Today in my pseudoarchaeology class we touched on a rather somber case study: The use and abuse of archaeological claims by the Nazi party and their predecessors in the early 20th century. The Nazi party directly used archaeology to justify many of their worst atrocities. 1/10 In 1935, Heinrich Himler founded a group called the Ahnenerbe explicitly focused on conducting archaeological work and related racist science tied to the goals of the party. The Ahnenerbe later became a wing of the SS showing how central to the party these activities were. 2/10

Today in my pseudoarchaeology class we dove back into the "Moundbuilder Myth" and the role it played in the history and politics of the U.S. This is the debunked notion that mound sites found across the eastern US were built by people other than the Indigenous inhabitants 1/9 Earlier this semester I tweeted a thread talking about the connections between this Moundbuilder myth and the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the horrendous loss of life associated with that law (explicitly promoted using the Moundbuilder myth)

https://twitter.com/PattMeeples/status/1560360769769783296

2/9

Today in my Pseudoarchaeology class we talked about the Piltdown Hoax. In 1912 an amateur archaeologist C. Dawson claimed to have found part of a human-like skull in Sussex, England that was ultimately claimed to be a 550k year old human ancestor. There was just one problem 1/7 It was a fake! The skull and other bone fragments were later shown to have come from different species and included modern bone, fossils from other animals, and teeth that had been drilled and filled with rocks and other materials. Dawson himself is the likely culprit 2/7