Lately, terms like “fake news” and “click bait” have made their way into the national conversation as leaders and political pundits call into question whether what we read or hear in the media is true. But this problem is hardly new for Gayle Fritz and David Freidel, both professors of archaeology in the Department of Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis.

“I began to dread riding on airplanes,” says Gayle Fritz. The situation is familiar enough to anyone who’s traveled by air. A seatmate looks over to strike up small talk with a question like, “What do you do?”

“‘I teach archaeology,’ I’ll say. Or ‘I’m an archaeologist,’ Fritz responds. “And then they say, ‘Oh, wow! I’ve always been fascinated with archaeology.’ And then the trouble begins because they start asking me questions about aliens who built the pyramids, or where Atlantis is, and things like that.”

Fritz pauses. “It makes you realize very quickly that the public is just pervaded by pseudo-archaeology and myths about archaeology, some of which are hoaxes and some of which just go way back to the founding of the United States.”

Public Misunderstanding

“When we teach in a public setting, which we do regularly because archaeology is of interest to the American public,” says David Freidel, “we get the kinds of questions that Gayle shared, and it’s important that we try to be public educators. When we are peer-reviewed for a research publication, we are always asked, ‘What is your target audience? How are you disseminating your information?’ So, we’re always thinking about these things.”

Experiences like these led Fritz to start a course at WashU called “Fantastic Archaeology,” and David Freidel, who had been teaching a course on the same topic at another university, offered to co-teach it with her when he came to the university in 2008. They’ve been co-teaching the course every fall semester since, though the title of the course has evolved much over the years, eventually settling on “Archaeological Fantasies and Hoaxes.”

“It’s a bait-and-switch class,” says Freidel. “I think it’s important for college students to learn to be discriminating in how they absorb information. I’m of the view that you don’t get to wisdom very easily, but just getting to knowledge from information is very difficult, actually. It requires a certain discipline of mind, which is what students learn here.”

“As a more general problem, most of the information the public is getting about archaeology and the past is deeply informed by public culture, which includes a lot of misinformation,” says Freidel. “So, it’s a balancing act in the course, to keep it engaging and, at the same time, to challenge the students to think clearly about the nobility of being skeptical. It’s important to be skeptical. Not just in this course, but in everything. That is not cynical; it means being careful about what one accepts as assertion of fact out there in the real world.”

Fritz adds, “It can be very subtle, too. I think all of our students know the ancient aliens shows are a bunch of hype, but they don’t realize that even some of the information they find on the National Geographic website, or on the Nat Geo or History channels, or some of the more entertainment-oriented programs, also need to be evaluated very critically.”

“It’s important to be skeptical…  That is not cynical; it means being careful about what one accepts as assertion of fact out there in the real world.”

So what myths do they get asked about the most? Which ones drive them the most crazy? From aliens and Atlantis to Indiana Jones, Gayle Fritz and David Freidel discuss why these hoaxes and fantasies are so harmful.

“A couple years ago when I was reading that the hook of the new Indiana Jones movie was going to have something to do with aliens, it was like, ‘No!! No! Why did it have to be aliens?’” says Fritz. “Like Indiana Jones says, ‘Why did it have to be snakes?’” She admits that UFO sightings and E.T. don’t bother her so much, but she says, “When civilizations of the past are denied the credit of their achievements, and it’s instead awarded to ancient aliens, that’s probably what annoys me the most.”

Freidel is in total agreement. “I think it’s very frustrating that people find stories about ancient aliens making the pyramids of Egypt or ‎Tiwanaku, or moving the great sculptures of Easter Island, so compelling. What people don’t take into account is what these assertions of ‘ancient aliens’ say about human beings—what we’re capable of and what we actually achieved. It’s so important in our field of archaeology that people take into consideration our long history. People seem to think that anything that didn’t happen in the last 10 years is not relevant, and that is absolutely not true. We have to explain exactly why we think such assertions of fantasy about the past are degrading of our knowledge.”

Myth #2: Indiana Jones, a Curse and a Blessing

The problems archaeologists have with the Indiana Jones series go far beyond just the latest installment’s use of ancient aliens. Freidel recalls, “My professor Gordon Willey at Harvard disliked Raiders of the Lost Ark intensely. The reason being that he was of that generation. He was actually an archeologist in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, and so for him, it was not okay to be caricatured in this way. The film did not show what archaeologists did. They did not go out and find prized artifacts and take them and run away. That is looting, not archaeology.”

“Incidentally, the opening scene shows Indiana Jones grabbing a golden idol off the altar,” Freidel says. “That’s actually a real jade artifact in the Dumbarton Oaks research library in Washington D.C., and it’s an image of the Aztec goddess Tlazolteotl. It’s a real piece of work, but it’s also an unprovenanced piece of work that was not found in good archaeological context. It was looted.”

“The issue of looting is a fundamental one for us in the field,” says Freidel. “What do we do with unprovenanced artifacts? How do we think about them when our museums today are full of looted artifacts? We teach Indiana Jones very carefully to make it clear that we’re not okay with looting.”

However, Fritz is quick to point out that Indiana Jones has done some good for the field, too. The films have brought a lot of publicity and inspired more students to foray into archaeology as part of their studies. But when they come to class expecting more Steven Spielberg-sized capers, Fritz says they are in for a rude awakening. “Some students are disappointed when they realize I’m nothing like Indiana Jones or Lara Croft,” she says, “and they find it more boring than they expected. But others get bit by the bug, and they say, ‘Well it’s different than I thought it’d be. There’s no whips. But still it’s cool.’”

“I think quite a few archeologists would not be in the field if it hadn’t been for Indiana Jones, and that’s a good thing,” she says. “We have to acknowledge that. Harrison Ford himself has made public service announcements that are anti-looting and that are pro-professional archaeological level of research.”