Hancock, a former East Africa bureau chief for the Economist, is a talented writer and one of the most reasonable exponents in a field full of wild guesses and conspiracy theories. But his claims about the past, like most of alternative archaeology, are generally unsupported by hard evidence. His view of mainstream archaeology as a closed-minded cabal of experts, which is also typical of the field, is overly simplistic. Despite the troubled past of their discipline -- 19th century archaeology could fairly be described as imperialist plundering, with overtones of racism -- and the all too human limitations Hancock cites, archaeologists have pieced together a compelling picture of the human past, which necessarily remains incomplete and full of genuine controversy.

It would be easy to cast this as a matter of rational scientists under siege from religious fanatics and zoned-out goofballs. But that doesn't help us understand what the long-running conflict over archaeology is really about. It's certainly about the rejuvenation of the search for Atlantis, and about the ambiguous intellectual flowering of the creationist movement. More fundamentally, it's another front in our society's intractable cultural and religious wars, a collision between people whose sincerely held beliefs about human origins and human culture are not just different but epistemologically opposed. In some sense they don't inhabit the same universe, but in the United States they are trying to share the same nation.

There isn't exactly a smoking gun linking creationism to alternative archaeology; there was no secret 1970s summit meeting between evangelists in Sears Roebuck suits and tie-dyed New Agers from the New Mexico mountains. But there are numerous points of contact, some of them surprising, and one can detect a pattern of common interests and common approaches stretching back at least as far as Ignatius Donnelly, the 19th century Minnesota politician who launched the modern Atlantis craze.

Donnelly suggested that the story of Noah's Flood was one of the many global legends that authenticated Plato's account of a lost continent (found in the Socratic dialogues "Timaeus" and "Critias"). Fundamentalists saw (and still see) the same equation in reverse: Plato's story about a proud civilization doomed by the gods was one of many heathen distortions of the true account given in the Hebrew Bible. The two sides have basically been mirroring each other's arguments and cribbing from each other's textual readings ever since.

American archaeologists have been aware of this pincer movement against their discipline for decades. Books and magazine articles speculating on the historicity of Atlantis and similar foremother civilizations have flowed virtually uninterrupted since the publication of Donnelly's "Atlantis: The Antediluvian World" in 1882. Not surprisingly, the 1960s and '70s marked a golden age for this genre. Erich von Däniken claims to have sold more than 60 million copies of his various books on the ancient-astronaut hypothesis, which could be called an outer-space version of the Atlantis story. Other alternative archaeology titles became cult classics, including some by genuine if eccentric scholars like historians Charles Hapgood and Giorgio de Santillana. Most remain in print today.

More recently, Hancock's "Fingerprints of the Gods," a summary of many converging currents in the Atlantean quest, was an international bestseller in the mid-'90s; he reports more than 5 million sales for all his titles. Other influential alternative-archaeology exponents, most associated with Hancock in some way, include amateur Egyptologist John Anthony West ("Serpent in the Sky"), engineer Robert Bauval ("The Orion Mystery"), the Canadian couple Rand and Rose Flem-Ath ("When the Sky Fell: In Search of Atlantis") and archaeological/historical researchers Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson ("Forbidden Archeology [sic]: The Hidden History of the Human Race").

That same period saw a resurgence of evangelical Christianity and the founding of the Institute for Creation Research and numerous other "creation science" organizations. By the '80s it was clear that creationism -- which most scientists viewed as an irrelevant cult belief -- had never died out in the United States and was in fact becoming increasingly popular and influential. Polls consistently suggest that 40 to 50 percent of Americans believe that the Genesis account of Creation is literally true, although the depth of that conviction is impossible to measure.

Alternative archaeology and creation science converged spectacularly in a notorious television special called "The Mysterious Origins of Man," which aired on NBC in February 1996. Hosted by Charlton Heston, the show presented an incoherent farrago of mutually contradictory hypotheses from "a new generation of scientific researchers," as Heston soberly intoned.

Hancock appeared to announce that the pre-Incan archaeological site of Tiwanaku in the Bolivian Andes might be 12,000 years old and a remnant of his lost civilization; creationist Carl Baugh held up molds of egregiously phony human footprints found alongside dinosaur footprints in a Texas riverbed. Pseudoscience researcher David Hatcher Childress discussed the alleged plesiosaur dredged up by a Japanese fishing boat in 1977 (probably a rotten shark carcass). Cremo and Thompson explained that archaeologists have ignored or suppressed evidence that the human race has been on this planet for millions, perhaps billions, of years. Nowhere was it mentioned that these people have vastly different ideas about the age of the earth and the origins of human civilization. The only thing they shared -- and the program's only plausible goal -- was a desire to damage the credibility of science with a mass audience.

If there were a smoking gun linking creationism to alternative archaeology, Michael Cremo would be holding it. A soft-spoken man who radiates calm and measured intellect, Cremo is a singular figure on the scientific fringe. He is friendly with mainstream archaeologists and with Graham Hancock. He has delivered papers at the World Archaeological Congress and been cited as a "fellow-traveler" by creation evangelists. His 1993 "Forbidden Archeology," written with mathematician Thompson, has become a canonical text for both New Agers and fundamentalists.

This is especially remarkable when you consider that virtually all those people would agree that Cremo's central contention -- that anatomically modern humans have existed for billions of years -- is ludicrous. His genuine intellectual achievement in "Forbidden Archeology," a dense 900-page discussion of "ooparts" and other anomalous findings, is the development of a meme that's now ubiquitous in creationism and alternative archaeology. Mainstream science, he argues, has become a "knowledge filter" designed to keep the most challenging ideas out of the discourse. His explorations of this question -- how scientific consensus can become a kind of groupthink, and how contradictory evidence then becomes unacceptable -- have gained him the grudging respect of at least some scholars.

"I've had some degree of recognition from mainstream academic circles that what I'm doing makes a contribution," Cremo says from his Los Angeles office. "I think I've gotten a fair hearing; it's not like on one side you have Michael Cremo and on the other side you've got mainstream science."

This is true, but only up to a point. "Forbidden Archeology" was favorably reviewed in a few specialized academic journals. But even Cremo hastens to explain that those reviewers don't agree with his underlying belief system. His entire posture as an almost respectable historian or sociologist of science (he doesn't claim any scientific credentials) and a bridge between fundamentalist Christians and New Agers is only possible because no one agrees with him.

Cremo is a follower of the Western Hindu sect founded by the late Bhaktivedanta Swami -- in layman's terms, he's a Hare Krishna. According to the Vedas of ancient India, Lord Krishna created the human race at the dawn of time, roughly 2 billion years ago. (Which is pretty close to the accepted emergence of life on earth, as it happens.) Cremo's research, as he freely admits, is an effort to buttress this faith with hard evidence. Like Christian creationists, he believes that humans were divinely created in our present form and did not evolve from lower life forms; like the alternative-archaeology crowd, he accepts scientific arguments that the earth is billions of years old, but believes ancient humans may have possessed wisdom and technology beyond our understanding.

Creation evangelists Ken Ham, Jonathan Sarfati and Carl Wieland, the co-founders of Answers in Genesis, probably the creation-science movement's most articulate and aggressive organization, cite "Forbidden Archeology" approvingly in "The Revised and Expanded Answers Book" (2000), a key popular text of current creationism.

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