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Cult and Fringe Archaeology

"Archaeology is an extraordinarily diverse branch of human knowledge and exploration. From the field technicians knee deep in mud in a Hebridean winter to the Classical specialist examining frescoes on a wall at Pompeii, from the geneticist tracing bovine DNA relationships to the linguist attempting to refine our understanding of Maya inscriptions, the range of specialisms and viewpoints is enormous. Nevertheless, there are commonalities of approach and boundaries to that diversity, mostly connected with what may be termed ‘the scientific method’, the use of naturalistic explanations based on uniformitarian principles (in other words, including only processes that can be observed in the world today). These boundaries are best explained by showing what archaeology is not. Once an investigator of the past begins to bring in explanations that involve unknown civilisations, extraterrestrial contact, the inerrancy of religious texts or the operation of paranormal powers, we can see instantly that they belong to a very different intellectual tradition from mainstream archaeologists. The orthodoxy – itself a mass of contradictory, competing and often abstruse arguments – regards these other investigators as being beyond the pale of its scrutiny for the most part; if these other views are discussed at all, they are relegated to ‘fringe’ or ‘cult’ status."
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Cult and Fringe Archaeology
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