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What is pseudoscience?
Image by mot the hoople via Flickr
At its most basic, pseudoscience is fake science. The prefix pseudo- meaning “fake”- followed by the word science. But it’s more than that. Or, I should say, it’s not just that. Pseudoscience involves more than faking science, it often involves the perpetuation of concepts and ideas that are not [...]
Sacrifice and the Anthropology of Religion
Image via Wikipedia
Mention the word “sacrifice” in a religious context and, for many people, thoughts of young virgins tossed in volcanoes by a Polynesian King or lying on altars below the obscenely sharp obsidian blade of an Aztec ruler. Or perhaps they’re reminded of the story of blind faith by Abraham who was prepared to [...]
Anthropology of Religion
Image via Wikipedia
I don’t often post on religious topics on this blog. At least not topics related to modern religion like Christianity. I’m more interested in ancient religion and expression of religion and belief in the material record of antiquity than modern squabbles about “belief in God,” etc.
But I took the time to listen to [...]
Artificial Cranial Modification: Head Shaping
Image via Wikipedia
In addition to cranial surgery, another artificial modification of the human skull present in the archaeological record, which is perhaps better known, is skull shaping. Like trephination, this practice of modifying the shape of the human skull is present on every inhabited continent and at various periods in human history and prehistory[1]. It [...]
Artificial Cranial Modification: Trephination
Image by Luciana Christante via Flickr
The practice of artificially modifying the human skull has been a part of human culture as far back as 45,000 years BP[1], and it has been shown to occur on every inhabited continent . Two primary forms of artificially modifying the human skull include trephination, the deliberate and surgical creation [...]
How to make casts of bone and stone
In the United States, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 mandates special care and treatment of Native American cultural remains, particularly human remains. The single best discussion on the internet that includes the most sources of clickable information that I’ve found on NAGPRA is on Larry J. Zimmerman’s site[1]. I [...]
The ‘Ancient Underwater Ruins’ of Yonaguni, Japan
One of the pseudo-archaeological claims that I see from time to time on the intertubes is the speculation that there are underwater ruins of an ancient civilization off the coast of Yonagumi.
This by itself isn’t such a fantastic claim. There are countless settlements and remnants of civilizations as old as the neolithic and before that [...]
The First Americans Were Immigrants of Two Populations
The most recent online issue of Current Biology has an article describing the research which reveals evidence that the first Americans immigrated via two distinct populations at around the same time. One population is comprised of haplogroup D4h3, which took the Pacific coastal route; the second is made up of haplogroup X2a and they migrated [...]
Alien Skulls? Not even close!
If you’ve ever spent any time browsing a UFO forum or website, you’ll eventually run into a link or claim that the ancient Mesoamericans and Incaor worshiped aliens as gods. The “proof” is usually a skull much like the one you see depicted here. And it does look alien! Indeed, this must have completely [...]
The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Reviewing an Ethnography
I recently had the pleasure of reading Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, an ethnography done in an experimental style just at the end of World War II in 1946. Benedict studied anthropology under Franz Boas and was the friend (and lover, I believe) of Margaret Mead. There’s plenty I could go one to [...]
