Pseudoarchaeology comes in many shapes and forms but relies on the same core argument: People of the past did not have the knowledge, technology, and/or capability to achieve all that they are said to have accomplished, so someone or something else was involved. Ancient alien proponents will tell you Egypt’s great pyramids, for example, or Peru’s Nazca lines were really due to extraterrestrials, while hyperdiffiusionist proponents will tell you they were built by residents of Atlantis, or another “highly advanced civilization” that lived more than 13,000 years ago. Archaeologists are often accused of conspiring to hide the “truth” of these histories.
These pseudoarchaeological arguments may seem to be simply fun to entertain. But they are invariably heavily biased against Black people, Indigenous peoples, and other people of color (BIPOC), who are doubted to have been responsible for their own histories. Archaeological sites from Africa, Asia, and the Americas are often put forth as proof of external interventions, while the achievements of those who lived in ancient Greece or Italy, for example, are rarely questioned.
news.sky.com
