If you dig up something that looks old, there's all sorts of things you can say about it that people will believe if you're wearing a tweed jacket or the equivalent for your culture and gender.
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The Piltdown Man |
More sophisticated, but in the same vein, was the Piltdown Man, which had the brainy folks going for quite a while.
The Vinland Map, which allegedly proves that the Norse had discovered America before Columbus, the Kensington Stone, and the plate of brass that puts Sir Francis Drake on the Pacific coast of the North American continent are a few fine examples. More recently, the finds at Burrows Cave in Illinios in 1982, are worth a peek.
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The Kensington Stone |
A fellow who had a feeling that God was just making fossils to use up extra creative energy (in opposition to the more accepted view nowadays, that they are the impressions of long-dead creatures), Dr. Hohann Beringer, was willing to theorize about any carved up rock that was planted at his digs. The wonderful Beringer's Stones included impressions of "Hebrew characters, [and] the figures of a winged dragon."
Religion and archaeology combine in interesting ways, leading to such phenomena as the discovery of Noah's Ark (reported on CBS), and the perpetual ballyhoo surrounding Shroud of Turin.
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The Cardiff Giant |
Don't get me started about the immense quality of bovinous excretion that has been piled higher than Mt. Ararat in an attempt to scientifically prove the account of divine creation from Hebrew mythology.
Joseph Smith was probably not the first person to invent an archaeology in order to found a religion, but his Book of Mormon takes the cake wherever cake is served, spawning a counter-hoax in the form of the Kinderhook Plates, and Ongoing attempts to shore it up with further pseudoarchaeology.
Religions have an honorable history of foisting off incredible nonsense on huge crowds of people by sheer force of authority. Check our our Great God Hoax pages for more.
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The Shroud of Turin (detail) |
Learn more about the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence and other Literary Forgeries in our pages on that subject.
You might also be interested in checking our our pages on Pseudoscience, on Invented People and on Art Forgery.