Pseudoarchaeology consists of attempts to study, interpret, or teach about the subject-matter of archaeology while rejecting, ignoring, or misunderstanding the accepted data-gathering and analytical methods of the discipline. These pseudoscientific interpretations involve the use of artifacts, sites or materials to construct scientifically insubstantial theories to strengthen the pseudoarchaeologists' claims. Methods include exaggeration of evidence, dramatic or romanticized conclusions, use of fallacious arguments, and fabrication of evidence.
Sir John Eric Sidney Thompson was a leading English Mesoamerican archaeologist, ethnohistorian, and epigrapher. While working in the United States, he dominated Maya studies and particularly the study of the Maya script until well into the 1960s.
Assyriology, also known as Cuneiform studies or Ancient Near East studies, is the archaeological, anthropological, historical, and linguistic study of the cultures that used cuneiform writing. The field covers Pre Dynastic Mesopotamia, Sumer, the early Sumero-Akkadian city-states, the Akkadian Empire, Ebla, the Akkadian and Imperial Aramaic speaking states of Assyria, Babylonia and the Sealand Dynasty, the migrant foreign dynasties of southern Mesopotamia, including the Gutians, Amorites, Kassites, Arameans, Suteans and Chaldeans. Assyriology can be included to cover Neolithic pre-Dynastic cultures dating to as far back as 8000 BC, to the Islamic Conquest of the 7th century AD, so the topic is significantly wider than that implied by the root "Assyria".
François Lenormant was a 19th-century French Hellenist, Assyriologist, and archaeologist.
Sir Ernest Alfred Thompson Wallis Budge was an English Egyptologist, Orientalist, and philologist who worked for the British Museum and published numerous works on the ancient Near East. He made numerous trips to Egypt and Anglo-Egyptian Sudan on behalf of the British Museum to buy antiquities, and helped it build its collection of cuneiform tablets, manuscripts, and papyri. He published many books on Egyptology, helping to bring the findings to larger audiences. In 1920, he was knighted for his service to Egyptology and the British Museum.
Cheikh Anta Diop was a Senegalese historian, anthropologist, physicist, and politician who studied the human race's origins and pre-colonial African culture. Diop's work is considered foundational to the theory of Afrocentricity, though he himself never described himself as an Afrocentrist. The questions he posed about cultural bias in scientific research contributed greatly to the postcolonial turn in the study of African civilizations.
A chultún is a bottle-shaped underground storage chamber built by the pre-Columbian Maya in southern Mesoamerica. Their entrances were surrounded by plastered aprons which guided rainwater into them during the rainy seasons. Most of these archaeological features likely functioned as cisterns for potable water.
Barry John Kemp, was an English archaeologist and Egyptologist. He was Professor of Egyptology at the University of Cambridge and directed excavations at Amarna in Egypt. His book Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilisation is a core text of Egyptology and many Ancient History courses.
Sacred Weeds is a four-part television series of 50 minute documentaries investigating the cultural impact of psychoactive plants on a broad array of early civilisations. The series was filmed at Hammerwood Park by the producer, Sarah Marris, and her production company TVF. It was broadcast in the summer of 1998 on Channel 4, a British television network.
Maxcanú is a large town in the western part of the Mexican state of Yucatán; it also functions as the seat for the Maxcanú Municipality. It is located on Federal Highway 180, approximately 62 km (39 mi) south of Mérida.
Karl Andreas Taube is an American Mesoamericanist, Mayanist, iconographer and ethnohistorian, known for his publications and research into the pre-Columbian cultures of Mesoamerica and the American Southwest. He is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, University of California, Riverside. In 2008 he was named the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences distinguished lecturer.
Merle Greene Robertson was an American artist, art historian, archaeologist, lecturer and Mayanist researcher, renowned for her extensive work towards the investigation and preservation of the art, iconography, and writing of the pre-Columbian Maya civilization of Central America. She is most famous for her rubbings of Maya carved stelae, sculpture, and carved stone, particularly at the Maya sites of Tikal and Palenque.
Simon Martin is a British epigrapher, historian, writer and Mayanist scholar. He is best known for his contributions to the study and decipherment of the Maya script, the writing system used by the pre-Columbian Maya civilisation of Mesoamerica. As one of the leading epigraphers active in contemporary Mayanist research, Martin has specialised in the study of the political interactions and dynastic histories of Classic-era Maya polities. Since 2003 Martin has held positions at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology where he is currently an Associate Curator and Keeper in the American Section, while teaching select courses as an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania.
Peter Mathews is an Australian archaeologist, epigrapher, and Mayanist.
Kʼàakʼ Chiʼ is a hypothetical archaeological site of the pre-Columbian Maya civilization, proposed by then 15-year old William Gadoury of Saint-Jean-de-Matha, Quebec in 2016. It is located in the state of Campeche in southern Mexico, in the extreme south of the Yucatán Peninsula. The location was determined by overlaying Maya constellations with a map of the Yucatán Peninsula.
Claude-François Baudez was a French Mayanist, archaeologist and iconologist. He was honorary director of research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, a specialist on the rituals and beliefs of Mesoamerica, particularly of the Maya civilisation.
Cyril John Gadd, was a British Assyriologist, Sumerologist, and curator. He was Keeper of the Department of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities, British Museum from 1948 to 1955, and Professor of Ancient Semitic Languages and Civilizations at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London from 1955 to 1960. Having served in the British Army during the First World War, he joined the British Museum after demobilisation and also worked on excavations at Ur, Carchemish, Alalakh and Nimrud. Having risen to Keeper, he left the British Museum to enter academia, and was appointed professor emeritus on his retirement in 1961.
The periodisation of the history of Belize is the division of Belizean, Maya, and Mesoamerican history into named blocks of time, spanning the arrival of Palaeoindians to the present time. The pre-Columbian era is most often periodised by Mayanists, who often employ four or five periods to discuss history prior to the arrival of Spaniards. The Columbian era is most often periodised by historians, and less often by Mayanists, who often employ at least four periods to discuss history up to the present time.
