An Archaeologist Challenges Mainstream Scientific Thinking (2017)

What he and other pseudoarchaeologists claim to be orthodoxy in the discipline is actually a representation of how archaeology was in the 1960s and 1970s. Anthropology, which archaeology became a sub discipline of in the 1960s, was firmly structuralist at the time. Structuralism is the theoretical paradigm that sees culture as comprising two intertwined components: intangible conceptual constructs, and expressions of those constructs such as language, symbols and myths. Dualities in myth in particular were latched onto as the scaffolding that uphold the underlying cultural constructs; if you could identify these pillars of culture then it was though that you could truly understand it. This was later recognized to be total garbage since it completely ignores the lived experiences of actual people, it pretends to be omniscient, it considers cultures as pure entities that live in isolation relative to one another, it flattens culture as a single way of life with no possibility for multiplicity to exist. Post-structuralism noted that there are blatant disconnects between so-called cultural norms and the actual experiences of individual people.

Structuralism was dismissed during the 1970s and being overly prescriptive, and rightly so. Graham Hancock criticizes the prescriptive terms that archaeologists in the 1960s devised, but simply replaces them with a different, much more arbitrary, completely unverifiable, utterly wacko, and much more prescriptive cultural framework, rather than consider that the whole notion of thinking in such a way is just plain wrong. He is stuck in the 1970s, subscribing to an outdated ideology that no archaeologist or anthropologist today would accept (though some aspects do creep in, especially in introductory pedagogical settings, and when similarly-minded systems theory approaches are uncritically applies, especially by theoretical physicists who claim to know everything).

It's sad really, because this perspective is so common, largely due to completely outdated representations of archaeology in the media. For instance, in Stargate the show has an hour for the crew to land on a planet, identify the conflict, and resolve it based on an off-hand remark made by a local that is strategically written into the show to express the cultural structure of the week. Why do all the planets they visit have only a single culture? Because it needs to be monolithic in order to meet the basic formula of the show. This is the reddit version of culture, which happens to be completely wrong, completely outdated, and persists largely to legitimize nationalist policies (it meshes very well with the implicit notion that nations have only one culture, expressed through famous cultural landmarks, and that 'lesser' cultures deserved to be displaced due to the fact that they did not meet the arbitrary criteria that distinguish so-called 'civilizations' from those miscellaneous 'simple tribes').

Does this negate the work that has come out of archaeological research? Not necessarily.

Also note that genetics has been harnessed extensively for political purposes, especially in tandem with archaeology (see: eugenics). Does that de-legitimize its genuine practical applications today, when conducted in an ethical, respectful and regulated manner?

edited to convey what I actually meant to say, and mistyped due to being drunk.

And that's true of all archaeology, really. Archaeologists create the best narratives we can based on the limited evidence we've got. There is no single and knowable truth about the past, only our best attempts at understanding it. Archaeologists have accepted this for decades, you just seem out of the loop.

One should not ignore scientific consensus as a suggestion of what beliefs to examine.

But one should ignore it as evidence in favor of a belief once you've decided to examine it. Scientific consensus is not an argument at all.

Doesn't sound super conclusive.