The Bat Creek Stone Revisited: A Fraud Exposed

Mainfort, Robert C.; Kwas, Mary L.

doi:10.2307/4128448

Cited by 3 publications

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“…The skull, which Charles Dawson first presented to the scientific community in 1912, shaped evolutionary science for decades before it was fully debunked in 1953, and analyses of the case highlight the clear intentionality and the motivation of advancing white supremacist conceptions of human origins (Gardiner, 2003). Other notable archaeological forgeries by project leaders—rather than workers—include the Bat Creek inscription (Mainfort and Kwas, 2004), the Michigan Relics (Kelsey, 1908), the Beardmore Relics (Carpenter, 1957), and the Grave Creek Stone (Williams, 1991). Further examples abound.…”

Section: The Stakes Of Archaeological Dishonestymentioning

confidence: 99%

Cultivating trust, producing knowledge: The management of archaeological labour and the making of a discipline

Ashworth

Byrd

2021

History of the Human Sciences

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Like any science, archaeology relies on trust between actors involved in the production of knowledge. In the early history of archaeology, this epistemic trust was complicated by histories of Orientalism in the Middle East and colonialism more broadly. The racial and power dynamics underpinning 19th- and early 20th-century archaeology precluded the possibility of interpersonal moral trust between foreign archaeologists and locally hired labourers. In light of this, archaeologists created systems of reward, punishment, and surveillance to ensure the honest behaviour of site workers. They thus invented a set of structural conditions that produced sufficient epistemic trust for archaeological research to proceed—a system that continues to shape archaeology to the present day.

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Section: The Stakes Of Archaeological Dishonestymentioning

confidence: 99%

Cultivating trust, producing knowledge: The management of archaeological labour and the making of a discipline

Ashworth

Byrd

2021

History of the Human Sciences

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Archaeology and New Religious Movements

Card

2019

Nova Religio

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The practice of archaeology—the study of material evidence of past human activities—is not in alignment with the human drive to understand relics of the material past as touchstones of mythic origins and evidence of the sacred. New and alternative religious movements, political movements, and popular culture use archaeological artifacts and monuments as slates on which to inscribe stories of supernatural ancestors, advanced civilizations and races, and lost ancient wisdom that justify critiquing or displacing existing religious and cultural structures and knowledge. The rhetorical power of these metaphorical (and sometimes literal) texts derives from the symbolic capital of the practice and profession of archaeology even as the content and form of these texts is in conflict with archaeology. The articles in this special issue of Nova Religio examine how archaeology is used to create new sacred meanings and narratives, and how archaeologists need to engage with persons attributing these alternative meanings to archaeological artifacts.

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Up Bat Creek (Without a Paddle): Mormon Assessment of the Bat Creek Stone

Cevallos¹

2021

Journal of Mormon History

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The Bat Creek Stone Revisited: A Fraud Exposed

Cited by 3 publications

References 4 publications

Cultivating trust, producing knowledge: The management of archaeological labour and the making of a discipline

Cultivating trust, producing knowledge: The management of archaeological labour and the making of a discipline

Archaeology and New Religious Movements

Up Bat Creek (Without a Paddle): Mormon Assessment of the Bat Creek Stone

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