An Artificially Intelligent Pseudoarchaeologist?

Graham Hancock recently shared a link to an article on Hub Pages titled, “How Archaeology’s Gatekeepers Hinder Discovery,” by Sigrid Salucop. Her early work at Hub Pages was an absolute delight to read, particularly an article highlighting Philippine artists. She even wrote an article about, “Why Archaeology Matters and Why You Should Fund Us.”

But it’s the Gatekeeper article we’re going to examine here. And she didn’t write it. Not all of it anyway. So I’m going to take a two-part approach to addressing the article.

Part One: Premises of “Gate-keeping” in Archaeology

Hancock has had a long-standing love-hate relationship with archaeologists for decades. He’s mad that they won’t take him seriously. And that they call him a pseudoscientist or, worse, a pseudoarchaeologist. But he loves for archaeologists to keep finding things. He’s there like a metaphorical stray-dog looking for scraps that support his fantastic notions of “ancient advanced civilizations.” Civilizations that move stones with their minds. Or sounds. Depending on which book you read or which mockumentary you watch.

Salucop begins her Hub Pages essay with:

Anyone challenging these spaces can be threatening and so, unintentionally, the very fields that should welcome new perspectives or entertain even the wildest suggestions, can harden into orthodoxy.

We don’t accuse gynecologists of retreating to orthodoxy if they refuse to welcome the “new perspectives” (much less the “wildest suggestions”) of plumbers into the natural plumbing of the human body. Or airline pilots who refuse cockpit access to gamers with hundreds of hours playing MS Flight Sim while over the Atlantic.

And that isn’t even what’s happening in archaeology. We’re one of the most welcoming disciplines of science when it comes to public participation. Perhaps second only to paleontology, though I doubt it. We often depend on public participation to get projects done. I work with dozens of volunteers each year, limited more by my ability to generate enough projects than the lack of volunteers. We do digs, teach college students how to do shovel tests, photograph artifacts, document historic cemeteries, and so on.

Each year, I host several outreach events for school-age kids including home-schoolers. I’ve taught them concepts of human migration, radio-carbon dating, stratigraphy and relative dating, and even an annual mock-excavation for kids 4-12 years old. During all these, my team and I are peppered with questions that range from very informed to “I just saw this on Ancient Aliens…” And they’re all treated with dignity and respect–even if I disagree and give them an answer they didn’t expect.

But these aren’t the “new perspectives” Salucop is referring to. She means notable figures like Graham Hancock.

…those who ask uncomfortable questions or present uncomfortable ideas should no (sic) be locked out because this sacrifices the very basics of science and inquiry.

Interestingly, Salucop doesn’t define what she means by “locked out” in this instance. One assumes she means public-facing pseudoarchaeologists like Hancock, who rightfully came under fire for his mockumentary, Ancient Apocalypse. Is he “locked out?” I wouldn’t say 2 seasons of speculative tourism hosted on a Netflix show where he travels to dozens of places and interviews several archaeologists is “locked out.”

Sure, he was unable to film at certain places, but that’s more to do with production and bad optics expected by land managers than it is archaeologists. Archaeologists didn’t turn down his special use permits for his film crew, the directors and supervisors of the facilities he wanted access to did. He was certainly free to enter as a private citizen and shoot video on his iPhone like anyone else. But those directors and supervisors aren’t archaeologists. They’re agency land managers for State and Federal facilities like Serpent Mound.

…his book lacked scientific foundation. But didn’t Charles Darwin speculate, too? And isn’t speculation the very act that ignites scientific inquiry?

Yes, and didn’t they persecute Galileo, too? Here, Salucop is talking about how scientists have, for years, accused Hancock of being pseudoscientific and that his books “lacked scientific foundation.” She invokes Darwin by attempting to point out that Charles Darwin speculated before arriving at a theory of evolution. There are, however, some key differences between Darwin and Hancock.

First, Darwin didn’t just “speculate.” He employed a hypothetico-deductive method to his work. While he does state in the first paragraph of The Origin of Species (1859) that he allowed himself “to speculate” on the subject of evolution after 5 years of observing and note-taking, he most definitely stuck to a rigorous hypothetical-deductive method when it came to hypothesizing and arriving at conclusions.

Indeed, Darwin had a disdain for any empirically untestable idea. Darwin once wrote of Herbert Spencer, “His deductive manner of treating any subject is wholly opposed to my frame of mind. His conclusions never convince me. His fundamental generalizations […] are of such a nature that they do not seem to me to be of any strictly scientific use. […] They do not aid me in predicting what will happen in any particular case.”

Essentially, the hypothetico-deductive methodology that Darwin followed meant that one observed carefully then formulated hypotheses based on those observations. These hypotheses are then empirically tested to see if predictions derived from these observations hold true in the real world.

Even if we consider Darwin’s initial hypotheses to be on the same level as Hancock’s speculations, we can, without argument, all agree that Darwin ultimately tested his hypotheses. And formulated a theoretical framework that he himself tested over and over again.

The only thing Hancock has in common with Darwin’s method is that they both wrote books.

Nothing Hancock has speculated on has been demonstrated as fact. He’s been writing pseudoarchaeological speculation for over 30 years. Darwin wasn’t even 30 years old when he first started the hypothetico-deductive method of observing evolution.

We must also mention what should have followed speculation – testing, falsification, evidence gathering, peer review, and reproducibility. Without these steps, speculation remains as creative theory or at the very least mythology. This is where the experts of the day should have stepped in and said, well. this sounds ridiculous but let’s test it out

It’s pleasing to see that Salucop gets it in the first two sentences above. And she almost gets it at the end of the passage. Almost. Archaeologists and other scientists have been telling him to show evidence and test his hypotheses for decades!

Even Hancock admits this when he say’s, “Scientists asked me to try to substantiate my theories – to find actual sites to support my beliefs.”

When geologist Robert Schoch, normally known for his own fringe beliefs, disagreed with Hancock about whether the Yonaguni formation is man made or natural, Hancock replied that he needed to dive on it at least 50 times first.

In 2001, the late Garrett Fagan, who frequently criticized Hancock’s lack of scientific rigor, said this of Hancock’s work: “Hancock justifies his procedure of systematic omission of relevant but countervailing information by claiming that the ‘orthodox’ view of such matters saturates the public consciousness, that he is not required to be encyclopedic, and that his readers are free to ‘make up their own minds’ about his claims; he is just a writer presenting his side of the story.” –Hall of Ma’at, Antarctic Farce.

As findings at Göbekli Tepe made their rounds in academic circles, Hancock essentialy (sic) got that much needed vindication.

Vindication? Hancock? It isn’t as if he predicted Göbekli Tepe. In fact, when the Göbekli Tepe news was making the rounds as news, Hancock was still saying Antarctica was the home of his “lost civilization.” Never mind the fact that Antarctica has been ice-covered for over 15 million years.

Göbekli Tepe is not in any way similar to the sort of civilization Hancock has been describing for the last 30+ years. It wasn’t sea-faring. It wasn’t agrarian. It was a hunter-gathering society that created some monumental architecture in the form of pillars that now seem to have been supports to roofs of some sort. Hancock didn’t discover this site nor did he predict anything about it. In fact, the only things Hancock knows about Göbekli Tepe is what has been shared by archaeologists. The alleged “gate-keepers” of the article at hand.

This forced many archaeologists to admit that perhaps, complex societies emerged far earlier than previously thought. Interestingly enough, the findings were quite close to the dates that Hancock has been pushing for decades.

I can think of no archaeologist who stipulated some sort of limit on “complexity” (whatever that might mean to a Hancockian) for social structure. My own graduate work surrounded the Neolithic of the Mediterranean which includes Göbekli Tepe. Some of the earliest work I was reading suggested some very complex ideas about how pre-literate societies stored and transferred information from person to person or generation to generation. There were some rather complex ideas on how Neolithic societies organized religious thought, revered ancestors, migrated with seasons and pressures from other, growing populations competing for resources, and so on. The notion of the simple cave-man was not something I was reading about from works dating from the 1980s through the early 2000s.

American geologist Virginia Steen-McIntyre and her team went on to find that stone tools at the Hueyatlaco site were more than 250,000 years old.

Steen-McIntyre didn’t have a team at Hueyatlaco. She was part of a team. In fact, she was a geology student on a team led by Cynthia Irwin-Williams, a remarkable archaeologist and a genuine ground-breaker for women in archaeology. Steen-McIntyre’s dates had some inconsistencies and produced a range around 370,000 years BP for human stone tools and remains. Another set of dates, from a different method, produced dates around 20,000 years BP. For the 1960s, even the lower order of magnitude dates were considered extreme, though Irwin-Williams was partial to them.

Sadly, Irwin-Williams passed away from a chronic illness at age 54 and was never able to publish her findings from Hueyatlaco. Read more about it in the article I wrote on the topic.

The geologist could not publish her work and the findings strained academic relationships.

She did publish her work. Did it strain her academic relationships? Possibly. I’d say it should have since many people, including Irwin-Williams, tried to tell her that 1) the dating techniques being used were new at the time; 2) the margin for error was the same order of magnitude and almost as great as the date itself (370,000 BP +/- 240,000 yrs); 3) there were some potential explanations for the extraordinary date; and 4) there was not a set of extraordinary evidence given everything else.

In the 1980s, archaeologist Ian Hodder was also locked out by traditionalists in the field.

Locked out? Really? Let’s look at Ian Hodder’s CV for just the 1980s:

I hope someday to achieve this level of “locked out” of my profession.

Today’s archaeologists march beneath banners of LIDAR, AI, and satellite imaging and that should be celebrated. However, technology unchecked, can lead to discrepancies.

These are both meaningless statements. “Archaeologists march beneath banners?” What does that even mean? That we’re controlled by Lidar, AI, and Sat imaging? Or that we depend on them too much? That we covet them? Something else?

Regardless of what tools like these we use (and I’ve yet to use AI for archaeology. I’m not sure how that would help me clear a Section 106 project), eventually archaeologists need to do a physical survey of the landscape. My most used technologies are a map, a shovel, and a camera. I don’t even use a tablet in the field.

Perhaps it is time for archaeology to be more open to collaboration with other disciplies. Science, after all, is based on openness, humility, transparency, and interdisciplinary verification.

Salucop seems to be saying archaeologists not only don’t collaborate with other disciplines but that we don’t like to. She clearly doesn’t know any real archaeologists. She mentions “statisticians and data scientists” along with “reproducibility protocols.” While most archaeologists are trained with an excellent understanding of statistics and find themselves frequently doing the duty of data scientist, there are many other specialists we would likely collaborate with first.

When it comes to collecting ancient DNA, we call in specialists who are trained in aDNA collection protocols. They suit up, do their thing, and handle the delicate matter of data collection with the least risk of contamination compared to if I tried it.

When it comes to needing to understand a stratigraphic sequence, I call on a local geologist or soil scientist. That person meets me in the field and does his or her thing. Even though I minored in geology.

When it comes to analyzing pollen, phytoliths, ancient plant remains, organic residues, etc, I call on an ethnobotanist.

If I was working an ancient cemetery in Europe or the Levant, I would definitely be working hand in hand with one or more bioarchaeologists.

Archaeologists collaborate regularly with ethnographers, biologists, astronomers, psychologists, neurologists, carpenters, engineers, architects, geologists, chemists, and professionals of all sorts. This is a tried and true method of discovery that was pioneered by Linda and Robert Braidwood in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Probably the only group we need not ever worry about collaborating with is the pseudoarchaeologist. Grifters like Graham Hancock. He’s simply not in it for true discovery. At this point, he’s been given sufficient professional critique that he knows right from wrong when it comes to science. He chooses pseudoscience because it sells.

And the author of that Hub Pages article chose Artificial Intelligence instead of actual research and personal creativity to generate a story, perhaps to help keep her payments from Hub Pages rolling in.

Part Two: Artificial Intelligence Wrote the Article

This is not a paid advertisement, but I’m going to plug a product nevertheless.

If you need to find out if an article or few paragraphs of text are AI generated, I highly recommend the Copyleaks AI detector. I tested several of the free AI detectors and this one was one they all seem to make use of, and it was the only one that seemed to give consistent results. I did some science, feeding it known AI and known non-AI and some blended AI. It nailed every single test. Others were about 35-70% accurate.

You really don’t need to use an AI detector to see that her article was at least partially produced with AI. Some of the hints are several non-existent references hallucinated by the AI. This is an extremely common fault. References that did not exist were Casini, Giardino, & Thaler (2021), Fujimura, S (2001), Loeb (2021), and Roe (2023).

References that the AI cited but didn’t include in the bibliography included Virginia Steen-McIntyre and Charles Darwin along with several premises that went un-cited. These are rather minor for an opinion essay and not even a requirement, but the inconsistency helps one identify the AI origin. Another point about the references is the inconsistent style, also common with generative AI. It is, after all, mimicking human creative style. Not actually generating a true creative work.

There are also some instances where the phrasing or word choices were odd, but correct only in the technical sense. Or perhaps not even correct at all. One of these, I suspect was a result of some editing by Salucop and she just missed it since the spelling was correct and Word didn’t underline it: “ideas should no be locked out” would ideally be, “ideas should not be locked out.”

I wrote to Sigrid Salucop through Hub Pages and asked for comment a few weeks ago. Specifically, I asked about her use of AI, if Hub Pages encourages it, disallows it, or just turns a blind eye. I asked if others are doing this at Hub Pages as well. But I let her know that I actually enjoyed the articles she clearly wrote herself. They were more alive and had a passion to them. Sadly, I didn’t hear back from her.

Several other articles she wrote were also generative AI in origin. There were two other articles on archaeology, one she created; the other was AI. And a handful of articles on world current events that were generative AI.

However, I’m pleased to say that her last two articles as of writing this were 100% Sigrid Salucop. They were also both written after I emailed her. I don’t know that my email had anything to do with her change, but her strange beef with archaeology notwithstanding, her writing is good when she’s at the wheel.

I think archaeology, like most professions, has its problems. We’re doing what we can within our profession to diversify our voice so as to include more indigenous perspectives. We’re trying hard to be sensitive to our racist past, something that isn’t unique to archaeology and anthropology as sciences, but, because ours is the study of humans, it is a definite obstacle.

I get that those who believe in fringe and fantastic archaeology feel left out or marginalized by real archaeology. And, for the most part, I’m all about including these people if they truly want to learn. If they’re truly willing to hear what I have to say. I’ll even listen to what they have to say.

But I see no reason to include Hancock. He’s been given many chances to sit at the table yet he shits on archaeology as a profession and archaeologists as professionals. I personally know more than one archaeologist who has tried to be cordial with him only to find out this isn’t what Hancock wants. His grift depends on conflict and making his customers think he’s being oppressed.

References and Further Reading

Ayala, Francisco J. (2009) Darwin and the scientific method. PNAS, 106 (supplement_1) 10033-10039.

Braidwood, Linda, Robert J. Braidwood, Bruce Howe, Charles A. Reed, and Patty Jo Watson, Eds. (1983). Prehistoric Archaeology Along the Zagros Flanks. The University of Chicago Oriental Institute Publications, 105. Chicago, Illinois: The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.

Darwin, Charles (1859). On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, Or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. John Murray, 6th ed., London.

Fagan, Garrett (2001). Antarctic Farce. Hall of Ma’at.

Steen-McIntyre, Virginia (2008). A review of the Valsequillo, Mexico early-man archaeological sites (1962-3004) with emphasis on the geological investigations of Harold E. Malde. Presentation at 2008 Geological Society of America Joint Annual Meeting, Oct. 5-9, Houston, TX.

Steen-McIntyre, V., R. Fyxell and H. Malde. (1981) Geologic Evidence for Age Deposits at Hueyatlaco Archaeological Site Valsequillo Mexico, Quaternary Research, 16, pp. 1-17.

Szabo, B.J., Malde, H.E., and Irwin-Williams, C (1969). Dilemma Posed By Uranium-Series Dates On Archaeologically Significant Bones From Valsequillo Puebla Mexico. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 6(6), pp. 237-244.