What's Real, and What is not (Paperback)

This extended essay is taken from the author's dissertation. In it, Adam Stout reviews and critiques the relationship between mainstream archaeology and the 'fringe' since the 1920s, focusing especially on Earth Mysteries. With its fraudsters, radicals, occultists, druids and alien believers, the fringe has had a bad press and mainstream archaeology has been staunch in its policing of the frontier between the two. Stout traces when the distinction between the fringe and the archaeological establishment was at its strongest and how it became blurred with the advent of post-processualism, with, from the 1990s onwards, the latter becoming much more accepting of the former. He concludes that there is ample room for both approaches in the 21st century.