Pseudoarchaeology has a pretty long and not-so-awesome background due to the profession’s colonial roots with treasure hunters, adventurers, and the like, especially in antiquarian circles.
In the late 18th to 19th century archaeology became a national endeavor as personal cabinets of curios turned into national museums. People were now being hired to go out and collect artifacts to make a nation’s collection more grand and to show how far a nation’s reach extends. For example, Giovanni Battista Belzoni was hired by Henry Salt, the British consul to Egypt, to gather antiquities for Britain. In nineteenth-century Mexico, the expansion of the National Museum of Anthropology and the excavation of major archaeological ruins by Leopoldo Batres were part of the liberal regime of Porfirio Díaz to create a glorious image of Mexico’s pre-Hispanic past.[22]
So that’s great evidence for racism being in archeology in general but I still don’t see the connection between that and people crediting aliens for things we don’t completely understand.
Edit: There are definitely good examples in the article but they also use your argument about things that were built way more recently compared to things that were built before written language. Egyptians definitely built the pyramids, they’re in Egypt so by definition that’s what happened. But I really don’t believe people getting excited over the mystery around how it happened and then pointing to aliens as a possible answer is rooted in racism at all. That being said, there seems be all sorts of nefarious reasons to put that alien explanation on things that are much easier explained without aliens.
https://hyperallergic.com/470795/pseudoarchaeology-and-the-racism-behind-ancient-aliens/
Pseudoarchaeology has a pretty long and not-so-awesome background due to the profession’s colonial roots with treasure hunters, adventurers, and the like, especially in antiquarian circles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_archaeology
So that’s great evidence for racism being in archeology in general but I still don’t see the connection between that and people crediting aliens for things we don’t completely understand.
Edit: There are definitely good examples in the article but they also use your argument about things that were built way more recently compared to things that were built before written language. Egyptians definitely built the pyramids, they’re in Egypt so by definition that’s what happened. But I really don’t believe people getting excited over the mystery around how it happened and then pointing to aliens as a possible answer is rooted in racism at all. That being said, there seems be all sorts of nefarious reasons to put that alien explanation on things that are much easier explained without aliens.