Bad Archaeology: How the Media Deceive us about our Past

Have you got a 2000-year-old mobile phone lying around in a drawer at home?

Almost every day, we hear news reports about archaeological discoveries, which the media manage to misunderstand and misrepresent. Every discovery is world-changing, overturns what we thought we knew and will rewrite history.

Worse than that, though, are the enthusiastic amateurs who see Roman roads, King Arthur and ley lines everywhere. To them, the past is full of hidden connections that mainstream academics suppress to bolster their own careers. At the top of the heap of rubbish are the out-and-out frauds and charlatans who make a fortune by presenting programmes about ancient aliens, writing best-selling books about lost technology and embarking on lucrative lecture tours telling people that the Sphinx was built 12,000 years ago by a vanished civilisation.

All of them damage public understanding of the past.