This is as thorough and systematic a rebuttal of persistent stupidity as could be constructed. Feder's relatable delivery makes it pleasant reading as well, and his snarky, pop-culture-laden presentation is funny and immediately understandable. While some reviews have taken exception to Feder's level of snark, I am struck by his _restraint_; as an archaeologist and anthropology professor, I have had to smile politely in the faces of folks holding forth these very fantasies too many times to count and the building rage is real. Simply not knowing something is very innocent ignorance, but fiercely defending baseless and timeworn illusions in the face of solid evidence to the contrary is willful stupidity and worse than tiresome. The step-by-step dismantling here is refreshingly....scientific.

To be sure, Feder's clear statement of why so many of these hoaxes and myths are not only wrong but insulting and worthy of spleen is a major takeaway and one I fully share. Racism, scriptural literalism, and assumptions that past humans were clueless are beneath contempt and deserve no academic recognition: not all ideas are of equal merit. To whit:

"But in the face of...assumptions that degrade and diminish the inherent human capacity to invent, create, build, cooperate, and rise to the occasion to solve great technological challenges, both in the present and in the past, I maintain that meanness and inflexibility are entirely appropriate responses." (p. 215) ( )

Michael Shermer mentioned this book in his Why People Believe Weird Things, and I was curious of enough to read it. One of the few reasons Shermer gave at the end of his book, the only one that made any sense to me, was “because they want to”. Feder says of the Piltdown hoax: “Many accepted the Piltdown evidence because they wished to—it supported a more comfortable view of human evolution.” A lot of hoaxes are successful because they have enough believers who want to believe them.

Of true archeological works, to which some ascribe nonsensical explanations, Feder says, “Let’s face it; I’m an archaeology nerd. Though I am a professional archaeologist with more than thirty years of experience excavating, analyzing, and writing about the human past, I continue to be awestruck when I am in the presence of the remnants of antiquity.” Which is why he dismantles the lunacies and brings to a general audience the frauds perpetrated by enterprising hoaxers. He also looks at the nonsense explanations of the like of Erich von Däniken’s, who can’t seem to understand simple ingenuity and would rather posit ancient aliens visiting and building pyramids and other constructions. Feder offers critical thinking exercises after each chapter, and answers frequently asked questions in a summary.

So why commit the frauds? Money is the biggest motivation; fame, of course; sometimes nationalism, and racism. And

Unfortunately, religion has also played a significant role in archaeological fraud. Many religions have their roots in remote antiquity. Some of their adherents dabble in archaeology, trying to prove the validity of their religious beliefs or claims through the discovery of archaeological evidence. Martin Luther, leader of the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, asked, “What harm would it do if a man told a good strong lie for the sake of the good and for the Christian Church . . . a useful lie, a helpful lie, such lies would not be against God; he would accept them”

Some just romanticize the past that never was, and then there are the plain old nut jobs.

To uncover frauds, science plays a big role. “The techniques used to get at knowledge we can feel confident in—knowledge that is reliable, truthful, and factual—are referred to as science. In large part, science is a series of techniques used to maximize the probability that what we think we know really reflects the way things are, were, or will be. Science makes no claim to have all the answers or even to be right all the time. On the contrary, during the process of the growth of knowledge and understanding, science is often wrong.”

Feder even tells prospective con artists the “Rules for a Successful Archeological Hoax” (not really...these are just some of the downfalls when a hoax is unveiled)
Give the people what they want - A hoax works best when the public has a predisposition to accept it in the first place.
Don’t be too successful - too many finds draw the wrong kind of attention
Learn from your mistakes - debunking hoaxes tells future hoaxers what not to do

Pyramids, Atlantis, ancient aliens, crop circles, Turin shrouds, psychic archeology, an ark of Noah, Feder covers a lot of ground (accidental humor.) The past is open to interpretation, unfortunately.

Ultimately, then, we get the past we deserve. In every generation, thinkers, writers, scholars, charlatans, and kooks (these are not necessarily mutually exclusive categories) attempt to cast the past in an image either they or the public desire or find comforting. Biblical giants—some, apparently, walking their pet dinosaurs—large-brained, ape-jawed ancestors, lost tribes, lost continents, mysterious races, and ancient astronauts have all been a part of their concocted fantasies.
But I believe, and have tried to show in this book, that we deserve better—and we can do better. We deserve a veritable past, a real past constructed from the sturdy fabric of geology, paleontology, archaeology, and history, woven on the loom of science. We deserve better and can do better than weave a past from the whole cloth of fantasy and fiction. Finally, I hope I have shown in this book that the veritable past is every bit as interesting as those pasts constructed by the fantasy weavers of frauds, myths, and mysteries.

( )

Despite being intended - and I gather widely used - as a university textbook, this is written in a breezily informal and rather personal style. I might have prefered a bit more restraint, but Feder can be rather funny so the style's not without its virtues.

Each chapter deals with some particular archaeological or palaeanthropological fraud or fringe theory; there are no "mysteries" covered in the sense of genuinely unexplained phenomena. While international favorites like the pyramids of Egypt do feature, most of the examples relate to the prehistory of the United States. This presumably primarily reflects the fact that Feder is a US author writing first and foremost for a US audience, but it might have been interesting if he'd commented on whether pseudo-archaeology is particularly prevalent in America: it's certainly easy to get the impression that it is from the book.

The book will infuriate you if you should be silly enough to believe in Atlantis, ancient astronauts helping to build the pyramids, or the like, but for the rest of us it's an entertaining and educational look at fringe ideas.

This was my textbook for an archaeology class. I loved it! It was easy to follow, easy to read, and while it didn't go into depth with things, it did give a very good overall view of the arguments. ( )

We were a little at cross-purposes, the author and I - he's interested in proving that these beliefs are silly, and I'm interested in why people believe these things in the first place. It was a decent introduction to some of the weirdnesses of popularized pseudo-archaeology, but not quite what I was looking for. (Also fairly interesting as a historical artifact: I had no idea there was a guy going around in the eighties telling people that humans originated in California.) ( )