Know Your Archaeoporn: Impossible Knowledge Part I

Archaeology is also afflicted with similar ideology, coming from a variety sources on the fringe of the scientific community.  Just as in the case of biology and the other physical sciences, the intelligent design of archaeology is specious, unscientific, and many times suffers from a similar logical impossibility to the intelligent design of biological creationists. 

One of the currently popular forms of this logic comes in the form of Afrocentrism, which seeks to attribute the intellectual, architectural, social, political, economic, and in short all developments of the Greco-Roman world to Black Africans.   This position is often defended by those who see all contrary claims as racist, descending from the well documented actions of European and American civilizations toward Africans.   However, as scholars such as Mary Lefkowitz have shown, these claims often are little more than a modern political rewrite of history.  Discussions of Afrocentrism have shown that claims are often dependant on misdating, misrepresentation of archaeological discoveries, ignoring clear differences between ideas that Greeks and Romans are supposed to have stolen from Africans, and at times a misunderstanding of the actual historic makeup of populations in Northern Africa. 

In here article in the book Archaeological Fantasies, Lefkowitz presents the claims of Afrocentrists for the existence of Greek Pyramids mirrored from Egyptian designs, as evidence of the fallacies behind these theories.  To keep it short, these archaeological remains clearly differ from Egyptian pyramids in form, use, and size.  This is certainly enough to show a lack of intellectual borrowing.  Yet, Afrocentrists have built up a model around these remains in order to support their ideology.

This may seem to be a simple dispute of archaeological interpretation.  However, some aspects of Afrocentrism are more obviously the simple teaching of lies.  One common claim is that Aristotle, tutor of Alexander the Greek and subsequently a figurehead behind Greco-Roman thinking, learned all he knew from the Library of Alexandria, in Egypt.  However, this cannot possibly be true, as the library was built after Aristotle died, under the direction of one of his students.  When Lefkowitz made this statement, which truly shows the flawed methodology of Afrocentrists, the veracity of either side was never noted, instead she was simply branded a racist. 

This is the problem with Afrocentrism.  It is not necessarily about searching for answers, but is instead a politically agenda.  In pushing this agenda, Afrocentrist teachers, scholars, and lay individuals deny the ability of humans to innovate and develop ideas, instead looking to earlier cultures for a root source behind knowledge.  In this process, Afrocentrists ignore not only a large amount of historic and archaeological fact; they ignore the important contributions of entire cultures.   The result is, as Lefkowitz has noted, the teaching of a “myth”. 

Of course, if archaeologists or historians were to discover Africa and Egypt as a home for Western society, through Greece and Rome, this would only lead a whole new group of pseudo-historians to ask where these groups attained their knowledge.  Never willing to sit still, a variety of armchair historians such as Graham Hancock, have already looked to the origins of the pyramids out of Africa.  It is to this that I will return in the next “Know Your Archaeoporn”.  After this, I plan to discuss the origins of Ethiopian religion in pseudo-archaeology and the lost tribes of Israel in the Americas.  Anthrogenic intelligence can only go so far, at least according to pseudo-archaeologists.  So, it is inevitable that I will eventually have to leave the earth, heading for the extra-terrestrial origin on intelligence in the Americas and the Near East.   Finally, modern pseudo-archaeology has come all the way back to the origins of intelligent design.  This will lead to a discussion of divine creation of artifacts. 

Lefkowitz, Mary R. Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth As History. New York: BasicBooks, 1996.

Lefkowitz, Mary R. in Fagan, Garrett G. Archaeological Fantasies: How Pseudoarchaeology Misrepresents the Past and Misleads the Public. London: Routledge, 2006.