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nside 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.
| |
"Archeological
hoaxes and fantasies are certainly not in the past."
|
"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."  |
