Indiana Jones: Myth, Reality And 21st Century Archaeology

In this episode, Dr. Schuldenrein and special guest Dr. Kenneth Feder deal with an assumption that underpins a lot of pseudoarchaeology: the notion that the archaeological record is full of evidence of technological achievements that “primitive” people would not have been capable of on their own. By this reckoning, the native people of North America were not capable of constructing the burial and temple mounds that are found in the American midwest and mid-south, and the pyramids were too big an achievement for the ancient people of Egypt or Mexico. Therefore, they must have been taught the requisite technology by folks from Atlantis…or maybe it was an extraterrestrial peace corps that visited Earth and taught ancient people how to build them. Again, the underlying libel is that ancient people (almost always non-white, non-Europeans) were too dumb to progress without some outside help. Why do these assumptions lead to bad archaeology? How does pseudoarchaeology effect the perception of archaeology as a field