[aaaaaatttuyy]

I work at a site that claims to have evidence that would have similar implications. The burden of proof is indeed very high, and for good reason. You need to demonstrate that (a) the remains were the product of human activity, (b) the context was secure, (c) dates samples are representative of secure contexts, (d) samples are not contaminated and were processed effectively, (e) the dating of the site as a whole is internally consistent. Some material just doesn't lend itself to meeting that kind of criteria, that's just how things are sometimes.

What this article should focus on is the work of Lauriane Bourgeon, who went back to the material and tested it under revised methods that were specifically oriented to meet these criteria. Archaeological knowledge does not just result from one-man discoveries, but accretes over time as new ideas become pervasive and we develop new ways of recognizing archaeological phenomena.

All that stuff about monteverde and other similarly controversial work is just red herring that distracts from the claims that the article is supposedly all about. It says 'archaeologists are stuck in their ways! They are such extreme orthodoxy gatekeeper morons!" But archaeology is actually one of the most interdisciplinary domains of science and is most open to alternative perspectives, based on my varied experiences at least. If the article wanted to seriously tackle knowledge production in archaeology then it would actually address how archaeologists think about and use evidence to draw narratives about the past, which involves discursive knowledge and values, which could be very well represented by Bourgeon's work as a case study. Or you can write a thrilling blockbuster about the lone outsider who tore down the temple of doom with his own two fists.

[sandworm101]

But we must still remember that archaeology in particular has been tainted by various non-scientific ideas. It is an old discipline that, at times, was used for political purposes. For instance this passage:

>>> Evidence had long suggested that humans first reached the Americas around 13,000 years ago, when Asian hunters crossed a now submerged landmass known as Beringia, which joined Siberia to Alaska and Yukon during the last ice age.

Talk to the Inuit about that one, the assumption that 'primitive' people were only ever able to walk over a land bridge rather than migrate along the ice coast in boats. Many longstanding ideas, especially those most convenient to questionable ethnographic ideas, need to be challenged. Frankly, I look very closely at any idea that appeared in 1950s/60s highschool textbooks, such as the above land bridge concept. The clovis/pre-clovis debate is so tied into US politics (ie the challenge to the "first" in "first nations") that everyone should be very careful.

[aaaaaatttuyy]

Yep, it does indeed have a nefarious past, and archaeologist tend to own this criticism and have worked towards genuinely working in an anti-colonial spirit (though there are still soooo many things that need to be improved upon).

Does this negate the work that has come out of archaeological research? Not necessarily.

Also note that genetics has been harnessed extensively for political purposes, especially in tandem with archaeology (see: eugenics). Does that de-legitimize its genuine practical applications today, when conducted in an ethical, respectful and regulated manner?

edited to convey what I actually meant to say, and mistyped due to being drunk.

[antonvs]

The issue isn't unique to archaeology.

Another notorious example was the discovery of the bacteria that causes most ulcers - the person who discovered that was vilified for at least a decade or so.

The root problem is simple: most people treat what they learned during their initial education as a kind of gospel, which they defend with the same fervour as any faith. This defense relies on things like social shaming to repel ideas that challenge their faith. This means that for an individual, stepping outside the faith has consequences, which has the effect of keeping most people in line and part of the defense against significant change.

Max Planck recognized this when he wrote, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

[marcus_holmes]

I'd be much more forgiving of archeology and archeologists if they admitted what they didn't know, rather than presenting theories as facts.

"Ritual Purposes" is the poster child for this. Site reports I've read from early medieval digs on artifacts rarely say "purpose unknown" or even "probably art", but instead say "ritual purposes".

I understand that creating a theory for, say, early American migration, is useful and a good thing, as long as everyone understands that it's not "what happened". It's the current theory, and can be disproven at any time by better evidence.

[aaaaaatttuyy]

Archaeologists are constantly aware of what they don't know and cannot know, and make these things very clear when they publish. Seems like you are taking pseudoarchaeologists at the word when they make accusations about legitimate archaeologists without any basis for such nasty claims. 'Ritual purposes' is indeed a trope, a trope that was recognized in the 1980s and that is now shied away from because it was applied uncritically. If ritual purposes is cited as an object's raison d'etre, then it is almost always described tentatively as such, like "probably for ritual purposes", or "under the circumstances of our limited data thus far, we describe it as such", because you are correct, there is very little way of knowing what actually happened.

And that's true of all archaeology, really. Archaeologists create the best narratives we can based on the limited evidence we've got. There is no single and knowable truth about the past, only our best attempts at understanding it. Archaeologists have accepted this for decades, you just seem out of the loop.

[marcus_holmes]

that's entirely possible. I left re-enactment 10 years ago. Things could have changed since then.

[Reedx]

Interesting. What are your thoughts on this interview with Graham Hancock in regards to dogma in archaeology?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qgs9zJdJctw

[aaaaaatttuyy]

Graham Hancock is an egotistical moron who is more entrenched in his own beliefs than any actual archaeologist today would ever be.

What he and other pseudoarchaeologists claim to be orthodoxy in the discipline is actually a representation of how archaeology was in the 1960s and 1970s. Anthropology, which archaeology became a sub discipline of in the 1960s, was firmly structuralist at the time. Structuralism is the theoretical paradigm that sees culture as comprising two intertwined components: intangible conceptual constructs, and expressions of those constructs such as language, symbols and myths. Dualities in myth in particular were latched onto as the scaffolding that uphold the underlying cultural constructs; if you could identify these pillars of culture then it was though that you could truly understand it. This was later recognized to be total garbage since it completely ignores the lived experiences of actual people, it pretends to be omniscient, it considers cultures as pure entities that live in isolation relative to one another, it flattens culture as a single way of life with no possibility for multiplicity to exist. Post-structuralism noted that there are blatant disconnects between so-called cultural norms and the actual experiences of individual people.

Structuralism was dismissed during the 1970s and being overly prescriptive, and rightly so. Graham Hancock criticizes the prescriptive terms that archaeologists in the 1960s devised, but simply replaces them with a different, much more arbitrary, completely unverifiable, utterly wacko, and much more prescriptive cultural framework, rather than consider that the whole notion of thinking in such a way is just plain wrong. He is stuck in the 1970s, subscribing to an outdated ideology that no archaeologist or anthropologist today would accept (though some aspects do creep in, especially in introductory pedagogical settings, and when similarly-minded systems theory approaches are uncritically applies, especially by theoretical physicists who claim to know everything).

It's sad really, because this perspective is so common, largely due to completely outdated representations of archaeology in the media. For instance, in Stargate the show has an hour for the crew to land on a planet, identify the conflict, and resolve it based on an off-hand remark made by a local that is strategically written into the show to express the cultural structure of the week. Why do all the planets they visit have only a single culture? Because it needs to be monolithic in order to meet the basic formula of the show. This is the reddit version of culture, which happens to be completely wrong, completely outdated, and persists largely to legitimize nationalist policies (it meshes very well with the implicit notion that nations have only one culture, expressed through famous cultural landmarks, and that 'lesser' cultures deserved to be displaced due to the fact that they did not meet the arbitrary criteria that distinguish so-called 'civilizations' from those miscellaneous 'simple tribes').

[ianai]

Is there anyway to see an outline of such “borderline“/maybe someday discoveries?

[aaaaaatttuyy]

No idea what you mean by outline. Also, I'm glad that you implicitly recognize the difference between being wrong and having insufficient data.

[ianai]

A list of archeological sites with evidence that challenges the established theories.

Thank you for your comments in this thread. I’m learning quite a bit from them!

[GorgeRonde]

User aaaaaatttuyy has not mentioned the fact that NASA has recently found a crater under the Hiawatha glacier in Greenland that was, at the time of discovery, supposed to be 12k to 3M years old.

But a paper from March that tries to cross-validate this finding by looking at sedimentary data in South-America finds that the impact must have occurred 12,835 ~ 12,735 years ago.

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-38089-y#ref-CR25

And this, is what Graham Hancock has been supporting for so long. And yeah Semmelweis was full of himself as well.

Now to answer your questions about archeological sites:

  - Atlantis (when) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSx_0stJI0w
  - Atlantis (where, the Richat Structure) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDoM4BmoDQM&t=230s
  - Göbekli Tepe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6K5NvCiYGEI
  - Underground city around the world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMjbtb4xLGQ&t=5s
  - Underground city under the Giza plateau https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVR5V-cmpbA
  - Huge cities in the Amazon bassin (a giant garden) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn1MugPalaA&t=608s
  - The Sphynx of Egypt is more ancient than thought https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9aZlLqkcYw
  - Underwater city in japan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vHbpimRQLg&t=47s
  - Underwater city off the coast of Cuba https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhcCjbl2Vjc
  - Similarity between various archeological sites: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYfpu2sHZuo
  - The Antikythera Mechanism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkL5Wkj1gYk
  - The Ellora caves in India (as much work as the buildingof the great pyramid): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WypT8RPUxg
  - The "laser-cut" Lomas Rishi caves (India again): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShObd9t_0Oc
  - The fact the Giza pyramid and some megalithic structures around the world (some in Corsica for instance) are north-aligned with a greater precision than Copernic's observatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDBA3fhCfmo
  - The Sahara used to be green and turned into sand in a generation, around **11,000** years ago: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-really-turned-sahara-desert-green-oasis-wasteland-180962668/
  - The Great Pyramid could be a giant ram pump : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDUwD59OYzI&t=122s
  - The pyramids could be made of artificial re-agglomerated limestone : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znQk_yBHre4
  - The Machu Pichu has not been built by the Incas and the walls were made out of molten stone.
  - Organic matter in the incredible ruins of Puma Punku, Peru, show stones where made by pouring a geopolymer into casts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Q1f0YBm4ic&t=317s
  - Etc ...

The list is long, and as you may have noticed, I tried to pick short videos here. Also most of them are "crackpot" theories from youtube. It may be unbearable to watch if you like to razzor-cut bushes the Occam style. Now if you like to watch them grow into a passionately intricated puzzle and can enjoy these videos like a Netflix series, this might interest you.

A few channels/authors to follow on the matter:

  - Graham Hancock
  - Ancient Architects: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCscI4NOggNSN-Si5QgErNCw. Both crackpot theories and scientific news related to the topic. Very prolific
  - Bright Insight: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsIlJ9eYylZQcyfMOPNUz9w/videos. Similar, but more crackpot.
  - Le Moment Curieux (french) : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyVPaIiBL9ieiyMeoCTR0SQ. Deep analysis of cyclopean/polygonal walls around the world + a toy-model of the Great Pyramid as a pump.
  - Suspicious0bservers's Earth Catostrophe Cycle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvjJqIXYT1w&list=PLHSoxioQtwZfY2ISsNBzJ-aOZ3APVS8br most stars including the sun cyclically burst into "micro-nova" events and cause poles to shift. This is Roland Emmerich grade entertainment and very enjoyable. Very scientific as well altough a tad conspirationist.
  - The science behind comet capture then disintegration in the solar system: https://cosmictusk.com/how_a_disintegrated_comet_destroyed_the_world/

But the best way to deep into the subject (warning, lot of numerology ahead!) is this documentary and its sequel:

  - The Revelation of the Pyramids: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fS9ixfQ_no&t=793s
  - Builders of the Ancient World: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okhDDknJ9o0&list=PLt3D1556v66JLCCEtdI7spskIsvDUwylw&index=1

Good luck

[rgrieselhuber]

In general, once the Science is settled, it should never be questioned. It is often the work of hundreds of peer-reviewed papers and bias-free institutions devoting time and resources into confirming hypotheses. Researchers from outside fields, in particular, should never be given a platform to question the experts in a given field.