There could be something in it

That’s a phrase that grates sometimes. “There could be something in it.” It doesn’t seem to matter what outrageous tale you make up, it doesn’t take too long before you find someone who’ll gently shake their head, hmm and say “Well, there could be something in it.”

This does crop up as a phrase from graduates in Archaeology and Ancient History from most universities that I’ve met. Interestingly I often hear in association to claims about Atlantis or Pyramids on Mars. Obviously the Face on Mars isn’t an actual face, but there could be something in it. If readers from the hard sciences are feeling unduly smug, I also struggled with a Physics post-doc who was convinced that interbreeding with aliens was a possibility, when we find them. We share no DNA with alien life, if it exists. We do however share something like 47% of our DNA with cabbages (I think that the figure varies a lot depending on how you measure it). A Human-cabbage hybrid would seem more likely. You can insert a joke about the politician of your choice here. So what is it that we’re teaching students at university that leaves them ill-equipped to think critically about the conjectures that have no evidence or logical inconsistencies in them? How could we teach thinking, rather than have students have memorised lists of good and bad history, leaving them unable to evaluate anything that doesn’t appear on any list?

This comes from being provoked by a particular nonsensical press release which I keep getting hammered by. I could rebut Walter Cruttenden’s claims that the Sun is in a binary system with a period of 24,000 years with some basic astronomy. The period would suggest that the companion star is at a distance of around 1000 AUs (+/- a couple of hundred of AUs depending on mass from Newton’s modifications to Kepler’s third law). One AU is the Eart-Sun distance, so a star would have to be unfeasibly faint not to be visible from this distance, being comfortably inside the Oort cloud. Not that we’d see it, as the gravitational effects would have long perturbed Earth out of its comfortable orbit. There are other astronomical reasons to doubt Cruttenden’s claim, but I think that fact that it a load of rubbish releases from the need to list the many astronomical flaws in the argument.

But if not this then some other claim will grab the attention of students, and while they are very good at what they know, they are sometimes less good at knowing what they know. They struggle to apply the same methods across domains, so while they can be razor-sharp tackling the existence or lack of it of Celtic Britain, they don’t see how the same methods can be used to evaluate the strength of archaeological claims about Atlantis or whatever else.

We also ignore motivations for learning about ancient history. I have no doubt some students do have dull but worthy reasons for learning it. Many have interesting and worthy reasons. But I think a large number of students have interests like Atlantis, which they don’t feel happy talking about because they’re not ‘serious history’. These students sometimes get disillusioned with ancient history because they find it’s not answering the questions they’re interested in.

Part of me thinks “tough luck”, they should have taken more of an interest in what they’d learn before they signed up. But even if Atlantis isn’t ‘serious history’ that doesn’t stop it from raising serious questions. Why did Plato use it in his works? What does it reveal about the way Greeks thought about citizenship. How plausible was the tale to ancient Greeks? Would they have thought of it as an obviously fantastical setting like Cloudcuckooland, or was it based on the real world? Is Critias useful for history? If you don’t have a background in Ancient History then questions about lost civilisations are reasonable. I don’t think throwing out Ancient History and simply teaching how to spot poor arguments is a solution, but it is possible that including pseudo-history you can illustrate what the process of historical research is as well as the content.

One guy doing this is Kenneth Feder, who wrote the interesting Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology. It’s good, but very American. There’s a couple of books by Peter James and Nick Thorpe Ancient Inventions and Ancient Mysteries, which may be useful, but I haven’t worked out if I can plan much of a course round this yet. —–