what do aliens have to do with the pyramids
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One afternoon in June, I found an electronic mail in my inbox from Atlantis Rising: The Research Grouping. The web log and YouTube channel claims to "challenge orthodox thinking" and archaeologically explore questions about human history that are "notwithstanding largely neglected past academia." Questions like: "Were aliens involved?"
It might be like shooting fish in a barrel to but dismiss organizations that push speculative conspiracy theories while presenting themselves as purveyors of supressed knowledge. Just what caught my attention in this email was a department advertising a video interview with Frank Joseph.
Southwardince 1987, Joseph has published several books, mainly focused on the mythical continent of Atlantis. From 1993 to 2007, Joseph was also the editor-in-chief of the pseudoarchaeological Ancient American magazine. Perhaps more importantly, Frank Joseph is the pen name for Frank Collin, who was the former coordinator for the American Nazi Political party and founder of the National Socialist Political party of America. This is who Atlantis Rise was recommending to their audience.
For a long time, pseudoarchaeology was pushed to the fringe by archaeologists as something not worth their attention. But the fringe is where ideas can fester and become unsafe.
The idea of a lost city or continent called Atlantis persists in the public imagination. George Grie/Wikimedia Eatables
As an archaeologist currently working on my doctorate, I have spent the last twelvemonth examining the means various groups, such as white nationalists, use pseudoarchaeology in their worldviews. Understanding this feels especially important today, considering the recent increase of such groups in the Us. According to a 2019 written report from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the number of white nationalist hate groups in the United states of america increased by 55 percent between 2017 and 2019.
Pseudoarchaeology comes in many shapes and forms just relies on the same cadre statement: People of the by did not accept the knowledge, technology, and/or adequacy to attain all that they are said to have accomplished, so someone or something else was involved. Ancient alien proponents volition tell you Egypt'south smashing pyramids, for example, or Peru's Nazca lines were really due to extraterrestrials, while hyperdiffiusionist proponents volition tell you lot they were built by residents of Atlantis, or another "highly advanced civilisation" that lived more than thirteen,000 years agone. Archaeologists are oft accused of conspiring to hibernate the "truth" of these histories.
These pseudoarchaeological arguments may seem to exist simply fun to entertain. Just they are invariably heavily biased against Black people, Indigenous peoples, and other people of colour (BIPOC), who are doubted to have been responsible for their own histories. Archaeological sites from Africa, Asia, and the Americas are often put forth every bit proof of external interventions, while the achievements of those who lived in ancient Hellenic republic or Italia, for case, are rarely questioned.
In other words, these arguments are oft racist.
While arguments about extraterrestrial or Atlantean ancestors may seem outlandish, some people do believe in these arguments. Chapman University in California, which conducted the Survey of American Fears between 2016 and 2018, found in 2018 that 57 percent of their respondents believed that ancient advanced civilizations such as Atlantis existed (a 17 percent increase from 2016), and 41 percent believed that aliens visited the Earth in the ancient past (a 14 percent increase from 2016). These have become more than than merely behavior: They're realities for those who take embraced them.
Fifty-vii percent of survey respondents believed that ancient advanced civilizations such as Atlantis existed.
Pseudoarchaeology is useful to white nationalism specifically because it casts dubiousness on the achievements of BIPOC communities, opening the doors to rewriting history through a white power lens. The SPLC has noticed this and written nigh connections between pseudoarchaeology and far-right ideologies such as antisemitism and white nationalism. White nationalism is a pro-white racial ideology that shares many interests with white supremacy, such as anti-immigration stances and beliefs that the interests of white people must be placed first.
White nationalists also encourage enhanced protections and rights to defend what they see as the "purity" of the white race, a pseudoscientific concept congenital on extremely reimagined views of history and genetic ancestry. A core belief of white nationalism is a conspiracy theory referred to equally the "great replacement," which suggests a "white genocide" is happening: that white people are nearing extinction and need to be protected.
Though anthropologists and geneticists accept long noted that race is non a genetically defined concept but rather socially defined, white nationalists have sought to genetically define and support the concept of a "pure white race." For instance, at-habitation genetic ancestry tests have become popular with white nationalists, who reinterpret the results in a variety of means to support their beliefs that a "pure white race" exists and that, without protection, this special race will be replaced.
Although ancient conflicting theories have been discussed on white nationalist websites such equally Stormfront and the Renegade Tribune, it is hyperdiffusionist theories—the distribution of cultural traits or people spread across vast distances—about Atlantis, Aryans, and Solutreans that are specially popular with white nationalists in North America.
Hyperdiffusionist theories are the easiest to accommodate to the conspiracy of replacement: aboriginal white Atlanteans, Aryans, or Solutreans traveled to North America first and were "replaced" past Indigenous peoples. For example, books and articles by Frank Joseph and Patrick Chouinard, a regular contributor to the Renegade Tribune, adhere to early 20th-century Nazi beliefs that white Aryans were descended from the people of Atlantis, who purportedly likewise spread to the Americas tens of thousands of years ago and brought technology and wisdom with them. Joseph and Chouinard fence that these white descendants in N America were replaced over fourth dimension by Indigenous peoples.
The Solutrean culture lived in Europe some 20,000 years agone. There is no disarming evidence that they were the offset settlers of N America. Sémhur and MPants at work/Wikimedia Eatables
Due southimilarly, writers on Stormfront argue in support of the Solutrean hypothesis, a hypothesis widely rejected by archaeologists that proposes people from the Solutrean culture of southwestern Europe were the first to settle on the eastward declension of Due north America between 17,000 and 20,000 years ago. On Stormfront, science suggesting the Solutrean people had darker pare is ignored, and instead people argue that white Solutreans in N America were abruptly and violently displaced by Indigenous peoples.
Archaeological evidence does not support these theories. While the total story of life during the Pleistocene in the Americas is still evolving, there is no evidence for a vehement displacement of white Solutreans anywhere in N America, at any betoken in time. The continent was always the land of Ethnic peoples.
Explore more, from the archive: " Archaeologists Should Be Activists Too "
Pseudoarchaeology contributes to the marginalization of BIPOC communities past denying their histories and instead reattributing them to mythical continents or even extraterrestrials. White nationalists apply this denialism to rewrite—or rather "re-white"—history to bolster their own systems of power.
The public and the subject area must challenge pseudoarchaeology and the violent, white power structures that oftentimes utilise it to support their own goals. It is through these challenges that all of the states can support recentering the voices of marginalized groups in telling their own histories and ensure those are the histories existence heard.
In this commodity, white is styled lowercase throughout, contrary to SAPIENS' house manner , at the request of the author.
Source: https://www.sapiens.org/archaeology/pseudoarchaeology-racism/
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