Thread by @KUHoopes

In our critiques of Graham Hancock and his fans, the role of Ancient American magazine doesn’t get mentioned often enough. Hancock, like the magazine, is hyperdiffusionist.
ancientamerican.com

The banner on the Ancient American website features “American Antiquities and Discoveries in the West”, a book by the extremely racist 19th century author Josiah Priest, whose name few people recognize today.

You can find digital facsimiles of Josiah Priest’s book in the Internet Archive. It went through multiple editions in the early 1800s. In It, Priest attributes archaeological sites and artifacts to anyone *but* the ancestors of living Native peoples.
archive.org/details/americ…

Josiah Priest’s racism is some of the ugliest I’ve ever read. In “Bible Defence of Slavery,” which also went through multiple editions, there is a visceral loathing of Black people, who he describes as a separate species, closer to monkeys than humans.
archive.org/details/bibled…

For what it’s worth, Josiah Priest not only viciously attacks and disparages Native and Black people, but in the early 19th century he also published a popular book on cryptozoology whose legacy survives in crap on cable TV today.
archive.org/details/wonder…

In his other writings, Josiah Priest fanned the flames of anti-Native westward expansion, repeating and amplifying gruesome, graphic accounts of the massacres of white people, much like right-wing media today amplifies crimes by Blacks on whites.

One of the founding co-editors of Ancient American magazine was former neo-Nazi leader and convicted pedophile Joseph Collin, who writes about Atlantis and Lemuria under the pen name Frank Joseph.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Col…

I don’t think Graham Hancock has ever published in Ancient American, but the hyperdiffusionist themes in the magazine and his own books and documentary are the same: ancient white people were the culture bearers.

That is, Ancient American and Graham Hancock are communicating to a common audience: one that wants to hear narratives about superior ancient white people bringing knowledge and civilization to “simple hunters and gatherers”.

This interest has had a continuous presence in American culture for centuries, with Josiah Priest being a prominent antecedent to Frank Joseph and Graham Hancock beginning about 200 years ago. There is nothing new about it.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josiah_Pr…

This is why this excellent book by @JasonColavito deserves much more attention than it has received. 19th century “Mound Builders” are Graham Hancock’s “pyramid builders”.
amazon.com/Mound-Builder-…

If you want to research these racist themes in the pages of Ancient American magazine, you can get a compendium of its contents for just $9.95. This should be of interest to anti-racism scholars in History, American Studies, Indigenous Studies, and African American Studies.

The Internet Archive is also an excellent resource for researching these topics. In addition to facsimile’s of Joseph Priest’s horrible books, it has a digital facsimile of Squier & Davis’ “Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley” (1848).
archive.org/details/ancien…

This book by Squier & Davis documented the extensive ruins of sites built and occupied by Native people in the eastern United States. It was published more than a decade *after* the implementation of the 1830 Indian Removal Act and the Trail of Tears forced migrations.

This Wikipedia article helps to put Squier & Davis’ publication in context. I’m sure most Graham Hancock fans are unaware of it.
#AncientApocalypse
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_M…

They buy his claims that archaeologists have conspired to hide the truth about the ancient Americas. No, we are not the ones who have been conspiring.
#AncientApocalypse