Hancock strikes back!
Graham Hancock Reacts to SAA Archaeological Record Articles on "America Before"
In his rebuttal, Hancock is notably more concerned with threats to his book sales than to the content of the criticisms against him, devoting significant space complaining about Carl Feagans’s negative review of
America Before on Amazon than to any specific criticism of his work. He is upset that “319 visitors have upvoted Feagans’ hostile review,” making it the top review for the book despite “79 per cent” of reviewers giving the book five-stars.
Having been involved with this project since the beginning, I can tell you that Hancock is wrong to think that the special section is a panicked response, a “sure sign that the archaeological establishment feels the ground moving under its feet.” Instead, it exists almost entirely because most archaeologists are not aware of or actively engaged with popular “alternative” descriptions of the past, and the section was intended to raise awareness of the growing gulf between academic and popular understandings of the past. I didn’t choose the topic of my article; John Hoopes asked me to write on the long, sordid history of the Mound Builder myth in the frame of
America Before, tying my article to my upcoming book,
The Mound Builder Myth. I also didn’t choose the term “pseudoaracheology,” and it is debatable how to define the difference between “pseudoarchaeology,” “alternative archaeology,” and whatever popular quasi-mystical reimagining of the past we find in some of Hancock’s more spiritual works.
Instead, let me present what Hancock says about me:
Meanwhile blogger Jason Colavito, who also contributes an article to the issue, strives mightily to accuse me of condoning white nationalist racism while being obliged to admit that: “Hancock is careful to attribute his lost civilization to a Native American origin.
I guess Hancock missed the important sentence that followed: “By building on a scaffolding of discredited nineteenth-century views like those I examine in my book, Hancock serves to perpetuate Victorian assumptions about the limits of Native potential, despite his own stated respect for indigenous peoples the world over.” In other words, I didn’t accuse him of
condoning white nationalist racism. Instead, he is like my college classmate, ignorantly test-driving racism without fully understanding the origins of the claims he puts on offer. Remember, in
Fingerprints of the Gods Hancock explicitly said he wanted to “pay tribute to Ignatius Donnelly,” who declared Atlantis the homeland of the white race, and twelve times described his lost civilization as belonging to “white” people. By
America Before he had changed his tune and made them Native American, but that didn’t really change the history of the myths that he has upcycled into an upscale Pleistocene analog for globalization and climate change. ...
http://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/g...haeological-record-articles-on-america-before