Graham Hancock, Prometheus for a New Age: Alternative Archaeology as Modern Mythmaking

Abstract

ABSTRACT: The Netflix show Ancient Apocalypse revolves around British writer Graham Hancock’s claim that he has uncovered evidence indicating that there was an advanced, spiritually attuned civilization during the last Ice Age that brought key elements of culture to peoples around the world. Critics, professional archaeologists in particular, characterize Hancock as a pseudoarchaeologist and a pseudoscientist. A less commonly explored perspective is to see Hancock as a bricoleur who creates a myth from a motley selection of cultural elements. A quintessentially modern feature of his Ice Age myth is its tension in relation to scientific archaeology. A story that has the characteristics of a culture hero myth is presented as evidence-based and empirically more valid than the accounts of professional archaeologists. A narrative analysis based on the work of literary theorist Algirdas Greimas shows how this claim results, on the one hand, in a pervasive vagueness in the account of the Ice Age heroes and, on the other, in a far more sharply drawn story of Hancock as a present-day Promethean culture hero who fights the dogmatism of academics and reveals the insights of the ancient Ice Age sages to a world afflicted with amnesia about its true history.