Answering Pseudoarchaeology from the Repository

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

As an archaeological repository, the University of Texas at Austin’s Texas Archeological Research Laboratory is simultaneously a public-facing entity and a gatekeeper, standing between the public and a massive corpus of sensitive archaeological evidence in the form of held-in-trust archaeological collections and records. It is therefore not surprising that TARL receives a significant number of public inquiries, and that some of these express interest in topics outside the archaeological mainstream—including claims of giants, supposed evidence supporting hyperdiffusionist views, and accusations that our institution is hiding "the truth." In this presentation, inquiries of a pseudoarchaeological nature received by TARL staff over the past several years are analyzed in order to provide insight into the types of inquiries we receive, who is reaching out to us, what their expectations or desired outcomes might be, and how we tend to respond. Exploring the repository’s roles and responsibilities in this ongoing public conversation is an important task as we confront common misperceptions and work toward improving public education in archaeology.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23119