Many archaeologists remain disturbed about widespread belief in these modern mythologies, but its consequences aren't clear. "Science requires public funding to survive, and it should be public property," says Fagan. "When the public isn't sure about what's valid science and what isn't, that's not a good situation."

Michael Cremo, who more than anyone else connects creationism to alternative archaeology, offers a key to understanding this whole conflict. He says it's "a fair characterization" for Answers in Genesis to call him a "fellow-traveler," but explains that he isn't exactly like the Christians: "I don't claim to have a monopoly on truth, which might distinguish me from other kinds of creationists. I'm part of the larger spiritual family of alternatives to Darwinism."

Alternative archaeology and creationism offer "alternatives to Darwinism," and in so doing they respond to an inchoate need that characterizes our era. Alt-archaeologists engage in outrageous speculation but make no claim to absolute truth. Creationists make absolute truth their first principle, shining the Word of God into the darkness and chaos of science. Both seek to provide a picture of the past that is more orderly -- and certainly more meaningful -- than the bloody chronicles offered by science and history.

Fairly or not, archaeology's assailants see this rich and contentious field as part of a great scientific machine of meaninglessness. Graham Hancock sees archaeology as subscribing to "a materialist ideology which states as a fact that there is no meaning to life, simply an accidental combination of molecules evolving into the situation we find today. I think huge numbers of people find that extremely unpromising, extremely dark."

As archaeology has become more rigorous and more scientific, it has formed a picture of the human past generally compatible with that developed by evolutionary biology and paleoanthropology. Our ancestors were not perfect beings, molded from the clay of Eden by the hands of God, nor were they the ultra-enlightened citizens of the Hancock's lost civilization, casting our age of greed and technology into the shadows. They were tool-using apes who got surprisingly good at it and began to accomplish strange, even shocking things around 50,000 years ago. They started painting animals on cave walls, burying their dead in ceremonies, and piling rocks one atop the other, in tribute to their developing sense of the sacredness of life -- their own and the life they saw around them.

One could argue that human history from that point forward has involved the development of parallel capacities, for technology and science on one hand, for myth and spirituality on the other. It's only a dark story if you choose to see it that way; it's certainly a rich and ambiguous one. Arguably we need both myth and science to think about the world and our place in it; perhaps their uneasy coexistence is what makes us human.

As somebody who writes about culture for a living, I want to insist on the centrality of myth to the human experience. But myth posing as science is quite another matter. If myth, whether in the form of art or religion, can be said to illuminate certain truths about the human condition, they are categorically distinct from the quantifiable and falsifiable truths of science. Maybe this is why we evolved those big brains -- we have to balance competing and often contradictory systems of thought, when we can't do without either of them.

The conflict over archaeology forms part of the long-running argument between science and religion, which scientists thought they had won generations ago. The public, at least in this country, has not acknowledged their victory. Various terms for peace have been proposed. Since the time of Augustine, if not Socrates, philosophers, priests and scientists have argued that science and religion ask different kinds of questions and seek different kinds of answers, that they are, in the famous phrase of biologist Stephen Jay Gould, "non-overlapping magisteria."

But that's something of an egghead dodge, isn't it? Gould clearly wanted to consign religion to the role of airy-fairy speculation, but most Tibetan Buddhists don't understand reincarnation, nor most Christians the Resurrection of Jesus, as an interesting metaphor. Creationists are doing us all the favor of challenging our commitment to truth. They know what they believe; do the rest of us?

Cornelius Holtorf and others from the postmodern philosophy of science tradition might remind us that truth is a thorny question about which scientists (and especially archaeologists) should never feel confident. So maybe we should ask ourselves what kind of epistemology we want: a scientific model that claims to be open to doubt, potential reversal and the hypothetical possibility that its opponents might be right; or a rock-solid doctrine of revelation?

Alternative archaeology buffs don't want to choose; Graham Hancock told me in an e-mail that he sees the conflict between science and creationism as that of two competing orthodoxies howling at each other and drowning out everyone else. One can sympathize with that on an abstract intellectual level, but as a practical matter most of us will conclude that we have to pick sides. Holtorf may be comfortable with the idea that the Coso artifact can be a Model T spark plug to some people and a transmitter dropped by one of Noah's drowning cousins to others, or that, depending on context, australopithecine skull fragments can simultaneously signify a hominid ancestor millions of years old and an extinct ape created by Jehovah in 4004 B.C. Most people, I suspect, are content with a simpler conception of historical truth, even if they understand that it is always conditional and always potentially wrong.

If science has sometimes leached into religion in ways it shouldn't, religion -- at least of a certain stripe -- has devoted immense energy to dressing itself awkwardly in scientific drag. This is where alternative archaeology and creationism show their essential kinship. It isn't just that they call for lost utopias, the interference of powerful supernatural beings, and chains of occurrence that seem impossible to those outside the faith. Those things are legitimate after their fashion. But they claim their view is not just revealed truth but also sound science, and that the so-called science of the infidel universities is a grand conspiracy. You can agree or disagree with these propositions as a matter of faith, but there's no point debating them. They have left the realms of rationality and coherence behind.

Archaeologists, meanwhile, can only hope that there continues to be a public interested in what they have to tell us about the past. Holtorf suggests that the question of "what really happened" in the past is irrelevant. Professional and alternative archaeologists, he argues, "fulfill a similar social demand of providing the present with larger historical perspectives and narratives." Furthermore, the only criteria by which to judge those narratives is their "credibility and appropriateness" in a given context. The profession's future, he writes, lies in an openness to "multiple pasts and alternative archaeologies." Archaeologists should stop trying to tell people what to think about the past, "because it has not been established that scientifically acceptable accounts of the past benefit society more than mythical, biblical or other accounts."

Kenneth Feder's view of his job is more traditional. He explains that he has just completed a grueling summer dig at a site in rural Connecticut where a nomadic group of Native Americans camped for a few weeks, perhaps 3,000 years ago. "Why the hell would I spend six weeks out in the broiling sun, picking bloodsucking ticks off myself, if it didn't make any fucking difference?" he asks. "If the truth doesn't matter, I can sit at home and make up good stories."

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