Forbidden Archeology's Impact

Forbidden Archeology's Impact
Author	Michael A Cremo
Published	1998
Publisher	BBT Science Books
Pages	592
ISBN	0892132833

Forbidden Archeology's Impact: How a Controversial New Book Shocked the Scientific Community and Became an Underground Classic is a 1998 book by Michael A Cremo. It is not an argument but a dossier: a compilation of the reception of his and Richard L. Thompson's Forbidden Archeology (1993), reproducing the reviews, private correspondence, broadcast transcripts and newsgroup exchanges that followed it, together with Cremo's replies — many of which, he says, journals declined to print.

The subject of the book, in other words, is what happened when the first book appeared. That makes it an unusual document, and its interest does not depend on whether one accepts the archaeology. Whatever else it is, it is a substantial primary record of how a discipline responds to a challenge it regards as illegitimate.

Background: the first book and the knowledge filter

Forbidden Archeology assembled several hundred nineteenth- and early twentieth-century reports of artefacts and human remains in strata far older than the accepted human timeline permits — the Calaveras skull, the Table Mountain mine artefacts, eoliths, and much else — and argued that this evidence had not been refuted so much as quietly dropped.

Cremo's name for the mechanism is the knowledge filter:

I call this process "knowledge filtration." Evidence that conforms to a dominant theory passes through this intellectual filter very easily, but evidence that radically contradicts a dominant theory is filtered out.
— Michael A. Cremo

It is worth being precise about what this claims, because it is often read as an accusation of conspiracy and Cremo mostly does not make one. The filter as he describes it is structural — closer to confirmation bias and the theory-ladenness of observation than to concealment. His paradigm case is the Smithsonian archaeologist W. H. Holmes writing in 1899 of the geologist J. D. Whitney: "Perhaps if Professor Whitney had fully appreciated the story of human evolution as it is understood today, he would have hesitated to announce the conclusions formulated, notwithstanding the imposing array of testimony with which he was confronted." Cremo's gloss: if the facts do not agree with the favoured theory, then the facts must go.

The concept is not original — it restates Kuhn on paradigms and Fleck on thought collectives in popular form — but the phrase appears to be Cremo's own.

The Vedic framework

This should be stated plainly at the outset, because it is not incidental and because Cremo states it plainly himself. He is a member of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness and of the Bhaktivedanta Institute, writes under the devotional name Drutakarmā dāsa, and describes himself as a Vedic creationist. Forbidden Archeology is dedicated to A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, and Cremo has written that its main text "is solely dedicated to documentation and analysis of evidence consistent with Vedic accounts of extreme human antiquity."

The Puranic chronology — kalpas of 4.32 billion years subdivided into manvantaras of some 306 million years, within each of which human beings appear essentially as they are — is what makes the very old anomalies significant rather than merely puzzling. The positive account is set out in Human Devolution: A Vedic Alternative to Darwin's Theory (2003), in which consciousness precedes matter and human beings have devolved from a spiritual origin rather than evolved from primates.

Cremo's own defence is that provenance should not disqualify an argument: "That our theoretical outlook is derived from the Vedic literature should not disqualify it." The fair reply, made by Kenneth Feder, is that the objection is not to the authors being Hindus but to a framework that shaped which anomalies counted while remaining largely undeclared in the body of the work.

What the book contains

The compilation is reproduced at length rather than summarised, which is the source of both its value and its shapelessness. It includes academic reviews with Cremo's replies, private letters, radio and television transcripts, and Internet newsgroup postings.

The NBC broadcast

The best-documented episode, and the heart of the book, is the reaction to The Mysterious Origins of Man, an hour-long NBC special hosted by Charlton Heston, broadcast on 25 February 1996 and repeated on 8 June. Cremo and Thompson were its first interviewees and much of its content came from Forbidden Archeology.

The response was organised and public. NBC's own press release for the repeat carried the headline "Controversy surrounds The Mysterious Origins of Man — university profs want special banned from the airwaves", and the producer Bill Cote said the makers "were not prepared for the enormous cry of outrage from some members of the scientific community." The palaeontologist Jere Lipps of Berkeley circulated material on scientific discussion lists to generate further pressure; Cremo reproduces an email of 17 June 1996 from Allison R. Palmer, president of the Institute for Cambrian Studies, asking the Federal Communications Commission to censure NBC, compel it to broadcast repeated public apologies, and fine it. The FCC took no action.

Two qualifications belong here. The FCC petition rests on Cremo's reproduction of the letter; the independent record confirms an organised letter-writing campaign led by Lipps but does not corroborate the FCC filing. And not every critic sought suppression — one wrote that he did not encourage censorship of this kind and would rather see the programme shown in classrooms and then thoroughly debunked. A book about the knowledge filter is more persuasive, not less, for containing that.

Reviews and letters

The reproduced reviews range from the dismissive to the seriously engaged, and the book's value lies partly in that range.

At one end, Jonathan Marks in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology called the first book "a veritable cornucopia of dreck". Richard Leakey, in a letter reprinted here, wrote that "a quick glance at some pages suggests to me that your book is pure humbug and does not deserve to be taken seriously by any one but a fool" — a sentence whose evidential value to Cremo lies in the admission that opens it.

At the other end are responses that treat the work as an object of study. The Harvard anthropologist William W. Howells wrote to Cremo that the book "represents much careful effort in critically assembling published materials", before setting out exactly why he could not accept its conclusion: modern humans appearing before any possible ancestors "would be devastating to the whole theory of evolution", and would demand a process incompatible with evolutionary theory as understood. Tim Murray, in the British Journal for the History of Science, judged that it "provides the historian of archaeology with a useful compendium of case studies in the history and sociology of scientific knowledge" — while also calling it a piece of creation science not based on Christian premises. Jo Wodak and David Oldroyd, in Social Studies of Science, answered the question whether the book contributed anything with "a guarded 'yes'", noting the authors "appear to have gone into some historical matters more deeply than any other writers of whom we have knowledge." Marylène Patou-Mathis, in L'Anthropologie, found its documentary richness "not to be ignored". Kenneth Feder, hostile in substance, allowed that "in distinction to the usual brand of such writing, the authors use original sources and the book is well written."

The mainstream case against

A wiki sympathetic to heterodox work is more useful to its readers, not less, for stating the opposing case at its strongest. The substantive objections are not about tone.

The Calaveras skull — the most-cited anomaly — is a documented hoax. William H. Holmes visited the site in 1899 and found the associated fauna genuinely ancient while the skull matched recent local Native American material; a San Francisco newspaper reported in 1869 that miners had said they got up the affair as a joke on Whitney; radiocarbon dating in 1992 returned an age under about a thousand years.
The Table Mountain mortar is made of andesite — the same material as the strata above the find spot — and the mine's own tunnels supply the route by which it could arrive there.
Eoliths can be produced accidentally: at the Timlin site a student generated indistinguishable specimens by rattling the source material in a dustbin.
Context is the central archaeological objection. The accepted record rests on assemblages — tools with butchered fauna, living floors, multiple independent dating methods, hominin remains in the same deposits — whereas the anomalies are almost all isolated, out-of-context, single-method finds.
The biological objection is the deepest. Modern humans coexisting with other hominins would not refute common descent at all. The claim only bites at the very old dates — but humans at hundreds of millions of years would predate the vertebrates, which leaves the nested pattern of comparative anatomy, genetics and biogeography without any explanation. Cremo offers no alternative account of animal evolution.
An unfalsifiability objection was pressed by Wade Tarzia in Creation/Evolution: when a Table Mountain tablet was judged to have been incised recently with a steel blade, the authors suggested the critique was a distraction and that steel tools in the Tertiary would themselves be the finding. "Take your pick, you cannot go wrong."
And the filter argument has a self-undermining edge: the book's own examples include positions the profession did overturn, and if twentieth-century field reports are untrustworthy enough to doubt, so are the nineteenth-century ones the case depends on.

Cremo's best counter-argument concerns the Laetoli footprints, and it deserves recording. The prints are strikingly modern; the Australopithecus foot bones are not, having a long divergent hallux. When Cremo put this to Ron Clarke at the World Archaeological Congress, Clarke replied that the trackmaker walked "with his big toes pressed close in to the side of the foot, and with his other toes curled under" — an answer Cremo did not find satisfactory, and one that a reader may judge for themselves.

Reception of this volume

The compilation itself was reviewed thinly but instructively.

The most useful assessment is A. Bowdoin Van Riper's in Isis, the flagship journal for the history of science. He records that the material appears in full, and — significantly for a book whose subject is fair dealing — that "Cremo's use of quotations is (judging from his treatment of my own brief correspondence with him) scrupulous." His verdict on genre is that the book "is not, in itself, a work on the history of science", but that the raw data it makes available "could, however, inform studies of such topics as disciplinary 'boundary work', fringe science, popularization, and the intersection of science and religious belief."

Van Riper also lands the sharpest philosophical objection anyone has made to Cremo: that his "explicit use of social constructionist ideas to cast doubt on mainstream archaeology conclusions also invites closer analysis — especially in relation to the strict Baconian empiricism that he promotes as proper scientific methodology." The tension is real. The knowledge-filter argument requires that observation be theory-laden; the presentation of the anomalies requires that facts speak plainly for themselves.

Writing in Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, Dominic Caraccilo called it "an unusual book, possibly an inaugural work of this kind", while faulting its form: "nothing short of a menagerie of disjointed letters and reports… readers should not expect the book to develop any central argument." Tom Morrow reviewed it hostilely for the National Center for Science Education. In the alternative press, Atlantis Rising covered it warmly under the title "Academe Lashes Back".

The fairest summary is close to Van Riper's: of little value as history of science, of real value as a primary-source record of boundary-work — which is a reason to keep it, not to discount it.

A note on authorship

Forbidden Archeology's Impact is by Cremo alone. Richard L. Thompson (1947–2008), his co-author on the 1993 book, was a mathematician with a Cornell doctorate who published in statistical mechanics and mathematical biology, took the name Sadaputa Dāsa, and was a founding member of the Bhaktivedanta Institute. He is discussed throughout this volume but did not write it.

Links to Purchase Book

Forbidden Archeology's Impact at Amazon.
Publisher's page, which reproduces several of the reviews in full.