Pic: The stage in the auditorium where the talk was held These were the posters we found on telephone poles which alerted us to this event Last weekend while out on the town, my husband and I came across several posters for a speaking event titled, “Atlantis: Myth or Reality?” As you know by now, pseudoarchaeology is an interest of mine and Atlantis is one of the most popular pseudoarchaeological theories out there. So of…

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Image: from Arnold (2006: 154-155) Following the Fox announcement I ran a quick poll on Twitter asking who would be interested in a genuine archaeological discussion of pseudoarchaeology You may have heard the recent announcement that Megan Fox (yes, from Transformers) is producing and staring in a new show for the Travel channel. Titled, “Mysteries and Myths with Megan Fox”, the series features Fox as she “re-examines history” with the help of various experts. Who these experts…

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Pic: My swag bag! Well, bag for collecting the swag In the blink of an eye it went by, my first experience attending the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) annual conference. The SAA conference is one of, if not the largest archaeology conference in the world. You have thousands of archaeologists convening in one location for four days of panel discussions, research presentations, and research posters. Plaid shirts and Blundstones everywhere you look. Bars setting…

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Pic: These are all walrus bones. The question is, how from how many walruses? At work today I found myself presented with a great, quick teaching opportunity. I’m in the midst of cataloging the artifacts collected from the first part of a large field project we conducted during October/November 2017 (with part 2 coming up this spring/summer). My work is kind of split into two parts per bag of artifacts – identifying what’s in the…

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Pic: I’ve had my blog for a little under 2 years and in that time I’ve had 16,278 visitors from countries all around the world (with the majority of views (6479) having come from Canada). Don’t doubt the reach of social and digital media! Last night I had the wonderful opportunity to be a guest on the Women in Archaeology podcast. Emily, Kirsten, Serra, and I had a lot of fun discussing one of my…

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Pic: In my almost two years of blogging I’ve written 41 posts and it’s definitely been a learning experience getting to that point! There is no doubt that blogs are popular. They have an enormous reach, with approximately 88 million posts being published and around 409 million people reading blog posts every month (these stats are specific to WordPress, which is one of, if not the most popular blog-hosting service) Blogs are everywhere, sometimes hosted by…

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Pic: Tutankhamun’s iconic funerary mask Undiscovered; Treasure Hunter Security #1 – Anna Hackett (2016) It’s time for my first edition of Digging in the Wrong Place! In case you missed my initial post about it, my plan is simple: I’m going to read a bunch of books (mostly fiction) involving archaeology and then talk about the archaeology involved, paying careful attention to what the authors get wrong. And then I’ll explain why it’s wrong. It’ll be fun, I…

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Pic: Still from the documentary On January 14th, 2018, the popular CBC program “The Nature of Things” aired an hour-long documentary titled, Ice Bridge. This documentary sought out to explore in detail the Solutrean Hypothesis, the brain-child of archaeologists Dennis Stanford and Bruce Bradley. Well, in fairness the hypothesis came about in the 1930’s but quickly died out. Stanford and Bradley have since resurrected it. This hypothesis states that the first people to settle in the…

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Pic: Image from Jason Colavito’s blog discussion on a 2017 study into American beliefs by Chapman University If you’ve read about the new blog series I’ll be starting in 2018, “Digging in the Wrong Place”, than you definitely saw the word ‘pseudoarchaeology’. Maybe you’ve even heard of it from other sources, or under other names (fringe archaeology, alternative archaeology, cult archaeology). Simply put, pseudoarchaeology refers to archaeological theories and/or interpretations that are rejected by the…

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Pic: Image from Jason Colavito’s blog discussion on a 2017 study into American beliefs by Chapman University If you’ve read about the new blog series I’ll be starting in 2018, “Digging in the Wrong Place”, than you definitely saw the word ‘pseudoarchaeology’. Maybe you’ve even heard of it from other sources, or under other names (fringe archaeology, alternative archaeology, cult archaeology). Simply put, pseudoarchaeology refers to archaeological theories and/or interpretations that are rejected by the…

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