The origins of ‘fringe’ archaeology
There have always been people with slightly eccentric beliefs about the past. Right at the birth of scientific archaeology, at the end of the eighteenth century, there were people in the newly-formed United States of America who believed that some (if not all) Native Americans were descendants of the so-called “Ten Lost Tribes of Israel”. The Mormon religion is founded on this very premise, while the first ever stratigraphic excavation that we know about was conducted by Thomas Jefferson on a burial mound to test the hypothesis. In fact, no evidence relevant to the hypothesis has ever been found, but there are still groups in addition to the Mormons, mostly in the United States, who continue to hold such beliefs.
Others cling on to traditional beliefs about the past. Literal readings of the Bible and early medieval speculative literature about the peopling of Europe have been (and in some instances continue to be) treated as authoritative accounts of the distant past. Until the nineteenth century, the written record was the only source of information about the past, but nobody had any means of assessing which – if any – version of variant accounts was the most likely to be accurate. It soon became apparent that archaeological evidence does not match any of these accounts terribly well and most historians came to accept that the writers of these ancient texts were repeating folk traditions, indulging in amateur etymologising and speculating to fill in the gaps.
Those who were unwilling – primarily for religious reasons – to abandon their familiar texts began to shoehorn the archaeological data into the text-based framework, often with confusing results. A good example is Joshua’s supposed conquest of Canaan in the second millennium BCE: take any century in that millennium to be the time of the conquest and there will always be a Canaanite city whose sack is described in the Book of Judges that turns out not to have been occupied at that time. Choose a different century and other cities will be found to have been deserted. This shoehorning is a desperate attempt to force the evidence into a preconceived structure, the reverse of how real archaeology works and much more like the behaviour of Cinderella’s ugly sisters when confronted with a glass slipper that was patently not theirs.