities cut off from access to scientific, academic, and disciplinary practices. Reducing this kind of knowledge to the “pseudo” risks doubling down on the very colonialist, classist, and even racist practices that this work often seeks superficially to challenge.

This is a particularly dangerous time to do this as many people—including admired disciplinary practitioners—have come to consider scientific knowledge as inadequate for understanding the past and producing actionable knowledge for a present threatened by the existential crises of global climate change.