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Life is change

How it differs from the rocks

I’ve seen their ways too often for my liking

New worlds to gain

My life is too survive

And be alive for you

From Crown of Creation, Jefferson Airplane

A couple of weeks ago, we had the release of “Einstein Companion,” which the Ars Technica coverage trumpets “Doesn’t Just Help With Homework. It Takes Over Your Role as a Student.” It apparently connects to Canvas, the learning management system (LMS) that my university uses, and in which I currently have about 290 students for Anthro 101. If the corporate propaganda can be trusted, it can read documents, including the course syllabus, watch videos, interpret slides, and complete and submit assignments, on time, on behalf of a student.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to us professors until after the fact, the university rolled out enhanced AI tools to students toward the end of January (as far as I can determine.) When they open a Google doc now (which I use for assignments in my classes), they are greeted by a very large, prominent “ask Gemini” button at the top, a “help me write” prompt right at the cursor, and another in a context-aware menu to the right. It offers to help them “refine” a passage, “expand” on it, make it “more formal” (or less), etc. Those buttons and menus are cluttering up my screen even as I draft this post (sadly unaided).

At about the same time, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was asked about the energy cost of training and running Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. He responded, more than a bit defensively, that humans too, are expensive to train and run. For example, you have to feed them for twenty years “before they get smart.” 

We happened to be discussing human exceptionalism in class that week, and that Altman clip generated a lot of discussion. If we’re down to discussing the energy value of humans relative to LLMs, “what are we even doing,” asked one student.

Then a colleague, Alberto Acerbi, a leading scholar in the modeling of cultural evolutionary processes, posted a thread on X (erstwhile Twitter), in which he says that he asked Claude Code (another LLM) to elaborate on one of his own pre-prints. Claude wrote a paper, complete with simulation experiments, analysis etc, which Acerbi reports is publishable with minor tweaks. “…it would be possible,” he says, “for someone to create hundreds (?) of those with small efforts.“ He ends the thread by asking, much like my student in 101, “what should we do?”

To top it off, the CEO of Claude’s Maker (I suppose I should capitalize that), Anthropopic, warns of “an impending AI tsunami that will upend human society as the tech surpasses human intelligence.”

What should we do indeed? Even absent the predicted rogue wave of computer-based super intelligence, in this new world of good-enough automated writing and instantaneous analysis, wither academia? I’ve been asking myself that question for a while now. 

LLMs can already write papers better than most humans, certainly better than most undergrads. They can draw better than the vast majority of humans. They can search parameter spaces faster and more completely than any human researcher. They can write and review articles, code simulations, analyse results. Using NotebookLM, they can even learn the content of textbooks and courses, and produce interactive podcasts. They can give our courses, live and in person, any time, anywhere, at much lower cost than we can. Our final preserve it seems, the Human of the Gaps, is that we can take responsibility for their work and their decisions, something they legally can’t do themselves at the moment. But how many of us are needed for that? And who would be willing to do it?

Human learning

In the face of all this, the only thing we can do is remember who we are, and what our mission is. We are an academic community. Our mission is to learn about the world and to help others learn. 

We can also benefit from remembering what we’re not, or at least what we shouldn’t be: We are not an article production machine. We are not a student ranking engine, either, although that’s what many would like us to be. 

In class, I remind students that we are here to learn, together. There is no future for them without AI (except perhaps a very depressing, post-apocalyptic future, which this morning looks increasingly likely), and they will have to learn when and how to use it, but especially when and how to not use it. 

I don’t tell them not to use AI. I don’t make AI use into a moral problem. It is a practical issue in learning. I simply tell students that if an LLM does their course work for them, they are not learning. They are only hurting themselves, not to mention wasting time and money. There are plenty of good, productive, ways for them to use AI. Doing their course work for them is not one of those.

I tell them that my goal is to help them learn, and to learn with them. My goal is to help them prepare to go out into the world and make a contribution to their community, however they define and identify that community. Over the years, I’ve learned a few things about contributing to a community, and I want to share that with them. That message seems to resonate.

In terms of assessing student learning, which is different from ranking, we can either get into a losing arms race with software like Einstein Companion, playing increasingly futile digital whack-a-mole, or we can change our approach to emphasize more human assessment of human learning, in a world increasingly dominated by computer assessment of computer work. 

We can make sure students at all levels understand that they are part of this academic community of ours. They are welcome here. They can contribute. At the end of the day, students will do their own work and their own learning if they want to, if they think it is worth doing, and if they value both the process and the outcome. 

We need to engage with our students and their learning as directly as possible, as fellow learners. We are learning with them. If their goal is to get a credential so they can take their place as a cog in a faceless socio-economic machinery, “in the world of bigger motorcars,” as Jethro Tull’s Thick as a Brick once put it, which is how many of them view things at the moment, they will use whatever machines are available to them for that purpose. I can’t blame them. Born forty years later, I would probably be doing the same. 

If, on the other hand, their goal is to learn, they will learn. We create the conditions under which they labour, and we help drive their decisions.

For a couple of years now, I’ve assigned a reading journal as the only work in my courses, which I think I will rename “learning journal” for future semesters. I have about 290 students right now. I comment on each and every reading journal. My plan this semester is to comment on them three times each. I meet with the students. Not much. Just little fifteen minute meetings. It turns out that it’s enough for me to engage with them and with their learning. Some students want to meet. Some don’t. That’s fine too. Different engagement strategies work for different people. I make the time to meet with those who want to.

The outcomes are encouraging. I see very little use of AI, because students know that I am interested in what they have to say, and I am interested in helping them answer the questions they have about the world, through an anthropological lens. I treat them like human beings and like fellow learners, not like LLMs and not like exam completion algorithms. They reciprocate.

In Anthro 101, I am not so interested in whether they know the conventional (and ever changing) dates for the initial Out of Africa dispersal, for example. I tell them that I am interested in seeing how they can develop the beginnings of an anthropological perspective on the world. 

I’m not interested in the finished product, in the polished answer, which an LLM can create much faster and better than most of them. I’m interested in the process. I am interested in the getting there, more than in the knowledge itself. (And here, I find myself consciously trying to avoid the now classic LLM tell-tale formula of “it’s not x, it’s y.” Already.)

And what, they ask, is that anthropological perspective I want them to develop? Here is what I tell them: Always consider the whole human, biological, cultural, and linguistic, past and present. Develop a basic awareness that human variability in all those dimensions is greater than they have ever imagined. Acquire a sense of cultural relativism that acknowledges its own limits, a consciousness that humans are part of a larger web of things, organic and inorganic, living and not. There, congratulations. You have now taken my Anthro 101. Now you just have to do the reading, and tell me about it from those perspectives.

All this, including the reading of the journals and the individual meetings, actually fits very well within the forty percent of my job that I am supposed to be spending on teaching. Forty percent is a lot of hours in a semester, especially when I spend most of my time on other things outside the regular teaching term. 

I even did the math myself, since LLMs are not very good at that part of it yet. If I have 250 students (which is what I recommend), and if I read their journals three times (15 minutes per read on average) and meet with each for 15 minutes, that’s approximately 20 hours per week during the semester. Add six hours for lecture and course prep, and pro-rated over a year, that’s less than the famous forty percent of my typical work week. I even have time to write the occasional blog post.

Not everyone, at every stage of life and career, should do this. Communities are diverse, and there are diverse ways of contributing. This is also part of being human. But this is what I can do now. I could do even more if we decided that we are not prisoners of the course and semester structure that we’ve imposed upon ourselves, almost completely because of historical contingency, and for reasons of administrative convenience.

Yes, it’s a lot of work. But I can’t complain about the pay, and most of it comes from the public, so I feel that I must give their children their money’s worth. It’s also endlessly fascinating and stimulating work. I see a student’s perspective shift within a semester as they read the course materials (and the evidence says they do), as they make connections with material from other courses (learning across the curriculum), with events in their lives, and even in the world around them. Best of all, I have the evidence that all of this is happening, in their own words.

With their help, I glimpse regions of the discipline to which I have had little, if any exposure. I help them explore as much as I can, by giving them comments, starting points for further reading and reflection, tips on writing (so many tips on writing, which is how I know they are not using AI).

Even those international students who tell me they initially use AI to clean up their text eventually stop, mostly. I make sure to tell them that I am interested in their thought, their writing, their expression. I am not going to punish them because English is their second, or third, or fourth language. I judge not, lest I be judged, especially as a second language writer myself, I tell them.

On the contrary. I am interested in how they express themselves, in their linguistic peculiarities and individualities, because I am an anthropologist, and I consider the world from that anthropological perspective that I want to share with them, and that I want them to start developing and using.

And if a few of them fool me, if they train an LLM to write like a first year student whose third language is English and who went to school in Chengdu, or like a fourth year psychology major educated in rural Alberta (of which I have many this semester), in the end, the loss is theirs. The vast majority will have learned more about being human, and they will be better prepared to meaningfully participate in a community. Good for them.

Human scholarship

These principles all transfer quite directly to the scholarship part of our workload. Many tools are available to us for pursuing that mission. The LLM is now one of them, and soon, no doubt, other forms approaching Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Archaeologists have always been notorious early adopters. From the theodolite used by William Stukeley at Stonehenge in the 18th century (page 51), to aerial photography as early as the First World War, to genetic algorithms in the 1990s. 

Like all of these, LLMs have their uses, and they will be used in scholarship. AI is great at finding patterns in landscapes and assemblages, for example. And if LLMs can draft some boiler plate for us to edit, so we can spend more time thinking about our data, so much the better. Then of course, we shouldn’t fault our students for wanting to use the same strategies.

Just as our students respond to the learning environment we create for them, the debilitating deluge of AI paper submissions to journals will only materialize if we don’t make necessary changes to our academic culture.

Quantity has never been a good metric for scholarship, and as Acerbi points out above, it is now completely obsolete, and even actively harmful. So what do we evaluate then, if not numbers of papers published and numbers of citations?

Perhaps we do something radical and evaluate contribution. Does this contribution help us learn? Does it help us figure things out, and answer questions that we care about answering, as a community of human beings? This means we need to read and evaluate.

If we’re going to actually read the work of applicants to grants, jobs, graduate programs, promotions, pay increases etc, which is mostly when we rank, we will have to ask each other to produce and present less, not more. But what we produce should matter, and it should be recognized as such.

Yes, LLMs can produce millions of papers, as quickly as we give it chips, water, and electricity for. A percentage of those papers could even represent potentially useful contributions. But they will only be useful contributions to us as humans if we can read them as humans.

Without forgoing the tools that make our work faster and more efficient, that allow us to search through databases at speeds that would leave the heads of our grandparents spinning, that crunch numbers and yes, even string words words at undreamt of rates, we will have to produce work that can matter at a human scale, because we are a community of humans.

We will have to embrace our limitations relative to LLMs, and be aware of our unique features. We will have to finally develop a scholarly landscape in which quantity is irrelevant above a certain reasonable threshold, and in which contribution is measured by real world impact on real world communities.

The question should never be how many papers, or how many citations, and certainly not in what journal (which heaven save us from). We won’t benefit from counting each other’s productions. We may, however, benefit from learning from each other’s contributions to knowledge and practice. 

The question should be what difference does, or could, this work make for us, as a community of humans living in a larger world. It’s more work than counting outputs. It’s more reflection. It’s a greater ethical struggle. Like reading student learning journals, it means more engagement. But like reading student learning journals instead of applying an answer key to a quiz, it’s worth it in the end.

At the end of the day, we’re all humans, learning to be human in a larger world. We are members of communities, and we should want to contribute to our communities, to make them better for all of us. We do this by learning and by doing. Only we can do our learning. Various AI tools can help us with the doing, no doubt, but we still have to do the learning, together. As Jefferson Airplane told us more than fifty years ago, before the LLMs arrived, our life is to be there for each other.

John Hawks recently published a post on the “uniquely American controversy” on the place of evolutionary ideas in education. In the runup to the centennial of the “Scopes Monkey Trial,” he traces the broad outlines of the substantial Christian Fundamentalist pushback on the introduction of Darwinian and other evolutionary ideas in American public education in the first part of the 20th century.

That got me thinking about the situation in Québec, where I was educated, and where I taught for many years. Hawks is right that people from elsewhere in North America and Europe are often puzzled about the political charge attached to the teaching of evolution in US schools, even at the university level in some cases. The situation in Québec is certainly very different from that. But why?

After all, without exaggerating much, I can say that Québec was essentially a theocracy until the death of Maurice Duplessis in 1959, and the subsequent Quiet Revolution of the early sixties. School boards were confessional, and universities were either owned and run by religious orders, or they were de facto religious institutions. McGill, for example, operates under a Royal Charter, and its highest official is still today the Visitor, who is normally the Governor General, who happens to be the representative of the Sovereign in Canada, who is also the head of the Anglican Church.

The idea of separation of Church and State, which had at least some currency in the United States, where evolution was sometimes anathema in education, would have been considered not only absurd in Québec, but downright socially destructive. To give you a sense of the intertwinning of Church and State back then, when I got my driver’s license in the mid-80s, as a non-practicing Catholic, the official identity document I had to bring with me was still my baptism certificate. I remember riding my bike to get it from the local church (St-Colette, in Montreal North, if anyone is interested). 

So where then, is this divergence to be found between the American case, and the Canadian? The importance of religion is certainly not the discriminating factor. A quick look at two important figures in the history of science and education in Eastern Canada provide some clues. 

On the Anglophone (and largely Protestant) side, William Dawson (1820-1899), Professor of Geology and Principal of McGill University for almost forty years (until 1893), introduced evolutionary ideas to scholars and to the public. He had global reach, serving as President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1882. He identified as an Evangelical Christian, but as we will see, there was room in his interpretation of the Bible for at least some evolutionary forces, if not for Darwinism proper.

Dawson and Marie-Victorin

On the Francophone (and largely Catholic side), Frère Marie-Victorin (1885-1944, for a more complete account in French) brought evolution to science and to education in French Canada. He founded of the Montreal Botanical Garden in 1931, and he was the Professor of Botany at the Université de Montréal. He was one of the main pioneers of French Canadian science (he founded the Association Canadienne Française pour l’Avancement des Sciences, still going strong), but as a member of the Brothers of the Christian Schools (Frères de l’instruction chrétienne) he was first and foremost a teacher. 

When I read Hawks’ account, I see two main differences between the US story and the Québec version. There are probably similar stories elsewhere as well. First, while both Dawson and Marie-Victorin were deeply religious, and in Dawson’s case would have to be considered fundamentalist, they weren’t biblical literalists in the American sense of the term. Second, they were both gifted naturalists who (sometimes desperately) sought to explain their field observations in light of their faith, and sometimes fell into explaining their faith in light of their field observations. The debate in the US seems to be conducted on a more political plane.

Dawson

Dawson, born in Pictou, Nova Scotia, got his degree at Edinburgh. He worked with Lyell in Nova Scotia in 1842, and significantly for our story, was the first Superintendent of Education in that Province. As Principal of McGill, he maintained a life-long interest and involvement in the development of education at all levels in Canada.

He was a day-age creationist early on (Cornell 1983). He thought there was a strong parallel to be made between the story of Genesis and the geological and biological history of Earth. There was also room in his creationism for the operation of natural forces. By 1890, a mature Dawson succinctly described what he called the biblical theistic version of evolution in his popular Modern Ideas of Evolution (:20):  “God has created all living beings according to their kinds or species, but with capacities for variation and change under the laws which He has enacted for them.”

Dawson was no fan of Darwin. He (1890:59) recognizes in him “transcendent gifts as an observer”, but considers him “a very defective reasoner.” And yet, as Cornell (1983:168) notes, “In all of Dawson’s later articles and pamphlets it is difficult to find even an implicit condemnation of the idea of evolution. It was, in the long run, a positivistic theory of nature, without the possibility of design, that troubled him.”

For Dawson, design was obvious, because without it, Gödel-like, the world, and the presence of humans in it in particular, made no sense. He drew a distinction between variation (within species), and specific difference. Mutation could explain variation, but species themselves must have been designed in order to form a system, or a harmonious whole. There is an echo of this view in modern American-style scientific creationism in the leitmotif of “within kind, not between kinds.”

Dawson, however, even allows for the possibility that we, imperfect human observers of God’s unfolding plan, could be mistaking evolved varieties in the present for species in the original design, and that the originally created species were fewer and more generalized that we perceive at present. “Can we ascertain any of the methods of such creation or making, and can we know how many of the forms which we have been in the habit of naming as distinct species coincide with His creative species, and how many are really results of their variations under the laws of reproduction and heredity, and the influence of their surroundings?” (Dawson 1890:20). 

But for him, there is no room for descent with modification (1890:55): “The man who, in a popular address or in a textbook, introduces the descent of species as a proved result of science, to be used in framing classifications and in constructing theories, is leaving the firm ground of nature and taking up a position which exposes him to the suspicion of being a dupe or a charlatan.”

Marie-Victorin

Marie-Victorin, initially skeptical of evolution, discovers its traces through his massive synthesis of the flora of Québec (Perru 2020), published in 1935 as La Flore Laurentienne. The world he sees is certainly created and designed, but it is dynamic and alive, more so than Dawson’s. By 1929, he describes that dynamism in publications in both French and English.

In Le Dynamisme dans la flore du Québec, getting much closer than Dawson to a Darwinian view of evolution, he muses that “it rather seems that the species, due to a dynamism whose nature still escapes us, and stimulated by the environment, generates mutations randomly and in all directions, regardless of environment or utility” (cited in Perru 2020, my translation.)

Among environmental conditions that stimulated these changes, he identifies not only the glacial cycles that impressively shaped the Québec landscape, but also the recent land-clearing activity of settlers in the St-Lawrence Valley, making it clear that he sees the world as dynamic in the now, and not just in the past.

Some of his evolutionary ideas are formed in the course of a long Beagle-like voyage of discovery he undertakes in 1929 to give a talk on Some evidences of evolution in the Flora of Northeastern America at the British Association Meeting in Cape Town. Before reaching South Africa, he visits the UK, France, Spain, the Canaries, Ascension, and St-Helen, in each place interacting with local researchers and visiting both collections and landscapes (Perru 2020). On the way back, he travels through Africa, the Middle East, and ends up at the Catholic University in Louvain.

But perhaps his most significant encounter on that journey is with Breuil, with whom he discusses evolutionary ideas in detail and at length aboard ship. He reads Teilhard de Chardin. He comes back an evolutionist. He is still a creationist, but certainly not in any literalist sense, and much less so than Dawson.

His evolutionism, like Teilhard’s, is vitalist, mystical, teleological, full of wonder, and perfectly in keeping with the youthful interest in plants and flowers that brought him to teaching, science, and religion, and expressed in his journal in 1904 when he was nineteen years old: “They are so charming to the eye, these masterpieces that delight the intelligence and project us into the infinite, in search of the First Cause!” (quoted in Perru 2020:91, my translation).

For Marie-Victorin, while most mutations could be random, some, the important ones at least, like the creation (his term) of a soul in a remote primate ancestor, must represent divine intervention, and must be fulfilment of a divine plan.

Creation and Education in Québec

Both these teachers, naturalists, scientists, and men of religion and faith, had a significant impact on the development of education in Québec, and on the acceptance of some version of evolution in the general population.

Marie-Victorin’s botanical garden and Dawson’s Redpath museum are both pilgrimages for school groups. They both remain active centres of research, and they both preserve the natural history orientation imparted by their founders.

Dawson was highly critical of Darwinism, which he thought mistakenly gave natural selection a power of creation. On the other hand, he readily accepted that the world changed, and that life varied over time in response to environment, but always according to a well ordered and provident plan.

Marie-Victorin, a generation and a half later, was much closer to modern neo-Darwinian conceptions of evolution, without abandoning the ideas of design and of teleology, but pushing them back into a fog of mystery. They raised unanswerable questions, but not critical ones. Life evolved, whatever the mechanism, and his role was to describe its development. The cause of the development was known a priori, in general if not in detail, and needed no serious investigation.

Being a product of Catholic school in the 70s and 80s, this is very much the outlook I encountered. There was no contradiction between the highly symbolic Genesis account and the fossil record. Dinosaur bones, which were prominently displayed at the Redpath, were not satanic traps laid in the ground to test our faith. The Earth was old, life was wondrous, humans were a miracle, and evolution by natural selection shaped life as we saw it in the world around us. There was no fear of knowledge in our training, no anxiety of discovery. There was the acceptance of deep and unknowable mystery, and an embrace of observation.

The Fathers who taught me, the Eudistes, had a teaching mission much like Marie-Victorin’s order. Our task, they taught us, was not merely to follow biblical teachings (which they also taught us), but to discover and understand as much about the world as we could, so that we could do good.

To this day, McGill students sit and listen to Darwin Day lectures in Dawson’s Redpath Museum auditorium, a wonderful space conducive to learning and reflection. In the Council Room of the old Arts building, Dawson, sitting in his portrait, sternly observes and judges every decision, overseeing every deliberation, his expression now approving, now critical. The house on the edge of campus to which Dawson retired in old age is alive with administrative offices, and the occupants are often aware of its history. 

But also, one of my mentors and colleagues at McGill, Jérôme Rousseau, is the son of one of Marie-Victorin’s early students at Université de Montréal, and his successor as director of the Botanical Garden. He later served as Director of the Museum of Man in Ottawa. These religious and linguistic communities were connected, and never unaware of each other’s travails.

This is the degree to which the legacies of Dawson and Marie-Victorin are alive in the Québec education system. Their presence is felt, even for those who don’t know their names or their histories. There is a lot more I could say about this. As a child, for example, I played on the grounds of the college named after Marie-Victorin, which was near our place. But I think you get the idea.

Fundamentalism and biblical literalism exist in Québec, in both the Catholic and the Protestant traditions, but they didn’t have the same impact on education as they did in some parts of the US. The controversy surrounding evolution in the early modern history of the Québec education system wasn’t binary. It wasn’t so much about whether evolution should be taught. It was much more about the role evolution should be accorded in the natural history of the Earth and of humans.

References

Cornell JF 1983. From Creation to Evolution: Sir William Dawson and the Idea of Design in the

Nineteenth Century, Journal of the History of Biology 16:137-170.

Dawson JW 1890. Modern ideas of evolution as related to revelation and science, The Religious Tract Society, London.

Perru O 2020. Le frère Marie-Victorin (1885-1944) et l’évolution, Revue d’histoire des sciences 73:89-116.

Like all great empires, the American Empire is concerned with the fate of its predecessors (literally, those that went, retired, or died before). Of all its predecessors, the Roman Empire looms large in the American imagination. The idea that American (and Western) men constantly think about Ancient Rome even became a topic of discussion and a set of memes and videos a couple of years ago. 

Commodus, in the modern imagination

Just this morning, Michael Moore amplified a Chris Hedges piece that draws parallels (again) between the current political situation in the US and one of the many collapses of Rome. Hedges compares Trump to Commodus, the bad in guy Gladiator (which was a hit at the Millenium, another moment of high Imperial anxiety), with “his bottomless narcissism and lust for wealth,” and his selling of pardons and favours. One can see the likeness. 

As an archaeologist, I certainly believe the past is a useful guide to the present, and to the future as well, full of warnings, but also of helpful lessons and signposts to ways forward in a life that constitutes our eternal individual and collective predicament. The physical, biological, cultural, and social forces that shaped the past are shaping the present. 

Although history doesn’t quite repeat, similar configurations of factors are likely to produce similar sorts of outcomes, so the search for answers to present problems in the history of Rome, or any other time and place, is not likely to be completely fruitless. Because of structural, political and cultural continuities, though, one of the Roman collapses is a good place to start looking for analogues in the case of present-day America.

Commodus and his era, however, no matter how Trumpian he may have been personally, is perhaps not the most useful analogy for our time. He reigned immediately after the so-called Five Good Emperors of the Neva-Antonine dynasty, which included his father, Marcus Aurelius, whose sometimes painful, sometimes confused, but always enlightening Mediations are currently being misinterpreted, misapplied, and otherwise perverted by various Trump supporting tech-bros (but that’s a different post). 

He was the first son of an Emperor to inherit the Imperium in a hundred years, and he was not a success. His reign can indeed be considered some kind of collapse. It was followed by the Year of the Five Emperors, and shortly thereafter a quite tumultuous Severan interlude (the topic of Gladiator 2, incidentally), then by the Crisis of the Third Century, a period of central collapse of Roman authority so severe that it nearly led to the permanent break up of the Empire into warring successor states. But Constantine and his dynasty, I am sure, would hesitate to call this period The collapse of Rome, and even Alexios Comnenos, who reigned a full seven centuries later, would want to have a word about this.

So yes, the parallels between Trump and Commodus are in some ways striking, but the historical context around them is quite different. When I look for a Roman collapse that can help us navigate the world around us now, I am much more drawn to the end of the Roman Republic and the transition to Empire in the first century BC.

First, there seems to be among the US public, political class, and even the courts, a broad and worrisome acceptance, or at least a tolerance, for the idea that the institutions of the republic have become optional, or fungible in some way. The period of collapse of the Roman Republic, I think, began in earnest with Marius’ fourth consecutive consulship (some of my colleagues in Classics will disagree, I’m sure). 

Even in a time of deep crisis (a barbarian invasion), this signalled a certain willingness by the public and the political class to ignore law and tradition when expedient, in a way and to an extent that hadn’t occurred to their ancestors a hundred years earlier, even with Hannibal camped out at the gates of the Eternal City .

The result of this general constitutional laxism was that after a first civil war, the state was gradually captured by a shadowy network of extremely wealthy men, culminating in the reluctant and short-lived agreements between Pompey, Crassus, and Caesar. The strange-bedfellows alliance between Trump, Musk, and other less visible but no less wealthy and powerful figures like Peter Thiel, etc, which is unraveling in real time on social media as I write this, is a powerful echo of that time.

There are even deeper contextual similarities. This week’s flashpoint in LA over immigrant status is in some ways a structural echo of late Roman Republican times. Many, and perhaps most of the people on whose labour and service Roman power and the Roman economy depended, were not citizens of Rome, and did not enjoy the benefits of citizenship. They had no formal way of participating in the decisions of the Roman state, except as clients and supplicants, even when those decisions affected them directly. This in large part resulted in the Social War, in which the Italian Allies fought for additional rights, whether through citizenship, or through liberation from the Roman yoke (opinions, objectives, and methods among them varied).

Many of the families and individuals who played prominent roles in the later civil wars and in the final collapse of the Republic were central players in the Social War. The end result, after terrible and violent repression by Rome, was a massive expansion of citizenship rights to many Italian communities.

About twenty years later, another group whose labour Rome depended upon, but who as slaves had no rights at all, followed Spartacus in a revolt, subject of another famous American film. Unlike the allies, these rebels weren’t fighting for more rights. Some were trying to escape Italy and go home, some wanted to overthrow the Roman state, and some, no doubt, just wanted to pillage it and exact revenge upon it. They were even more violently repressed than the allies of the Social War, also by people, like Crassus, who would play a direct role in the fall of the Republic.

Another structural similarity is that both public and private debt in the US are at concerning and potentially unsustainable levels, as they were in the lead up to the collapse of the Roman Republic. When debt reaches impossible levels, there are not many solutions. Debt amnesties have happened many times in history, but war, internal or external, is the usual way of resetting debt.

In a context of constant and increasing transfer of wealth from the many to the ever fewer, debt grows, and inequality even more so. A complete system reset can become a tempting prospect, both for the average person, and for the state itself.

Crassus and Caesar tried to direct some of that energy outward, one by conquering the Gallic tribes, the other against Rome’s Parthian rival, Rome’s China. Crassus failed, not even spectacularly, but rather ignominously. Of the First Triumvirate, that left the uneasy and unstable partnership of Pompey and his unlikely, slightly younger father-in-law Caesar. 

Various proponents of the reset lined up to support each of them. The hapless Bernie-like Cicero tried in vain to maneuver an increasingly impotent Senatorial party toward republican salvation, or at least stability. But by then, the Senate, like other republican institutions, had clearly abdicated its constitutional duties.

Fear of arrest, prosecution, and punishment after stepping down from elected office, played an increasingly significant role in the late republic, and along with the general casualness about the constitutional order, helped precipitate the final institutional spasms. Another clear echo.

One last point I want to mention is that far from destroying Roman power, the collapse of the Republic multiplied it many times over. The Roman state emerged from the civil wars that created the Empire, larger, wealthier, and more dominant than ever. Its citizens had lost their liberty, and many formerly free peoples were now subjects. But the Empire itself was much more powerful than the Republic it had replaced. Of this too, I hear an echo in the present American crisis.

Many have become convinced that American democracy, an ideal, even if flawed in its implementation, is holding the country back, and even actively harming it. Some are eager to leave it behind. Many are open to the idea, and even more don’t seem to care one way or the other.

My colleague Ruth Gruhn, Emerita in our department, recently showed me a critique of Chariots of the Gods? (the title still had its question mark back then) that she published in the journal Calgary Archaeologist (vol 3) way back in 1975. Even though I am very much aware of Jason Colavito’s work showing that pseudoarchaeology constantly recycles (sometimes very) old ideas and narrative structures, I was still stunned at the degree to which Ruth’s critique resonates fifty years later. There are entire passages of her article in which one could search and replace (not as easily achievable in 1975) Hancock for von Däniken, and no one would notice much. It reads very much like it could have been written yesterday.

Ruth prefaces her critique by noting her surprise that Chariots “was in second place in the New York Times rank list for best-selling non-fiction” (emphasis original). This echoes the 2022 controversy about the inclusion of Graham Hancock’s Ancient Apocalypse Netflix series under their documentary category.

Right away, Ruth identifies the most fundamental critique, so familiar to us in 2025, of the claims of von Däniken and others: the claims are unnecessary. To each of von Däniken’s extra-terrestrial explanations of archaeological observations, there is a simpler alternative that is supported by actual material evidence. 

“Items which are actually typical of their time and place are held out to be something highly unusual,” she says. The lid of Pakal’s sarcophagus at Palenque, for example, still now much discussed in pseudoarchaeological circles, is not “an astronaut operating the controls of a space capsule.” Instead, says Ruth, with references in support, “every element on this sculptured panel at Palenque can be replicated in many other examples of that particular art style.” The Nazca lines, von Däniken’s cherished UFO landing strips, “relate closely to the ceramic styles of the Nazca culture, which developed in the area early in the first millennium A.D.”

It’s amazing that for fifty years at least, the refrain from archaeologists has been much the same. We don’t need alien space visitors or atlantean supermen to explain these archaeological remains. Here is the evidence. Here is what our ancestors did, with their own minds and their own hands, and here is how they did it. Sometimes, as in the case of the Egyptian pyramids, they even left us quite detailed written and illustrated instructions.

Like modern critics of von Däniken, Hancock and others, Ruth points out the often ethnocentric and sometimes racist nature of the idea that indigenist explanations of the archaeological record are somehow insufficient, that the Maya or the Ancient Egyptians needed external help to build their impressive structures. “A basic premise of [these theories] is an ethnocentric idea of Europeans that the native peoples of Africa and the Americas were primitives incapable of accomplishing marvels.” 

“Von Däniken,” she notes, “gives a modern twist by placing his super race in outer space.” This aspect of his proposal, “claimed to be new and revolutionary, actually has historical precedent in the old theories of the ‘lost continents’ of Mu and Atlantis.”

Von Däniken took the 19th century’s imagined survivors of earlier earthbound cataclysmic destructions of advanced civilizations, born of then prevailing romantic nationalism, and in the spirit of the 60s space race, cast them as visitors from other worlds instead. Hancock, given the Western retreat from optimistic progressivism in the 90s and 00s, brings them right back to Earth as survivors of a highly hypothetical Younger Dryas Impact. The fundamental idea is the same. The settings change according to temporary taste and fashion.

But the archaeologist’s reaction to this externalist model of human development, that relies on special (non-divine?) intervention is the same in 1975 as in 2025. To quote Ruth at length:

“decades of careful archaeological research at ruins from Sacsahuaman in Perù and Teotihuacàn in Mexico to Zimbabwe in Rhodesia and to Easter Island in the Pacific, in case after case, have solved the ‘mystery’: the local people did it, and without accomplices. Detailed archaeological records from various parts of the world now demonstrate clearly the gradual indigenous development of prehistoric civilizations as a result of local ecological and demographic factors, without the need for any powerful mysterious super race as a stimulus.”

Like contemporary archaeologists and other critics of pseudoarchaeology, Ruth is concerned with understanding and explaining the massive popularity of these claims. She describes several instances of deception and “blatant faking”, especially in the film version of Chariots, which was shown on Canadian television in 1972 and in the US in 1973, and that seems to have precipitated her writing.

“With such deceptive arguments it is small wonder then,” she says, “that so many millions of people were taken in by the book and by the film. But public interest in the theory is not simply the result of delusion. It must also be seen in the context of the strong wave of anti-intellectualism, anti-science, and anti-rationalism now current in modern society.”

She wrote the above passage fifty years ago, and one could argue that things have only gotten worse in that department. I would say we are now in a full-blown crisis of confidence in the academy and in scholarship in general. Fifty years after Ruth’s expression of concern over anti-intellectualism, we have entered a world of post-truth and alternative facts.

People like Hancock capitalize on this crisis of course, and Ruth notes the way in which von Däniken was already attacking professional archaeologists as part of his strategy. This is also worth quoting in extenso: 

“The opinions of archaeologists, if not completely ignored, are consistently derided as merely representing the vested interests of the profession in its own theories. Von Däniken, proudly neither scientist nor scholar, says repeatedly that professional archaeologists do not or will not accept his theory only because his ideas are counter to the cherished and immutable theories of the scientific establishment.”

Sound familiar? It should if you have read (or listened to) any of the past three years of exchanges between Hancock and his critics. From the proud avocationalism, which should not in itself be a problem, to the worldwide archaeological cabal, it’s all there in 1975, and all obvious to Ruth.

She concludes her discussion with another theme that should be familiar to modern critics of Hancock’s claims and narrative strategies. Von Däniken presents his work as factual and scientific, but “his theory is above empirical testing, for it is no less than Revealed Truth, mystical in origin.”

Ruth notes that according to von Däniken’s own statements to Encounter Magazine in 1973, “the concept of prehistoric visitations of Earth by extraterrestrial beings was revealed to him in a strange visionary ‘ESP experience’ in 1954. The vision became an obsession.” There is a parallel here with Hancock’s frequent discussion of visions and revelations while under the influence of ayahuasca and other substances.

I strongly agree with Ruth’s conclusion that “the public response to Chariots of the Gods? should not be met simply by annoyance and dismay on the part of scientists; rather it must be analysed  as part of a significant psychological phenomenon of our times…” People are interested in these claims for a reason. As archaeologists and science communicators, as Ruth well knew back in 1975, we ignore that reality at our peril.

But no matter how hard we work to help the public learn about the past through archaeology, “no amount of hard fact will deter the faithful from fantasy, and thus it should not be surprising if Chariots of the Gods? Rolls on for a century or more.”

Well, Ruth, you’ve been proven at least half right in that regard. The chariot has now rolled on for more than fifty years, and shows no signs of slowing down. It continues in forms new and old. And we continue our work, undeterred.

The Joe Rogan Experience lately seems to have become one of the epicentres of pseudoarchaeology. After Flint Dibble and Graham Hancock, and then Hancock on his own, it was Zahi Hawass’ turn to discuss ‘advanced’ ancient civilizations and other archaeological mysteries on the podcast. Overall, the episode is a useful and informative watch, but there are some issues worth discussing in a bit of detail.

Zahi Hawass on the Joe Rogan Experience

Hawass, an archaeologist and former minister of antiquities in Egypt, is an influential and controversial figure, both in archaeology and in broader society. He is famously colourful and can be abrasive, which always makes him entertaining and attractive to mass media. 

At some points in the podcast, he comes off as a Peter Lorre villain in some lost Dashiell Hammett noir. When Rogan kept asking Hawass where the pictures were of the things he was describing, and Hawass kept saying to look in his book, I half expected Bogart to burst into the studio, pistol in hand, Bacall at his side, demanding to see them.

But Hawass mostly held his own under Rogan’s cross-examination. He was clear about the fact that we have detailed evidence about the construction of the pyramids by actual Egyptian humans, rather than by space aliens or survivors of Hancock’s ancient lost civilization. Many Rogan viewers and listeners learned about the Diary of Merer, for example, a stunning testimonial from one of the participants in the gargantuan project. Rogan said he did think ancient Egyptians did build the pyramids, and not aliens. All in all, a decent at bat for archaeology.

Hawass provides other starting points for the audience to learn about archaeological remains of ramps, of boats, of sleds, and other pieces of ancient engineering that made the pyramids possible. As Flint Dibble points out, he could have been better prepared for this part of the interview. He kept sending Rogan and the audience to one of his publications for more detailed evidence, instead of having it to hand. Fortunately Dibble provides (around the 45 minute mark) a great complement to the Hawass interview, with all the pictures, detailed references, and receipts that Hawass should have brought. If you’re interested in all that data, and it is fascinating, that is the place to go.

Since Flint does such a great job with this, I want to focus on some other aspects of the interview. In one particularly interesting exchange, Hawass not only tells Rogan that he believes in magic generally (because it is mentioned in ancient textual sources), but that the ancient Egyptians specifically wielded a powerful form of it.

Now, I can hear some colleagues thinking that having one of the top Egyptian archaeologists go on Joe Rogan and tell millions of people that ancient Egyptians were powerful magicians is possibly not the best idea, especially if one’s goal is to address pseudoarchaeological claims such as Graham Hancock’s or von Däniken’s. As Rogan reasonably asks in Hawass in that conversation, if you he thinks ancient Egyptians were powerful wizards, how does he then know  that the pyramids weren’t built with magic?

Hawass’ response is immediate and unequivocal that the pyramids were not built with magic. I think this is actually a good thing. Hawass is saying that despite fully accepting that ancient Egyptians were great magicians, he has the concrete, material, textual, and archaeological evidence that they were building great monuments without using magic. Given the archaeological evidence, he doesn’t need to invoke magic to explain the pyramids. 

That’s actually more powerful than if I, a complete agnostic when it comes to the existence of magic, or if one of my colleagues who flatly denies its existence, went on Rogan to say there was no magic involved in building the pyramids. Someone who thinks it’s theoretically an option, and who happens to be one of the world’s top experts, thinks the evidence clearly shows it didn’t happen. I’ll take it.

Perhaps an even weirder moment than Hawass’ profession of faith in magic, is when he mounts a concerted attack on the value of radiometric dating (e.g. Carbon 14) in archaeology. I understand that in some contexts in ancient Egypt and a few other places, there are more precise methods than C14, with higher resolution, such as dating based on textual evidence and ceramic seriation, but I wasn’t expecting to cheer on Joe Rogan, of all people, as he stepped into the breach to defend what has been the backbone of many archaeological chronologies worldwide. 

And even in places like Egypt, I hope Hawass realizes, where we are lucky to have textual sources and detailed ceramic chronologies, there are still sites that don’t have much more to rely on than radiometric dating. Anyway, it was just a very weird moment. So… thanks to Joe? I guess?

Then there’s the whole discussion of the alleged pillars (now even portrayed as an underground city, complete with spiral staircases and a cooling system hundreds of metres deep) under the pyramids, recently claimed to have been identified by Biondi, Malanga, and others, using a combination of synthetic aperture radar, a form of seismic tomography, and a machine learning algorithm (from what I can tell).

Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder has a very good video on this for anyone interested. First, I have to say that in a 2022 paper, Biondi and Malanga give Hancock’s Fingerprints of the Gods, as one of the inspirations for their pyramid work, so it isn’t as if they just ‘found’ this sub-pyramid city by accident. Malanga also believes that UFO contactees around the world are being reprogrammed for some unknown purpose. 

I personally have no problem with any of that, but if you are trying to evaluate their work, it is useful to keep in mind, as some of it appears to colour their interpretations of their data. And speaking of their data, I agree with Hossenfelder that they are most likely overinterpreting noise. But there is very little substantial to go on in their papers and presentations.

I want to end by saying that after this performance by Hawass, after his discussion of magic, his attack on C14, and his (fairly sad and inappropriate) condemnations of  (all?) his colleagues, I never again want to hear Rogan or the others claim that professional archaeologists lack imagination, are closed to possibility, or form a monolithic global cabal whose goal is to hide the truth about the past. 

If nothing else, Hawass gave plenty of evidence (most of it involuntarily) that we are individuals with our own foibles and eccentricities, our own beliefs, fascinations, and even obsessions, our own pet peeves and annoyances, and that archaeological orthodoxy, if there ever was such a thing, is not the outcome of some sombre central planning exercise, but rather the resultant of a complex, messy, and fractious vector operation.

There has recently been renewed interest in a 2001 Mars Orbiter photo that shows a rectangular feature on the surface of the red planet. It seems the feature is about 250 metres per side. Joe Rogan has declared the photo “f-ing wild,” and even Elon Musk has chimed in, saying that astronauts need to be sent there to investigate.

Figure 1: Detail of Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) E1000462

Mars and archaeology

From the canals of Mars described by Schiaparelli in 1877, to HG Wells’ 1898 Martian invasion of Earth in the War of the Worlds, the red planet has long been an object of xenoarchaeological speculation and the possibility of other nearby civilizations. Scientists have wondered from the start whether there is, or ever was, life on Mars. 

In the 1950s, Chad Oliver, an Anthropology professor, department Chair at the University of Texas, and a classic science fiction author, wrote a (really excellent) story, “Artifact,” about an archaeological excavation on Mars. The main character, not surprisingly an archaeology professor, is shown a rock from Mars and identifies it as an artifact, setting the story in motion. Is this photo equivalent to the artifact in the story?

In the 70s, the Viking landers carried out experiments to detect microbial life in Martian soils, and the question is still unresolved. As a big fan of the original 1994 X-COM computer game, which I still play on occasion, and which eventually brings the player to an alien base in the Cydonia region of Mars, where Viking I had photographed in 1976 what became the famous “face on Mars.” So I am aware of the interest and it isn’t surprising to me that Martian xenoarchaeology is making a comeback in 2025.

A very quick analysis

First, I must say that, as an archaeologist, if someone showed me that picture and told me that it was from Google Earth, I would definitely want to find out more about it. It is a striking feature, no matter how you look at it. I would not immediately conclude that it can’t be archaeological. The question would be whether it actually is archaeological (human made) or a product of other forces (geological, for example). That’s always very difficult to tell from just images, and would eventually need some testing on the ground through survey and excavation.

Let’s go through a similar exercise for this feature. I am not a geologist, and certainly not an exogeologist or planetary scientist, but this is how I approach it as an archaeologist. Can we rule out that feature is the product of geological or other non-intelligent forces? 

Figure 2: The structure, annotated

First, let’s look at just how regular it really is. The squareness of it is what catches the eye and creates the initial interest. The bottom left (SW) corner is the most visually striking part of the feature. 

Superimposing a rectangle (red square on figure 2) on it shows that it isn’t quite squared up. The SW angle is more than ninety degrees. Of course, that isn’t a deal-breaker. Human architecture is rarely perfect, and besides, a perfect square is not always what humans try to do. To top it off, I have no idea whether building squares would make sense for some alien civilization.

The alignment of the square with what look suggestively like a top right (NE) corner is pretty damn good. The bottom right corner (SE) needs a bit more imagination, but I can sort of see it. The top left (NW) corner though, seems lost in the sands of time. Looking at the structure in isolation is not that informative. We have to look at it in context, and ask ourselves whether it is surprising to find it there. 

The square is at the top of the strip of Mars imaged in this particular picture, in the north wall of a large crater about 60 kilometres in diameter. The green arc on figure 2 shows what looks like the edge of part of a small impact crater within the large one. The SE corner of the square feature is within that smaller crater, and possibly post-dates it, but this is where I would need real input from a planetary scientist.

Figure 3: The second interesting area

Further south in the area, toward the middle of the crater, we find another set of interesting features. There is a linear feature, like a low ridge,kind of wavy, running from the top right of the image to the bottom left, past some kind of mesa. Just south of the mesa, the low wavy ridge first crosses a higher ridge almost perpendicularly, and then terminates at another, lower ridge, this time forming an angle (circled in red in figure 3) that looks a lot like one corner of the square feature that’s causing all the excitement.

In fact, there are a number of nearly straight edges in the whole region of the square feature, many of which run pretty much perpendicular to each other. So it looks like there could be some local geological process that favours the production of these kinds of square features. Processes related to crystallization sometimes generate straight edges and right angles at surprisingly large spatial scales.

Preliminary conclusion

If, like at the beginning of Chad Oliver’s Martian archaeology story, a shadowy government type (or maybe a SpaceX employee) walked into my office unannounced one day, showed me a picture of the square feature and asked me whether they should urgently organize an expedition to explore it, this would be my official response:

Based on the limited photographic information presented to me, and looking at it as an archaeologist, I can’t rule out that the feature of interest is the product of normal local geological processes, and in fact, this seems likely. It could be (xeno)archaeological, but at this time, there is no strong reason to think so, and it seems unlikely. If at some point, you have people in the neighbourhood, it is certainly worth exploring it, but I see no need to immediately organize an expedition for the specific purpose of studying it. More extensive photographic study from a planetary science (geological) perspective could shed further light on the question.

In S12 E8 of The Curse of Oak Island presents us with a new glass trade bead recovered from the increasingly interesting Lot 5 structure. This isn’t the first time we see beads come out of the Lot 5 excavations (see here for last year’s find), but every bead tells a story, and this one is definitely worth a look. There may not be much evidence of treasure on the island, but as the years go by, there is certainly a lot of really interesting archaeology emerging.

On some sites in North America, dating from the earliest European contact in the 16th century, right up until the early 20th century, archaeologists find hundreds, and sometimes thousands of glass trade beads. They were used for trade between europeans and indigenous groups, and within indigenous economies. They were valued for their decorative as well as symbolic and ritual purposes. Archaeologists can get a lot of information from beads about past trade and exchange networks.

The team are quick to present the new bead as “Venetian,” implying that it comes from Venice. As always in archaeology though, things are not quite that simple. How do we know a glass trade bead is from Venice? Let’s dive in a bit.

The third bead (is it venetian?)

According to the Kidd and Kidd (2012) archaeological classification, I would say this is a type IVa1, a small circular bead with a red exterior and a dark (green, blue, or blackish) interior. Bead type, or style, unfortunately does not say much about provenience, as many bead types were made in many places.

It is interesting to read Walter and Dussubieux’s (2022) recent work on trying to track the origin of glass trade beads found in 17th century Huron-Wendat archaeological sites in the northern Great Lakes region. There are a few different kinds of data that can tell us where beads might have come from before they were traded to indigenous groups in North America:

1. The recipe for making glass, and especially for colouring it.
2. The technique used for making the beads
3. The trace elements in the raw materials used to make and colour the glass

It turns out the recipes themselves are not that informative about origin. As Francis (2008) tells us, by the 17th century, Venetian glass bead experts had made their way to Bohemia in central Europe, and to Holland, England, and France in northern Europe, bringing their recipes and techniques with them. To complicate things, glass making started in Jamestown, Virginia as early as 1608, some of it involving Italian experts brought in for the purpose, and there seems to have been steady glass production in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam (now Manhattan, NY) through the 17th and into the 18th century. All of these new centres exported beads for trade to the Americas.

Venice was one of the largest and earliest European centres of glass trade bead production, but it wasn’t the only one. Human economies and societies have always been complex and interconnected, making the work of archaeologists that much more difficult when it comes to tracing the geographical origins of objects and ideas.

Bead L from Walder and Dussubieux Figure 3, from the Ellery site, mid-17th century, similar type to the third bead from CoOI

The raw materials themselves, such as the silica (mainly from sand) which forms the main ingredient of glass, and the colouring ingredients such as copper, iron, or cobalt, can tell us a bit more, since they can vary in trace element composition depending on where they were obtained. This can give indications of whether beads were made with raw materials from the Mediterranean or from the North Sea coast of Holland, for example. 

Unfortunately, the trace elements used by Walter and Dussubieux, such as Hafnium (Hf) and Zirconium (Zr) are difficult to detect and they don’t show up in the graphs we are shown in the episode. It is unlikely that the CoOI team has on-island equipment that can detect them in trace concentrations. Keep in mind of course that raw materials can be exchanged as well as experts, although the assumption is that they are usually not transported very far, especially when a local source is available.

Bottom line

The beads from Lot 5 are venetian in style and probably in technique, and they could definitely have come from Venice, but given the information available by just watching the show, they could equally be from Holland, northern France, or England. Although it is much less likely, they could even be from New York.

Whoever was living on Lot 5 was engaged in the bead trade at least in some ways. In my experience, a very active bead trading site, or one where beading was done, yields dozens or hundreds, even thousands of beads in a relatively small volume of soil, so the trading on Lot 5 was probably minor, unless there is another nearby undiscovered structure where all the beads are. When you find one, you start looking for more, and you soon end up with very many indeed, if they are there to find.

References

Francis P Jr 2008. The Venetian Bead Story, Beads 20:62-80

Kidd KE and MA Kidd 2012. A Classification System for Glass Beads for the Use of

Field Archaeologists, Beads 24:39-61.

Walder H and L Dussubieux 2022. The Elemental Analysis of Glass Beads: Technology, Chronology and Exchange. Leuven University Press. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/book.103372.

Graham Hancock was again a guest on the Joe Rogan Experience on October 17th, presumably in support of the release of season two (The Americas) of his Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse on October 16th.

The opening move

Hancock and Rogan begin by complaining that they were duped by archaeologist Flint Dibble (who was just given a well-deserved Ockham Award) on the widely viewed and commented debate episode about Hancock’s claims, in which Hancock ended up conceding that “where archaeologists have looked,” there is no evidence in support of his advanced ice age civilization.

Hancock and Rogan seize on what amounts to some clerical errors on Dibble’s part in the context of an information-packed four hour presentation. For example, when debating whether there is evidence of Hancock’s ice age global sea-faring civilization, Dibble misreads the estimated number of shipwrecks available to archaeologists, for the number of actually mapped wrecks, on which the estimate is based. It isn’t rare that at the end of a lecture, I will have some clarifications and small corrections for students. Like Dibble, I’m only human.

Correcting the number has no bearing on the argument or the conclusion, but Rogan and Hancock use the minor mix-up as an excuse to accuse Dibble and the entire archaeology community of engaging in “dirty tricks” to suppress the truth about the past, and of being “abusively arrogant experts” who seek to control the narrative. 

Ironically, Hancock later says that while he may have made honest mistakes in presenting information in the past, he has never willfully lied about his claims. Rogan accepts this. Hancock says that we all make mistakes, “even the most godlike archaeologist makes mistakes”, he says. At the very least, the same courtesy should be extended to Dibble, unless he’s even more godlike than the most godlike archaeologist, which even he will grant is unlikely. So much for that.

Hancock says he is not interested in evidence

Hancock proceeds to reiterate, at Rogan’s prompting, that there is indeed no archaeological evidence of his proposed ice age civilization, at least where archaeologists have looked. But he specifies that he is not demanding that people believe him (good), and that he is “just injecting the idea [of an advanced ice age civilization] into the discussion.” 

Well, I can confirm that the idea is in the discussion already, and has been for a long time. I am discussing it right now, and I have discussed it often in the past, as have many other archaeologists. I get the feeling I will be discussing it again at some point in the future.

Hancock is at least clear in stating that he is actually not interested in evidence, and that he is not even interested in testing his hypotheses. “I didn’t come here to prove my claim,” he says, “I came here to talk about why I am interested in it.” Ok, that’s good, because I am interested in it as well, even though I have been unable to find evidence to support it so far, no matter how hard I have looked.

Hancock is seemingly so uninterested in evidence that at one point, when he is talking about some of his old work on the possibility that the Ark of the Covenant is in Ethiopia, and he is describing how it might be radioactive, Rogan asks him “did you bring a geiger counter?” Hancock’s only reply is “it’s a thought.” And then he moves on. 

Unlike Hancock, however, whose job it is to talk about why he is interested in claims, my job as an academic archaeologist and as a scientist, is to evaluate the claims, and generally to formulate and test hypotheses about the past. In the case of the Ark, bringing a geiger counter would pretty much be my first thought. It’s a good hypothesis testing tool.

I love chatting about possibilities as much as the next sentient being, but when I’m at work, I try to evaluate those possibilities as rigorously and as fully as I can. That involves looking for actual evidence, and it involves communicating my results, even when they are not that popular.

The archaeological imagination

Hancock and Rogan go on to argue that because of our alleged unwillingness to even entertain possibilities, professional archaeologists perceive imagination as “a deadly threat.” 

Au contraire, mon frère! Without some fairly well developed sense of imagination, there is no archaeology at all, period. The material we find in the archaeological record is endlessly puzzling. It comes to us from a world we’ve never experienced. It was made by people we’ve never met, and it’s patterns are the result of actions we’ll never witness.

We can imagine any number of possibilities to explain the archaeological record, and we have to. We have no choice. Then, however, once we’ve imagined all kinds of cool possibilities, we have to get down to the task of testing the hypotheses we generate based on those possibilities. It’s important for us not to overreach our data in our conclusions. We have to clearly demarcate our speculations, in which we all engage, and which we all find fascinating, from our actual conclusions.

The campfire in the field, or the beer with colleagues at a conference are filled with speculation, sometimes pretty wild. That’s often where we exercise our imagination. We over-reach, we joke around, we build on crazy ideas. Then we go to the lab, and we start testing.

There’s an interesting and relevant segment of the podcast in which Rogan talks about the disconnection of the average modern urban dweller from the wider universe, because we don’t see the night sky. And because we don’t see the night sky, we don’t ask ourselves certain questions that were constantly on the minds of our ancestors, and we don’t make some observations and some connections that would have been obvious to them.

I completely agree. Many archaeologists are in fact extremely aware of this, because we do fieldwork in places far away from modern industrial cities. We spend weeks at a time in the forest, or out in the desert, sometimes in places where people used to live, but where it doesn’t make much sense to live now. We see the sky, and we watch the Milky Way drift across our view. Sometimes, we get the feeling that the sky sees us, too. 

We feel the solitude of the deep forest. We sense the moose and the wolf watching us, even though we rarely see them. After a couple of weeks, we might start wondering if the birds in the trees are talking about us while we survey and excavate. We wonder what lies beneath the surface of these enormous, cold lakes on whose shores we camp, and whose fish feed us daily. We wonder how big the sturgeon really get, and sometimes we think we’ve caught a glimpse of a monster.

It fires up our imaginations. It feeds our hypothesis generating machine. Just ask someone like my colleague Knut Helskog, one of the archaeologists who for decades has studied the Alta rock carvings in northern Norway, some of which are older than the pyramids of Egypt.

Some of the Alta rock carvings in Northern Norway, side-illuminated at night. I don’t remember whether I took this one, or my wife did.

I don’t want to sound too much like Hancock, but my wife and I had the extraordinary privilege of visiting the carving fields with Helskog himself. We visited them once by day, which was incredible enough, but then he showed them at night, illuminated from different angles, and by flickering light, and, as if the ancient gods were smiling on us that day, under the northern lights as well.

Knut will tell you for hours about how light and environmental conditions affect his proposed interpretations of the carvings, and his thoughts about the people who made them, about their spiritual lives, and yes, even about their imaginations. He will tell you what his thoughts are, what his speculations are, and then he will tell you what we can know from the actual material evidence. Because that’s how archaeology works.

Archaeoastronomy is a real thing

Which brings us to the question of archaeoastronomy. Hancock repeats his old canard that archaeologists outright reject archaeoastronomy. Last time I checked, archaeoastronomy is an actual subfield of our discipline, complete with a journal and everything. Not the most obvious sign of rejection.

There are tons of astronomical interpretations in archaeology, simply because ancient people were very aware of what was happening in the sky, and it mattered to them for reasons both practical and philosophical. The difficulty is that beyond some pretty obvious solar and lunar alignments, it is very difficult to test hypotheses about potential ancient astronomically inspired patterns in the archaeological record. 

That doesn’t mean they don’t exist. It stands to reason that they do. Establishing the existence of specific ones with some degree of confidence, however, is a very different matter, which is where science differs from Hancock’s approach.

There are many objects in the night sky with which any given set of archaeological remains could be aligned, and thanks to precession, a broad range of dates at which they could be aligned. Deciding whether any given observed alignment is intentional is statistically difficult to say the least. There are a great many dots up there to align with, and a great many objects on the surface of the earth with which to align them. The result is that there are a many possibilities in archaeoastronomy, and very few certainties.

So when boring old archaeologists say they don’t know whether Poverty Point is astronomically aligned, for example, or whether the pyramids at Giza map onto Orion’s belt, it doesn’t mean they reject archaeoastronomy, or suffer from a terminal lack of imagination. It simply means that most hypotheses about these alignments are essentially impossible to test (for the moment, at least).

Bigfoot? Did someone say Bigfoot?

There is one more segment of the podcast I would like to discuss, because it proves exactly the opposite of the point Hancock and Rogan are trying to make about academics and our alleged fear of imagination. Toward the end of the podcast, Rogan goes on a somewhat surprising tangent about hominin cousins and ancestors that could still be alive today (e.g. Bigfoot).

He specifically mentions a “new study” that suggests Homo floresiensis, the so-called ancient “hobbits”, could still be living in some of the forests of Southeast Asia. The book he is talking about is in fact Between Ape and Human: an anthropologist on the trail of a hidden hominoid, by none other than my colleague Greg Forth, Emeritus Professor in the Anthropology department which I Chair, right here at the University of Alberta. Hence my familiarity with the book and its argument.

The very existence of this book completely undermines Hancock’s claim that anthropologists, archaeologists, and academics in general are uninterested in possibility, that we hate imagination, that we ignore cool ideas, and that we actively try to suppress them because they are a threat to our temporal power.

Greg’s observations are extremely interesting, if only from an ethnographic perspective. He shows pretty clearly that the people he works with firmly believe that there is something out there, and that some even believe they have evidence of its existence. I personally don’t think he makes a convincing case in that particular book that the creature is physically real, at least not in the present, but guess what, I am completely open to the possibility (shock! Horror!).

If you go to the Emeritus Professor page on our department’s website, you will see that Greg lists as part of his research interests folk zoology, and oral narrative and rumor. Those are really interesting, absolutely legitimate areas of anthropological research, and they may lead someone with a fairly normal level of human imagination to wonder whether some of those oral traditions and rumors might reflect some biological truth. It may even lead one to write a book about it. None of this is surprising.

In any case, as I have myself argued about Sasquatch, the creature is real in many ways, and it influences people and society in the present. It says something about our cultural evolution. Whether it is biologically and physically real in the present is a different matter, and one that remains open (gasp!), even though I consider it very unlikely (but just to reinforce the point, not impossible. Unimpossible, I guess).

This segment of bookshelf in my office at the university holds some of the ideas Hancock says people like me refuse to even consider. There’s a lot more where these came from. My vintage 1970s UFO mags didn’t fit in the picture, sadly.

The best archaeology (and the best science in general) starts with imagination and with possibility. But it doesn’t stop there. Imagination and possibility are the starting point, and they lead to something even more amazing, which is the formulation and the testing of hypotheses in order to increase our understanding of how the world works, and in the case of archaeology, of where we came from, how we got here, and where we might be headed.

Hancock ends by saying how lucky he is that, thanks to his readers, he’s had a fun life, traveling the world, investigating mysteries. I can say much the same, with the addition that I have spent a lot of time evaluating evidence of claims about the world and about those mysteries, which is even more fun, and I would say, more productive.

Like Hancock, I am interested in talking about why I am interested in those claims. But in addition, I also want to report the results of my evidence-based evaluation of those claims. That’s what I get paid for. I invite you on that adventure. It’s an amazing ride. After all, like Billy Mack in the Steve Miller song, I make my livin’ off of the people’s taxes. I don’t do this just for me, I do it for you, as well.

Tony Trupp recently asked this question on twitter. It’s not a new question, but given the impending release of Graham Hancock’s Ancient Apocalypse: The Americas, it’s a good time to give it some thought.

I have long argued that archaeologists must be an active and vocal presence in the public conversation about archaeology, and about the past in general. When the vast majority of people encounter claims about the past that they find surprising or even just interesting, they go in search of good answers.

The stats from this very blog bear that out. Of about 78000 views so far this year, more than 46000 were generated by search engines. Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit are very distant runners-up, with fewer than 4000 each. That means most people who find my blog posts about archaeology are not coming to them from direct links posted by interested parties (i.e. traditional knowledge dissemination), but rather simply by googling answers to questions they have about the past and about archaeology.

My most viewed posts by very far tend to be about pseudoarchaeology. The most viewed post this year, with almost 27000 views, is about the debate between Flint Dibble and Graham Hancock on the Joe Rogan Experience (by contrast, my “real” archaeology posts rarely break a couple of thousand views, usually not even a thousand).

This means people are looking for answers, and as archaeologists, we have to be there for them. When someone is searching for information on Atlantis, I want them to be at least as likely to find Jason Colavito’s awesome blog, for example, as they are to find Graham Hancock’s website.

But beyond being there for people when they look for answers, and beyond making ourselves and our critiques of pseudoarchaeology visible, the question arises about the extent to which we should directly engage with the pseudoarchaeologists themselves, and in what venues and formats.

Pseudoarchaeologists make claims which are typically not supported by evidence, or even for which there is good contradictory evidence. Often there is good evidence and strong support for another claim, which happens to be the archaeological consensus (e.g. the pyramids of Egypt were designed and built fully by actual humans who lived in Egypt at the time, for which we actually have good archaeological and historical evidence). 

The general public is interested in claims about the past, wherever those claims originate. They don’t care if the claim is in an academic journal or in youtube video from some channel they’ve never heard of. Neither should they care. The claim itself is the unit of analysis here. 

The public needs help evaluating the claims in the light of evidence. That’s what we do.

The pseudoarchaeologists themselves make and disseminate their claims for a range of reasons. Some of them, undoubtedly, are true believers who make their claims in good faith. Some are certainly motivated by profit. It has become self-evident that a sensational claim about the past that is poorly backed up by evidence, or not at all, is easier to sell to Netflix or to the History Channel than a less sensational, well-researched conclusion. Some pseudoarchaeologists exploit some false claims about the past to push ideological agendas. Some are a mix of all of the above to various degrees.

Whatever their motives, there is good reason to think we will not convince the pseudoarchaeologists themselves to abandon their pursuit. It is the audience that we share with them to whom we have to speak, and for whom we have to be available.

Given the above, it does us little good to use venues controlled by pseudoarchaeologists (or by those who profit from their work) to reach the public. We have to develop our own. 

The magic of editing is too powerful a force for us to ignore, and there is no chance that an academic archaeologist will appear on Ancient Alien and be given full editorial control of the episode, or even of the segment on which they speak (If the producers want to prove me wrong, please contact me). We should talk about Ancient Aliens, but not on Ancient Aliens, so to speak.

Sometimes, there is an opportunity to speak alongside purveyors of pseudoarchaeology, and to address with them the audience we share. Flint Dibble took such an opportunity when he appeared with Graham Hancock on the Joe Rogan Experience. 

It was a live podcast, there was no editing, and Rogan did a very decent job of moderating. It was a reasonable strategy and it was highly successful. It reached a massive audience and provided them with solid information and modeled critical thinking. That was more akin to a classroom experience than to an appearance on Ancient Aliens. Most of the time, however, we just want to reach and engage with the audience, with as few filters as possible. 

So work on your podcasts, your blogs, your youtube and tik tok videos. Ride your bike to the nearest public square and set up an easel with informative posters on it. Take that invitation to go chat with a group of kindergartners about the human fossil record. Write and perform a song about primary sources on Quetzalcoatl. Whatever you like to do. 

There is room for a diversity of strategies for helping the public evaluate claims about the past.  All of it makes a contribution, no matter how local it might feel in the moment. After all, you don’t know whether one of those kindergartners won’t be an archaeology prof some day, or whether one of the puzzled onlookers on the subway, as you sing your Quetzalcoatl polka, accompanied by your friend on accordion (evidently), is in fact the editor of a major newspaper in your country.

Address specific claims you hear on Ancient Apocalypse or the Curse of Oak Island. Help the audience acquire and develop the tools they need to be their own critics and to evaluate the claims being sold to them on television and on the internet.

Let the pseudoarchaeologists speak in their own venues. We can’t stop them, and neither would I want to. The answer to bad information is good information. The answer to unsupported claims is evidence and critical thinking. Be there for people when they look for answers. Because they are looking. That’s what the evidence tells us.

In the second season of Ancient Apocalypse, Graham Hancock focuses his search for a lost ancient civilization on the Americas. The presentation is, if anything, even slicker than in the first season. The cinematography looks amazing, the  music is inspiring, the editing is masterful. I am sure it will be a stunningly beautiful travelog.

Right from the first few seconds of the trailer though, Hancock gets into some conceptual trouble. First, it seems that he has dropped the “advanced” and the “ice age” qualifiers from the civilization whose traces he seeks. After famously stating on the Joe Rogan Experience, in his conversation with Flint Dibble, that where archaeologists have looked so far, they have not found evidence of an advanced ice age civilization, he now considers it merely “lost.” In any case, we’re not nearer than in the first season to knowing what he means by civilization.

If ever Hancock clearly defines what he means by “lost civilization”, we can figure out first whether we’ve already found it. If he means a group of people who live together over a period of time and create social institutions, and elaborate a material culture, and evolve regular settlement patterns, we’ve certainly found a great many of them that were lost (at least to Western scholars), some of them in the Americas, some of them very old, and even recently, one that is pretty solidly ice age.

We’re constantly finding more and getting to understand them better. Far from suppressing those new discoveries, as Hancock and others often accuse us of doing, we disseminate them as far and wide as we can, because that’s explicitly part of our job description (I mean that very literally), and which is why he has material to work on for his new books and Netflix series. 

When Keanu Reeves, the personification of my generation, by the way, says in the trailer that he feels “the timeline is… off,” of course I agree with him.  The timeline is off because we keep finding pieces of it and working to integrate them, and to revise and refine said timeline as needed. 

The timeline is always being adjusted, through the work of archaeologists. To quote a now famous Hancockism, “stuff just keeps getting older.” Yes, and it’s archaeologists that you have to thank for that. Stuff keeps getting older because we keep looking for it, and because we keep analyzing it, in the plain light of day, not in somber academic conclaves where we decide what should and shouldn’t be revealed to the huddled masses, presumably living in fear of the next apocalypse.

Hancock complains that “archaeologists claim that if there was such a thing as a lost civilization, they would have found it already.” I certainly don’t claim that. That’s actually the opposite of how archaeological reasoning works.

If by “lost civilization” he means as he sometimes hints, a globe-spanning society that had detailed knowledge of astronomical phenomena such as precession (but apparently not much in the way of material technology), and whose survivors could eventually have taught monument building to post-glacial hunter-gatherers, and the remains of which were wiped out by an asteroid (whose traces we have not found either), well, no we haven’t found it. So far. In fact, we’ve found evidence that makes it difficult to imagine it ever existed, but that’s very different from saying we would have found it if it ever existed.

In science, if you make a claim like “there was an advanced ice age civilization that is now lost,” it is up to you to present evidence in support of the claim. It is not up to everyone else to present evidence that your claim is wrong. But you still shouldn’t ignore the evidence that already exists and that makes your claim highly unlikely to be true, if not strictly speaking impossible.

In the absence of evidence for such a lost civilization, the most we can say is that we have no evidence that it ever existed. When evidence presented in support is easily shown to actually not be evidence of what you’re claiming, or to have a much better, much simpler explanation that is more consistent with what we already know about the past, don’t blame the archaeologists. We’re just following the evidence where it takes us.

And if the evidence ever takes me to a lost, advanced, ice age civilization, whether that evidence comes from Graham Hancock or anyone else, you can be certain that I will be the first one to want to see it on the cover of a journal. And since I am on the editorial board of a journal (convenient!), I can make it happen. Call me. If you have the evidence.

I look forward to watching the new season, and I look forward to commenting on it, plainly and openly.