Comment on this article Inside the Blue Book
Unearthing the Truth
by Jennifer L. Holley
December 2002 ANTH 172a: Great Hoaxes and Fantasies in Archaeology
Faculty: Marcello A. Canuto On Marcello Canuto’s first day of teaching “Great Hoaxes and Fantasies in Archaeology,” he asked his students to fill out a survey about popular and academic theories of archeology. He discovered that, of his 90 students, 25 percent believe (either strongly or mildly) that there is good evidence for the existence of “lost” continents like Atlantis, and that 20 percent believe an ancient curse placed on the tomb of King Tut actually killed people.
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“Archeological hoaxes and fantasies are certainly not in the past.”
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“Archeological hoaxes and fantasies are certainly not in the past,” says Canuto, who is now in his second year of teaching at Yale. The class explores the disconnect between academic and popular conceptions of archeology. “We look at egregious examples of hoaxes and see how academic archeology deals with them,” says Canuto. “I’m not only there to show how archaeology has debunked these hoaxes and fantasies, but also to show students how archeology is both logical and scientific.” Some topics include the Piltdown Man (a fabricated skull that was “found” and “proved” that the earliest humans had a very large brain); the Kensington Runestone, which was “discovered” in Minnesota in 1898 and “affirmed” that the Vikings had arrived in the Midwest; and Atlantis. That final fantasy first appears in Plato’s discourse as an ancient land which fought a war with Athens and then disappeared into the sea. “Plato used Atlantis as a pedagogical tool,” says Canuto. “But because the fantasy came from such an important philosophical source, it was later interpreted as if real.” Canuto wants students to think about the mechanics by which information is distributed, and why people know, for instance, more about Indiana Jones than A.V. Kidder, who revolutionized American archeology. He believes archeologists need to make their work more accessible. The payoff for the public? “Popular theory always explains things away,” Canuto says. “But fact is even more interesting than fiction, because it has to make sense—it opens your horizons to things you might not have imagined before.”  |
