You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.

Welcome to Digging Up Ancient Aliens.

This is the podcast where we examine alternative history and ancient alien narratives in popular media.

Do these ideas hold water to an archaeologist or are there better explanations out there?

We are now on episode 77, the last episode of 2024 and I am Frederik, your guide into the world of pseudo archaeology.

This time we will look back at the year that has gone by and look at some of the highlights of it.

Before that though, I want to thank all of you who support the show.

You are really helping out producing this content and I'm humbled and grateful for your and if you want to help out, I will tell you how to do that and get some bonus stuff at the end of the episode.

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Now that we have finished our preparations, let's dig into the episode so 2024 is coming to an end and it's been a pretty eventful year.

I started down by breaking my hand while skiing in February, so I can tell you that research with only one hand was a little bit difficult.

Still, I've been able to get out 25 episodes over the year and it's covered a mixed bag of topics.

We started the year by looking at Ancient Aliens Top 10 Pyramids this countdown began back in December 2023 and included a structure in Hellenicon that I actually was able to visit in April during a trip to Greec.

However, the pyramids here in 2024 included the Djoser's Step Pyramid and the Pyramids on the Giza Plateau, to which we dedicated several episodes explaining the construct and how we know what we know about these wonders of the world.

I also got to look at Gunung Padang, but this time from the perspective of the ancient alien crowd in opposite to what Graham Hancock claimed about it in his Ancient Apocalypse Saying series.

In that episode I also got to talk about a wonderfully lousy paper on the pyramid itself.

While it's retracted by now, it's still up on the publisher's website.

The only reason for that that I can see at least, is that they want to have the cake and eat it too.

I mean they should take it down.

It was terribly flawed and should not have passed initial peer review.

I Suspect though that it drives a bit of traffic to their page and it will remain up for people to use as evidence of Gnunung Padang being a 10,000 year old pyramid, which is not the case.

Remember, they did not test anything that they could tie to human activity.

They were testing rotting pieces that they found among the stones themselves, so to say.

Now, from the pyramids we went on and discussed some real mysteries.

The German golden hats or combs that were made during the European Bronze Age and from what we can tell might have worked as calendar.

And again, I actually got to see one of them this year when I was in Berlin just a few weeks ago.

It was a great trip with a huge disappointment though.

The Pergamon Museum.

I had completely missed that it was closing for renovations in November, just a week before I came to to Germany.

The museum has the Ishtar Gate, the Pergamon Altar and a lot of things in its collection.

It will however be closed for well, the next 30 years or so.

So I guess it will be something I will see sometimes during my retirement maybe now in episode 58, I also discussed the Copper scroll found in the Dead Sea.

Ketchup.

What I found remarkable about it was it is actually to some extent a real mystery.

And even more intriguing, it's a real pressure map.

Contrary to what you see in games or movies, arch galleries rarely find maps that will take you to a treasure location.

The question, however, as I discussed in that episode, is whether or not the values described in the scroll are genuine.

Was it a symbolic inventory list like those we could find in ancient Greek temples, or.

Or was this an actual set of items stowed away in times of unrest and we are not sure.

But none of the fortunes described within has so far been found.

So again, we have a real mystery.

But as I discuss in the episode, we don't need aliens to explain the scroll's existence.

We have real world evidence that can actually explain the scroll.

For example, the Greek temple treasury list.

Our journey then took us to the Shroud of Turin in episode 59 and episode 60.

And I did enjoy this episode actually.

While it's pretty apparent that it's a medieval forgery, as the people of the time even uncovered, it was refreshing to see that there were, as I said in sceptical investigations of it back in the Middle Ages.

Now, what surprised me the most regarding this episode is not that I could find in my research, but the comments and emails following them.

This has been an episode that's generating the most significant amount of angry emails so far.

And most of them are from Christians who I assume feel that I attack their faith in some way.

Most of those lamenting were doing so solely on their feelings.

But some try to use papers that I was critiquing in those episodes, pointing out that academics wrote them.

The thing with higher education alone is it does not protect you from bad ideas.

What we see among the ancient alien people where there are those with actually doctorates who arguing for aliens interfering with the construction of ancient monuments like the pyramids and things like that, and looking at the papers, the authors often don't agree have a degree in the topics they are discussing and they are often tied to in most cases Catholic think tanks.

While some contribute with excellent research outside their initial fields, sometimes it can also be a red flag for that paper, especially when they start at the wrong end.

They think the fraud is authentic and then try to find evidence to support this claims.

And I mean they start the whole paper with the conclusion that the artifact is real and then they test novel ideas trying to prove it.

And could this idea help us date fabric?

Maybe.

But as far as from those papers, that's not a good good way to do it.

And they mostly ignore other stuff like the like the herring type weave that we see on the fabric that was popular in Europe during the Middle Ages but not around year zero in the area of Israel and Palestine.

And at the end of April I reviewed Professor Flint Dibble's debate against Graham Hancock on the Joe Rogan show and they will sense received the Skeptic of the Year from the Merseyside Skeptic Society.

He was also involved putting together the RealArchaeology online event that I also was a part of.

I created a website for example for that event and did a little video on lake monsters and Vikings if you missed it.

The website with all the participations is still online and you can go there to find a ton of great content.

And May was dedicated to the Mayans.

We had the brilliant Demetrious and Marie from the Maya History Instagram account and the following episode was dedicated to the uneventful end of The World of 2012 with M.

Drew King Kella.

As always, it was a blast to have him on.

Hopefully we will hear more from him in the coming year.

Let me know if there's a specific ancient alien episode or topic that you want him to tackle.

There's a much of weird alien lore out there that we can show him and see how far he gets through it.

So and following this came one of maybe my favorite episode While the episode Silencing History and Memory in the Crisis of Yore doesn't contain any aliens, it does cover something we in archaeology will have to tackle more and more history, and especially how states and museum can use it to present a preferred historical narrative.

While this topic is far from new in the field of archaeology, it may not be discussed as much as it should be.

So this is a short case study on how things can go when a state dictates what can be researched and what can be exhibited in the museum.

Poland is far from the only country using history in this way.

But it's maybe not often we think of this going on in countries with what we would deem to be a sound democracy.

It's easy to believe this is an issue for state under dictatorships or heavy censorships.

We're talking China, Vietnam, Russia.

The list can go on and on.

But this is not true.

Again, nobody is immune to misinformation.

And we need to be careful when our government is using history to present ideology or an idea, or trying to create a state identity tied to this, the most often false historical narrative.

As I go into great detail in in that episode, and I'm going to fast forward a little bit to September and the Kensington Runestone episode.

I think this is among the one of the better ones from the year and it was really fun to research and it turned out quite well.

And I got to offer things that are available in Swedish but not in English.

So this makes the Kensington Runestone and the research on it that goes on in Sweden among Swedish experts in runestones and the Scandinavian Viking and Middle Ages more accessible to people that well, does not speak English.

Again, the stone itself isn't much of a mystery.

Know who found it and he was probably the one who created the stone, maybe with two accomplices.

At least one of the accomplices, children, seems to claim that in later interviews they made with the Minnesota History Museum that was active or is active around Kensington still.

And you can still find these interviews online if you want to go and look them up yourself.

But what's more interesting is how this stone ties into the Nordic identity in Minnesota.

In a sense, the hoax, the surrounding of the hoax reflects a more important history about the identity of Nordic immigrants to the area than the Stonewood.

If it was real, as I said, even if it's a real genuine artifact created by, well, Scandinavian people in the Middle Ages, we know that Scandinavians was in the Americas.

It would just prove that they went a bit further than we initially thought.

We know that they were on Newfoundland, up in northern Canada, in Meadow Lyons, for example.

And we know this due to all the archaeological artifacts we find there.

We have plenty of them, and we have where they lived, where they stayed, and we know that they imported wood from America to Greenland to some extent, but this stone itself doesn't give us much of anything, just that they went there.

But again, we don't find any archaeological remains from this expedition, which again is strange.

We find it of other expeditions.

And I mean, either it's ninja Vikings or, you know, it's a hoax.

But here has been more than just podcasting, and I've been to some conferences and among the favorites of this year is the Theoretical Archaeology Group's 45th annual meeting, and the conference took place here in December in Bournemouth, England.

And while there I talked about how ancient aliens use human remains online.

And the very short version of these is that they used remains as objects rather than approaching these remains as humans, indicating they're not applying any ethical thinking before posting these remains online.

To them, it's a mere prop, a way to create sensationalism which should go against how archaeology and historians and, well, media in general should handle human remains online.

And the British association of Biological Anthropology and Osteoarchaeology or Baobao, has developed some very good guidelines for publishing remains online.

And I will have a link to these on the episode transcript page if you want to read more about this.

If you wonder how you yourself can approach human remains and your social media feed.

The highlight, however, was attending the first TAG Ethics Bowl, a concept that has been part of the SIA annual meeting for a very long time.

And I emptied the room as part of the audience actually, but I jumped in due to a shortage of contestants in the teams, and it was a really interesting debate regarding ethics in two random scenarios that was based on real events.

I'm also delighted to say that my team actually won.

This team Gilder, as we were called, got the honor of taking home the trophy for this first annual TAG Ethics Bowl.

I believe at the moment it's at the University of Liverpool, but I would not have minded bringing it home, but I think it will be a trophy that cycles through the coming year.

So maybe not great bringing it back home here to Sweden.

And if you're interested in the scenarios that was put up to be discussed during this debate, I will also have these linked on the transcript page for this episode.

And last but far from least, are, well, you, you who are supporting the show.

It really does help and it's Amazing to have you here in this little community.

You all really push me to improve the show and helping out building it and feel free to reach out with thoughts, ideas or thoughts on what you want to have more of in the episodes or questions for that matter.

Happy to help sort things out that you might encounter online or on TV or wherever you find your strangeness day to day.

So with just few more hours of this strange year of 2024 I want to wish my patrons and listeners a great future.

2025.

Let's see what the next year has to bring us.

And until we meet again on the other side, please spread the word by leaving a positive reviews on platforms like itunes, Spotify or even among your fellow trench dwellers.

For more information about me and the podcast, check out diggingup ancient aliens.com There you can often find sources and resources or reading recommendations if you want to learn more about the things I talk about on the show or want to know what the source is for Something I say.

And on this episode it will be a bit scarce but you will find links to the Baobao, recommendations regarding social media and human remains and also the ethic balls case studies that you can look at yourself.

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And if you have comments, corrections, suggestions or want to write that email in all caps, you find my contact info on the website and this show was created with the support of the Archaeology Podcast Network.

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Producer of the show is Ashley Array and I, Fredrik Trusahan wrote, edited and mastered the episode you're listening to.

Sandra Martador created the intro music and our outro is by the Swedish band called Tral Skriv who sings their song Fulje Hat links to Both of these artists can be found in the show notes.

Until next time, keep showing that science.

Take it out.

The idea man with the name for your holy heart.