1st August 2006, 12:30 PM
I haven't bothered to read the Da Vinci Code. I'm rather fond of Pseudoarchaeology though - it's highly entertaining and a great read at bedtime. I've just finished some crap about the Mayas and the Incas and how they were visited by spaceships that was making me laugh out loud. I think it was written in about 1970 when this type of stuff really flourished. I'm just starting one about the Bermuda Triangle which is equally funny.
People seem to love all this rubbish. It's probably linked with social and political trends at specific times. The late 1960's - early 1970's Von Daniken stuff I suppose was probably tappinig into collective uncertainty and paranoia about going into space and visiting the moon. People got all paranoid about government conspiracies and the Y2K computer bug in the 1990's with the millennium approaching as well. Now we're back to religious conspiracies again. I'm sure there's a really fun PhD proposal in there somewhere if someone hasn't done it already. Anyway, try reading Archaeological Fantasies: How Pseudoarchaeology Misrepresents the Past and Misleads the Public, by Garrett G. Fagan for a bit of debunking. Unfortunately it's not as funny as Graham Hancock, but the discussion is rather more plausible.
People seem to love all this rubbish. It's probably linked with social and political trends at specific times. The late 1960's - early 1970's Von Daniken stuff I suppose was probably tappinig into collective uncertainty and paranoia about going into space and visiting the moon. People got all paranoid about government conspiracies and the Y2K computer bug in the 1990's with the millennium approaching as well. Now we're back to religious conspiracies again. I'm sure there's a really fun PhD proposal in there somewhere if someone hasn't done it already. Anyway, try reading Archaeological Fantasies: How Pseudoarchaeology Misrepresents the Past and Misleads the Public, by Garrett G. Fagan for a bit of debunking. Unfortunately it's not as funny as Graham Hancock, but the discussion is rather more plausible.