I believe that, overall, the answer to this question is yes. I believe, for the sake of our country, that we should stop pseudoarchaeologists from believing and trying to influence others. Like Dr. Watrall said, this is especially important when it comes to stopping nationalist groups from growing and escalating their riots. However, I am not sure this is a realistic goal to aspire to, especially since there are many obstacles in the way of changing the minds of pseudoarchaeologists.

One of the main issues is pseudoarchaeologists’ perception of archaeology and archaeologists as a whole. Throughout all of our reading, pseudoarchaeological works love using the terms “mainstream archaeology” or “mainstream science”. These phrases are used to convey how they view archaeologists: secretive. There is widespread belief in pseudoarchaeology that archaeologists are conspiring with the government to conceal the truth. As a result, all archaeological work that disagrees with pseudoarchaeological “theory” is considered a cover-up so the public doesn’t know the truth. Pseudoarchaeologists use “mainstream” as an indicator of such scientific work and as a symbol to show that the results are not trustworthy. This means that many attempts to do more archaeological work or more targeted archaeological work to disprove these claims may have limited effect. It may change the minds of the public briefly but the pseudoarchaeologists will not be phased. They will just write other articles or make other TV shows about the “mainstream science” that is deceiving everyone.

Another obstacle, that we talked about in class today, is the pseudoarchaeological TV shows as a whole. These shows blatantly mislead the public into believing their “theories” based on their “evidence” supported by real archaeologists. However, the archaeologists interviewed end up “confirming” their theories due to extensive editing of the content. No matter what their intentions are, these archaeologists fail in influencing what is broadcast and hurt their reputations, simultaneously, by being on these shows in the first place. This allows pseudoarchaeologists to raise the reputation of their show and discredit archaeologists at the same time because they hypocritically voice support for “theories” that they claim are wrong.

Lastly, many people won’t change their minds because they want to believe. In many cases, the real story of what happened at a particular site is considered as “more boring” than the pseudoarchaeological claim even though many are amazing achievements. For example, pseudoarchaeologists claim that an ancient advanced civilization, like aliens, built the pyramids, which is an entertaining idea. But the public would rather believe that than believe that the Egyptians were advanced enough to build it themselves 2000 years ago. They would rather listen to the racist, anti-archaeological, violence-inducing, unethical, anti-scientific, and anti-religious stories spun by pseudoarchaeologists because people would rather believe myths than listen to real evidence validating amazing feats done by real people.