Writing Wednesday: Some Low Stakes Writing on Pseudoarchaeology

One thing I’ve been trying to integrate into my weekly writing regime is some low stakes writing. The goal of this kind of writing is to worry less about getting every little thing right and more about getting words on the page. More than that, I want to get back to writing in joyful way. So here goes!

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Since I’ve been reading a bit more around the intersection of pseudoarchaeology and Black religious thought, I started to get more and more excited about the prospect of rehabilitating both pseudoarchaeology (and my simmering book project) as viable way to think about not only the past, but also challenges facing society (and archaeology) in the present. It also feels like a good time to get writing about this kind of thing as my paper with Kostis Kourelis on “Dream Archaeology” has just appeared.

My readings this past week, for example, have located no conceptions of the Black past in the context of the displacements associated with the Great Migration. It’s almost as if the alienation that Black communities experienced in the urbanized north evoked uncomfortable parallels with the displacement of the Middle Passage. In an effort to bridge the gaps created by the Middle Passage and the Great Migration, Black communities engaged in an ambitious effort to reclaim their past by narrating Black origin stories in new ways. Many of these narratives were deliberately subversive and sought to upset conventional white perspectives by asserting the priority of Black culture, connecting Black experiences with the Islamic and Near Eastern world, locating Black origins in Egypt and Ethiopia, and demonstrating how these obscured, or at least overlooked, pasts offered a strong foundations for the present and future.

Of course, this past also sometimes involved ancient aliens or advanced technologies some of which — such as the Mother Plane in Nation of Islam— continue to play a role in the present and future.  

Many of these newly articulated pasts had roots in the global experience of Blackness. This echoes the global displacement of the Middle Passage and the role that the exploitation of Blacks played not only in the earliest expressions of globalization, but also as a form of human capital that allowed for its expansion and acceleration. The role of Black labor in the industrialized north of the Great Migration continued this tradition and the squalid conditions often afforded to workers simply reinforced their sense of alienation. In this situation, new Black histories became a counterweight to both past and present senses of displacement and alienation as part of globalized and globalizing world.

If part of what archaeology can and should do is trace the material connections to the past, it is hard to deny the power of pseudoarchaeological narratives that seek to produce meaning for groups marginalized in (and by) the predominantly white archaeological discourse and the processes (and structures) that support this discourse.

This, of course, means capitalism in some cases. I’d hesitate to argue that all pseudoarchaeology is anti-capitalist — Graham Hancock and other grifters would disprove this instantly — at the same time, there is no reason why certain anti-western, anti-academic, and anti-colonial strands in pseudoarchaeology can’t be anti-capitalist as well.

In fact, one wonders whether the persistent interest in catastrophic collapses among pseudoarchaeologists —  typified in their persistent fascination with Atlantis and other lost civilizations — stems partly from a belief that contemporary society with its misplaced values and profligate consumerism is lurching toward Armageddon. It might also account for some of the more vociferous push back against pseudoarchaeology. Pseudoarchaeology threatens to upset the structures rooted not only in institutions and disciplines, but also methods and epistemologies that support archaeological knowledge and the systems that produce and sustain it.

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This is obviously pretty rough, but I’m open to feedback and suggestions. If you like this kind of casual, low stakes writing, let me know or if you have observations about this, I’d love to hear them!