By and large, it’s something I avoid. Many of the criticisms levelled against either this blog or the main Bad Archaeology website are trivial, vapid or misinformed. I tend to give a short reply to the original comment and move on: there isn’t usually anything substantial in the criticism that warrants revision of the original post or page.

That is especially true of the blog. I view blogs pretty much as opinion pieces, like the editorial in a newspaper. If I want authoritative facts, I’ll go elsewhere. This guides my writing: opinion pieces get posted here, while more factually-based pieces go on the main site, which I hope is used more as a work of reference than the blog. Blogs are effectively entertainment.

A little while ago, I switched the main site over to a content management based system, using WordPress as the software to run it (it’s simple, it does what I need and it is hugely customisable. And did I mention that it’s free?). This allows users to comment on those pages where I permit them to do so (which, actually, is just about every page on the site), in addition to which there’s a contact form. Since doing this, there has been a slow but steady stream of comments.

I am now faced with a quandary, though: most comments are from people who have not registered as users and therefore need approval, as do pingbacks from external websites. By and large, I approve all comments, no matter how ill informed, and the last thing I want to do is to censor dissent, so I will allow through comments that just disagree with what I’ve written (or what James has written). So far, so good. But what happens when I get a pingback from the forum of an extremist organisation? I won’t mention them, as I haven’t approved the two pingbacks from them, but one of their regular users has tried to rubbish what I write on the ridiculous grounds that I’m gay. Because my sexuality doesn’t fall in line with their very narrow definition of what a citizen of their country should be (and it shouldn’t be non-white, Jewish, Moslem, Roman Catholic, gay, socialist… you get the picture), the user thinks that my opinions and my handling of data are worthless. But this ad hominem attack was brought up as a reply to another user of the forum who had linked approvingly to one of the pages on the main site. Do I approve the pingback or do I delete it? I certainly don’t want to send traffic to a hate-filled extremist website.

Then there is a commenter who regularly posts largely incomprehensible statements. I’ve approved all of their comments so far, but it’s getting tedious. Their comments add nothing to the page in question. Do I block the comments on those grounds? I have been hoping that the commenter will eventually get bored and give up, but it’s been going on for some weeks now; it’s not the usual internet troll, out to pick an argument, because the comments are so far off-the-wall that there’s nothing to respond to. I really don’t know the answer.

And finally, there’s a recent criticism of the page devoted to The Turin Shroud. Rather than comment, the person who disagrees with what I wrote, a blogger called Dan Porter, has written an entire blog post, Bad Archaeology at Bad Archaeology (how I wish I could have used that title!). In his comment on Bad Archaeology, he calls it a “comprehensive response”, but it’s far from comprehensive. It cherry picks elements of the page for specific criticisms, but I found that I had to delete only two errors of fact. What Dan Porter has done has been to use the very dubious claims of Ray Rogers that the linen samples used for radiocarbon dating were contaminated, to press on with the silly notion that the image on the Shroud encodes three-dimensional data (an inexplicable miracle!) and generally disagree with what I wrote.

A miracle of relativity (praise be!) or a trick of image manipulation?

What his criticism did allow me to do was to test the claims about the encoding of three-dimensional data in images. I took a well known facial image and processed it with results that look fairly similar to those obtained from the Shroud. It even rendered unevennesses in the photographic print as three-dimensional! Another miracle!

In the end, I want to be reasonable. I really don’t want to upset people, but if they have wrong, silly or downright objectionable beliefs, I can’t stand by passively and let them persist. If they have raised valid objections, I’ll happily change what I’ve written: that’s how real science works. If they are wittering on incomprehensibly, I’ll tolerate them. If, on the other hand, they want to push an ideology that is hate filled, I feel that I must ignore them and not give them the dubious benefit of a link from my site.

The bank where the west wall of the Cheese Warehouse was located

I’ve described my direct interaction with dowsing in a previous post. The semi-serious hunt for the eighteenth-century Cheese Warehouse on the bank of the River Dee in Chester yielded equivocal results: we “identified” a rectangular “anomaly” that most of us agreed upon. The problem was that the one wall we identified that lay on a line predicted by dowsing also lay under a bank that may have been a visual prompt for the responses we got. What was surprising was that I had not believed that the wall of the warehouse lay so close to the river bank. The subsequent location of the wall in this trench (actually a metre or so east of the line indicated by dowsing and also east of the flat top of the bank, which carries a footpath) occasioned some surprise and was seen by some of the team of volunteers (not least the member who has brought the equipment to site) as a confirmation of the reality of the technique

Now, I don’t think that it’s unnecessarily cynical of me to suggest that something other than the detection of some buried drystone masonry by means of dowsing was going on here. We had dug a linear trench at right angles to the line of the western wall of the Cheese Warehouse–wherever that may have lain–and would have hit it at some point along its line. The fact that we did has more to do with what we already knew about the location of the building from historic maps than from any use of bent coathangers swivelling in empty ballpoint pen tubes. Of course, it was difficult to persuade the rest of the team that they had not necessarily been witness to a confirmation of the reality of archaeological dowsing. It didn’t seem to matter that dowsing failed to locate the south-eastern corner of the Warehouse (the trench dug over the suggested position turned out to be well inside it) or that the wall we did locate was off the line by around a metre. No, the willingness to believe outweighed the evidence of excavation. I’m not suggesting that the team of diggers from the Chester Archaeological Society was especially credulous; no, they were simply prone to the usual human fallibility of confirmation bias.

Stapleton’s Field henge and the involvement of a well known dowser

Moving on ten years, I had changed jobs. The Cheese Warehouse was a distant (and still, to my shame, unpublished) memory and I had returned to the part of the world where I grew up: North Hertfordshire. A local group of enthusiasts – Norton Community Archaeology Group – had been formed in 2007 to investigate the heritage of one of the three historic parishes that make up Letchworth Garden City. I was asked to provide the Group with a wish-list of ten sites I considered worth investigating. One of them was actually a landscape that appeared to consist of a series of Bronze Age monuments in a field known as Stapleton’s Field (a recent name: its historic name seems to be unknown). They included a group of ring ditches (all that is left after round barrows have been ploughed flat), a possible trackway, an enclosure and a series of probable field ditches. This was exciting, as it appeared to be a nearly complete landscape from around 4000 years ago. The more I looked at aerial photographs and a geophysical survey of one of the ring ditches, described as a “double ring ditch” by the Historic Environment Record for this specific monument, the more convinced I became that something was wrong with the description. Rather than an unusually complex burial mound, I thought it looked like a henge.

Your humble author and his brother, doing something that can no longer be done at Stonehenge (it was a long time ago and I was very young!)

A henge isn’t necessarily what you might think it to be. On hearing the word, most people think immediately of Stonehenge, a unique monument that is one of the most instantly recognisable sites anywhere in the world. There is a henge at Stonehenge, but it’s not the stones: it consists of the circular bank and internal ditch that forms the defining edge of the monument. To an archaeologist, this is what makes a henge. While some may contain stone circles, the majority do not; in some, the stone circles are a secondary addition. The henge I suspected might exist in Stapleton’s Field is one of those that did not have a stone circle, largely because the local chalk bedrock is quite unsuitable for use in megalithic construction.

To test my ideas, we dug a trench across the centre of the monument in 2010 as well as two others across anomalies seen in the geophysical survey that I thought belonged to the Bronze Age landscape I had hypothesised. The enclosure turned out to be Romano-British, as did the field ditches; the potential henge turned out to be Neolithic, although we did not find conclusive evidence for its interpretation as such. However, there was enough to go public with the idea that it was likely to be a henge, as we had found Grooved Ware pottery in the centre of the monument.

It was shortly after we had a number of stories on the radio, television, the press and the Group’s blog that the Chairman was approached by Paul Daw, a dowser who has made a study principally of stone circles, but who also has an interest in Neolithic monuments including henges and causewayed enclosures. He said that he had dowsed the site and could outline the henge; he was also willing to give demonstrations of the technique to the Group and to teach members how to dowse for themselves. He gave a talk to the Group on 16 March 2011, which I attended, followed by a practical session on 4 June, which I did not.

The talk given by Paul Daw was curious. He showed a lot of slides of scanned newspaper articles about his discoveries as well as some plans of the results of his dowsing. He focused largely on East Anglia (he is based in Cambridge) and on the Neolithic, particularly causewayed enclosures. However, at no point did he present any evidence that the sites he had discovered by dowsing had been confirmed by other techniques. In particular, there was no presentation of data derived from excavation. Allowing for his dowsing to have discovered buried anomalies, we were given only his assurance that they were of Neolithic date. I did not find this good enough to convince me and there were certainly others in the audience who felt the same way. Despite what readers may think, I had gone to the talk with an open mind and was prepared to be convinced. As an exercise in present a case for the reality of the technique, the talk was a failure.

Changes in the perception of dowsing following training

I am less able to comment on the practical session, as I did not attend it. However, one of those who did managed to collect information about how the participants in the exercise perceived dowsing. They were asked before the fieldwork to rate how strongly they believed that dowsing could detect buried archaeological anomalies on a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 for complete disbelief and 10 for complete belief. They were then asked again, after the fieldwork, using the same scale. In every case, the perception of dowsing improved after taking part. The average pre-fieldwork response was a rating of 2; after the fieldwork, it had risen to 8. This is an impressive improvement. Although no plans were made of the anomalies detected, blue flags were left in the ground to mark the positions of what was dowsed. There were two main groups of flags: a circular area, supposed to correspond with the position of the henge, and a linear ‘anomaly’ that I was told was very strong. The flags were still there when we began the 2011 season of excavation on 27 July.

A flag marking a dowsed ‘anomaly’ (arrowed)

This is where I can vouch for what was dowsed. There was a circle of flags in roughly the right place, although it was perhaps five metres too far to the south-east: it looked as if it had been put there by someone who knew roughly where the monument was located and roughly how big it was but not the precise location or size. This may be an unfair judgement on my part. However, when we opened up the trenches, it became even less clear what the flags were supposed to be marking: was it the inner ditch, the chalk bank or the outer ditch? The circle of flags corresponded with none of the archaeological features we excavated. Of course, one could always argue that as we haven’t yet excavated down to bedrock, the dowsing has detected a first phase that has not yet shown up. This would be special pleading and is not supported by the results of the geophysical survey or aerial photography.

The linear anomaly was even less convincing as an archaeological anomaly. It lined up perfectly on the tower of Baldock Church, just 910 m away to the east-south-east. For this reason, somebody suggested that it was a ley line. Well, ley lines don’t exist, despite the intuitive certainties of New Agers, so we can rule out that explanation! One thing that I did wonder was whether or not a twentieth-century ditch located in the 2010 excavation might have been the basis for this anomaly. The alignment was right, although its position was once again wrong, being about 15 m off the line of the archaeological feature. Nevertheless, nothing in the excavation corresponded with this anomaly.

If we treat the excavation as a test of the reliability of the dowsing, then the dowsing definitely failed. One of the real issues over the results that were obtained is that they were obtained with foreknowledge of what exists in this part of the field. I first published a plan of my suggested interpretation of the site as a henge in 2009 and there has been a page on the Group’s website giving details since February 2009. This means that anyone has access to information about the site, should they choose to seek it out; it is also the case that everyone who attended the dowsing session on 4 June had seen the site under excavation and had participated in the first season of work there. I could, uncharitably, argue that the dowsing was little more than a test of the memories of those taking part: the circular shape of the monument is known from a variety of sources, while the twentieth-century ditch, which ran roughly parallel with the footpath crossing the field, may have provided the “inspiration” for the linear anomaly. The details of the monument, which only became clear following the 2011 season on the site, were not picked up by the dowsing that preceded it. I wonder why.

Places supposed to lie on the St Michael (Ley) Line

As a postscript to the dowsing of Stapleton’s Field henge, I was informed that it lies on the St Michael’s (Ley) Line, a notorious line said to run from St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall through to Hopton on the coast of Norfolk. It is supposed to be marked by a large number of churches dedicated to St Michael; it is also said to run through Royston Cave. Unfortunately, it doesn’t pass through any part of Stapleton’s Field, nor does it pass through Royston Cave, missing them both by about 3 km. This isn’t minor quibbling: 3 km is a long way off a line that’s supposed to be dead straight and accurate across hundreds of kilometres. Either sites that are supposed to provide evidence for it (such as Royston Cave) lie exactly on the line or they lie off it and must be discounted as evidence: you simply can’t have it both ways!

Dowsing as a technique

As the reader will have gathered by now, I am far from impressed by my encounters with dowsing on archaeological sites. On two occasions, I have seen it used in an attempt to locate archaeological sites whose existence was already known and on both those occasions, it failed to locate the sites with any accuracy. I may have been unlucky; I may have gained an accurate impression. But there is one more instance of a site I know that has been dowsed for information that I have deliberately held back from describing. It’s another site investigated by the Norton Community Archaeology Group, this time in 2007.

This attempt to dowse a site was very different. Based around the earthworks of part of the village that had been deserted during the Middle Ages, the dowser used a pendulum in an attempt to locate structures and date their abandonment. He also pointed to the locations of human burials, again supposed to be of medieval date. At the same time, a soil resistivity survey of the site was carried out. Although the geophysics was inconclusive, the dowser pointed to a number of buildings and graves and gave the dates (to the nearest year) of their demolition or burial.

This is the sort of technique that Tom Lethbridge believed could be used to identify different materials, date sites and even recognise abstractions. It is a long way from the use of a hazel twig or bent coathangers to locate buried anomalies, however they might be detected. Instead, the dowser has a more mystical role, tapping into data that simply cannot be encoded in a purely physical form. This is the realm of ‘subtle energies’ of which conventional science is ignorant. This sort of thing is removed from scientific testing: the basic principles on which it supposed to rely involve things that defy measurement. The nature of this type of dowsing is what Robert Sheaffer has described as a “jealous phenomenon”: one that disappears before conclusive evidence for its existence can be gathered. The phenomenon does not manifest itself, so the believers’ argument goes, in the presence of sceptics. This is the very essence of pseudoscientific thinking.

For this reason, I have no truck with the use of pendula on maps. There is nothing that can be tested. However, I am more open to the idea that dowsing might have some basis in reality. Might it be possible that the dowser is sensitive to gravitational or magnetic gradients in the landscape, such as might be produced by holes in the ground. Some dowsers have claimed that this is how the phenomenon works. That being the case, dowsers relying on changes in the background magnetism should be able to detect hearths, kilns, fired clay and ironwork; indeed, the magnetic signals should be so strong that they could swamp other signals. Yet dowsers generally seem to ignore such things. Why, if magnetism is the source of signals being picked up by the dowser, would the effects of these highly magnetic materials remain hidden? Then, if the dowser relies on an ability to recognise changes in the gravitational background, there ought to be a correlation between the size of a buried feature and the prominence given to in the results of dowsing. At Stapleton’s Field, the outer ditch of the henge – which geophysics indicates is at least 3.5 m wide – ought to be the most prominent ‘anomaly’ to be recognised in dowsing. Why, then, were the strongest responses received from a linear ‘anomaly’ that aligned on the (perfectly visible) tower of Baldock church yet did not have a buried correlate?

You can see where I’m going with this. Suggest a mechanism known to science that might explain how dowsers can get the results they claim, and there will always be something that doesn’t fit. If dowsers wish to explain the phenomenon using forces known to science, they then need to explain how the individual dowser can select from among the responses received to locate only those things that the person using the dowser wishes to find. Once they start to invoke forces unknown to science, we are in the realm of pseudoscience. The Bullshit Historian has done an extensive analysis of dowsing claims in archaeology and finds them wanting. So do I.

Here’s an excerpt:

The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 90,000 times in 2011. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 4 days for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Dowsing for an eighteenth-century warehouse: Phil Miles in Chester, May 2000

This is another of those posts I’ve been meaning to write for some time without knowing quite where to start. I’ve been given a kick start by a twitterer (Marcus Smith) and by a recent BritArch announcement of a dowsing ‘experiment’ (you must be a subscriber of BritArch to see the link!). The problem is that it’s such a huge topic, it’s difficult to know where to begin.

Personal experience

I’ll start of with a bit of personal history. In my early teens, I devoured every book in Letchworth library on Egyptology, followed by every book on archaeology in general. I was also interested in fringe archaeology, even then, so I was drawn to the Dewey Decimal System’s notorious class 001.9, ‘controversies’. It’s basically a catch-all for busy librarians who don’t know where to put pseudoscience but who know better than to lump it in with the genuine science it mimics. So, I would turn left on entering the library, past the card indices of authors, titles and subjects (and, in those days, it really was a physical card index in wooden drawers), and into the realms of Isis Unveiled, Chariots of the Gods and the like.

Thomas Charles Lethbridge (3 March 1901 - 30 September 1971)

On one of those visits, a whole raft of books by T C Lethbridge had appeared. I was vaguely aware of the name, as he was an archaeologist who had excavated at a well-known Romano-British cemetery site in Guilden Morden, close to my home. These books – Ghost and ghoul (1961), Witches: investigating an ancient religion (1962), Ghost and divining rod (1963) and ESP: beyond time and distance (1965) – were about various matters on the occult side of things. Like many teenagers, I found the occult fascinating: perhaps there was secret knowledge that the Establishment was either unaware of or was keeping from the rest of us. This sort of fascination, I now understand, is all part of growing up, of learning how to be an individual, of discovering that there are no real authorities to whom we can turn for the answer to everything.

Yet here was a proper archaeologist discussing such matters. Some of it made intuitive sense to me and I was swept up in the rest of it. One of Lethbridge’s great discoveries was that he could dowse using a pendulum. Like a proper scientist, he conducted experiments. He found that the pendulum reacted to different materials if he varied the length of its string; he then found that as well as materials, the pendulum could be made to react to concepts (such as male, female, age and so on). He discovered that he could use the pendulum to determine the precise age of something (a site, an artefact, anything that he wanted to date). He also found – and this is where my teenage credulity was stretched to its limits – that it was possible to dowse for archaeological sites using a map: one did not have to travel to places to discover new sites (and, of course, date them with a precision that radiocarbon will never achieve).

Of course, I tried the technique. It didn’t work. I rationalised this (can one really rationalise the irrational?) as “it doesn’t work for me“: it clearly worked for Tom Lethbridge. After all, he was a retired archaeologist and I was determined that I would become one, too. Archaeologists were people I admired and trusted. The curator of my local museum, John Moss-Eccardt, was an archaeologist who ran evening classes and a museum club that I attended. Archaeologists were serious people who knew their stuff, so Tom Lethbridge just had to be on to something.

The view from the mainstream

Professional archaeologists have always been a bit ambivalent about dowsing. Here’s the entry from Warwick Bray and David Trump’s (1970) Dictionary of archaeology:

dowsing A technique for discovering buried features or materials by the use of a Y-shaped hazel wands, bimetal strip or the like. The scientific principle behind it is not understood and indeed by many people its validity, at least for archaeological prospecting, is doubtful.

“Scientific principle“? Do the authors believe it or not? There seems to be some fence-sitting going on here. A little over a decade later, Lesley Adkins and Roy Adkins’s A thesaurus of British archaeology (1982) has this to say:

Dowsing is the same procedure as water-divining and can be used to located buried archaeological features. The success or failure of the method depends on the talent and skill of the dowser, who usually uses some form of simple instrument such as a Y-shaped piece of wood which is held in the hands and whose movements indicate the position of the features as the dowser walks over them. Once the position of a site has been located, it can also be surveyed by dowsing. A grid is laid out over which the dowser walks, so that the results of the survey can be plotted on to a scale plan of the area.

So, it works then? It’s all to do with the “talent and skill of the dowser“, which is an assertion that my teenage self was happy to contemplate. What about more recent texts? Colin Renfrew and Paul Bahn’s Archaeology: theories, methods and practice is currently the most popular undergraduate textbook of archaeology: they must say something about dowsing. And indeed they do:

In concluding this section on subsurface detection, we may refer in passing to a controversial technique that has a few followers. Dowsing (in the U.S. witching) – the location of subsurface features by holding out a twig, copper rod, coathanger, pendulum, or some such instrument and waiting for it to move – has been applied to archaeological problems for at least 50 years, but without being taken seriously by most archaeologists.

Aha! A note of scepticism. The writers go on to describe an experiment carried out in Northumberland, in which sceptical archaeologists took part in the survey of buried church foundations and were convinced by its results. Some of the walls detected by dowsing were located, while other predicted walls were not located. Another experiment described by Renfrew and Bahn involved an attempt to locate a Romano-British pottery kiln, for which the results obtained by dowsing did not match those obtained by magnetometry: they do not say whether excavation was carried out to test the two techniques. Nevertheless, they conclude:

For the moment… until overwhelming proof of the validity of dowsing and other unconventional methods is forthcoming, archaeologists should continue to put their faith in the ever-growing number of tried-and-tested scientific techniques for obtaining data about site layout without excavation.

The greatest authority on archaeology for students nevertheless leaves open the possibility that “overwhelming proof” of dowsing’s ability to detect archaeological remains may one day be found.

More personal experiences

The Cheese Warehouse, from an eighteenth-century painting of the Port of Chester

In 1999, I worked with members of the Chester Archaeological Society on a project to locate a warehouse on the banks of the River Dee that had been used during the eighteenth century to store Cheshire cheese before being shipped to London, which was becoming an important market for the product. The warehouse burned down in the nineteenth century and no trace of it survives on the site today; it had been the inspiration for Lewis Carroll’s grinning Cheshire Cat, which is said to have described the happy cats who sat on the quayside of the Cheese Warehouse, waiting for the mice who, attracted from the ships by the smell of cheese, would run up the tethering ropes of the ships into the cats’ ready paws.

We began the work by undertaking a resistivity survey in February/March 1999; this was inconclusive, but showed up some foundations that we could identify as part of a house known as Copfield House, which is first seen on a map of 1874 and which was demolished c 1979×81. A photograph of the back of the house taken in the 1960s bore a slight resemblance to a depiction of the Cheese Warehouse on an eighteenth-century painting of the port. Excavation in May of the same year revealed the foundations of the nineteenth-century house but nothing that could be recognised as part of the Cheese Warehouse. We returned to the site in 2000 to carry out more excavations in different areas, still with little success. One of the society members is a keen dowser, so he got out his rods and everyone soon began dowsing. Several people – myself included – got reactions on a bank on the western edge of the site, so we decided to dig there. Very soon, a stone wall was located. Another trench placed over an area where dowsing had suggested another wall should be located failed to locate it; it did, however, locate some small stone pillars on which the wooden joists for the raised floor of the warehouse were held.

The south-west wall of Chester's Cheese Warehouse: not quite where dowsing had located it

So, what did the dowsing achieve? In my opinion, nothing. The one trench where a length of wall was found ran across a bank (which had apparently not existed in 1972), where the dowsing suggested that there ought to be a wall. I suspect that the bank misled us into identifying it as something piled up over the demolished warehouse wall. In fact, the top of the bank did not coincide with the position of the wall; nor was it on the line suggested by dowsing. The other walls “located” in this way proved not to exist.

To be concluded

I am currently working on a fascinating site with the Norton Community Archaeology Group, where I have identified what appears to be an early (‘formative’) henge of Neolithic date. The group has worked with a well known dowser on the site, and the next instalment of this blog will deal with their discoveries.

A page from the Dresden Codex, one of only four Maya books to survive, unless this story is true

Here’s something that seems to have passed by the mainstream archaeological news outlets. A press release by someone called Gregg Prescott MS, a Self-Growth Expert, claims that “Over 1,000 Mayan codices were discovered in the basement of a Los Angeles museum, presumably owned by Randolph Hurst [the source of this abstract wrongly gives the name as Randolph Hunt] and donated to the museum. Two other codices were found by the Maya Itza Council and have been analyzed for the past 10 years. If that’s not enough, 7 additional codices were found by a treasure hunter. Carbon dating has authenticated these sacred texts and professional photographs have been taken for the Maya Itza Council to analyze the meaning behind these lost codices”. This is a remarkable discovery, to put it mildly. So why has the archaeological community not been agog at the news?

The first problem is that we are not being given the sorts of details that help check the story. At which Los Angeles museum were the codices found? There are lots of them. Not to be told which one holds them in its collections is a worrying oversight. Secondly, what is the Maya Itzá Council? It’s difficult to find out much about it, although it seems to be affiliated to the Council of World Elders, dedicated to “Healing the Earth for World Peace”, a laudable aim that no-one other than a crazed psychopath would disagree with. It has its own museum, which is a treasure-trove of New Age wonders, including a crystal skull, dated by the Hopi people to “approx. 30 000 years of age”. The leader of the Maya Itzá Council and its representative in the Council of World Elders is a Maya named Hunbatz Men. The pronouncements of the Council seem to be taken seriously by UFO buffs and alternative spiritual practitioners. The third problem is the discovery of two codices by the Council. Where did it find them? Fourthly, what qualifications do its members have for their analysis? The decipherment of Maya hieroglyphs is still in its infancy and many puzzles remain to be solved: do members of the Maya Itzá Council have the relevant expertise to read them? The fifth problem is the identity of the treasure hunter who found seven more codices. A sixth problem revolves around the details of the radiocarbon dating. Can we see some actual dates? Which laboratory performed the analysis? Finally, no visual evidence is being offered us. Can we see some of the “professional photographs”? I’d be happy to see a photograph taken with a mobile ’phone camera!

Hunbatz Men, leader of the Maya Itzá Council

Apparently, Hunbatz Men has asked for the codices from the unnamed museum, but “upon conferring with the museum’s curator, he was denied due to the new antiquities laws”. Those darned politicians, always putting laws about museum property in the way of genuine researchers! Why can’t they be allowed to hand over unique and priceless antiquities to the representative of a group working towards world peace? What killjoys! Apparently, “[i]t would take considerable time, around 10 years or so, to purchase these items”. It sounds like a curious museum that would even contemplate the sale of a collection of Maya codices whose contents would doubtless transform our knowledge and understanding of the Maya civilisation.

Never mind, Hunbatz Men is leading a pilgrimage of thirteen crystal skulls from Manhattan (why?), which began on 27 October 2011, and will end with a ceremony in Los Angeles on 11 November. Are any readers going to this event? It’s billed as a Gateway Event and “the Ceremony of the Thirteen Crystal Skulls, a ceremony that was last performed 26,000 years ago, will be open to the general public”. Something not to be missed. Unfortunately, I’m on the other side of the Atlantic and I’m sure that I’ll be doing something too important to miss next Friday to be able to pop across to Los Angeles to attend. Pity. Never mind, the “event is expected to be televised to 2.5 billion people. After the ceremony, the Mayan elders will speak to the world for about 30 minutes”. Perhaps I’ll catch it on the television, if I can be bothered to tune in. It will probably be at an unearthly hour, given the difference in time zones, so I may well miss it.

The thirteen crystal skulls are bringing their ancient wisdom to seed a vortex, perhaps somewhere near you!

On the way from east to west coast, the party will be “stopping at sacred power points along the way to perform ceremonies that will seed each vortex with the ancient wisdom of the Crystal Skulls”. One can only assume that these are not the dreaded vile vortices, but something much more wholesome. At least there don’t appear to be any on the North American mainland. Phew! On reaching Arizona, “there will be an historic meeting with the Hopi and Tibetan Elders at the Hopi Mesa”. I hope we’ll be told about the relevance of the Tibetan elders to this pilgrimage of nineteenth-century carved skulls. After this conclave, the group will move on (inevitably) to Sedona “to prepare for a Crystal Skull Ceremony to be held in the heart of the Red Rocks, on the land that for the Indigenous Tribes People has always been Sacred Ground”. Heady stuff!  Ou can even take along your own crystal skull to be blessed by Hunbatz Men.

Bernard Perona, now known as “Drunvalo Melchizedek”

Tied into all this is someone called Drunvalo Melchizedek, who runs something called the School of Remembering. According to the online biography on his website, he is the author of four books (The Ancient Secret of the Flower of Life Volumes I & II, Living in the Heart and Serpent of Light: beyond 2012), “the first person in the world (in modern times) to mathematically and geometrically define the human body light body” [sic] and is a consultant for a magazine called Spirit of Maat. It almost goes without saying that he is a resident of Sedona.

It turns out that his real name is Bernard Perona. His books have been panned by critics. On perusing his Wikipedia page, I spotted the Flower of Life, something I’ve seen before, sent to me in several anonymous emails over the years. Intriguing. Drunvalo Melchizedek no longer runs the Flower of Life workshops, so I’m not sure about the connection. He is somehow associated with Hunbatz Men, promoting him and his pilgrimage. Everything seems to tie in to the 21 December 2012 “end” of the Maya Long Count Calendar (the correlation between the Mayan calendar and our own is not as well established as the promoters of 2012 would like it to be, though), which Melchizedek believes will also see the end of the precession of the equinoxes (although he does not explain how precession will be stopped and what cataclysmic effects this will have on the seasons that are so vital for food production).

We are quite clearly in New Age territory. New Agers aren’t known for their rigorous testing of factual claims. Indeed, they tend to pour scorn on ‘materialists’ who insist on testable evidence, preferring to rely on revealed, channelled and traditional wisdom. This makes me doubt that we’ll be shown any evidence for this miraculous discovery of a previously unknown hoard of Maya codices. If we go back to the source of the story, Gregg Prescott MS (what do those letters stand for?), we find that he’s linked to a re-release of a film 2012, promoting some very New Age ideas about the end of the Maya Long Count.

I have a faint suspicion, that I hardly dare articulate, that these codices don’t exist, at least, not in our plane of existence, and that it’s all a hoax connected with some 2012 bollocks. But it would be wrong of me to be so uncharitable, wouldn’t it?

Stop press! Update 6 November 2011, 16.27

One of the alleged newly discovered Maya codices, from Nohan Normark’s Archaeological Haecceities

Thanks to Johan Normark, I am going to eat my words. Some evidence has been produced for the existence of the codices (well, one of them, at least) in the form of a photograph. It’s a very odd looking Maya codex. The layout and the artwork are nothing like the four known codices. I suppose we could put that down to having only a very small sample against which to compare it. As I can’t read Maya hieroglyphs, I have no idea whether the text is readable or gibberish. But the illustrations leave me (almost) speechless. We appear to be looking at a treatise on acupuncture! The illustrations are not in a Mesoamerican style but look childish and lacking in the baroque decorative elements that are characteristic of Maya art. It seems safe to conclude that with the photograph than Johan has managed to locate, we are dealing with a very clumsy hoax.

The Hill of Visočica: supposedly the Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun

This story has been around a while now, but I’ve been ignoring it for reasons I don’t fully understand, although I have suspicions that ought to become clear. The first anyone heard about supposed pyramids in Bosnia was in 2005, following a series of high profile public announcements based on a story carried by the popular Bosnian newspaper Dnevni Avaz. This ought instantly to set alarm bells ringing, as this is a typical tactic employed by pseudoscientists: rather than try out your new ideas on your peers (or, in the case of a discovery made by someone who is an amateur in a particular field, on acknowledged experts), you go straight to the mass media to instil your ideas in popular imagination. In that way, when the real experts begin to raise awkward questions, you can claim that they are trying to suppress your revolutionary ideas.

The origin of the hypothesis

Semir Osmanagić (born 1960), the American of Bosnian origin responsible for the ‘discovery’ of the pyramids, interviewed in Slovenija on 10 March 2011

Whose idea was it? According to the Wikipedia page on Semir Osmanagić, Senad Hodović, the director (muzejski savjetnik – direktor) of the cultural and historic heritage museum (Zavičajni muzej) in Visoko (Bosna i Hercegovina), first contacted him about the site. There is little information about Senad Hodović available on the web: most of it relates to the pyramid claims. However, the museum’s own website (which is entirely in Serbo-Croat, a language I do not speak: the language button in the header is not working), appears not to deal with the pyramids at all, although there is plenty of conventional archaeology as well as social history, art and folk life on display on its pages. We must leave the question of Professor Hodović’s involvement as an open question.

If he did approach Semir Osmanagić in the first instance, though, we should ask ourselves why he would choose to involve a metalworking contractor of Bosnian origin but living in Houston (Texas, USA) to investigate a potential archaeological puzzle. Although the Wikipedia entry for him describes him as an amateur archaeologist, his involvement in archaeology appears to date only from shortly before his interest in the formations around Visoko, to judge from his list of publications. It is entirely possible, of course, that the Wikipedia entry is in error and that it was Osmanagić who first contacted the museum.

The hypothesis itself

In brief, Osmanagić claims to have identified six ancient pyramids in the landscape around Visoko, of which the best known is the one he calls Bosanska Piramida Sunca (“Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun”), otherwise known as the hill of Visočica. This is a flatiron formation, standing some 341 m above the valley to its east, although its peak is only 77 m above the plateau to the west. He has named the five other sites Bosanska Piramida Mjeseca (“Bosnian Pyramid of the Moon”, the hill of Plješivica Hrašće), Piramida bosanskog Zmaja (“Pyramid of the Bosnian Dragon”, the hill of Bučki Gaj), Bosanska Piramida Ljubavi (“Bosnian Pyramid of Love”, the hill at Četnica), Hram majke Zemlje (“Temple of Mother Earth”, the hill at Krstac) and Šesta Piramida (“Sixth Pyramid”, the hill at Vrela).

The Illyrians by John Wilkes: one of the lesser known peoples of Iron Age Europe, but not pyramid builders in the remote past!

In initial press releases, the impression was given that a date of c 12,000 BCE was being suggested for the construction of the pyramids. When questioned, Semir Osmanagić clarified that he meant that they were constructed by the indigenous Illyrian population, whose culture he believes he can trace back to the Late Upper Palaeolithic of the region. It should be noted that this early date runs counter to the views of mainstream archaeologists who see Illyrian ethnogenesis as belonging to the Late Bronze or Early Iron Age, around 1000 BCE, while Classical writers located the people in coastal Dalmatia, not central Bosnia. Nevertheless, while Osmanagić has conceded that the pyramids could have been constructed as late as 500 BC, he seems a little ambivalent about so late a dating and still prefers to talk in terms of c 12,000 BCE.

Unlike a lot of Bad Archaeologists, he has actually gone out into the field and excavated sites to retrieve evidence in support of his hypothesis. This is unusual and he deserves respect for actually being prepared to put his ideas to the test. He claims to have detected evidence for artificiality in the pyramids. This consists of the identification of stone paving, terraces, tunnels, blocks and cement. This is the sort of evidence that would convince sceptical archaeologists of human activity in at least modifying natural geological formations to create pyramid forms. Why, then has the archaeological community failed to endorse his hypothesis?

Poor quality evidence

It’s the nature of the data unearthed by Semir Osmanagić that has not impressed archaeologists around the world. During late 2005 and early 2006, Osmanagić mkade statements to the media about the involvement of other archaeologists from around the world, who would bring scientific credibility to his excavations. Unfortunately, several of those named by him denied any involvement in the project (one, Royce Richards, even describes his alleged involvement as “a big load of bollocks”), others (such as prehistorian Anthony Harding) who visited the site failed to see any evidence for artificiality, while yet others (such as Egyptologist Nabil Swelim) failed to present convincing evidence or left the project after discovering it to be a sham.

Interesting geology at Visočica that no archaeologist would mistake for human construction

One of those who might have been expected to uphold Osmanagić’s hypotheses was Robert Schoch of Sphinx-more-ancient-than-Egyptologists-claim notoriety. However, after visiting the excavations in 2006, he declared that all he saw was interesting geology. That is certainly the impression given by photographs published in documents available from Osmanagić’s website, which is public front of his Fondacija Bosanska Piramida Sunca (“Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun Foundation”). The foundation has raised hundreds of thousands of (American) dollars to carry out its research, at a time when Bosnian archaeology is poorly funded and many monuments in the country are at risk following the devastation of the 1990s war.

An amazing resource for debunking the claims of those who promote Osmanagić’s ideas is Le Site d’Irna (it can be read in French, English and Serbo-Croat). Irna has collected just about everything you need to work your way out of the morass of claim and counter-claim about the “Bosnian Pyramids”. There is no real need for me to examine the “Bosnian Pyramids” in detail: everything you need is there.

Interestingly, the web has been the downfall of the claims about these so-called pyramids. In an earlier age, it was relatively easy to promote ludicrous ideas through traditional media and not have them subject to detailed scrutiny. The traditional press still seems to work this way: the lazy churning of press releases with minimal, if any, fact checking is a regular feature of even the quality press, and this is exactly what happened with Osmanagić’s original story. But it was being promoted just as bloggers were beginning to pick up the gauntlet and do the fact checking that journalists so often fail to do. It was bloggers who questioned those professional archaeologists who were said to be working on and even endorsing the sites; it was bloggers who began to unravel the mass of poor data being used in support of the hypothesis; it was the rapid sharing of genuine data around the web that showed how flawed the claims were; it was bloggers who flagged up the curious ideas that Semir Osmanagić has brought to bear on other archaeological questions (of which, more below). While the web is often derided by its critics as being largely populated either by pornography or by conspiracy theories, the advent of more interactive web technologies has taken us into an era in which genuine experts are able to contest the claims of pseudoscientists and fraudulent ‘alternative scholars’.

The cover of Alternativna Historija tom II leaves one in no doubt about how ‘alternative’ its history will be!

Semir Osmanagić

We can gauge something of Semir Osmangić’s understanding of the past from his publications and from his other website, Alternativna Historija (“Alternative History”). Although most of the site is written in Serbo-Croat, it includes the English version of his book The World of the Maya, which gives a flavour of his interpretive framework. He states that “the Maya should be considered watchmakers of the cosmos whose mission it is to adjust the Earthly frequency and bring it into accordance with the vibrations of our Sun. Once the Earth begins to vibrate in harmony with the Sun, information will be able to travel in both directions without limitation”. What on earth does this mean? Vibrations, of course, are a staple of pseudoscience, which pseudoscientists seem unwilling to define more rigorously or to explain how they can be detected. We are treated to discourses on the (fraudulent) crystal skulls, Atlantis and the Pleiadean origin of the Maya people. This is a long way from archaeology, even the shoddiest amateur archaeology! We are without doubt in the murky realm of Bad Archaeology.

Šemsudin Begović with his ‘fossil footprint’

Despite the implausibility of his claims about the “Bosnian Pyramids”, Semir Osmanagić has become something of a celebrity archaeologist in Bosna i Hercegovina, especially as one who can be called on to investigate unusual claims. A recent story (in Serbo-Croat, I’m afraid) involves an unemployed soldier, Šemsudin Begović, who claims to have discovered a billion-year-old fossilised human footprint. Ignored by most archaeologists, anthropologists and museum professionals, he has gone to the press, asking for Semir Osmanagić to validate it. Osmanagić has become something of a hero for Bosnian nationalists, whom they believe to have shown the venerable antiquity of Illyrian culture, making it the mother civilisation of the planet. This, I think, is the secret of his success.

The late twentieth-century history of Bosna i Hercegovina was not a happy one. Torn apart by the civil wars that accompanied the breaking apart of Yugoslavia (a creation of the twentieth century), it saw invasions by Croatian armies from the north-west and a desperate attempt by Serbian nationalists to retain control over what they regarded as “their” territory. Add to this the religious dimension (the Croatians are mostly Roman Catholic, the Serbians Orthodox) and the creation of ethnic tensions with the majority Moslem population of Bosnia, the appalling years of “ethnic cleansing” (a term invented for the mass murder of Bosnian Moslem men and boys) left a country devastated by internal and external tensions. Bosna i Hercegovina is yet to recover properly from this. If Semir Osmanagić is trying to use the heritage of his homeland as a means of reconciliation and fostering a sense of national pride, then he is to be admired. If, however, he sees a situation in which he can profit and make himself famous, then he is to be despised.

It’s my uncertainty about his motives that has held me back from writing about this fraud.

Looking through the search terms by which people have been brought to the main Bad Archaeology website, I’ve discovered that far and away the most common search term is “Dropa Stones”. What are they and why are people in search of information about them being directed to my website? Even more importantly, why is there apparently so little other information out there about them that Bad Archaeology is currently the second link provided by Google (not that I’m complaining about its popularity)?

The story of the Dropa Stones has been around since 1960, when Valentin Isaakovich Rich and Mikhail Borisovy Chernenko published the article “Hypotheses, assumptions and guesses: does the trail lead into space?” in the magazine Новое Русское Слово (Current Digest of the Russian Press, a Russian language newspaper published in the USA since 1910) Volume 12 No 9 (30 March 1960), p 24-6. This was a complete reprint of an article that had originally appeared in Литературная газета (Literaturnaya Gazeta) 9 February 1960, p 2, discussing the speculations of Matest M Agrest (1915-2005) that aliens might have visited earth in the remote past and left traces of their arrival.

An alleged “Dropa Stone”

According to the article, which is summarised on the main website, a Chinese archaeologist named Chi Pu Tei made an unusual discovery in January 1938 in caves in a remote part of the country, in the Bayan Kara Ula mountain range. The caves contained a series of graves, while their walls were decorated with drawings of people with elongated heads together with images of the sun, moon and stars. The graves were found to contain the remains of beings little more than a metre tall, with abnormally large skulls. The archaeologists also found a stone disk a little over 300 mm in diameter, with a hole in the centre. A groove on the surface of the disk spiralled outwards from the centre hole to the rim and back, forming a double spiral. Another 716 disks were found in the caves by subsequent investigations.

Reinhardt Wegemann’s article in the July 1962 edition of Das Vegetarische Universum

Two years later, the story turned up in the July 1962 edition Das Vegetarische Universum, a German vegetarian magazine, which published a story attributed to a Reinhardt Wegemann called Ufos in der Vorzeit? Die Hieroglyphen von Baian-Kara-Ula (‘Ufos in ancient times? The hieroglyphs of Bayan Kara Ula’). Intriguingly, the story is attributed to a news agency DINA, Tokyo; this is neither General Pinochet’s secret police nor the Mexican lorry manufacturer, so I am unsure what it is (it looks as if it could be the Deutsche Internationale Nachrichtenagentur”, although I can find no trace of such an agency). The same story, from the same (apparently non-existent) news agency, again credited to Reinhardt Wegemann, was published in UFO-Nachrichten, a German UFO magazine, in July 1964. The Belgian UFO organization BUFOI published a French translation in the March-April 1965 edition of its newsletter (number 4), to be followed by a Russian translation in 1967, bringing the story full circle.

Vyacheslav Zaitsev (not to be confused with the clothes designer Vyacheslav Zaitsev!)

The Russian translation of the story was condensed by Vyacheslav K Zaitsev in the English language magazine Sputnik: the Russian Digest dating from 1967, where it was called ‘Visitors from outer space: science versus fiction’. Sputnik is a sensationalistic magazine similar to Britain’s Daily Sport and the USA’s National Inquirer (please note that you may not be able to see its pages outside the USA) and the only other sources simply repeat the original 1960 story, with no additional information.

Some have suggested that Valentin I Rich and Mikhail B Chernenko never existed and were pseudonyms. However, they published a book in 1964, Сквозь магический кристалл: повесть о мысли (‘Through the Magic Crystal: a story of ideas’), on artificial diamonds, while Valentin Rich published Охота за элементами (‘The hunt for the elements’) in 1982 and В поисках элементов (‘In search of the elements’) in 1985 and so they appear to have been genuine popular science writers. However, no trace of either Reinhardt Wegemann or the DINA news agency can be found outside the story first published in Das Vegetarische Universum.

What can we make of all this? Firstly, that the story has a very, very dubious pedigree. A speculative article by a pair of science writers seems to have been expanded by an unknown writer into the story published in the name of Reinhardt Wegemann in 1962. Whoever was behind this seems to have been disappointed by the poor take up of the story (a page in a vegetarian newspaper can hardly have had the impact the author of the hoax would have wanted), so he pushed it out again in 1964. Although rewritten, there is a clue in the text that it was originally prepared two years previously: it describes the expedition in which Chi Pu Tei discovered the discs as having occurred forty-five years previously, which would have placed in 1939, rather than 1937 as originally claimed. It seems that 1964 was a better year for tall tales involving crashed UFOs, as the story was taken up in a variety of publications. It was through one of these that Vyacheslav Zaitsev’s popularisation made it known to a wider world, including the up-and-coming Erich von Däniken. From there, the story blossomed, giving rise to at least two works of fiction, one of which was to foist the non-existent Lolladoff Plate on the gullible through the fictional Sungods in Exile.

In a curious twist of fate, the Wikipedia article on the Dropa Stones currently redirects to an account of the Sungods in Exile hoax. In 2007, it carried a fairly extensive page about the stones under the heading of Dropa, with only a brief mention of Sungods in Exile; in 2009, there was a much shorter but completely uncritical page. It is always interesting to watch the evolution of Wikipedia pages. What is unusual in this case is the transformation of a relatively complete and reasonably balanced page into something very bland that does not justice whatsoever to the complexities of the case.

Royston Cave is a fascinating and unusual monument in the small market town of Royston, Hertfordshire. It consists of an artificial bottle-shaped circular chamber in the chalk bedrock, originally around 5.2 metres (17 feet) in diameter and 7.7 metres (25 feet 6 inches) in height, with a band of strange carvings around the lower part of its wall. There are suggestions that it once held a wooden floor above the carvings, while there is an octagonal depression in the centre of the floor and a larger brick-lined depression (known since its discovery as ‘the grave’). It has been mired in controversy since its rediscovery in August 1742 and with each new generation, a new controversy is generated. The current controversy is over its alleged links with the Knights Templar (more correctly, the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon), a medieval religious order suppressed in 1312 and currently a focus of one of the most widely believed conspiracy theories of our times: the “bloodline of Christ”.

The entrance to Royston Cave in an alley off Melbourn Street

Where to start? I have written about the Cave before, complaining that “[t]he first hit on Google takes the browser to a page that mentions the Knights Templar, the Masons, James I (alleged without evidence to have been a Mason!) and ley lines; it concludes that “The Cave is a mystery””. Yes, the Cave is a mystery, but many mysteries are capable of solution and, as this is a site with numerous carvings on its walls, it is one that might be solved by applying techniques of stylistic analysis. Local opinion since the 1970s has held that it was a shrine used by the Knights Templar, although the evidence for this assertion is inconclusive and alternative explanations are possible for its origins and the origins of the carvings (which need not necessarily be connected). Explaining a site that appears to be unique requires judicious use of Occam’s Razor and awareness of how easy it can be to jump to unwarranted conclusions.

The Cave

Had the site been rediscovered in recent years, it would have been the subject of careful excavation, one hopes. As it was rediscovered in 1742, though, it was simply cleared of its contents in the hope of discovering buried treasure. The clearance was done by shovelling the soil that filled the lower eight feet (2.4 m) into buckets hauled up using a block-and-tackle set up over the entrance shaft. The soil is said to have contained a human skull, a number of other bones, fragments of a small brown earthenware cup decorated with yellow dots and a piece of copper alloy plate. None of the material seems to have been kept, as no-one at the time understood that it could yield useful information, although some similar material was found in a twentieth-century excavation of the ‘grave’ in the Cave floor. The initial 1742 clearance does not seem to have been very thorough, as during a visit later in the same year, the antiquary William Stukeley (1687-1765) found a decorative pipeclay object with a fleur-de-lys design at one end, which he interpreted as a medieval seal die.

A slipware cup, dated 1652, in the collections of the Ashmolean Museum

The description of the cup fits a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century type known as slipware. Although slipwares were still in use at the time the Cave was rediscovered, they were going out of fashion and many older forms and styles would have been unfamiliar by then. From the description given, there is no reason to regard this vessel as being any earlier than the sixteenth century; it certainly does not sound like a medieval type (brown with yellow dots was not a fashionable colour for pottery, while mugs were an introduction of the later fourteenth century). Similarly, the pipeclay object found by Stukeley is unlikely to be any earlier than the later sixteenth century. What we can deduce about the material found during the initial exploration of the Cave suggests that the fills date from the late sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, not the Middle Ages. This seems reasonable and fits with documentary evidence that suggests that the Cave was occupied by a hermit c 1506 and was purchased with the Manor by Robert Chester in 1540, after which we hear no more about it. Indeed, the same Robert Chester, who died in 1574, “buylded up in the myddest of Icknell Streate… a fayer House or Crosse… for a clockhowse and a Pryson Howse”, apparently above the site of the cave. This all sounds thoroughly consistent with a hermitage that did not survive the Dissolution of the Augustinian Priory in Royston and was forgotten by the end of the sixteenth century.

St Laurence (above, but damaged) and a king (sometimes identified with the biblical King David)

What this doesn’t tell us, of course, is when the carvings were created or when the Cave itself was dug (assuming that the two are not necessarily connected). The carvings clearly include religious imagery (there is a large depiction of St Catherine of Alexandria, holding the wheel on which she was martyred, St Christopher crossing the river with a baby Jesus on his shoulder, a Crucifixion scene and St Laurence with a gridiron), but there are many others of more obscure character, including depictions of people wearing crowns (and one whose crown hovers above their head), and yet others whose precise interpretation is debatable. For instance, a figure identified by the eccentric and controversial archaeologist Tom Lethbridge as a sheela-na-gig and claimed to have pagan associations does not really resemble any other depiction of these figures (which, despite their supposedly ‘pagan’ meaning, are found in ecclesiastical contexts). The carvings are also naïve in execution: they were evidently not the work of a skilled artist and may not all be by one person. It is possible that they were created over many years, which would explain the jumble and occasional repetition. As the cave was in all probability used as a hermitage, it is reasonable to suggest that the carvings were made by its occupants, perhaps inspired by visions they experienced in the darkness of the Cave.

Given that the carvings were probably created by people who were unversed in the techniques and canons of the high art of their day, how useful is it to apply Art Historical analytical techniques in an attempt to date them? Where they have been used, there seems to be no agreement. Sir Nikolaus Pevsner suggested that they are “probably of various dates between the C14 and C17 (the work of unskilled men)”, while Lilian Redstone in the Victoria County History of Hertfordshire thought that they were “probably carved in the 13th or 14th century”, with which the Hertfordshire Historic Environment Record concurs. Writing for The British Association for Local History, Joanna Mattingley suggested a late fifteenth-century date for some of the carvings and a seventeenth-century date for some letter forms. Evidently, we can’t get very far using stylistic analysis!

Image of a knight wearing plate armour; perhaps St George

Enter the Knights Templar

So why has the standard interpretation of the carvings settled around the idea that they were created by the Knights Templar? There are two principal arguments used in favour of the identification: iconographic and stylistic. In the former case, it is suggested that there is a strong militaristic element to some of the carvings, with depictions of knights in armour. While there are armoured figures in the Cave, they are not numerous and at least one of them has been thought to represent either St George or St Michael (probably the former, as it has a George Cross incised on its chest). They appear to be wearing plate armour, which would date them to the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries, too late for the Templars. Moreover, the distinctive Templar symbol of two knights on horseback, intended to show that their self-imposed poverty forced them to share horses, is completely absent from the cave. As we have already seen, the stylistic arguments are contradictory over the date. An attempt has been made to compare the carvings with others said to have been made by Templars in the donjon of the Tour du Coudray in the Château de Chinon (Indre-et-Loire, France), where the carvings include hearts, Stars of David, grids and geometrical patterns. These are relatively commonplace devices and are not uniquely associated with the Templars. The Templar connection with the carvings has also been thoroughly debunked by Hervé Poidevin, anyway.

Nevertheless, the identification of the carvings in Royston Cave as products of the Knights Templar has become the standard interpretation, at least locally. This is despite the weakness of the evidence in favour of the hypothesis and the arguments in favour of a later date. It therefore becomes all the more disappointing to see further promotion of the cave as “A Knights Templar Mystery of History’ on the Heritage Daily website. The article, by Sue Carter, was published on 3 October and repeats the usual myths about the Templars uncritically, adding other elements of dubious authority into the mix.

Sue Carter states that “Hertfordshire was a county used a lot by the Knights Templar. They had their main Preceptory in England at Temple Dinsley, now a girl’s school, as well as being associated with Hertford Castle, and owning the town of Baldock, just outside of Royston, as well as manors at Chelsing, Bengeo and Weston”. This sentence is full of basic errors. The only association of the Templars with Hertford Castle is that some members of the Order from Temple Dinsley were imprisoned there during the investigation of the Order in 1309; they did indeed found the market town of Baldock, which, far from being “just outside of Royston”, lies some eight miles (13 km) away and was a commercial rival; Baldock originated as part of the manor of Weston granted to the Order in the 1140s.

County Hall, Hertford: why would Knights Templar imprisoned at the Castle build tunnels to a building that did not exist before 1939?

She continues: “[t]unnels were discovered under Hertford Castle in 2004 and have been attributed to the Templars, which ‘connect the dungeons at Hertford Castle with the County Hall and other locations’”. This was remarkably prescient of the Templars: during their brief imprisonment at the Castle, they were able to build tunnels linking their prison with a building that was not to be erected for another 630 years! County Hall was built in 1939; even the Shire Hall, with which Sue Carter may be confused, was not built until 1768-9. Her source for this tale of mysterious tunnels is The Templar Code for Dummies by Christopher Hodapp and Alice von Kannon (2007). A flavour of the book can be gleaned from part of its blurb, which proclaims that it “explores the surprising part the Templars have played in some of the most important historic events of these past seven centuries, including the French Revolution, the birth of groups such as the Freemasons, and even the American Civil War”. One can only say “gosh!”. It doesn’t really sound like a work of scholarly archaeology or history.

Sue Carter then speculates: “[r]umours have grown rife since the discovery of the tunnels including a labyrinth under the county in order to move the vast amounts of treasure that the Templars are reported to have amassed over time. ‘One version suggests that the Holy Grail is concealed there. Another hints that it is the hiding place of the Ark of the Covenant’… But what does all of this have to do with Royston Cave?”. What, indeed! Her suggestion is that the Cave was used as a hiding place by fugitive Templars escaping to Scotland (the modern A10, which passes through Royston, was a Roman road that served as the main road to the north during the Middle Ages). I will await the publication of the discovery of this labyrinth in Hertfordshire Archaeology and History before commenting further.

Back to Royston…

Lime kiln at The Warren, Royston, from a drawing by its discoverer F John Smith

Just when you think it can’t get any worse, we are suddenly regaled with a passage from Joseph Beldam’s account of the Icknield Way, from 1849 (Sue Carter seems not to know that Beldam’s Ichenhilde Street is a bizarrely archaic form of Icknield Way that Beldam used for reasons best known only to himself). Using the passage as evidence for more “bone shafts” in the town, she fails to recognise the description of a well in Beldam’s “depth of 100 feet, terminating in a fine spring of water; but like the others, it had been filled up, at some remote period” or of a chalk-cut lime burning kiln in “a circular cavern beneath a low mound, the floor being grooved”, taking an antiquary from more than a century and a half ago as an authority for interpretations that are clearly wrong. This is poor research!

She suggests that “a full geophysical and archaeological survey of the town needs to be undertaken”, unaware of Neil Smith and Catherine Ransome’s Extensive Urban Survey Assessment Report, available since 2001. This provides a good overview of the town’s archaeology, although it did not attempt “a full geophysical… survey”, as such a project would be ludicrously expensive and of dubious value in an historic town, where a depth of complex stratigraphy can be expected. However, there are unconfirmed reports that a second potential cave has been identified in Melbourn Street. A ground probing radar survey was carried out in February 2008 as part of the filming for a television series, Quest, which promotes a Masonic conspiracy theory about the origins of the Knights Templar; the series was never aired in the UK but went straight to DVD release. In view of the sensationalist nature of the programme, doubt should be cast on the claims.

Conspiracies: the Masons, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail and The da Vinci Code

You know you want to!

I have written so often about the supposed “Bloodline of Christ” that it’s becoming tedious to have to debunk it every time it’s raised. The Prieuré de Sion did not exist before the 1950s, Freemasonry has no connection with the Knights Templar, there is no shadowy conspiracy directing the history of the western world run by Knights Templar/Masons/the Illuminati/the Grand Master of the Prieuré de Sion/a descendant of Jesus of Nazareth (delete or combine as appropriate). Get over it. The Knights Templar disappeared from history following the disbanding of their Order in 1312; Freemasonry as an organised set of beliefs did not exist before the later seventeenth century, at the earliest; if Jesus had one or more children, he could potentially have millions of descendants alive today. There is little point in pursuing these conspiracy theories of history.

Conspiracy theories are popular, though. They have an emotional appeal that mainstream history does not. They place the believer in a privileged position, making them feel wiser than academics, more in tune with the way the world works than the rest of the population and able to see through the guile of politicians. They don’t need to follow the boring, analytical methodologies of traditional historians: in a very telling passage, the authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail dismiss analysis and talk grandly about how “the techniques of academic scholarship were sorely inadequate… we were obliged to adopt a more comprehensive approach, based on synthesis rather than conventional analysis”; in other words, they announced how they were prepared to accept data that in ordinary circumstances really ought to be ignored as worthless. We see exactly the same attitude in Sue Carter’s parting comment that “you just cannot ignore the connections and possibilities of these sites and their hidden histories”, which is typical conspiracist thinking. Many of the connections just don’t exist while the possibilities turn out to be exceedingly remote and not worth pursuing.

It is a sad reflection of modern education that so many people can grow to maturity lacking the critical faculties that would enable them to see through many of the false stories they are sold in the name of history. It is even more worrying that in an age when access to information is almost instantaneous, thanks to the internet, that people either cannot be bothered to check basic facts (a shocking lapse when it comes to journalists) or are prepared to accept anything they read that challenges the mainstream view of how the world works.

An attempt at censorship?

Someone doesn’t want you to read this

Any suggestion that the supposed Templar connection is dubious, even wrong, can be met with hostility. As I state on the main Bad Archaeology site, I work in the local government district in which Royston Cave lies, but when I first posted the original article in March 2008, a complaint was made about it to my manager. Not to me, not via the contact email address on the site or my work email, but to my manager. The complaint came from Royston Town Council, the owner of the cave, which suggested that I was making unkind statements about people in the town that gave the impression were official statements. That was not the case, of course: Bad Archaeology is a site that I run as a hobby, which is done in my own time and which is not in any sense approved or endorsed by my employer. Nevertheless, I placed a disclaimer on the main page. Two more complaints followed, accusing me of misrepresenting the work of others, of failing to read the relevant publications and of pursuing a campaign of disinformation. I happily corrected a few factual errors that were pointed out. However, it has been clear to me since the first complaint that there is a faction that wants to see my article expressing scepticism of supposed Templar links taken down because it questions the current consensus.

Conclusion: the real Royston Cave

Oh, and Royston Cave itself? If you want my opinion, I suspect it originated as a chalk quarry close to an important crossroads before or around the time that the town of Royston began to develop late in the twelfth century. A hermit attached to the Augustinian Priory took up residence, perhaps as late as the late fifteenth century; in 1540, the Priory was Dissolved and there were no more hermits in Royston. The cave filled up with soil and rubbish (perhaps an attempt was made to cover over the Popish images in the seventeenth century) and its existence was forgotten until one day in August 1742…

Götterdämmerung! Even Erich von Däniken can’t resist the lure of 2012

While browsing Real Ufos (“Amazing! – the Best Real UFO videos & news posted from around the world”) yesterday, I came across what promises to be a huge story, if true: New Mayan film claims proof of aliens with government support? It’s a difficult phrase to parse, unfortunately. Is it a “Mayan film” (i.e. one made by Maya people) or a film dealing with the Maya? Are the aliens being supported by the government, or is the proof something that derives from government sources? I suspect the latter options in both cases.

The editor of Real Ufos has the grace to make it a question and the first sentence of the post reads “Is this all Public relations hype or can the movie makers back up their claims?”. Indeed. It’s clear that the editor (who posts weekly updates about the execrable Ancient Aliens series with a much less sceptical tone) has doubts about the item. It’s claimed to come from “a Mexican government official and the film’s producer”. The film in question, which is apparently currently in production, will be called Revelations of the Mayans 2012 and beyond. Unfortunately, the links on Real Ufos don’t work, but it’s easy to search for the film on Google, with about 21,700 results on 1 October 2011.

It turns out that the original press release was published by Reuters and its partner The Wrap on 17 August, although almost nobody seems to have paid it much attention. Undeterred, the film makers issued an updated press release on 26 September, and it is this one that has garnered the most attention. According to the original release, the film will disclose “state-held secrets… protected for 80 years” about Maya predictions of future disasters. It includes statements by Luis Augusto Garcia Rosado, currently Secretario de Turismo (Secretary of Tourism) in the state government of Campeche, who apparently “was quoted in a press release talking about contact between the Mayans and extraterrestrials. That statement has been recalled, and Rosado now paints this as a simpler, more archaeological-oriented documentary”.

Maya Cosmogenesis 2012 by John Major Jenkins. No, I have no idea, either

So, is the film really going to reveal anything about ancient aliens? According to one of the producers, Raul Julia-Levy, “I’m not allowed to speak about that. Everything is going to come out in time, but I can’t comment on aliens or on 2012. I can just say that the Mexican government is preparing to tell humanity and the world things that are critical for us, for the way we live, for the way we’ve been handling the planet”. Still no aliens.

By 26 September, though, Luis Augusto Garcia Rosado was saying that new evidence has emerged “of contact between the Mayans and extraterrestrials, supported by translations of certain codices, which the government has kept secure in underground vaults for some time…” and mentioned “landing pads in the jungle that are 3,000 years old”. Are those involved in the film allowed to talk or not?

The updated version of the press release also quotes Guillermo Novielli Quezada, said to be the Guatemalan Minister of Tourism who, curiously, isn’t mentioned anywhere on the Guatemalan government’s own website. Hmm… Perhaps Google will enlighten us. Of 1010 hits on 1 October, the first takes us to a deleted Wikipedia page, while all the others take us to versions of the 26 September press release, mostly cut-and-pasted in typical churnalist fashion, even in supposedly respectable news sources (such as The Guardian of 29 September 2011). Guillermo Novielli is a real person, though; he replaced the previous “Minister” of Tourism (actually the Director of Instituto Guatemalteco de Turismo, the Guatemalan Institute of Tourism (Inguat)) Dr Jorge Federico Samayoa Prado in July 2011.

Calakmul, Campeche (Mexico)

One archaeological site that is to feature in the film is Calakmul, in the Petén Basin area of… Campeche State. Wait, isn’t that where the Tourism Minister works? And rather than a government secret, kept hidden from the rest of us for eighty years, Calakmul has been a UNESCO World Heritage site since 2002. The city is known to have been founded toward the end of the Middle Pre-Classic Period (c 900-300 BCE) and developed into an important centre similar in status to the better known sites at Tikal or Palenque.

According to the first press release, “the filmmakers are talking to investors and waiting for the government to give them their first look at the material and the site”. So they haven’t even seen the site yet. The discovery of “rooms inside the pyramid that have never been seen or explored before” was apparently made by staff of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (National Institute of Anthropology and History), and although no mention of work at Calakmul appears on its website, it’s entirely conceivable that this is a genuine discovery.

A page from the Dresden Codex, one of only four Maya books to survive

The film is being produced by Raul Julia-Levy, Ed Elbert and Sheila M McCarthy, with Eduardo Vertiz as executive producer. Its director is Juan Carlos Rulfo. None of them is particularly known for documentary work, although it is evident that Sheila McCarthy has an interest in UFOs. That doesn’t disqualify them from making a documentary film, of course.

The question that has to be asked is why this information, supposedly “very important for humanity, not just for Mexico”, is being released through the medium of film. Pitching extraordinary claims straight to the media is often an indication of pseudoscience in action: there is no peer review, no critique of the interpretations on offer, no rival viewpoint. That is what worries me.

Coming from a completely different perspective, UFOHunterVlog has a rather foul-mouthed bilingual rant about the fact that it’s not being released as a news item, but as a documentary film (I like the way that certain English profanities seem to turn up in the Spanish version: what a wonderful cultural export!). But he has a point. If this material is genuine, then why is it first being promoted through cinemas?

And, even if the whole alien angle turns out to be a false lead, what are we to make of Raul Julia-Levy’s claim that he has proof that the Maya wanted to lead the planet for thousands of years? How could a society consisting of warring city states, which rarely achieved any kind of political unity over large areas, lead the planet? Did they even conceive of a world extending beyond Mesoamerica? And what of their escape from “men of dark intentions”? There are still Maya people in Mexico, Guatemala and Belize, some of whom continue to fight the governments of these nations, refusing to submit to the European invaders of five centuries ago.

And the 2012 connection? The film makers say that they want their documentary to be released before 21 December 2012, the end of a Long Count Cycle. It’s a cynical ploy to engage with the conspiracy theorists who are deluded that the world will come to an end on that day.

Once again, we have over-hyped press releases, claims, counter claims and retractions. Is this really going to be a documentary, or it is hype for a forthcoming work of fiction? It wouldn’t be the first time that a “documentary” has turned out to be something quite different.

“Biblical archaeology” is in “scare quotes” because it’s a highly problematical concept, but more of that later. What I want to address first is what ought to be a first principle for anyone reading about claims for discoveries that are supposedly related to the Bible (Hebrew or Christian) or any religious text, for that matter. It’s this:

If a discovery confirms your pre-held religious beliefs, then it’s wishful thinking at best and even more likely to be a fraud.

As a principle, I think it’s a good one. But it’s one I have rarely, if ever, encountered in so-called “Biblical Archaeology”, which is a sub-discipline that is characterised by a distinct lack of sceptical thinking. Why is that?

Let’s answer that by looking at some recent claims: the “Jesus family tomb”, the “lead codices” from Jordan and the interminable searches for “Noah’s Ark”.

The “Jesus family tomb”

The so-called ‘Jesus family tomb’

In 2005, the Canadian investigative journalist Simcha Jacobovici (know to television viewers as The Naked Archaeologist, a rather unappealing designation) entered a tomb originally found during construction work in 1980 at Talpiot (‏תלפיות‎), a suburb of Jerusalem. It seems that he did this without the permission of the Israel Antiquities Authority (העתיקות רשות), which makes it an illegal act. The purpose was to make a documentary with the film director James Cameron, as Jacobovici believed that it was the tomb of Jesus of Nazareth and other members of his family. The documentary, The Lost Tomb of Jesus, was released in March 2007, with a follow up book co-authored by Jacobovici and Charles R Pellegrino, The Jesus Family Tomb: the discovery that will change history forever (there are different versions of the subtitle that are less emphatic than this!) that was released a month later.

Both the book and the film have proved controversial, with criticism focusing on statistical claims that allegedly show that the combination of names found on ossuaries recovered from the tomb has only a one in six hundred chance of occurring in first century CE Palestine. They take this to be proof that the tomb really was that of Jesus and his family. There are problems with their argument, though: the statistics used by Jacobovici suggest that there were at least a thousand men named Yeshu‘a/Yehoshu‘a bar Yehosef alive in the first half of the first century CE. As more than twenty-two ossuaries of the right date bearing the name Yeshu‘a/Yehoshu‘a have been found in and around Jerusalem, several of these ought to belong to a Yeshu‘a/Yehoshu‘a bar Yehosef. Jacobovici’s statistical claims only stand up if Yehosef is counted twice (once on the ossuary belonging to Yeshu‘a bar Yehosef and once on the ossuary naming Yoseh, who cannot be shown to be the father of Yeshu‘a)/

The inscription supposedly naming Yehosu‘a bar Yehosef

To make matters worse, they include several additional names in their analysis: Mariamenou-Mara and Yehudah bar Yeshu‘a. The reading of the first name is disputed, her identity as the wife of Yeshu‘a bar Yehosef is entirely speculative and the suggestion that she was Mary Magdalene is also pure speculation. The second name is included to create a son of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Why? There is no biblical authority for this move. Instead, it relies on an idea first mooted in the notoriously slipshod but best selling The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln, that Jesus fathered one or more children, creating a dynasty that survives to the present day. Following the unprecedented success of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, the plot of which is based around the conspiracy at the heart of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, the idea that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married has now entered popular discourse.

It is not unfair to say that Simcha Jacobivici could not have made his documentary without Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln’s unfounded speculation about the marital status of Jesus. His contribution to the debate their book engendered uses statistics in a dishonestly tendentious way. Using this manipulated data, he claims to have found proof that a perfectly ordinary tomb in a Jerusalem suburb housed data that completely undermines the core belief of Christianity: that Jesus rose from the dead and ascended physically into heaven. Regardless of the religious dimension, which seems to be to create a Jesus-without-divinity, the claim that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene is a core prop in the hypothesis by which the Talpiot tomb is identified as that of Jesus’s family. This is an example of using one unsubstantiated hypothesis as a prop for another in order to claim that the original hypothesis is thus proven.

The “lead codices” from Jordan

One of the alleged lead codices from Jordan

In March 2011, the Jewish Chronicle Online, followed by several newspapers (including The Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraph), carried a story of an amazing new discovery: a group of lead codices or ‘books’ that were claimed to contain Christian texts older than the writings of St Paul (generally reckoned to be the oldest part of the New Testament). Curiously, although the early stories places Robert Feather at the centre of the recognition of the books, The Daily Telegraph focuses on a press release issued by David and Jennifer Elkington. Robert Feather is a metallurgist by profession and a member of the West London Synagogue who has published The Mystery of the Copper Scroll of Qumran, which links the treasures listed in the scroll with ’ḫnjtn (Akhnaten) and his city of ’ḫtjtn (Akhetaten). He links the codices with the rebellion of Simeon bar Kokhba in 132-136 CE rather than with early Christianity. David Elkington describes himself as “an Egyptologist, specializing in Egypt-Palestinian links that have inevitably drawn him into the field of Biblical studies” and is the author of In the Name of the Gods: the mystery of resonance and the prehistoric messiah, which is described as a “highly acclaimed academic thesis on the resonance and acoustical origins of religion”.

It’s only the start of the story and already we are in murky waters. Who is the discoverer of the codices? Both claimants refer to their owner, a Jordanian lorry driver called Hassan Saeda (or Saida), while the Elkingtons were in possession of two of the books at the time of their interview with The Daily Telegraph. The power of blogging was soon brought to bear on these issues. It turns out that David Elkington is a graphic designer originally known as Paul Elkington and that his “thesis” was self-published; he had originally contacted Biblical scholar Professor Peter Thonemann of the University of Oxford on 15 September 2010, sending him images of what were clearly the same objects, only they were said to have been found in Egypt. Thonemann was able to identify the Greek text on one of the codices as a bungled copy of part of a Greek inscription published in Inscriptions grecques et latines de Syrie XXI: Inscriptions de la Jordanie, 2: Region centrale, 118. It was thus clearly a fake. Nevertheless, he put out his press release on 22 March 2011 knowing this.

The Elkingtons in a portrait by The Daily Telegraph

In detailing the strange behaviour of David/Paul Elkington, blogger Thomas S Verenna notes that what is “scandalous is the complete lack of journalistic integrity, honest research, and thorough fact-checking. These codices might never have been heard of if the authors of the reports for BBC and Fox News (among others) had just checked with the academic community before publishing the “find”… After examining the almost immediate response to the codices by Biblioblogs, one is confronted with the value of a form of media, which is not peer reviewed or looked over by an editor, which can bring about correct historical information to a large audience quickly. Perhaps blogging isn’t enough; but it is something”.

I couldn’t agree more. What this story illustrates is one of the principal mechanisms by which Bad Archaeology and other pseudosciences are promoted: go straight to the press with a fantastic story secure in the knowledge that the hacks will do little to check its veracity. This is the practice of churnalism, whereby press releases are simply copied-and-pasted or occasionally very lightly redacted for publication. No scholarly articles are written to confirm the legitimacy of the finds, no data is made available for qualified scholars to examine, overblown claims are made for the significance of objects that are not available for examination and those making the claims inflate their own scholarly credentials.

The ‘lead codices’ are a feature of Biblical archaeology that is all too common: the allegedly important object that is supposed to rewrite our understanding of early Judaism/Christianity that turns out to be a fake. The ossuary of James the Just, the Jehoash inscription and the Turin Shroud are just some of the examples of frauds intended to bolster the faith of the pious by providing evidence that their beliefs are grounded in reality or to push a particular version of the past to discredit the religious beliefs of others. In some cases, the motive is simply greed.

Noah’s Ark

The Entry of the Animals into Noah’s Ark by Jan Breughel the Elder (1613)

I’ve covered this topic ad nauseam both on this blog and on the main site, but it’s a hardy perennial of Bad Archaeology. Scarcely a year passes without some new announcement that it’s been located. That’s not what I want to discuss this time, though. What I want to touch on is the curious belief among some of the faithful that objects mentioned as being significant to the religion of the Hebrews ought still to exist somewhere, as I touched on in this post some time ago.

Noah’s Ark makes a brief but significant appearance in Genesis VI.14-VIII.19. We’re told what Noah was commanded to use in his construction. The main material was “gopher” (גֹ֔פֶר) wood; nobody actually knows what sort of wood this was (Wikipedia’s suggestion that it may be a Hebrew transliteration of Assyrian giparu, claimed to mean “reeds” is wrong, as the word means “residence of the enu-priest”, “part of a private house”, “meadow” or “taboo”: this is why Wikipedia entries always need to be checked against more authoritative sources!). Pitch is also mentioned, while it had a “covering” that could be “turned back”. Although it is described as a massive boat, it was supposedly made from perishable materials: wood, even when coated in pitch, rarely survives in archaeological contexts and tends to survive only in very specific conditions (extremely dry, freezing or anaerobic situations). Nothing in the text of Genesis suggests that it was anything more than a temporary home for Noah, his family and the animals they cared for during the Flood. Its usefulness over, it was simply abandoned on the “Mountains or Ararat” by those who descended to the lowlands to repopulate the earth.

Mount Ararat: move along please, there’s no Ark to see here

So why do people want to go in search of it? Putting aside the question of whether the “Mountains of Ararat” (הָרֵי אֲרָרָט) in Genesis VIII.4 refer to the mountain we call Mount Ararat today, by what mechanism do they see the Ark surviving? And surviving as a complete or near-complete ocean-going vessel? Should its preservation be viewed as a miracle performed by Yahweh?

If I were to initiate a search for, say, the shells of the eggs laid by Leda, Han Xiang’s gourd without end or Mami Wata’s grooming set, it is unlikely that I would get many enthusiasts to join me or donate money to my expedition. It is only the privileged position that Hebrew mythology enjoys in Western culture that convinces some people that Noah’s Ark once existed in the real world.

The underlying problem with “Biblical Archaeology”

A great deal of what is presented to the public as “Biblical Archaeology” bears little relation to what other archaeologists recognise as archaeology. The spinning of data to push a particular and tendentious interpretation, the outright forgery of artefacts and the naïve belief that certain objects ought to survive to the present day are not characteristics of scientific archaeology but are typical of pseudoscience.

A great deal of what passes for “Biblical archaeology” consists of a search for sites and artefacts that ‘confirm’ what the Bible says; indeed, this was one of the inspirations behind the development of archaeological excavation. Following the questioning attitudes to religious certainty inculcated by Enlightenment writers, the faithful wanted to demonstrate that their beliefs could not be shaken by rational inquiry but, rather, would be confirmed through it. Unfortunately, the reverse has tended to happen. Archaeology has not confirmed the glories of the Davidic kingdom, has failed to produce evidence for Noah’s flood, has not revealed the location of Jesus’s crucifixion, has not identified a Pharaoh of the Exodus. And it probably never will.

A great many of its practitioners start out from a particular religious viewpoint (usually orthodox Judaism or a Christian sect) and aim to find evidence that backs up their literalist interpretation of the sacred texts. This seems to have been at least part of the motivation behind the forgery of the ‘James the Just ossuary’ and other dubious artefacts traced back to Oded Golan (the other being financial, of course).

In an important book, The End of Biblical Studies (Prometheus, 2007), Biblical scholar Hector Avalos argues that:

Since archaeology has failed to reveal much biblical history that matters, biblical archaeology… not only has ceased to be relevant but it has ceased to exist as we knew it. Instead of revealing biblical history, archaeology has provided a fundamental argument to move beyond the Bible itself. If… biblical archaeology has to serve theology once more to be relevant, its days as a secular academic field are numbered. Either way, biblical archaeology ended in ruins—literally, socially, and metaphorically…

So our purpose is to excise from modern life what little of the Bible is being used and also to eliminate the potential use of any sacred scripture as an authority in the modern world. Sacred texts are the problem that most scholars are not willing to confront. What I seek is liberation from the very idea that any sacred text should be an authority for modern human existence. Abolishing human reliance on sacred texts is imperative when those sacred texts imperil the existence of human civilisation as it is currently configured. The letter can kill. That is why the only mission of biblical studies should be to end biblical studies as we know it.

Strong words. And perhaps a little over-the-top. But, as Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman show in The Bible unearthed: archaeology’s new vision of ancient Israel and the origin of its sacred texts (2001), archaeology paints a coherent picture of the development of the Jewish people that is completely at odds with the claims of the Bible. No amount of fraud, wilful misinterpretation of data or quests to find the objects that will ‘prove’ a particular religious viewpoint will bring back the innocent and ignorant days when the Bible could be read as literally true.