Tiompan wrote:
E.P. Grondine wrote:You and I have a different definition of "ground breaking".
I am thinking in terms of paradigm shift.
For all his faults, Colin Renfrew qualifies in that category.
Styart Piggott also did ground breaking work in "The Druids".
James Churchward (Mu) and Ignatius Donelly (Atlantis) outsell all of those you mentioned.
Clearly , I wasn't talking about fantasy . Renfrew despite the clangers is a fine writer and archaeologist . Piggots Druids was pop single .
Do Paradigm shifts apply to pseudo science, and should we care ? Sales , what have they got to do with it ?
George
Hi George -
You have to remember that the public as a whole do not differentiate between fantasy and psuedo-science as you and I do. You have to remember that for me, the DENIAL of recent impacts killing people is a fantasy - a mental escape mechanism from a real hazard.
Sales indicate what people think, or want to think, their fascinations.
Yes, paradigm shifts do occur in cult archaeology. For example, we're now seeing much of the same old nonsense being re-packaged in terms of extra-terrestrial contact. This has to do with the commercial ties recently established.
Wolter's work is much the same, where Norse contact with North America is being repackaged in terms of Masons and Templars. Dan Brown started that with his book DaVinci Code, the themes for which he admits to receiving from David Hatcher Childress, who in turn plagiarized them from the earlier authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail; but their work gave some hint of Hitler's deep ties with the Theosophist cult the Thule Society.
You need to PM me with an e-mail address, and I'll send you my history of it, and you'll learn how dangerous cult archaeology is. As usual, I take the most interesting material and make it terribly boring.
Like I said before, it's all great fun until the bodies start piling up.
I'll disagree with you on both Renfrew and Piggott. I've had brief contact with Renfrew several times; the list of possible interactions between two peoples, set out in my book "Man and Impact in the Americas" is a far more useful apparat than Renfrew's simple diffusion/migration paradigm, which does not work at all in the Americas, and fails entirely to describe the first peoples interactions.
As a matter of fact, now that you've brought it up, Renfrew's simple paradigm does not work particularly well in Europe either. I remember one session at the AAA in DC, where Renfrew was prattling on about diffusion, while another excavator was showing a site with the a large number of skeletons piled in a garbage pit.
OAS, if you're following this thread, you want to PM me with an e-mail address as well.
