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The ‘fringe’
The ‘fringe’ often claims to be offering archaeology a new paradigm and claims that the mainstream refuses to set aside long-cherished beliefs, preferring to test new ideas against an orthodox dogma. Any ideas that threaten to undermine this dogma are rejected, usually by a refusal to acknowledge the evidence they present. To claim that this is how academic archaeology treats new ideas shows appalling ignorance of how academia works. All academic disciplines make progress by discarding hypotheses that no longer explain things properly: this is part of what separates ‘science’ from ‘religion’ and ‘knowledge’ from ‘belief’.
Archaeology is no exception to this rule. In two hundred years it has developed numerous hypotheses to explain the past. Some of them have stood the test of time, while others have been abandoned. In fact, it is depressing to reflect that a lot of what the ‘fringe’ now peddles as new ideas derives from these long-abandoned models. We see the excesses of hyper-diffusionism, the belief in biblical inerrancy, the faith in legends as history and an inability to grasp even the most basic principles and methods of modern archaeology, such as stratigraphic succession, contextual associations of artefacts and scientific dating techniques.