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The rise of Archaeologists Anonymous

Stone Age Herbalist ⋮ 14-17 minutes ⋮ 12/3/2022

In a quiet group chat in an obscure part of the internet, a small number of anonymous
accounts are swapping references from academic publications and feverishly poring over
complex graphs of DNA analysis. These are not your average trolls, but scholars,
researchers and students who have come together online to discuss the latest findings in
archaeology. Why would established academics not be having these conversations in a
conference hall or a lecture theatre? The answer might surprise you.

The equation of anonymity on the internet with deviance, mischief and hate has become a
central plank in the global war on “misinformation”. But for many of us, anonymity has
allowed us to pursue our passion for scholarly research in a way that is simply impossible
within the censorious confines of modern academia. And so, in these hidden places,
professional geneticists, bioarchaeologists and physical anthropologists have created a
network of counter-research. Using home-made software, spreadsheets and private
servers, detailed and rigorous work is conducted away from prying eyes and hectoring
voices.

Many, like myself, are “junior researchers” or PhD drop-outs — people with one foot in
the door but who recognise how precarious academic jobs are. Anonymity comes
naturally to a younger generation of internet users, reared on forums and different social
media platforms. They exploit the benefits and protections of not having every public
statement forever attached to your person. I chose to start an anonymous profile during
lockdown, a period which saw many professionals adopt a pseudonym as eyes turned to
the internet and political positions emerged in relation to Covid, the presidential election
and public demonstrations in the West.

Archaeology has always been a battleground, since it helps define and legitimise crucial
subjects about the past, human nature and the history of particular nations and peoples.
Most humanities disciplines veer to the Left today, explicitly and implicitly, but
archaeology is the outlier. Instead, it is in the middle of an upheaval — one which will
have deeply troubling consequences for many researchers who suddenly see decades of
carefully managed theories crumble before their eyes.

In the absence of genetic data, it was once possible to argue that changes in the material
record (objects and artefacts such as pottery, stone and metal tools, craft objects, clothing

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and so on) reflected some kind of passive or diffuse spread of technologies and fashions,
but this is no longer the case. For instance, for many years students and the public were
told that “pots are not people” — that new styles of pottery suddenly appearing in the
record does not mean that new people had arrived with them — and the appearance of
the so-called “Bell Beaker” pottery in the British Bronze Age showed how imitation and
trade allowed new styles of ceramics to spread from the continent.

But in 2018, a bombshell paper proved this was fundamentally incorrect. In fact, nearly
90% of the population of Britain was replaced in a short period, corresponding to the
movement of the Bell Beaker people into Britain and the subsequent disappearance of the
previous Neolithic inhabitants. We know this because careful genetic work, building from
paper to paper, shows clearly that the new arrivals were different people, with different
maternal and paternal DNA. Papers like this appear almost weekly now. Most recently,
the confirmation that the Anglo-Saxons did indeed arrive from northern Europe has
caused many academics a great headache, since for years the very idea of an invasion of
Germanic peoples has been downplayed and even dismissed.

What seems obvious to the general public — that prehistory was a bloody mess of
invasions, migrations, battles and conflict — is not always a commonplace view among
researchers. Worse, the idea that ancient peoples organised themselves among clear
ethnic and tribal lines is also taboo. Obvious statements of common sense, such as the
existence of patriarchy in the past, are constantly challenged and the general tone of
academia is one of refutation: both of established theories and thinkers and of
disagreeable parts of the past itself.

Added to this is the ever-present fear that studies and results are being used by the wrong
kind of people. In a 2019 journal article, entitled “Genetics, archaeology and the far-
Right: An unholy trinity”, Susanne Hakenbeck expresses grave concern that recent
genetics work on the early Bronze Age invasions of the Indo-European steppe are
needlessly giving oxygen to dangerous ideas — namely that young men from one ethnic
group might have migrated from the Pontic-Caspian grasslands and violently subdued
their neighbours, passing on their paternal DNA at the expense of the native males. This
narrative, fairly well-supported in the genetics literature, is for Hakenbeck deeply
unpleasant and wrong:

“We see a return to notions of bounded ethnic groups equivalent to archaeological

cultures and of a shared Indo-European social organisation based on common linguistic
fragments. Both angles are essentialist and carry a deeply problematic ideological
baggage. We are being offered an appealingly simple narrative of a past shaped by virile
young men going out to conquer a continent, given apparent legitimacy by the scientific
method.”

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That war-like young men might have invaded a nearby settlement is apparently a
troublesome statement, something that, again, most lay people simply wouldn’t find
difficult to contemplate. Yet others have gone further still. Historian Wolf Liebeschuetz
and archaeologist Sebastian Brather, to pick on just two, have both firmly insisted that
archaeology must not, and cannot, be used to trace migrations or identify different ethnic
groups in prehistory. To quote from Liebeschuetz’s 2015 book, East and West in Late
Antiquity: “Archaeology can trace cultural diffusion, but it cannot be used to distinguish
between peoples, and should not be used to trace migration. Arguments from language
and etymology are irrelevant.”

At a stroke, this line of reasoning would essentially abolish several centuries of work
unravelling the thread of movements and evolution of the Indo-European peoples and
languages, not to mention the post-Roman Germanic Migration Period, Anglo-Saxon
invasions, Polynesian and Bantu Expansions and almost all major changes in the human
record. But this is precisely the point: by depriving archaeology of the ability to point to
when and where different groups emerged and moved, there can be no grist to the
nationalist mill. Origin stories such as the foundation of Hungary, England, France,
Turkey and Japan can be collapsed into an amorphous and frankly boring set of stories
about pottery styles, trade and domestic craft. Any hint of danger or exclusion must be
downplayed as much as possible.

At the heart of this attempt at erasure lies a fundamental disagreement over archaeology’s
purpose. While modern researchers cloak their liberal progressive worldview in the
trappings of objective science, the fact is that archaeology is predominantly about telling
human stories, and with that, stories of different peoples. The roots of archaeological
scholarship lie in the antiquarian past, where intellectually curious men (it was mostly
men), worked to piece together foundational narratives about their country and kin.
From William Camden’s Britannia (1586) to Flavio Biondo’s Italia illustrata (1474),
European scholars were concerned with connecting their nation’s past to the present. But
since the Second World War, the trend in Western archaeology has increasingly been to
“debunk” or “critically assess” national origin stories: to illegitimate vulgar emotional
attachments to roots or claims to exclusive heritage. And yet the public are not stupid; it
is obvious that these sentiments are political and inconsistent. Compare these two quotes:

“As sensible anthropologists and sensible historians have reminded us: cultures are
always in the process of changing and reconstituting themselves, sometimes in almost
unrecognisable, qualitatively different ways. There is no culture that has existed ‘since
time immemorial’ and no people that is aboriginal in terms of their contemporary culture
with a specific piece of real estate.”

“Indigenous Australians belong to the oldest continuous culture on earth. Ancient

artefacts from Lake Mungo help show us what people ate and how they lived thousands of

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years ago. Today, the Paakantji, Mutthi Mutthi and Ngyimpaa people of the Lake Mungo
region continue their close connections to the land.”

The first of these is from Nationalism, politics, and the practice of archaeology in the
Caucasus (1995) by Philip L. Kohl and Gocha R. Tsetskhladze, the second from the
National Museum of Australia. One takes aim at the people of the Caucasus identifying
too strongly with their ancestors, the second happily accepts that modern Aboriginal
Australians are the owners of, and descendants from, 40,000-year-old fossils found at
Lake Mungo. The official acceptance that these Pleistocene skeletons are the sole preserve
of the Aboriginal people and not the common inheritance of humanity has been securely
acknowledged.

These are two extreme examples, but the value divide between the layman and the
academic frequently clashes over this endless push towards progressive politics. Queer
Vikings, transgender skeletons, female warriors… not a week seems to go by without
some new claim that today’s morality has always been the norm. For the British public,
perhaps no single phenomenon better demonstrates this than the “discoveries” of black
people in British history and prehistory. The infamous Cheddar Man fiasco, where a
Mesolithic hunter-gatherer was identified by geneticists as having black skin, a claim
quietly retracted afterwards, was perfect debate fodder and was exploited by anti-Brexit
campaigners.

Ironically, given that Left-wing activists accuse the Right of distorting facts to fit the
theory, these discoveries are not presented in a neutral light. Rather, they are weaponised
for supporters of mass immigration to make the rhetorical claim that “Britain has always
been a nation of immigrants”. I should say though, there is no consensus within academia
to do this, no secret plan or conspiracy. It is simply the almost total homogeneity of
political opinions held by scholars and researchers, staff and students, which ensures that
interpretations of archaeological findings often go “the right way”.

This became clearer than ever following the emergence of the Black Lives Matter
movement, which saw archaeology departments and professional bodies across the world
fall over themselves to pledge curriculum “decolonisation” and an explicit commitment to
politicising the discipline. To quote from the “’The Future of Archaeology Is Antiracist’:
Archaeology in the Time of Black Lives Matter”, published in American Antiquity:

“Consequently, Black archaeology has been and must remain purposeful in practice. It
rejects research and practices defined in sterile, binary terms of objective-subjective
positionality. Archaeology at historic Black sites must be conducted with an explicit
politics… To the field of archaeology, it serves as a moral guide with the potential to
elucidate historical wrongs and explore forms of contemporary redress.”

While many people may sympathise with the basic message of redress as a form of social

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justice, what is being pushed here goes much further and amounts to the destruction of
the scientific objectivity required to practice rigorous scholarship. One could argue that
archaeology has always been a political battlefield, but the most reliable approach to
finding the truth is grounded in empirical science, something precious and valuable and
not easily regained once lost.

All of which goes some way to answering my earlier question: why are academics and
researchers taking to anonymous online spaces to practice their craft? In part because we
have an inflation of young people, educated to around the postgraduate level, who no
longer see a future in the academy, where jobs are almost non-existent, and acutely aware
of the damage a single remark or online comment can do to a career. But also because we
have a university research system that has drifted towards a political position that defies
a common sense understanding of human nature and history. A young man entering full-
time research interested in warfare, conflict, the origins of different peoples, how borders
and boundaries have changed through time, grand narratives of conquest or expansion,
would find himself stymied at every turn and regarded with great suspicion. If he didn’t
embrace the critical studies fields of postcolonial thought, feminism, gender and queer
politics or antiracism, he might find himself shut out from a career altogether. Much
easier instead to go online and find the ten other people on Earth who share his interests,
who are concerned with what the results mean, rather than their wider current political
and social ramifications.

So this is where we are. If you want to learn about the Ymyyakhtakh culture, Corded-
Ware linguistics, Denisovan genetics, Mississippian cultural collapse, post-glacial
Mesolithic development or migrations to Madagascar, the anonymous internet is the
place to go. In the absence of status and career concerns, researchers can turn exercise
their obsession by thoroughly reviewing new papers in a way the current peer-review
system does not allow. Without the self-imposed firewalls of specialisation erected by
academic departments, anonymous accounts and blogs are free to roam across different
disciplines, connecting the dots between mortuary archaeology, languages and religions
in a way modern scholars simply cannot. Are there cranks and weirdos? Yes. But I know
of several hundred former or current academics who are committed to this new form of
research.

I don’t know what my future holds, but I find it inspirational living in two worlds, where
they bleed into one another. I get messages almost daily from others in a similar position,
who sense they are not wanted in academia, but wish to continue their research. In this
creative, dynamic interface between the visible and invisible worlds of historical
investigation, something new is rising.

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