what do aliens have to do with the pyramids
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One afternoon in June, I found an email in my inbox from Atlantis Rising: The Research Group. The weblog and YouTube channel claims to "challenge orthodox thinking" and archaeologically explore questions about human history that are "still largely neglected by academia." Questions like: "Were aliens involved?"
It might be easy to simply dismiss organizations that push speculative conspiracy theories while presenting themselves every bit purveyors of supressed knowledge. But what caught my attention in this electronic mail was a section advertising a video interview with Frank Joseph.
Since 1987, Joseph has published several books, mainly focused on the mythical continent of Atlantis. From 1993 to 2007, Joseph was also the editor-in-master of the pseudoarchaeological Ancient American magazine. Maybe more importantly, Frank Joseph is the pen name for Frank Collin, who was the former coordinator for the American Nazi Party and founder of the National Socialist Party of America. This is who Atlantis Rising was recommending to their audience.
For a long time, pseudoarchaeology was pushed to the fringe by archaeologists as something non worth their attention. But the fringe is where ideas can fester and get dangerous.
The thought of a lost city or continent called Atlantis persists in the public imagination. George Grie/Wikimedia Commons
As an archaeologist currently working on my doctorate, I have spent the final year examining the means various groups, such as white nationalists, apply pseudoarchaeology in their worldviews. Understanding this feels particularly important today, because the recent increase of such groups in the United states. According to a 2019 report from the Southern Poverty Law Middle (SPLC), the number of white nationalist hate groups in the United States increased by 55 percent between 2017 and 2019.
Pseudoarchaeology comes in many shapes and forms but relies on the same core argument: People of the past did not accept the noesis, technology, and/or capability to achieve all that they are said to have achieved, so someone or something else was involved. Ancient alien proponents will tell y'all Egypt'due south great pyramids, for example, or Peru's Nazca lines were actually due to extraterrestrials, while hyperdiffiusionist proponents will tell y'all they were congenital by residents of Atlantis, or another "highly advanced civilisation" that lived more 13,000 years ago. Archaeologists are often accused of conspiring to hide the "truth" of these histories.
These pseudoarchaeological arguments may seem to be merely fun to entertain. Only they are invariably heavily biased against Black people, Indigenous peoples, and other people of color (BIPOC), who are doubted to have been responsible for their ain histories. Archaeological sites from Africa, Asia, and the Americas are often put forth every bit proof of external interventions, while the achievements of those who lived in ancient Greece or Italy, for example, are rarely questioned.
Inorth other words, these arguments are ofttimes racist.
Westhile arguments almost extraterrestrial or Atlantean ancestors may seem outlandish, some people do believe in these arguments. Chapman University in California, which conducted the Survey of American Fears between 2016 and 2018, found in 2018 that 57 percent of their respondents believed that ancient avant-garde civilizations such as Atlantis existed (a 17 per centum increment from 2016), and 41 pct believed that aliens visited the Earth in the ancient past (a 14 percent increment from 2016). These have become more than only beliefs: They're realities for those who take embraced them.
50-seven per centum of survey respondents believed that aboriginal advanced civilizations such as Atlantis existed.
Pseudoarchaeology is useful to white nationalism specifically because information technology casts incertitude on the achievements of BIPOC communities, opening the doors to rewriting history through a white power lens. The SPLC has noticed this and written about connections betwixt pseudoarchaeology and far-right ideologies such as antisemitism and white nationalism. White nationalism is a pro-white racial ideology that shares many interests with white supremacy, such as anti-immigration stances and beliefs that the interests of white people must exist placed beginning.
White nationalists as well encourage enhanced protections and rights to defend what they see every bit the "purity" of the white race, a pseudoscientific concept built on extremely reimagined views of history and genetic ancestry. A core belief of white nationalism is a conspiracy theory referred to every bit the "great replacement," which suggests a "white genocide" is happening: that white people are nearing extinction and need to exist protected.
Though anthropologists and geneticists have long noted that race is non a genetically defined concept but rather socially defined, white nationalists accept sought to genetically ascertain and support the concept of a "pure white race." For case, at-home genetic ancestry tests accept get pop with white nationalists, who reinterpret the results in a variety of ways to support their beliefs that a "pure white race" exists and that, without protection, this special race will exist replaced.
Although aboriginal alien theories have been discussed on white nationalist websites such equally Stormfront and the Renegade Tribune, it is hyperdiffusionist theories—the distribution of cultural traits or people spread beyond vast distances—near Atlantis, Aryans, and Solutreans that are specially popular with white nationalists in North America.
Hyperdiffusionist theories are the easiest to adapt to the conspiracy of replacement: ancient white Atlanteans, Aryans, or Solutreans traveled to N America first and were "replaced" by Indigenous peoples. For instance, books and articles by Frank Joseph and Patrick Chouinard, a regular correspondent to the Renegade Tribune, adhere to early on 20th-century Nazi beliefs that white Aryans were descended from the people of Atlantis, who purportedly as well spread to the Americas tens of thousands of years ago and brought engineering and wisdom with them. Joseph and Chouinard argue that these white descendants in Due north America were replaced over time past Indigenous peoples.
The Solutrean civilisation lived in Europe some 20,000 years agone. In that location is no disarming testify that they were the first settlers of North America. Sémhur and MPants at work/Wikimedia Commons
Southwardimilarly, writers on Stormfront fence in back up of the Solutrean hypothesis, a hypothesis widely rejected past archaeologists that proposes people from the Solutrean culture of southwestern Europe were the get-go to settle on the east declension of Northward America between 17,000 and twenty,000 years ago. On Stormfront, science suggesting the Solutrean people had darker skin is ignored, and instead people fence that white Solutreans in North America were abruptly and violently displaced by Ethnic peoples.
Archaeological show does not support these theories. While the full story of life during the Pleistocene in the Americas is still evolving, there is no show for a fierce deportation of white Solutreans anywhere in N America, at whatsoever signal in time. The continent was always the land of Indigenous peoples.
Explore more, from the archive: " Archaeologists Should Be Activists Too "
Pseudoarchaeology contributes to the marginalization of BIPOC communities past denying their histories and instead reattributing them to mythical continents or fifty-fifty extraterrestrials. White nationalists utilize this denialism to rewrite—or rather "re-white"—history to bolster their own systems of power.
The public and the discipline must challenge pseudoarchaeology and the violent, white power structures that oftentimes use it to back up their ain goals. It is through these challenges that all of u.s.a. tin can support recentering the voices of marginalized groups in telling their own histories and ensure those are the histories being heard.
In this article, white is styled lowercase throughout, contrary to SAPIENS' house style , at the request of the writer.
Source: https://www.sapiens.org/archaeology/pseudoarchaeology-racism/
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