Calling Ancient Apocalypse Racist Doesn't Help
The Ancient Apocalypse Phenomenon
Ancient Apocalypse, a Netflix series hosted by self-described investigative journalist Graham Hancock, was ranked in the platform’s top 10 shows for around a week in mid-November, 2022. Hancock argues in the series that a complex, sea-faring Ice Age civilization perished due to a catastrophic comet impact that occurred around 12,800 years ago. Their seaside cities disappeared beneath the rising waters of the world’s oceans, and in the aftermath this civilization spread their knowledge to every corner of the globe, thus explaining geographically distant but superficially similar phenomena such as pyramids, earthen mounds, monumental architecture, and enigmatic iconography linking most continents.
The show’s success is remarkable. As far as I know, there’s never been another series about archaeology watched more than Ancient Apocalypse. Hancock was also granted incredible access to some of the world’s most interesting and impressive archaeological sites, collecting breathtaking aerial footage and devoting a large production budget to digitally render truly impressive (if dubiously accurate) reconstructions of archaeological sites. In these ways, the show should be celebrated by those invested in the past. It will undoubtedly create more archaeologists and historians, increase cultural tourism, and perhaps even place heritage management on the path towards greater funding by governments globally.
The problem is, of course, that the show is mostly not true. Contra Hancock’s suggestion that archaeologists are at least ignoring if not willfully obscuring evidence for his Ice Age civilization, archaeologists would love nothing more than for evidence of Hancock’s fantastical scenario to emerge from their excavations. Archaeologists are curious people, thirsty for discovery. But they’re also rigorous, critical thinkers, and Hancock’s story just doesn’t add up, mostly because there’s no physical evidence that supports it. As an archaeologist, I like to think of Hancock’s work as great science fiction, in which unrelated facts are sewn together to form a plausible if unlikely story about the origins of human civilization. As far as I can tell, Hancock sincerely believes the ideas he promotes, so he would probably bristle at this comparison. But I sincerely think that his work shows an enormous amount of creativity and cleverness that, if not taken too seriously, can be enjoyed on those merits alone. Other archaeologists disagree.
Archaeology’s Ire
Archaeologists began criticizing Ancient Apocalypse online even before it was released, and this wasn’t their first go-around with Hancock. In 2019, a group of archaeologists, geneticists, and journalists devoted an entire issue of The Archaeological Record to refuting pseudo-archaeology, inspired by the publication of Hancock’s America Before. Many of the critiques leveled at Hancock over Ancient Apocalypse took shape for the first time in the 2019 volume, most significantly the idea that Hancock’s work perpetuates 19th century racist propaganda regarding a lost race of North American mound builders used to justify the displacement and/or genocide of Native Americans.
Once the series emerged on Netflix as wildly popular, these critiques, primarily on Twitter, only intensified further to the point that popular media outlets began covering the controversy. Hancock himself began spending much of week responding to critics, and his most impactful Tweet that week was a compilation of critical headlines he compiled into an image:
Had this feud remained on Twitter and in click-baity opinion pieces, I probably wouldn’t be writing this. I think the optics of a nasty public fight are regrettable for archaeology, but everyone has their opinion and that’s kind of what the internet is for. However, the fight spilled out of the bar and into the streets when the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) penned a letter condemning the show on November 30th, 2022 (Hancock published a point by point critique to this letter while I was writing this). The letter summarizes critiques leveled at Hancock over the previous several years, enshrining them in the most public way yet by archaeology’s largest and most impactful professional society. The letter is addressed to the CEO and Head of Global Programming for Netflix, and condemns the show primarily for:
harming archaeologists in the public eye
promoting false claims about the past
supporting racist, white supremacist ideologies; doing injustice to indigenous people; and emboldening extremists
I don’t entirely disagree with any of these critiques. Hancock does routinely bash ‘mainstream archaeology’ in Ancient Apocalypse, most of his claims are demonstrably false, and those well-versed in the history of archaeological thought can point to some aspects of Hancock’s work shared with 19th century ideas of a lost white civilization. But that’s where my defense of this letter ends.
Problems with the letter
I’m about to be a little mean, so let me preface my critiques with some praise for the SAA. I’ve been an active member for years, and they do alot of good for the discipline. They have the enormous task of wrangling a particularly cantankerous group of social scientists into some semblance of professional decorum, and they usually do a good job of it. But in this instance, I think they missed the mark.
For starters, archaeologists have publicly shamed and ridiculed Hancock for decades, and I think it’s foolish to expect him to remain a passive recipient of that abuse. It seems enormously hypocritical for the SAA to decry harm in light of this legacy. Accordingly, when the SAA writes that “The combative tone of Graham Hancock damages public perception of archaeology,” I can’t help but think that the letter itself did more harm to public perceptions of archaeology than the series.
The harm inflicted by SAA’s public letter is only worsened by the undeniable fact that academic archaeologists are vastly outnumbered in this quarrel, so their request to Netflix comes off as arrogant and presumptuous. Hancock has appeared on the most popular podcast in the world at least nine times, has sold at least 7 million books globally, and oh yeah, produced one of the most popular shows about the human past that has ever been made. The idea that Netflix would pander their programming choices to a dorky professional society over a globally famous entertainer is, frankly, laughable.
Mostly though, I object to the SAA calling Hancock’s work racist. Even if Hancock’s ideas share some superficial similarities to racist ideas of 150 years ago, I think it is a stretch to claim a direct thread between the two. Some of this critique involves Hancock’s brief mention of ‘pale skinned’ outsiders in a myth purportedly drawn from Mesomerica and the notion that Hancock rarely cites early Western cultures as influenced by his lost ancient civilization, choosing instead to focus on (non-white) pyramid building cultures globally. However, accusations of racism among North American archaeologists are based largely on Hancock’s invocation of Atlantis in his work, the mythological city of Plato’s dialogues. Both Hancock and 19th century proponents of the idea that North American mounds were constructed by a lost white race of Atlantians (the so-called ‘mound builder myth’) cite Atlantis or a related society as the source for complexity in North America (and in Hancock’s case complexity worldwide). This similarity, and more broadly the idea that cultural complexity must have emerged in hunter-gatherer societies as a result of diffusion from more to less advanced cultures, is cited repeatedly by Hancock’s critics as evidence that his ideas are fundamentally racist.
The problem with this equivalence is that Atlantis is a myth, and like all myths, its meaning and role within contemporary discourse has changed through time according to the ideological needs of those invoking it. Need an archetypical utopia for your book about the future of society? Look no further than Atlantis. Need a superior race to justify your conquest of indigenous North Americans? Atlantis has got you covered. And of course, if you ever need a sea-faring civilization destroyed by a cataclysmic event, then Atlantis is the obvious choice. Atlantis has captured imaginations for at least hundreds of years, and its symbolic significance has shifted throughout that time, as symbols do. To accuse Ancient Apocalypse of racism is akin to accusing Volkswagen drivers of promoting Nazi ideology. While technically true, it’s a bad faith interpretation divorced from historical context. I don’t think Hancock is racist and I don’t think that most of the millions of people who watched Ancient Apocalypse are either. To the casual consumer who was simply entertained by the series, cries of racism look like just another hysterical response from elite institutions who nowadays seem to find racism under every stone they overturn.
In the most dramatic example, the SAA goes a few steps further by stating that “Hancock’s narrative emboldens extreme voices that misrepresent archaeological knowledge in order to spread false historical narratives that are overtly misogynistic, chauvinistic, racist, and anti-Semitic.” Not just racist, but misogynistic, chauvinistic, and anti-semitic too? Did they just throw those in for good measure or did I miss the womanizing, Nazi-sympathizing portion of Ancient Apocalypse? Admittedly, this statement is shrewdly phrased to divert accusations that the SAA is accusing Hancock directly of these sins. Rather, he is merely accused of inspiring them in others, a statement that surely gives the actual content of the series more power than it deserves.
The content of the letter aside, my biggest issue is that the SAA responded to this controversy at all. In my view, this letter is a public relations disaster. It both makes archaeologists look like overly sensitive hypocrites who can dish it out but can’t take it and undermines the SAA’s political credibility by leveling accusations of bigotry, all the while convincing nobody that Hancock promotes false ideas. At its worst, it validates Hancock’s most damning accusations, proving to the series’ viewers that archaeology’s most important professional society does indeed gatekeep information and use libelous tactics to discredit those whom they oppose.
A Better Response
In general, I find the impulse for professional societies to respond to online controversies ill-advised. There’s nothing wrong with taking a backseat and letting controversy blow over. At the same time, I recognize that one role of professional societies is to represent consensus viewpoints of their membership. Sometimes they need to make a statement. In that regard, the SAA could have struck a far different tone from the defensive, hectoring, and accusatory one they went with. If I were President of the SAA, my letter would have read something like this:
Mr. Hancock,
We appreciate you elevating curiosity about the human past to such great heights in public discourse. Although we disagree about your interpretations of that past, we acknowledge that your work has spread curiosity for the origins of human civilization to a vast audience that the professional community struggles to reach. For that, we are grateful.
The relationship between you, your audience, and the archaeological community has been rocky for years but it need not be that way. There is plenty of blame to go around for this acrimony, but I would prefer to find common ground. I think there’s a great opportunity to mend that relationshop should you be open to it.
In the spirit of good faith, we would like to invite you to present your ideas in a symposium at next year’s SAA annual meeting about creating engaging archaeological content for mass audiences. This symposium will be a chance for archaeologists, social media personalities, entertainers, producers, and others who create content about the past to present their thoughts and exchange ideas on how best to reach global audiences. You would obviously be a valuable contributor to this symposium, and we hope you accept the invitation….
Or something like that. Until Hancock produces some actual data, I don’t think his theories have much of a place in a professional academic meeting, but his ability to interpret the human past to a global audience surely does. He is arguably the most successful proponent of the human past that has ever lived. That remains true whether archaeologists like it or not, so why not leverage his obvious talent rather than screaming about him into the void?
Ultimately, American Archaeology had a moment in the spotlight and completely choked. They appeared defensive, hypocritical, deranged by niche politics, and gatekeeping of scientific discourse. For all the talk about engaging the public, archaeologists seem to have trouble pulling it off once thrust into the public eye (with a few notable exceptions). The Ancient Apocalypse debacle is only the most recent example. The next time this issue comes around, and it certainly will, I hope the discipline has found more effective ways to engage global audiences. Archaeology depends on public engagement to sustain its survial, and we certainly need some good PR.