The Boston Globe, 07/10/2007

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/letters/articles/2007/10/07/beset_by_pseudo_archeology/

Beset by pseudo-archeology

October 7, 2007

I APPLAUD Eric H. Cline's effort to inform the public of the sensationalist, bogus "archeology" that bedevils the legitimate work of biblical and Near Eastern archeologists ("Raiders of the faux ark," Ideas, Sept. 30). I hope that his efforts will help stem the tide of irrational and mystical claims about the past. Let us also hope that it is not too late to make such efforts.

Unfortunately, the purveyors of pseudo-archeology are sometimes aided and abetted by publishers and broadcasters who pander to the public's appetite for the "alternative" explanations of our shared past offered by those looking for Atlantis, Noah's Ark, or Jesus' tomb. The media sources that offer up a stream of nonscientific claims have abandoned peer review, and often common sense. They publish such claims not out of conviction, but for profit. There is a reason to be worried about this trend, because the genuinely interesting discoveries of archeologists end up being ignored or derided by skeptics and the public alike.

The late Carl Sagan warned us in 1995 about the unsettling abandonment of the rational explanations offered by science for the wishful thinking of creationists and New-Agers who offer up explanations of the past that are, at best, untestable and unverifiable and, at worst, untrue and dangerous.

CURTIS RUNNELS
Professor of archeology
Boston University
Boston