Tim Harrison on CTV: http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20100429/noahs-ark-found-100429/20100429?hub=CanadaAMV2
Eric Cline on Fox News: http://video.foxnews.com/v/4171840/wheres-the-actual-site
Eric Cline in Time Magazine: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1985830,00.html
Robert Cargill at RobertCargill: http://robertcargill.com/2010/04/28/no-you-didnt-find-noahs-ark/
Posted by T. Barako
For over 4000 years, the Great Sphinx at Giza has puzzled all who have laid eyes on it. What is this crouching lion, human-headed creature? Who built it and why? To unlock its secrets, two teams of archaeologists and sculptors must immerse themselves in the world of ancient Egypt—a land of pharaohs and pyramids, animal gods and human sacrifice, and sun worship and solar alignments.
Watch Providence Pictures’ “Riddles of the Sphinx” on Tuesday, January 19 at 8:00 pm ET on PBS/NOVA (check local listings).
And visit www.providencepictures.com for bonus scenes not available anywhere else and to sign up for future announcements.
In Dora’s Big Dig by Alison Inches (Simon Spotlight, 2006), Dora digs up a turquoise stone and tells her monkey friend that she should take the stone to her mami, because “My mami is an archeologist. That means she digs for ancient treasure!”
The misinformation starts at a young age.
Jim West writes about the responsibility facing archaeologists in his article Stalemate: Archaeological Research, The Public, and Our Responsibility at bibleinterp.
Posted by Eric H. Cline, George Washington University
Gather ye round, my friends and colleagues, and let me point you to a wondrous tale — the story of an arson investigator from Oklahoma named Jimmy Barfield; a man with no training in archaeology or philology, yet who claims to have “cracked the code” of the Copper Scroll; a man who, by his own admission, cannot read Hebrew and is not an archaeologist, bible scholar, or ancient historian, and yet claims to have located nearly all of the treasures listed in the Copper Scroll. Gather round, I say, and hear a whopper of a tale, which advocates a cause, pays little attention to the investigative process, ignores contrary evidence, and advertises a high moral purpose. Sound familiar? Junk science, anyone? Ah, the stuff of summer — more tales of miraculous discoveries by pseudo-scientists who are able to “think and reason without a PhD.” The fun just never stops, does it? And yet it must. It is up to us, as the group of professionals most affected by such nonsensical claims, to stand up and protest immediately when stories like this are hawked on the Internet and in the popular media to an unsuspecting and gullible public. And we have; Bob Cargill, a member of ASOR’s fledgling Archaeology and the Media Committee, is a first responder; his essay rebutting Barfield’s claims can be found on the Bible and Interpretation website at http://www.bibleinterp.com/articles/cargill2_08261.shtml. I urge everyone to read it and to move forward from there. If we do not say anything and do not begin to protect our “brand,” as Microsoft, Coke, IBM, and other entities do with a vengeance, then we shall continue to see such pseudo-archaeology practiced and our field continually sullied.
The following post contains mp3 files of papers presented at Duke University on April 23th and 24th, 2009. Thanks to the conference organizers, sponsors, and presenters for permission to post the audio.
For notes on the papers and the conference, see Robert Cargill’s blog (day 1 & day 2). Also note that some of these papers are available from Duke’s itunes.
DAY ONE
Eric Meyers, Introduction
Michael Schoenfeld, Welcome
Byron McCane, Scholars Behaving Badly: Sensationalism and Archaeology in the Media
Milton Moreland, Forged by a Genius: Scholarly Responses to History Channel Meets CSI
Christopher Rollston, An Ancient Medium in the Modern Media: Stages of Semitic Inscriptions
Jonathan Reed, The Lure of Proof and the Legacy of Biblical Archaeology: Scholars and the Media
Question and Answer Period
Eric Cline, Fabulous Finds and Fantastic Forgeries: The Distortion of Archaeology by the Media Pseudoarchaeology
Joe Zias, Response
Morag Kersel, The Power of the Press Release and Popular Magazines on the Antiquities Trade
Annabel Wharton, Response
Chad Spigel, Response
Mark Goodacre, The Talpiot Tomb and the Bloggers
A.K.M. Adam, Response
Patty Gerstenblith, Legal and Ethical Aspects of Cultural Heritage
DAY TWO
Nina Burleigh, Inside the Collector’s Lair and Other Tales from the Biblical Antiquities Trade in Israel and the USA
Mark Pinsky, The Holy Land Experience
Tony Cartledge, Walk about Jerusalem: Protestant Pilgrims in the Holy Land
Bert de Vries, Umm el-Jimal
S. Thomas Parker, Response
Eric Meyers, The Quest for the Temple Mount: The Settler Movement and National Parks in Israel
Rebecca Stein, Response
Ethan Bronner, Archaeology, Politics and the Media: A View from Jerusalem
Ray Bruce, Observations
Moira Bucciarelli, Observations
Eric Powell, Observations
Andy Vaughn, Summary of the Conference
Duke University is sponsoring a symposium on the relationship between archaeology and the media and its impact on politics. The conference will be April 23-24. Update: Check out Bob Cargill’s post about the conference (link).
Today’s Chronicle of Higher Education features an article entitled The Fall of an Academic Cyberbully by Steve Kolowich. It mentions many ASOR members.
Contributed by Tristan Barako, Ph.D., Senior Researcher, Providence Pictures
When The Bible’s Buried Secrets premiered on PBS this past November, it was NOVA’s most watched show in the past five years, attesting to the enduring interest that biblical archaeology holds for the general public. The two-hour special was produced by Providence Pictures, where I now work as senior researcher and writer. The president/producer/director of Providence Pictures, Gary Glassman, took the unusual step of hiring me—someone with absolutely no prior experience in film production—on the strength of my background in archaeology and biblical studies. He and NOVA wanted to make sure that the film was as accurate as possible. To that end we enlisted the support of more than 30 ASOR members, who generously gave of their knowledge and granted us complete film access to their excavations and artifacts. Through their participation and the collective effort of all our staff and crew, we’ve shown that a documentary about biblical archaeology can be both a popular and scholarly success.
To give the readers of this blog some sense of the filmmaking process, here are a few behind-the-scenes peeks of the challenges we faced while making The Bible’s Buried Secrets. Most of what follows relates to my uncredited cameo appearances. In the interest of full disclosure, it must be said that Michael Homan, the moderator of the ASOR blog, also appears in the film. It was originally a more substantial role—his big line went something like “Ron, you better come down here; we just found something that’s going to make your day!” —but that part of the scene, unfortunately, ended up on the cutting room floor.
A reenactment of the discovery of the Tel Zayit abecedary.
Idol smasher: The climax of the destruction of Hazor was a close-up, slow motion shot of a statue of a seated male being decapitated. We had originally planned to shoot this scene in Israel, so we had our Art Director there, Gal Oren, make three replicas of the statue, but we ran out of time so we had to do it in the U.S. instead. The location we ended up using was Gary’s garage in Providence, where we clamped the statue (made of plaster, not the original basalt) to a low table and positioned a Duraflame stick in front of the camera. Then we smoked up the garage and I put on a robe, dirtied up my arm and hand, and grabbed the mallet. I was a bit nervous because I wanted to make sure that the head came off cleanly, similar to how the original was found at Hazor. To stay in the frame I had to approach the statue at an odd angle, but this did not get in the way of a near perfect strike: the head flew off and crashed against the back wall. Good thing, because I shattered the next two replicas.
Smashing idols in Gary’s garage.
German scholar: This was my most challenging role given the amount of time on camera and the task at hand—channeling Julius Wellhausen. To prepare for it we bought a nineteenth-century German Bible and rented a three-piece suit from a costume company in California (surprisingly we couldn’t find anything on the east coast). I also let my beard grow out a little. Finally, I found a section in my Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia that contained clear J and E passages. Despite all these preparations we overlooked something, as pointed out to me by a friend who is a German historian: the wedding band was on my left hand, whereas Germans typically wear it on the right. There goes the Emmy for best research.
Playing Julius Wellhausen
Gila’s assistant: In this scene, a recreation of the discovery of the Tel Dan Stela, I played only a supporting role: the guy holding the stadia rod for Gila Cook who found this famous inscription in 1993. We followed her recollection of events throughout, which included loading her up like a pack mule, while I ambled off the tell empty-handed. I felt especially insensitive because she was battling laryngitis that day and we made her go up and down the hill with all that equipment a few times on multiple takes, but she was a real trooper and the scene turned out beautifully.
Loading up Gila
Dead Israelite: We used Nazareth Village for many recreations including the scene where one of the Jerusalem priests rescues scrolls from a building set aflame by the Babylonians. Again I donned a robe and got smudged up, but this time all I had to do was lay sprawled out in the background. I’m really not visible because of all the smoke. Our Director of Photography, Nick Gardner, inhaled so much of it that he woke up that night with a splitting headache.
Tristan as a dead Israelite
YHWH: In one of the many scribal scenes, we wanted an extreme close-up of someone writing the personal name of the Israelite god, YHWH. Most of our recreation actors were modern-day sopherim, whom we casted for their ability to write Torah scrolls. The problem was, though, they refused to write the divine name. I volunteered to do it, but I write left-handed and all our scribes were righties. So we pressed into service our thoroughly secular, dread-locked soundman, Amir Liani, who did a great job considering that it was his first time writing in paleo-Hebrew.
YWHW in Paleo-Hebrew
For more information about Providence Pictures and The Bible’s Buried Secrets, including additional behind-the-scenes features, visit: