2010: The Year in Pseudoarchaeology

Posted on December 28, 2010 by Carl Feagans

Compared to previous years, 2010 wasn’t really a productive one for the pseudoarchaeologists. Very little has been said about the Bosnian Pyramid, and rightfully so since it wasn’t a pyramid. The James Ossuary went back to the toilet it came from. The Jesus tomb was a bust, but made Simcha Jacobovici some money. And so on.

Still, there were a few pseudoarchaeological happenings in 2010 and here’s a summary:

Shroud of Turin
At the beginning of the year, in January, a Jewish death shroud was found in the Old City of Jerusalem that dates to around the time of Jesus. The significance is two-fold: it’s the first shroud found in Jerusalem and the textile is simple two-way weave. The find itself isn’t pseudoarchaeological, but it does have some ramifications on a long-held pseudoarchaeological find: the Shroud of Turin. The Turin shroud has been known for some time to be a 14th century hoax, with its ocher and vermillian (paint) facial image that is inconsistent with a cloth being wrapped around a skull. The real shroud, more recently discovered is nothing like the one purported to be that of Jesus. The Turin shroud has a complex weave, rather than the simpler, two-way weave. A complex weave is consistent with the 14th century, but evidence now shows the first century CE to have much simpler textiles.

Crucifixion Nail
In March, certain individuals claimed to have found a crucifixion nail of Jesus Christ. My skepticism surrounded the way in which the nail might be dated: it had no context and had been handled a lot. Sure enough, a few days later Bryn Walters of the Association for Roman Archaeology echoed my skeptical point of view in a bit more detail.

Noah’s Ark! Again!
A Chinese Christian cult discovered the lost boat of Noah. Yeah, not a year goes by that someone doesn’t discover Noah’s Ark. It’s a myth people! A story! Based on earlier flood tales like the brief story of Utnapishtim in Gilgamesh. Some of the Noachian myth are line-for-line copy. Gilgamesh was the earlier of the two, and didn’t purport to be fact. The Noachian tale has everything you would expect from a story borrowed from another culture: parts that are word-for-word the same, embellishments and hyperbole, and no basis in reality whatsoever. It’s amazing how people are so willing to spend money on “expeditions” that purport to bring back “proof” that no one ever gets to see. Amazing.

The Saint
Saint John the Baptist, a character in Christian mythology that may or may not have actually existed had his 15 minutes of pseudoarchaeological fame in August when officials in Bulgaria claimed to have discovered some of his remains in a small reliquary. Found under the basilica of an ancient monastary, this little alabaster box contained a few cranial, dental, and hand bones. Clearly motivated by religious and nationalist agendas, some Bulgarian officials rushed to the “holy relic” conclusion without any evidence. Since John the Baptist is alleged to have had his head separated from his body, the cranial section becoming a legendary trophy, one is left to wonder what contet might explain cranial and post-cranial bone if the claim were true.

Indiana Jones?
The Hollywood rumor mill buzzed about an Indiana Jones sequel. The last movie ended with space-aliens. How do you top that? Go to the Bermuda Triangle, apparently. If the make it, I’ll suspend disbelief for a couple of hours to enjoy the show… I doubt it will ever top The Last Crusade, however.

Pseudoarchaeological Vomit
Glenn Beck opened his mouth and spewed forth what can only be expected: nonsense. But for a change, he pretended to know something about archaeology! According to Beck, the Newark mounds in Ohio are measured differently in his reality than in everyone else’s. And Victorian era hoaxes are evidence that a lost tribe of Israel built the mounds and founded, apparently, the Mormon Church.

I did, however, just write a short rejoinder of sorts, in which I respond to a commenter who objected to my labeling the artifacts Beck discussed as “frauds” and “hoaxes.” I maintain their hoaxes, but it is possible they’re genuine artifacts.

“Biblical” Archaeology
Most of the pseudoarchaeology of 2010 centered around religious claims. Which is one of the reasons why I wrote, Why Biblical Archaeology So Very Often Equals Pseudo-archaeology. So-called theologians seek to “prove” through science their particular notions of god and why their particular scriptures are that god’s word. But, more often than not, these theologians (a questionable term in itself) resort to outright deception or poor science to support conclusions they already have. In the article linked above, I used Bryant Wood as an example where he uses shoddy science and deceptive data to arrive at dates more to his liking for Jericho.

I suspect the “biblical” archaeologists and their pseudoarchaeological methods were always there but found a shadow in the grand claims of the now much quieter significance-junkies and mystery-mongers like those who jumped on the Bosnian “pyramid” band wagon. Perhaps Michael Cremo, Hancock, and Osmanagic will return to regal us with new extraordinary claims that haven’t even the most ordinary of evidence to support them, putting all this religious pseudoscience back in its closet.

Yonaguni – It’s Just Rocks, Guys.
Still, even though I wrote the post in 2009, the Ruins of Yonaguni remain a hot topic in 2010, with a very active comment thread. It seems that there are those who will not be convinced that the geologic formations under the surface of the Yonaguni coast -that small island of Southern Japan- aren’t made by aliens, high-tech ancients, or [insert wild claim]. The rock formations were last above sea level prior to 10,000 years ago, so it’s possible they were walked on and even admired by humans in the area. But the geology under the sea exactly matches that above the surface, yet mystery-mongers and significance-junkies still insist it can’t happen in nature, this is an undersea city, etc. Never mind that were the megalithic structures formed by man an not nature, the caloric requirement would be so great that the earliest Joman people (14,000 – 5,000 BCE) would have needed an agricultural infrastructure that went way beyond the rudimentary, semi-sedentary Neolithic lifeway that presents itself in the archaeological record.

That’s all I’ve got this year. I’m looking forward to 2011. I can only imagine what pseudoarchaeological finds await us! But we should start a pool on the first claim of “Noah’s Ark Found” for 2011. I’m saying April 14th, 2011.

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The Newark Decalogue and Keystone Revisted

Posted on December 28, 2010 by Carl Feagans

Jim Goodman comments on my post, The Pseudoarchaeology of Glenn Beck, to point out the waste of his tax dollars on my education. Perhaps. But I doubt any of his tax money went to my tuition.

Still, his primary criticism surrounds a portion of that post which deals with some 19th century hoaxes used to promote a political agenda of the day, which is to say that there were many folks who were opposed to attributing the construction of the various mounds of the northeastern United States to the ancestors of Native Americans who lived there upon the arrival of European settlers. The mounds, they claimed, must have been built by ancient Europeans, therefore it was right to displace the Indians (i.e. Trail of Tears).

My chief disagreement was with Beck’s implication that there was somehow evidence that the “lost tribes of Israel” made their way to the Americas because of these artifacts. The “lost tribes” notion is one that Beck’s adopted religion of Mormonism believes.

The artifacts in question are primarily known as the “Decalogue” and “Key stone,” both inscribed with Hebrew script. The former includes a bas-relief of Moses (it reads in Hebrew square script, mosheh above the figure’s head) and an abbreviated version of the Ten Commandments from the Torah -the Decalogue- on the sides and back.

Beck’s implication in the video linked in the previous article was that these are artifacts suppressed by “mainstream archaeologists” and evidence of a much earlier presence of Israelites in America. Ironically, one of the purposes for the hoax in the 19th century was, in part, to justify our actions in stealing land from the Native inhabitants. Another part of it was that there existed a ethnocentric bias against Natives in that settlers of European descent couldn’t accept that they were capable of the technology or had the know-how to build the intricate mounds that exist in places like Newark, Ohio. Beck exhibits this same ethnocentric attitude even today in his show, but perhaps for somewhat different reasons.

The commenter, Jim Goodman, was, however, right to criticize my conclusions that the stones were forgeries. They’re hoaxes, but further investigation on my part reveals that they’re very likely the real thing.


Not having an expertise in ancient phonetic scripts, I had to rely on whatever information I could obtain from my university library or the internet on these stones. Most of the sources I was able to locate were either of the Glenn-Beck-America-is-the-Land-of-the-Lost-Tribes-of-Israel variety or of the aliens-are-among-us-variety. I remembered a Skeptical Inquirer article from years ago on the subject, but that issue has been long absent from my personal library. The author of that article eventually commented on my Beck-post, confirming what I remembered and linking to an article at Ohio Archaeology that sums it up.

Recently, however, a friend sent me a link to an article by Rochelle Altman, who is an expert on ancient phonetic scripts, in which she goes into great detail about the “…Newark Ritual Artifacts.”

Her explanations are convincing as well as her arguments, and I’m inclined to accept her conclusions that the artifacts themselves are genuine, Late-Medieval ritual objects. She bases this on the “stylistic features on the bas-relief sculpture [...] and the Late Medieval Hebrew base-script used for the consolidated grid font that appears in the inscriptions.” She goes on to say, “[t]he artifacts are authentic, if not what they were thought to be in the 19th century, and, unfortunately, even today.”

The likely source of the objects is a European settler, from whom these may have been stolen and subsequently deposited at the sites where they were located in the early 19th century. The Decalogue and Keystone may not be forgeries, as I stated in an earlier post, but they are certainly hoaxes when presented as artifactual evidence of an “ancient America” with ties to the “lost tribes of Israel” and the other mumbo-jumbo Glenn Beck was alluding to in his program.

I highly recommend Rochelle Altman’s article, “‘First, … recognize that it’s a penny’: Report on the ‘Newark’ Ritual Artifacts,” found at The Bible and Interpretation. I find that I have to thank Altman and my friend for setting me straight on this and I wish I would have found this article earlier. I find I must also offer some thanks to commenter Jim Goodman, though I was already thinking of writing a short article either by itself or a part of my annual round of of pseudoarchaeology (which will be published here in a day or so). I doubt, however, that I’ve fully satisfied Mr. Goodman: the Newark artifacts might not be fakes, but they are frauds in the manner by which they are being promoted.

The sad truth, pointed out by Altman, is that the true nature of these artifacts is being sidelined by nutters and skeptics alike (though she certainly didn’t say “nutters”).

EDIT (12/28/10): after a personal correspondence with Brad Lepper, I’m, again, back to wondering about the veracity of the artifacts. It is very suspect that a person who had a preconceived notion of how the mounds were built (David Wyrick thought the mound-builders were not the Natives that lived in the region and was digging to prove it) should find just the sort of artifact that could be used to show the site was not Hopewell.

It’s also convenient that the person who was able to translate it happened to be on-hand.

So, were these artifacts entirely fraudulent, created in the 19th century and planted as a means to confirm a conclusion about Native Americans that was popular among many? Or were these genuine artifacts, salted in the places Wyrick was to dig. It would be simpler to salt the site with genuine artifacts if they were available -not inconceivable given the number of European immigrants out nation had up to then. But, it’s also not inconceivable that the artifacts could have been created of locally quarried limestone, then salted at the site.

What Lepper and Altman agree on, however, is that this is not evidence of any “Lost Tribes of Israel” in the Americas.

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Lunar Eclipse on the Winter Solstice – 2010

Posted on December 21, 2010 by Carl Feagans

Here’s my very ad hoc image of the lunar eclipse from Dallas-Fort Worth, TX.

The Lunar Eclipse at around 1:15 am CST on 12/21/10. Shot with a Sony Cybershot 6.0 megapixels through one lens of an 8×12 Bushnell binoculars.

Okay… one last quick look then I’m off to bed!

Happy Solstice!

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Why is the Word ‘Science’ Not Good Enough for the AAA?

Posted on December 14, 2010 by Carl Feagans

I recently caught a New York Times article about this and thought I’d share just briefly.

The American Anthropological Association recently revised it’s Long Range Plan, removing all mention of the word “science” and replacing it with softer, feel-good terminology. Where the purpose in the Long Range Plan used to read, “to advance anthropology as the science that studies humankind in all its aspects,” it now reads, “to advance public understanding of humankind in all its aspects.”

Huh? How is this better?

The word “science” was previously mentioned in the Long Range Plan of the AAA in three places. Now it is non-existent.

And there’s been some backlash. Boy howdy. Two blog articles that the AAA actually links to are Anthropology Without Science and No Science, Please. We’re Anthropologists. I’ve put a few more from just from Zemanta at the bottom.

So the AAA responded, but, to me, it’s every bit as wishy-washy as the decision they’re being criticized for.

In their response, the AAA board says, “[a]nthropology is a holistic and expansive discipline that covers the full breadth of human history and culture.  As such, it draws on the theories and methods of both the humanities and sciences.”

If by “holistic” they mean it makes use of all the natural sciences to examine and define human culture and history, then that’s fine. Why not simply say so? By why must it rely on or even draw upon the humanities? Just about any definition of “the humanities” you find expressly excludes “the sciences.” This is utter bollocks. The suggestion is that its okay to draw upon religious explanations and speculative post-modern critique to examine human culture past or present. If anything should be excluded and excised from the long-range plans of the AAA it should be this sort of non-scientific codswallop.

They go on to say, “[c]hanges to the AAA’s Long Range Plan have been taken out of context and blown out of proportion in recent media coverage.  In approving the changes, it was never the Board’s intention to signal a break with the scientific foundations of anthropology…” and they go on to cite their What is Anthropology? document as evidence of this.

But if it was “never the Board’s intention to signal a break with” science, why not simply just put back the word science in the Long Range Plan? A word that has far more utility and express intent than the probably post-modernist appeasement of weasel-wording they settled upon.

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Google for the Anthropology Student (Part II)

Posted on December 13, 2010 by Carl Feagans
Google Desktop running on Red Hat Linux.
Image via Wikipedia

Over a year ago, I wrote part one of this two-part (so far) series! I truly intended to write part II long before now, and I actually started it when Google first announced the ill-fated Google Wave. I was trying it out and working with a colleague to test the capabilities and usefulness of it for the student (and even professor) of anthropology when Google pulled the plug on it.

In part I, you’ll remember (if not, click the link, silly!) I talked about some of Google’s key apps: Gmail, Google Docs, Google Scholar, and Google Books. My most used is, without a doubt, Gmail. But my favorite is Google Books. I’m still amazed at the sheer utility of this part of Google. If you think I’m kidding, read the three paragraphs I wrote in Google for the Anthropology Student (Part I?) and then check out my Google Books Library. Browse a couple of the titles there. Some of these I actually own, but I turn to Google Books first to search their pages. Then I crack open the actual text and read from there. Sometimes I just read online.

Here are some other ways Google can enrich and streamline your academic experiences from the perspective of a graduate student of anthropology who is focusing on archaeology.

Google Desktop

About a year or so ago, I downloaded and installed Google Desktop on my main computer, which is a Linux box currently running Ubuntu 11.04. What’s cool about Google Desktop is that it indexes all my files. And I have a lot. If you’re like me, you’re a pack-rat for journal articles and PDF files gathered while researching papers and the like. I have them largely sorted in a subject oriented directory tree, but it can still be a challenge to search a thousand articles and ebooks in PDF for just the right keyword, author, or topic. That’s where Google Desktop comes in.

I tap both CTRL keys on my keyboard at the same time and up pops a little search bar. From there, I type in my search terms -inside quotes if I really want to be specific- and watch the top 6 or so results float to the surface and display in a drop-down box that I can click on. Or, I can click “Show results in a browser window” to see all the results in that familiar Google results format.

Google Desktop indexes web history, emails, media files, Open Office files, MS Office files, PDFs and HTML files. And you can choose to exclude any of these. You can set up the directories/folders you want searched and you can set it to automatically remove deleted files from the search results. Clicking on a result takes you straight to the file (or email, or whatever). Or you can click and use the same search terms on the web just like you normally would with Google.

Oh, and it works with Windows and Mac as well as Linux.
Google Calendar

I used to use Thunderbird and Evolution, and I still use Outlook at my job. But, if I could, I’d even ditch Outlook for Google Calendar and Gmail. Unfortunately, when I’m not a graduate student, I work for a major world bank and they have some strict rules about what applications get used how.

But, for all my non-work needs, definitely all of my academic needs, I use Google’s Calendar. I can save appointments, meetings, input my recurring class schedules, and sync it all with my desktop and many other devices. I still occasionally use Thunderbird to monitor a couple of non-Gmail pop addresses I have (like cfeagans AT ahotcupofjoe DOT net) and I can sync all my Google Calendar entries back and forth. I can also sync my Google Calendar with my Nokia e71, my Nokia tablet, my netbook, my wife’s laptop, and I can access it from just about any computer with internet access (except my work machine, which is hobbled by a very careful IT department).

Google Voice

Every student needs their digits. For voice calls to that special someone, SMS text messaging to that special someone else, ordering pizza, ringing up a parent for more textbook money (you bought the pizza, remember?), and so on.

But with all the new trends in cool cell phone tech that keeps coming out, who wants to be trapped to a single carrier? AT&T is the only place to get that iPhone but T-Mobile and Verizon do a better job with the Blackberry… Then there will be those times when the pizza and textbook money get stretched thin and you’re forced to go with a prepaid phone (but you tell yourself it’s still cool ’cause Jason Bourne used it). So how do you manage all the phone numbers?

With Google Voice, that’s how. I have a single phone number that I give out. That phone forwards to any and all of my other phones (work, home, whatever cell phone I happen to be on) either at the same time or at times I specify. I have an outgoing message on Google Voice and if I don’t pick up at one of the three phones that ring simultaneously, the caller can leave a message. Google Voice then transcodes the message from voice into text and emails it to me. I can then surreptitiously read the message on the Blackberry or Nokia that quietly vibrated in my pocket while in class and know right away that my wife wants me to pick up Chinese on the way home. Pei Wei here I come.

And you can send SMS messages from Google Voice as well. And dial the phone from your desktop or laptop. Who needs a land line? Give me DSL and WiFi and unplug it. Oh, and when you forgot to pay that silly student loan one month (or put it off to get the car fixed), you can put their automated calls on the blocked caller list. You can do the same with that ex-boyfriend who keeps bugging you for a second chance. Another cool feature is “Add a Note” to any call in your history. Very handy for making personal notes about the message or SMS conversation so you can go back and read some of the details or important information.

This is a phone number that you can keep forever (or so it seems so far).

Google Reader

One of my favorite Google Apps. I’ve tried other RSS readers out there, but this is hands-down the best, most useful. You can get to your Reader app just about where ever you can get Google. Even my work’s IT hasn’t restricted it yet (shhh…).

If you’ve never used an RSS Reader here’s what it does: nearly every blog and most other sites have RSS feeds. These are typically XML files that change over time as the content is updated. My blog has a feed, which you can click on in the sidebar. Unless you have a browser configured with a feed-reader, it’ll usually come up as a continuous block of very hard to read text, links and images. But, with a feed-reader, you can sort and manage these feeds in a very orderly, library like fashion. You can get news feeds like CNN and Google’s Top Headlines. You can get feeds for your favorite blogs (like mine, hopefully) and keep up with many blogs in a single, easy to manage space. And with Google Reader, you won’t have to worry about whether or not you’re on a particular machine or laptop. You can get it from any internet capable computer.

There are a lot of cool features in Google Reader, but the three that stand out for me are

  1. Starred Items – reader has the ability to star items as you browse (I like to do this when I see something I want to revisit or perhaps blog about) -you can click on “Starred Items” and see all of them in one spot;
  2. Shared Items: these are items you “share” among others who can see your Google profile; and
  3. Notes -here you can read notes you made about a particular feed entry. These notes are shareable as well and collected in one spot the way starred entries are.

There are a lot of other features that make Reader a useful and powerful tool too: tags, “like this,” nesting feeds in collapsible folders, sorting options for feeds, etc.

That’s it for part II of the (so far) two part series on Google for the Anthropology Student!

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When does vandalism become an archaeological feature?

Posted on November 23, 2010 by Carl Feagans

When it’s done in antiquity, of course.

Below are some photos of a particular kind of vandalism commonly referred to as “pilgrim gouges.” I’ve noticed these peculiar scoops of stone in various photos of columns, ashlar blocks, monuments and so on, but never really stopped to think about what they were.

Pilgrim Gouges Avenue of the Sphinxes

Image by Cammyjams

In hindsight, all the examples I can think of or locate on the net or in books, are within reach of people. Still, my first guesses included eroded palimpsests and some sort of vandalism in antiquity.

Palimpsests in this sort of context are places where one set of inscriptions or a bas relief is removed or plastered over to create a new set of inscriptions or a new bas relief. This wasn’t an uncommon practice in ancient Egypt -sometimes one ruler wanted to substitute his own name or beatitudes or perhaps curses of an enemy. Sometimes a bit of vandalism occurred in antiquity when a subsequent ruler was unhappy with a predecessor or if a new culture just simply had no regard for a much older one. There are monuments with graffiti etched by Greeks and Romans in Egypt and there are monuments around Europe and the Middle East that have bullet holes that could only have been deliberate vandalism.

But these curious little scoops and gouges in the stones of Egyptian monuments and reliefs are something different. One thing they seem to have in common is that they are typically vertical and that they are deeper in the center, as if scooped out. Pilgrims and believers in magic scraped the stone to remove a fine dust, which they collected and mixed in a drink. By scraping out a portion of the temple or monument, the pilgrim hoped to obtain some of the power through sympathetic magic. This practice occurred from about the time of the New Kingdom to around the 5th century CE.[1].”

What’s interesting about the practice is the frequency and distribution of the “gouging.” Deeper gouges indicate more attention spent at a particular gouge over time (a single gouge probably wasn’t produced by a single pilgrim at a single visit), as do more gouges at a particular spot. The sphinx above, for instance, has more, deeper gouges than it’s neighbor tot he right. Both of these have more than other neighboring sphinxes, and so on, suggesting that the first two, in particular the first, has more perceived power than the others.

Pilgrim Gouges on Ramses II's Treaty

Frequency & Distribution -not random

Or perhaps more accessibility. Gouging by pilgrims was not random and the distribution tended to be concentrated in certain areas such as “outer corners of buildings, hypostyle pillars, and certain hieroglyphs and divine faces on outside walls[1].” So while there was the concern of the object’s power, there was also an obvious concern of accessibility. The sphinx above may have been easier to scrape without being observed by those that might interfere (caretakers of the temple) or it might have been perceived as the more powerful of the sphinxes (i.e. its position in the line along the avenue). But it wasn’t always an image or a temple, which are obvious places to perceive power, but also writing. The gouges on the Ramses II‘s treaty with the Hittites above may be written on a temple wall, but the gouges themselves are grouped together in ways that suggest it wasn’t the wall or the temple that had the power, but the words of the inscriptions that resided there.

Pilgrim gouges are a fascinating topic. Anyone who’s visited Karnak or stared at photos of Karnak for hours as I have will probably have noticed them. I can’t believe I’ve never really questioned what they were or how they came to be until a few days ago! So my thanks for that bit of inquiry goes to a reader of my blog that had a question about them. I think she’ll agree the bit of research we each did was fun. She actually found the answers faster than I, pointing me in the right direction.

Thanks, L!

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References and Notes:
  1. Frankfurter, David (2000). Religion in Roman Egypt: Assimilation and Resistance. Princeton University Press, pp. 51-52 [↩] [↩]
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Who Will Dig Our Bones if Apophis Hits?

Posted on November 5, 2010 by Carl Feagans
Apophis Symbol (Stargate).

Image via Wikipedia

Something that could very well make us all subjects of an archaeological dig is an asteroid impact. The very fate of the dinosaurs, which once ruled our planet up to about 65 Ma might some day be our own. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend Phil Plait’s Bad Universe, which, in its first episode, took a look at killer asteroids and the various ways we might deflect or prevent a potential extinction-level impact.

If you’re interested in modeling asteroid impacts, you can play around with an online simulation at Purdue University. You can input your own data: size of asteroid, composition, velocity, angle of approach, what sort of surface it impacts, etc. I chose Apophis, not so much because I have a particular fear of this one over any other, but because Apophis was the bad guy in Stargate SG-1. Love that show. Incidentally -and quite trivially- the archaeologist, Daniel Jackson, was played by actor Michael Shanks. Coincidentally, there is also a prominent archaeologist with the name Michael Shanks. Did I mention I’m a fan of Stargate?

In the simulation I ran of Apophis (the asteroid, not the Goa’uld), the Earth didn’t fare so well. Particularly the Eastern United States. A crater about 3.5 km in diameter and over 1 km deep was created 500 km from Dallas, TX somewhere towards northeastern Canada or Maine. Ejecta in the form of a fine dusting with occasional large fragments reached Dallas only 5.57 minutes after the impact.

Screenshot of Impact Earth!

Luckily, neither the Earth’s axis was not tilted and the orbit was not shifted to any noticeable degree. But the impact had the energy of 1,660 megatons of TNT. The average interval between impacts of this magnitude somewhere on Earth is somewhere around 50,000 years. The fireball, at over 500 km away, is well enough below the horizon that Dallas doesn’t suffer any ill effects, but we do get an air blast that arrives 25.3 minutes after impact, raising the wind velocity to about 6.21 mph and the blast can be heard to a level about as loud as heavy traffic. Long before that, however, somewhere around a minute and a half after the impact, an earthquake at 6.6 on the Richter Scale is felt 500 km away, but feeling like a passing truck hitting a pothole in the road nearby.

I suspect if I run the simulation again at 20 km instead of 500 km, the damage estimates would be different. I did. They were. People and buildings catching fire from the thermal radiation; a few people and buildings getting knocked down by the seismic effects; more people getting knocked down by the airblast; etc.

It ain’t pretty, but Apophis wouldn’t be an extinction-level event according to the simulation and the parameters I put in. Go check it out. Have fun. Destroy the world!

Another bit of Stargate trivia: in the show, another bad guy (Anubis) set an asteroid into motion that would collide with Earth. Luckily for us, the show’s heroes were able to put it in hyperspace for a few seconds to let it pass Earth up. I didn’t see Phil Plait try that method on his show!

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ET Impact Probably Didn’t Wipe Out Clovis

Posted on October 4, 2010 by Carl Feagans

ResearchBlogging.org
In a paper published in PNAS in 2007[1], Firestone and others suggested that there was evidence that shows that the Younger Dryas period in the Northern Hemisphere was interrupted by a barrage of extraterrestrial comets at about 12.9 ka. This impact, the authors said, was the cause of abrupt climate change, a sudden cooling, that led to “broad-scale extinctions, and rapid human behavioral shifts at the end of the Clovis Period.”

In short, along with megafaunal extinctions (i.e. mammoths), the Clovis period of human development in North America was brought to a close by this barrage of comets. The evidence Firestone et al cited included magnetic grains with iridium, magnetic microspherules, carbon spherules, fullerenes with extraterrestrial helium, and nanodiamonds. From that and other physical evidence, Firestone et al proposed:

that one or more large, low-density ET objects exploded over northern North America, partially destabilizing the Laurentide Ice Sheet and triggering YD cooling. The shock wave, thermal pulse, and event-related environmental effects (e.g., extensive biomass burning and food limitations) contributed to end-Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions and adaptive shifts among PaleoAmericans in North America.

Their hypothesis was met with a fair amount of debate and discussion, particularly evident on several well-known science blogs[2].

Now, Vance T. Holliday and David J. Meltzer, may have finally closed the debate with regard to the fate of the Clovis culture in a paper available free at Current Anthropology: The 12.9-ka ET Impact Hypothesis and North American Paleoindians. In this paper, Holliday and Meltzer challenge the ET impact hypothesis as a cause for Clovis collapse. Indeed, they challenge the automatic assumption that absence of post-Clovis occupation of Clovis sites should be interpreted as collapse at all.

… an examination of archaeological, geochronological, and stratigraphic evidence fails to provide evidence of a demographic collapse of post-Clovis human populations, especially where the Clovis and post-Clovis site records are reasonably well constrained chronologically. Although few Clovis sites contain evidence of an immediate post-Clovis occupation, interpreting that absence as population collapse is problematic because the great majority of Paleoindian sites also lack immediately succeeding occupations.

The authors stress that, when it comes to Paleoindian sites, single occupation is the norm. It isn’t unusual for either a Clovis or a post-Clovis site to show evidence for only a single occupation. Archaeological sites generally follow the rules of superposition, with oldest materials at lower strata and younger material at higher strata. Sites like tells in the Near East or Mesopotamia often have multiple levels of culture that demonstrates successive occupations through time at the same site as newer cultures build on the ruins of older ones. Not so, however, with most, Paleoindian sites. This is because “Paleoindian groups had a relatively empty landscape and unfettered mobility, and they rarely used the same spot twice, save in the case of fixed places on the landscape that provided important but rare resources, such as outcrops of high-quality stone for tool making or freshwater springs[3].”

The absence of successive Paleoindian occupation of sites is an important point because the ET Impact Hypothesis, in part, relies on this as evidence for societal collapse of the Clovis culture. Holliday and Meltzer, however, make a very convincing case that, while immediate post-Clovis occupation of sites is rare, there is a “trend of continuous occupation” during the period in which the barrage of comets -the ET impact event- is hypothesized to have occurred.

Paleoindian site occupations through the Younger-Dryas (grey area)

Holliday and Meltzer aren’t attempting to refute the hypothesis that some sort of extraterrestrial impact occurred at around 12.9 ka. They are, however, eliminating the alleged disappearance of Clovis culture at several sites as evidence for societal collapse due to their inability to cope with sudden changes in subsistence as a result of the sudden absence of megafauna. In addition to showing the faulty assumptions related to the absence of successive occupation at Paleoindian sites, Holliday and Meltzer also question the methods of choosing sites that some proponents of the ET impact hypothesis have used which may have introduced bias in their results. Also questioned is the fact that bison populations appear relatively unaffected by the alleged ET event, which suggests not an ET impact but, rather, a competitive release as large grazers go extinct for other reasons.

nanodiamondWhile Holliday and Meltzer weren’t necessarily refuting the ET impact hypothesis itself, others might be. Another bit of evidence the ET Impact proponents cite is the presence of nanodiamonds at the YD boundary. This claim has recently been challenged by Daulton, Pinter and Scott (Aug. 2010). They found that there was no evidence of nanodiamonds as claimed by several papers since 2007, among which is included the Firestone et al report. Instead, what they discovered were graphene and graphane-oxide aggregates that weren’t constrained to just the YD boundary[4].

It probably wasn’t a meteor or comet that caused the disappearance of the Clovis point. Rather, it was probably just a cultural decision. Perhaps the Clovis point was the platform shoe or the bell-bottom pants of North American antiquity.

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Holliday, V., & Meltzer, D. (2010). The 12.9-ka ET Impact Hypothesis and North American Paleoindians Current Anthropology, 51 (5), 575-607 DOI: 10.1086/656015

References and Notes:
  1. Firestone RB, et al. (2007) Evidence for an extraterrestrial impact 12,900 years ago that contributed to the megafaunal extinctions and the Younger Dryas cooling. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 104:16016–16021 [↩]
  2. The Younger Dryas comet-impact hypothesis: gem of an idea or fool’s gold [RealClimate]?, More Clovis Comet Debate and a Response from Dr.Richard Firestone [Anthropology.net], The Fantastic Mystery of the Younger Dryas [Greg Laden's Blog] [↩]
  3. V.T. Holliday and D.J. Meltzer (2010). The 12.9-ka ET Impact Hypothesis and Norht American Paleoindians. Current Anthropology, 51(5), 575-607, DOI: 10.1086/656015. [↩]
  4. T.L. Daulton, N. Pinter, and A.C. Scott (2010). No evidence of nanodiamonds in Younger-Dryas sediments to support an impact event. PNAS, 107(37), 16043-16047; published ahead of print Aug. 30, 2010, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1003904107 [↩]
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A Romantic Adventure-Tale of Treasure and Archaeology

Posted on August 27, 2010 by Carl Feagans

You know how you start googling for information on one thing but end up going down a completely different rabbit hole from the one you started on? This happened to me over the weekend and I found myself looking for more information on a story I came across while looking for something else entirely.

It all started this past weekend when I was watching Hondo, starring John Wayne and Ward Bond on cable. This is the story of the Army scout (Wayne) who comes across a soon-to-be-widowed woman (John Wayne shoots her husband) in West Texas who is under the protection of Victorio, the Apache chief.

Victorio was a real person, even if the widow and her new-found lover and his pissed off dog weren’t. So I got to wondering how much of the Hondo story was based on fact, etc….

Long story short: I started googling for Victorio and his battles and then started looking for Victorio Peak, which was supposed to be in the Diablo Mountains region near Van Horn, Texas. I used to live out that way, so when Google Earth pointed me to a place in White Sands, NM near Almagordo, I was initially confused. Turns out there are two Victorio Peaks. One in Texas and another about a hundred or so miles away in New Mexico.

And its the one in New Mexico, far from the place Victorio staged his last battle, that is possibly the more interesting!

In the links at the conclusion of this post[1][2], you can read a couple of articles posted on the web that go into more detail, and I encourage you to read them. I’m not saying the stories are true, mind you. But they were both captivating reads!

Doc and Babe in the 1930s

The story could begin in the mid-1800s with the battles of Victorio, an Apache chief (and, arguably, in charge of Homeland Security at the time). But that’s a story for another time (I’ve been pondering what an archaeological survey of these battles might consist of).

Instead, I give you Milton Ernest “Doc” Noss and his eventually estranged wife Ova “Babe” Beckworth.

Doc and Babe

They were a handsome couple. Doc was a “foot doctor” (no record of sort of medical degree, however) and he and Babe lived in Hot Springs, now known as Truth or Consequences, NM.  One November day in 1937, Doc and Babe were part of a hunting party that camped near Victorio Peak. While ducking under a rock overhang to escape a light drizzle of rain, Doc discovered an entrance to a cave that had been covered by a stone. Thinking at first that he’d stumbled on an abandoned mine shaft, Doc and Babe kept the discovery under their collective hats, returning several days later with ropes and flashlights. What they allegedly discovered is straight out of an Indiana Jones story!

At the bottom of the narrow shaft was a chamber about the size of a small room with drawings around the walls. Doc thought these sketches were made by Indians, as they were crude and stick-like. Some were painted, while others were chiseled into the rock face. At the other end of the chamber, the shaft continued sloping downward. Descending another hundred and twenty feet before it leveled off, Doc found that the passageway emptied into a huge, natural cavern large enough “for a freight train to pass through.” He saw several smaller rooms chiseled from the rock along one wall.

As Doc inched his way across the great cavern, he made a terrifying discovery…a human skeleton. The hands were bound behind the back, and the skeleton was kneeling, securely tied to a stake driven into the ground, as if the person had been deliberately left there to die. Before leaving the room, he found more skeletons, most of them bound and secured to stakes like the first. Some skeletons were found stacked in a small enclosure, as if in a burial chamber. All told, he reportedly found twenty-seven human skeletons in the caverns of the mountain.

As Doc explored the side caverns of Victorio Peak, he found amazing riches amounting to extreme wealth by today’s standards. Jewels, coins, saddles, and priceless artifacts were everywhere, including a gold statue of the Virgin Mary. In one chamber, he found an old Wells Fargo box and leather pouches neatly stacked to the ceiling.

And gold bars. Lots of them.

Noss Treasure?

The Noss Treasure?

Keep in mind, this was the 1930s. Franklin D. Roosevelt had just signed Executive Order 6102 in 1933, which forbade U.S. citizens from “Hoarding of Gold Coin, Gold Bullion, and Gold Certificates.” So, assuming the story of his find is true, what was old Doc supposed to do? From the stories I’ve read of Doc Noss, he was a bit of a shady character -a wheeler and a dealer. He allegedly brought up a bar or two at a time, smuggled them to Mexico and sold them on the black market at a price far below their worth.

What’s the Theory?

There are a lot of “theories” to explain Doc Noss’ treasure. Some think it was the Casa del Cueva de Oro, Spanish for the House of the Golden Cave, and was a cache of wealth established by Don Juan de Onate in the 16th century. Others think Noss may have chanced upon the treasure of Felipe La Rue, a 18th century French priest that was in search of riches he’d heard in stories and that he established a wealthy gold mine there in the Hembrillo Basin where Victorio Peak, once known as Soledad Peak, is. The peak was renamed in honor of Victorio, who used the site for a stronghold and stood off U.S. Army soldiers in the 19th century.

Victorio Peak

Victorio Peak

But did Doc and Babe Noss really find a cache of wealth in the 20th century?

This is where the story has a twist. Doc had filed a claim on the site for prospecting by the end of the 30s but ended up collapsing the entrance in a attempt to blast a wider entrance. He had a few hundred bars brought to the surface by now, but Executive Oder 6102 was still in effect, so his desperation for cash put him in a dilemma.  In 1949, 12 years after his alleged discovery, Doc Noss was shot in the head by a “business associate,” apparently wanting his gold.

But it doesn’t end there. In 1951, the U.S. Army, somewhat evolved from the days when it chased Victorio, annexed the land that Victorio Peak sits on as part of the White Sands Missile Range. This is the period following World War II where we were now in a nuclear arms race and White Sands was where much of the nuclear weapons were being tested. Babe fought for decades to work her inherited claim, but the Army had full control of the surface of the land.

What follows are a few tales of conspiracy and intrigue. Even an airman first class and a captain who apparently found an open fissure and reported seeing gold bars in a cavern. The Army excavated the site using Gaddis Mining Company in 1963 with no results. A member of the Noss family was finally given permission to excavate for two weeks in 1972, but also came up dry.

Victorio Peak

Victorio Peak: Courtesy Google Earth

To this day, the heirs to Babe Noss are still trying to access the site, which is still part of White Sands Missile Range.

My thoughts are that the site was part of an elaborate scam that involved seeding a mine to scam people out of their cash. Still, there’s always that romantic hope that a buried treasure sits there waiting for the right person to discover it. There may or may not have really been a treasure, but the story is ripe for a movie!

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References and Notes:
  1. McGuire, Bonnie (2010). The Treasure of Victorio Peak. http://www.mcguiresplace.net/The%20Treasure%20of%20Victorio%20Peak/ [↩]
  2. Paul, Lee (date unk). The Strange Mystery of Victorio Peak. http://www.theoutlaws.com/gold7.htm [↩]
Posted in Archaeology | Tagged , , , , , , , | 7 Comments

The Pseudoarchaeology of Glenn Beck

Posted on August 21, 2010 by Carl Feagans

It should be no surprise that, since he has little grasp on the rest of reality, that Glenn Beck would fare any better at understanding archaeology.

embedded by Embedded Video

YouTube Direkt

In the first few seconds of that video, Beck gets much wrong. He states that the little square he drew in the Octagon section of the Newark Earthworks (Newark, Ohio) is “made up of staves” which are each 606 feet long. He points to the four corners of these “staves” in his chalkboard diagram to illustrate precisely the four lengths he’s referring to.

Except his measurements are utterly wrong. And not by just a few feet. The average length of each of his “staves” is about 1,000 feet -nearly 400 feet more than he says. To illustrate this in a diagram that’s somewhat more precise than his chalkboard drawing, I’ve created the following graphic using Google Earth with a KMZ file[1] I borrowed from James Q. Jacobs (thanks, James. Hope you don’t mind).

Newark Earthworks

A true measurement of the Newark Earthworks

The measurements aren’t precise. I didn’t go to the ground and survey the site with a transit. But my margin for error is less than 10 feet. That still leaves 300 feet unaccounted for with Beck’s assessment. The “stave” above measures 1090.39 feet as indicated by the Google Earth ruler.

Next, Beck goes on to describe the angle of the pyramids and how its somehow significant that this angle precisely matches the angle taken from the center of the circular formation when measured against the line bisecting the octagonal formation. These, he claims, are both 51.8 degrees.

They aren’t. He’s closer than with the “staves” argument, however. The angle he shows on his chalkboard (what’s with that thing, anyway?) is one that’s very subjective. If you know what angle you want, you can just about arrive at it simply by moving your radius since the circular earthwork isn’t a perfect circle nor do the two openings perfectly align with the northeast opening of the octagonal formation, as you can see in the diagram above. I placed the center of the circle to be equidistant from the two openings of the circle but inline with the center of the two furthest openings -the southwest (on the circle) and the northeast (on the octagon).

From here, if you draw a line due north (true), which is easy to do in Google Earth, you end up with an angle of 50 degrees (+/- 0.5), which is as much as two full degrees from Beck’s “51.8 degrees” that the Great Pyramid of Giza is. Beck calls this the “exact same calculation,” but it really isn’t. The calculation for the Great Pyramid was arrived at through trial and error. Earlier pyramids had different angles. The Bent Pyramid, for instance, has and angle of 55 degrees until the upper courses, which change to 43 and 44 degrees. 55 degrees was probably too steep and it was probably too costly in manpower and resources to totally scrap the pyramid. By the time Khufu and Khafre built theirs, many lessons had been learned. 51-52 degrees (we no longer have the casing stones to be exactly sure) was ideal since it went up without falling over.

And that’s an important distinction between the “51.8 degrees” of the Giza pyramids and the Newark Earthworks. One is a structure’s angle going up. The other is an angle resulting from an alignment with an 18.6 year lunar cycle[2]. The two have nothing to do with each other and Beck is creating a correlation that doesn’t exist.

So then Beck’s poor grasp of archaeology moves on to moundbuilder pseudoscience, fakes, and forgery that has long been cast aside by scholars. He starts on about the “Newark Holy Stones,” one of which is often referred to as The Decalogue and was alleged to have been found by David Wyrick in 1860. It’s called the “Decalogue” because it depicts a bas relief of a man, ostensibly a priest, with a condensed version of the 10 Commandments inscribed in a crude form of Hebrew. Another stone is the “Keystone,” named for its shape, which also has Hebrew script.

That these two stones (and others) are fakes and frauds really isn’t in question. The only question is did Wyrick fake them himself or did he have help? Or was he duped by others. The implication by Beck and 19th century believers, was that this was evidence of the so-called “Lost Tribes of Israel” -a motif that Beck, a Mormon, has a lot of investment in. But, if this were evidence of such a “Lost Tribe,” then the script on the alleged artifacts would have been pre-Exilic Hebrew. Instead, the forgers, probably being ignorant of this, used a post-Exilic script[3] .

In the 19th century, there was a prevailing myth of a “Moundbuilder society” that somehow vanished. This often became twisted into the agendas of certain religious and political causes but the credit couldn’t possibly go to the Native Americans. To recognize these people as the rightful designers and builders of such magnificent and detailed constructions would mean admitting that the Native Americans were something more than the “savages” and “heathens” they were characterized and marginalized as. Such characterizations made it far easier to force them off their lands, displace them, and treat them as less than white.

Fortunately, such beliefs and agendas have been forced out of academia early on by the likes of Cyrus Thomas, who had a Federal Government budget to find out the truth of the Moundbuilder mystery. His work was empirical and it concluded that the mounds “were built by the Indians.” In addition, he had the occasion to debunk some of the “tablets” that were cropping up here and there, including the Davenport tablet to which he launched a full, empirical investigation that discovered that it had been planted recently (to 1894) in a mound in Davenport, Iowa[4].

The stones and tablets Beck presented are frauds. Beck is a fraud.

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References and Notes:
  1. http://www.jqjacobs.net/archaeo/sites/newark.kmz [↩]
  2. Lepper, Bradley T. Feb. 13, 2007. Octagon Earthworks’ alignment with moon likely is no accident [↩]
  3. Deal, David A. (1996). “The Ohio Decalog: A Case of Fraudulent Archaeology,” Ancient American, #11 [↩]
  4. Feder, Kenneth L. Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology Mayfield Publishing Company 1990 3rd ed [↩]
Posted in Pseudoarchaeology | Tagged , | 18 Comments