Thoughtless for the Day

If there's one thing I enjoy more than archeology, it's bad archeology, and when it comes to bad archeology it's hard to do better than the Bosnian "Pyramids".

You might remember a few months back when strange news items about what could possibly be the world's oldest pyramid being discovered in Bosnia began to appear. If the coupling of the words "Bosnia" and "pyramid" didn't any reporter's bullshit detector to clang like Clangy the Clanging Clown falling down a spiral staircase in a suit of amour (that's a such a fun visual) is understandable: after all, most reporters don't have a background in ancient history or archeology, so when an archeologist, even an amateur archeologist, says that he's discovered a pyramid in Bosnia, the press can be forgiven for believing that archeologist. What's unforgivable is believing that archeologist when his name is Semir Osmanagic.

Semir Osmanagic, the man who "discovered" the Bosnian "Pyramids" (I get the feeling that this piece is going to consist almost entirely of quotation marks) is not an actual archeologist. What he is, however, is the "man" who "discovered" the "reason" behind the disappearance of the Mayan culture: as laid out in Osmanagic's unintentionally hilarious book The World of the Maya, it turns out that the Maya were scooped up by aliens (from the Pleiades, to be exact) whom the Maya were descended from by way of Atlantis.

Here's a fun read courtesy of Archeology Magazine.