Bad Archaeologists tend to focus on a small number of special places, usually spectacular monuments or ruins, exotic or poorly known locations, sunken or extraterrestrial civilisations. Many of these places are known to Good Archaeologists, who understand them quite differently.
Special places
Archaeological monuments
There are certain well known monuments that crop up time and again in Bad Archaeological texts. Each variety of Bad Archaeology has a different explanation for them: they were built by aliens, by Celtic explorers of North America, by refugees from Atlantis, by Chinese circumnavigators, by a Lost Civilisation of the Ice Age… If any one of these claims is true, the others are automatically false. How do we set about testing them?
Pyramids
Pyramids have long fascinated people, from ancient tomb robbers intent on stealing Pharaoh’s gold to Victorian adventurers in the Mexican rainforest. They are among the most awe inspiring monuments left by our ancestors, but do we really know how they were built and what they were for?
Cities
Some ancient cities are places of mystery: because they are often set in remote locations, abandoned for centuries or millennia, not rediscovered until recent times, they can appear to be testimony to the existence of prodigiously ancient civilisations. But are they?
Places of questionable significance
Bad Archaeologists sometimes use places that have escaped the attention of Good Archaeologists. Is this because recognising them as ancient sites would upset the neat hypotheses of Good Archaeology or is it because the Good Archaeologists know they are not really archaeological monuments?
Mistaken and controversial identifications
The location of Noah’s Ark (why would it even survive?), the city of El Dorado, the lost city of Atlantis in the Sahara Desert: so many Bad Archaeologists claim to have found these dubious attractions. Why do their amazing discoveries fail to make archaeological textbooks, only tabloid headlines?
Natural formations
From sunken formations off the coast of Yonaguni in Japan to eroded ‘pyramids’ at Cydonia on Mars, Bad Archaeologists have been making claims that things other people have thought to be products of geology and erosion are in fact ancient monuments. Has the Good Archaeological community overlooked them?
I’ve been reading into the history of America and i found something that i couldnt explain, there is a digsite in Heuyatlaco that would be 80-250,000 years old!? can that be explained or is it so called “Out of place”?
There are a number of sites in the New World that have yielded anomalous dates. In some cases, the dates are probably wrong because the material being dated is residual (in other words, it’s something much older that happens to have been kicking around when a deposit formed: imaging an archaeologist in ten thousand years trying to date a twenty-first century deposit using a lump of wood that had come from a medieval house demolished nearby!). In some cases, the supposed artefacts are controversial: the supposed flintwork could have formed naturally.
Even though there is some evidence that humans were in the Americas rather earlier than we generally think, 80,000 to 250,000 years ago is just too early: before 95,000 years ago, as far as we know, Homo sapiens was restricted to Africa, while no fossil hominid remains (such as Homo erectus) have ever been found in the New World.
I was just wondering from where you get your evidence that the nonaguni formations are not man-made? I’m not challenging your point in any way, I’m just interested to know.