Post-Truth Archaeology

Saturday, December 17, 2016

A nice piece about how archaeology is presented in social media by Adrian Maldonado. All archaeologists have grimaced over some sketchy archaeological claim rapidly infecting in the global social media.

My favorite, and one of Maldonado's, was the claim of a Canadian teenager of finding a lost Maya city in Mexico's rain forests using satellite images. Archaeologists who know that region well alternated between a good laugh and tearing their hair out when the media blitz wouldn't end. After all, it was probably only a set of field walls. And we felt for the poor kid, when his  high school science project done at high school level by a high school student spiraled out of control to the point that his project had to be denounced by a bunch of archaeologists who knew that his conclusions were wrong and needed to calm the social media blizzard, but who also tried not to discourage the kid from pursuing his serious interest in archaeology.  A tough position. 

David Stuart, a noted Mesoamericanist,  called it right: "a terrible example of junk science hitting the internet in free-fall."

Maldanado's conclusions: "I’m convinced that we need to work within the system rather than against it. We can, at the very least, aim to talk to the media more often, and build the kinds of relationship with reporters that lead to some kind of mutual understanding. We can train students to write archaeology press releases as a form of short-form science communication, or perhaps just train them to decipher credible sources online. We need to apply the kinds of data-mining methodologies that can ask questions of how people engage with archaeology news online that I don’t even know to ask yet." His more complete explication of the topic appears in a scholarly journal Advances in Archaeological Practice.

It's that kind of world we live in, one with "unpresidented" reliance on social media. 

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