John Hoopes Profile picture
Nov 15 16 tweets 5 min read
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. Image
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. Image
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

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More from @KUHoopes

Nov 17
One of the debates in archaeology right now is about the origins of “urbanism”. Some identify Neolithic/Chalcolithic sites such as Nebelivka in Ukraine as among the first places where urbanism occurred, but most people have never even heard of it.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebelivka…
The site of Talianki, in Cherkasy Oblast, Ukraine, was the location of a major settlement of the ancient Cucuteni-Trypillia culture, dating to around 3800 BCE. It is currently the largest-known Neolithic settlement in all of Europe.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talianki_…
Questions about urbanism extend to Amazonia, where archaeologist Michael Heckenberger and his colleagues have identified Kuhikugu and connected sites in the Upper Xingu region of Brazil as a center of pre-European, Indigenous urbanism.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuhikugu
Read 4 tweets
Nov 17
Remember when the world was going to end on December 21, 2012?

Remember when we were all going to experience a transformation of consciousness?

It’s been ten years. What happened?

My chat with @KurlyTlapoyawa and @tlakatekatl
#AncientApocalypse
talesfromaztlantis.com/?episode=episo…
Graham Hancock was a huge booster of the imaginary Maya Apocalypse prophecy, dedicating many pages to it in “Fingerprints of the Gods” (1995), which contributed to a counterculture mythology that began in the 1960s and 1970s.
#AncientApocalypse
psychologytoday.com/us/blog/realit…
This excellent book, edited by Joseph Gelfer, was finally published in 2011, but hardly anyone read it. Most of it had been written in 2009, but publication was delayed.

The #AncientApocalypse is yet another #CountercultureApocalypse, but on Netflix.

amazon.com/2012-Countercu…
Read 7 tweets
Nov 17
For those interested in Egyptology, especially the dating of the Sphinx and the Great Pyramid, here are some recommendations of reliable web resources and publications, starting with archaeologist Mark Lehner’s AERA website.
#AncientApocalypse
aeraweb.org
“Who Built the Sphinx?”, an article by archaeologist Mark Lehner.
#Egyptology
#AncientApocalypse
aeraweb.org/wp-content/upl…
As for debunking claims about water erosion and weathering on the Sphinx by John Anthony West & geologist Robert Schoch in the 1990s, as boosted by Graham Hancock, here’s Mark Lehner’s response:

'Notes & Photographs on the West-Schoch Sphinx Hypothesis'

academia.edu/36580864
Read 11 tweets
Nov 16
From Alan Landsburg to Graham Hancock.

Yes, it’s about aliens.
#AncientApocalypse ImageImage
To my knowledge, Graham Hancock has never retracted his claim for the original, really, really #AncientApocalypse: the one that destroyed a civilization on Mars, causing the surviving refugees to flee to Earth, where they founded an Ice Age civilization.
science.nasa.gov/science-news/s…
The great Carl Sagan addressed the nonsense about the Face in Mars in his brilliant book published in 1995, the same year as Graham Hancock’s “Fingerprints of the Gods”.
amazon.com/Demon-Haunted-…
Read 4 tweets
Nov 16
For filmmakers, journalists, and pop culture and television historians:

Graham Hancock’s #AncientApocalypse is the direct, lineal descendant of “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau” (1968), created by Alan Landsberg, the grandfather of #RealityTV.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Land…
Alan Landsberg also created the “In Search of…” series, narrated first by Rod Serling (of Twilight Zone and Night Gallery) and then by Leonard Nimoy (of Star Trek).

It ran from 1977 to 1982.

The series presented pseudoarchaeology and pseudoscience.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Search…
Alan Landsberg’s successful #RealityTV genre of speculative documentaries and contrived situations led directly to the creation of The Apprentice, which ran from 2004 to 2017.

I blame Trumpism on “reality TV,” a lie even in its name.
#AncientApocalypse
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Appre…
Read 6 tweets
Nov 15
What troubles me the most about Graham Hancock is that he is metaphorically nodding and winking to white supremacists who know the tropes and phrases, ones that have been used over and over and over again in the worst possible ways, from British Israelism to Nazis.
British Israelism is the belief that the people of Great Britain are "genetically, racially, and linguistically the direct descendants" of the Ten Lost Tribes of ancient Israel.”

It was the ideological milieu within which pyramidology was born.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_I…
Graham Hancock is a pyramidologist. Pyramidology figures prominently in #AncientApocalypse
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramidol…
Read 4 tweets

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