Graham Hancock on archaeology: what the evidence says · JRE #2215
SUBJECT: ARCHAEOLOGY
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
and that led archaeologists to dive in on him And there was a ganging up of archaeologists and complaints were made to the Peer-reviewed journal that published it and finally they retracted they retracted his paper without any good reasons
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
The 2023 paper in Archaeological Prospection (Wiley) claiming Gunung Padang is a pyramid built up to 27,000 years ago was retracted in March 2024, but not, as Hancock says, without good reasons. The publisher and co-editors-in-chief cited a specific, substantive methodological error: the radiocarbon dates came from soil samples not associated with any artifacts or features that could be reliably interpreted as man-made, so the conclusion that the site is an ancient human-built pyramid was not supported by the evidence. Experts quoted by Nature and Scientific American (including archaeologist Flint Dibble) noted there was no clear evidence the buried layers were built by humans rather than shaped by natural processes, and that dating old soil does not date human construction. The retraction followed an editorial investigation prompted by expert concerns, which is standard practice, so the characterization of a baseless retraction driven purely by a hostile ganging-up is not accurate.
Who Benefits
Hancock is personally tied to the retracted paper (he was acknowledged for proofreading it and the site features in his Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse), so framing the retraction as baseless suppression defends work that supports his lost-civilization thesis and products.