What do you think?
Rate this book
Archaeological Oddities: A Field Guide to Forty Claims of Lost Civilizations, Ancient Visitors, and Other Strange Sites in North America
Does evidence show that Native Americas residing in Utah a thousand years ago lived among dinosaurs, depicting those creatures in their rock art? Did some of those same ancient Americans also encounter visitors from other planets, painting images of space-suited aliens on canyon walls? Have archaeologists discovered evidence that members of the Lost Tribes of Israel visited ancient America, leaving their mark by engraving the Ten Commandments in Hebrew on rocks in New Mexico? And Ohio? Is there archaeological evidence of ancient Celtic visitors to the New World in the form of messages etched in stone, megalithic monuments, and even the remnants of the villages in which they lived? Are American archaeologists covering up the remains of lost cities deeply ensconced in a secret cave in Arizona and in a subterranean chamber in Missouri? Finally, have archaeologists discovered the far western outpost of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh, not in Egypt or even Africa, but in, of all places, California?
Those questions and more are answered by archaeologist Ken Feder in Archaeological A Field Guide to Forty Claims of Lost Civilizations, Ancient Visitors, and Other Strange Sites in North America that the above listed questions and others addressed in his book represent the equivalent of “fake news” about America’s ancient past. The forty sites he highlights are, in fact, fascinating and fun places to visit. Feder’s guide provides an entertaining summary of those forty sites along with the practical information you’ll need to visit them. This full-color book includes over 100 fascinating photographs.
Those questions and more are answered by archaeologist Ken Feder in Archaeological A Field Guide to Forty Claims of Lost Civilizations, Ancient Visitors, and Other Strange Sites in North America that the above listed questions and others addressed in his book represent the equivalent of “fake news” about America’s ancient past. The forty sites he highlights are, in fact, fascinating and fun places to visit. Feder’s guide provides an entertaining summary of those forty sites along with the practical information you’ll need to visit them. This full-color book includes over 100 fascinating photographs.
312 pages, Hardcover
First published March 6, 2019
7 people are currently reading
88 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
October 8, 2023
AN ARCHAEOLOGIST LOOKS CRITICALLY AT MANY POPULAR SITES
Archaeologist Kenneth Feder wrote in the Preface of this 2019 book, “I have written fairly extensively on the topic of what is often called ‘fringe’ or ‘pseudo-archaeology’ with its claims of archaeological oddities including evidence of ancient aliens visiting the Earth in antiquity and mating… with proto-humans (to create our current species); those same aliens providing technological secrets to our ancestors, enabling them to build pyramids and great monuments; residents of the Lost Continent of Atlantis spreading to all corners of the world and giving primitive people agriculture, writing, and principles of engineering… I have written two books that focus on these and many other varieties of fake or speculative archaeology.” (Pg. xxvii-xxviii) He adds, “Though initially this book was going to focus exclusively on archaeological sites that have been misrepresented in popular media, I decided that a relentlessly negative book… just might not be …. fun… After all, there are in North America a fair number of whimsical, entertaining … examples of the use of archaeology …to amuse and maybe even inspire people.” (Pg. xxx)
He states in the first chapter, “Many of the sites highlighted in this book have been presented by their supporters as real game changers… [that] will inevitably force historians and archaeologists to rethink everything they think they know---about … the assumed isolation of Earth from extraterrestrial civilizations… lost tribes, lost cities, adnk lost continents… Hey, it there’s actual, physical, archeological evidence for any of those … claims, I’m all in… Ultimately, however, it’s all about that physical, archaeological evidence. So many of the sites I showcase … present us with evidence that rises to the level of proof for any of these game-changing claims?” (Pg. 1) He continues, “This book is … focusing on forty specific instances of the rejection of archaeological facts and the creation of new ones. On its pages I provide … a ‘greatest hits’ … of misrepresentation and fakery.” (Pg. 3)
He points out, “no one has ever found artifacts or habitation sites in the American Southwest that can be identified as reflecting the material culture of ancient Jewish explorers or settlers. There are no remnants of ancient synagogues… or anything else for that matter. The wandering Jews of ancient New Mexico, if they existed, must have been obsessively neat, never losing or disposing of anything for archaeologists… to find. In truth, it is a new impossibility for an ancient people to have been in New Mexico, taken the time to inscribe the Ten Commandments in Hebrew on a boulder during their journey, and not leave behind … any mundane evidence of their presence in the region.” (Pg. 66)
He explains, “Stonehenge is an enormously impressive ‘megalithic’ monument… however… it isn’t anywhere close to … [being] the construction project that included the greatest number of large (mega) stones… Stonehenge, many stone circles appear to have served as calendars marking important celestial events, including the rise and set points of the sun at the solstices (June 21 and December 21)… as well as the equinoxes.” (Pg. 103-104)
He notes, “These boulders are called ‘erratics’ and resulted from the movement of giant sheets of ice during the Pleistocene or Ice Age… In fact, the presence of large, often isolated boulders of raw materials different from all the surrounding rocks and underlying bedrock, often found many miles from… their source---and even balanced upon other, smaller rocks as if placed there by a whimsical giant---was one of the key clues cited by geologists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when they first suggested the existence of an ancient Ice Age. Only large bodies of slowly flowing ice would have been powerful enough to have moved large rocks so far from their source…” (Pg. 108)
He states, “The best answer to the question ‘Who discovered America?’ seems manifestly obvious: The ancestors of today’s Native Americans did… they were here more than fifteen thousand and probably closer to twenty thousand years ago… The truth is, Christopher Columbus did not ‘discover’ America by any reasonable interpretation of that term.” (Pg. 136)
He asks, “What kinds of evidence have been presented in support of claims that residents of another planet… visited Earth in antiquity and had a dramatic impact on our human ancestors? The answer … is, well, not much. Claims about an extraterrestrial presence on Earth in the ancient past are almost always based on indirect evidence and almost always … based on a low opinion of human intelligence… The problem with such claims … rests on the fact that if they were here, the ETs … [didn’t leave] behind any direct or definitive material evidence… Archaeologists have not found … fragments of crashed spaceships in ancient stratigraphic layers… Interestingly, scientists have not been close-minded on this issue and have seriously considered the POSSIBILITY that artifacts reflecting extraterrestrial visitation to Earth MIGHT conceivably exist… Carl Sagan [in a 1963 article] … actually proposed that geologists should investigate ancient strata in the search for material evidence left behind by extraterrestrial visitors to Earth in antiquity.” (Pg. 142-143)
He says, “something out of the ordinary definitely fell to Earth sometime in late June or early July 1947 just outside of Roswell, New Mexico… the RAAF was the hub of Project Mogul, a secret program with the goal of spying on the nascent nuclear program of the Soviet Union… the thing that fell to Earth near Roswell… can be explained most simply as a failed Project Mogul balloon train. In fact, all photographs and contemporary eyewitness testimony points in that direction…” (Pg. 146-147)
Of ‘geoglyphs’ such as the Nazca lines in Peru, he explains, “Perhaps the most obvious place to put gods and spirits is in the sky… it’s no wonder that all over the world people have constructed enormous monuments honoring them and that would be fully visible only from their perch on high… certainly visible and pleasing to a God residing in Heaven.” (Pg. 150)
He mocks “the ancient-alien-visitors-to-Earth hypothesis spread by folks like Giorgio Tsoukalos of the cable show ‘Ancient Aliens,’ in which it was claimed that Serpent Mound was built to somehow mark a fueling station for extraterrestrial spacecraft. Seriously. Serpent Mound is actually located on the rim of an ancient meteor crater… This high level of iridium in the soil under Serpent Mound led a researcher …. Interview on ‘Ancient Aliens’ to suggest …extraterrestrial visitors … fueled their spaceships with iridium and needed to collect the stuff wherever they landed…” (Pg. 153-154)
About ancient art that is claimed to portray ‘spacemen,’ etc., he comments, “The belief that ancient art must be interpreted as representational, depictions of creatures the artists actually saw, originates in a fundamental misapprehension of art in the first place… we all recognize that the imagery in their paintings are the result of creativity, imagination, some might say their genius. Apply the same perspective to ancient artists and the anthropomorphs become imaginative depictions of spirit beings, not strange renderings of ETs.” (Pg. 160)
Of ‘young Earth creationists,” he observes, “if the world is only six thousand years old and, therefore, people and dinosaurs have overlapped in time… Human bones might be found in dinosaur … remnants of their feces… it would mark definitive proof of the coexistence of human beings and dinosaurs…” (Pg. 182) Of the famous Glen Rose prints, he states, “Researcher Glen J. Kuban… has intensively research the Paluxy River man tracks for more than two decades and has explained the prints as resulting from one of four processes:… fakes carved during the 1930s… the misidentification … of elongate impressions as giant human prints when they were … produced by … three-toed dinosaurs… if the dinosaur was walking back on its heels (leaving no impression of its clawed toes)… they might look like the impressions left by giant human feet… erosional elements that … are elongate and misidentified as footprints… random marks that can be made to look vaguely footlike if you try hard enough.” (Pg. 195)
Turning to the “ongoing pilgrimages to Sedona by people seeking spiritual enlightenment,” he says, “New Agers appear to desire something from ancient people, and sense of enlightenment, harmony, balance, and connectivity that they crave but can’t find in their materially rich, but spiritually impoverished, modern Western lives… [this is] little more than a modern version of the idealized ‘noble savage’ myth of the seventeenth century.” (Pg. 212)
He says of the search for Bigfoot, “Grainy, poorly focuses, and bouncy film or video are weak evidence … It certainly doesn’t bode well for the science of Bigfoot that supporters keep returning to … the Patterson-Gimlin film… because that seems to be their best photographic evidence. It must be troubling … what, with all of the improvements in video recording since 1967 and with all of the people out there looking for Sasquatch, all of them holding cell phones with cameras that produce … high-resolution images… there isn’t anything better than those sixty seconds of footage.” (Pg. 217)
He concludes, “You …may disagree with my skepticism about some of the sites presented here, but that’s the beauty of science. Throughout this book I have pointed out… the kinds of physical evidence that must be found in order to support claims… Find irrefutable evidence, publish it, and have it reviewed by archaeologists and historians. At that point I will happily congratulate you… and begin work on a new, updated edition of this book. Until then…” (Pg. 248-249)
This book will be “must reading” for those seeking a critical perspective on dubious claims made by many persons.
Archaeologist Kenneth Feder wrote in the Preface of this 2019 book, “I have written fairly extensively on the topic of what is often called ‘fringe’ or ‘pseudo-archaeology’ with its claims of archaeological oddities including evidence of ancient aliens visiting the Earth in antiquity and mating… with proto-humans (to create our current species); those same aliens providing technological secrets to our ancestors, enabling them to build pyramids and great monuments; residents of the Lost Continent of Atlantis spreading to all corners of the world and giving primitive people agriculture, writing, and principles of engineering… I have written two books that focus on these and many other varieties of fake or speculative archaeology.” (Pg. xxvii-xxviii) He adds, “Though initially this book was going to focus exclusively on archaeological sites that have been misrepresented in popular media, I decided that a relentlessly negative book… just might not be …. fun… After all, there are in North America a fair number of whimsical, entertaining … examples of the use of archaeology …to amuse and maybe even inspire people.” (Pg. xxx)
He states in the first chapter, “Many of the sites highlighted in this book have been presented by their supporters as real game changers… [that] will inevitably force historians and archaeologists to rethink everything they think they know---about … the assumed isolation of Earth from extraterrestrial civilizations… lost tribes, lost cities, adnk lost continents… Hey, it there’s actual, physical, archeological evidence for any of those … claims, I’m all in… Ultimately, however, it’s all about that physical, archaeological evidence. So many of the sites I showcase … present us with evidence that rises to the level of proof for any of these game-changing claims?” (Pg. 1) He continues, “This book is … focusing on forty specific instances of the rejection of archaeological facts and the creation of new ones. On its pages I provide … a ‘greatest hits’ … of misrepresentation and fakery.” (Pg. 3)
He points out, “no one has ever found artifacts or habitation sites in the American Southwest that can be identified as reflecting the material culture of ancient Jewish explorers or settlers. There are no remnants of ancient synagogues… or anything else for that matter. The wandering Jews of ancient New Mexico, if they existed, must have been obsessively neat, never losing or disposing of anything for archaeologists… to find. In truth, it is a new impossibility for an ancient people to have been in New Mexico, taken the time to inscribe the Ten Commandments in Hebrew on a boulder during their journey, and not leave behind … any mundane evidence of their presence in the region.” (Pg. 66)
He explains, “Stonehenge is an enormously impressive ‘megalithic’ monument… however… it isn’t anywhere close to … [being] the construction project that included the greatest number of large (mega) stones… Stonehenge, many stone circles appear to have served as calendars marking important celestial events, including the rise and set points of the sun at the solstices (June 21 and December 21)… as well as the equinoxes.” (Pg. 103-104)
He notes, “These boulders are called ‘erratics’ and resulted from the movement of giant sheets of ice during the Pleistocene or Ice Age… In fact, the presence of large, often isolated boulders of raw materials different from all the surrounding rocks and underlying bedrock, often found many miles from… their source---and even balanced upon other, smaller rocks as if placed there by a whimsical giant---was one of the key clues cited by geologists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when they first suggested the existence of an ancient Ice Age. Only large bodies of slowly flowing ice would have been powerful enough to have moved large rocks so far from their source…” (Pg. 108)
He states, “The best answer to the question ‘Who discovered America?’ seems manifestly obvious: The ancestors of today’s Native Americans did… they were here more than fifteen thousand and probably closer to twenty thousand years ago… The truth is, Christopher Columbus did not ‘discover’ America by any reasonable interpretation of that term.” (Pg. 136)
He asks, “What kinds of evidence have been presented in support of claims that residents of another planet… visited Earth in antiquity and had a dramatic impact on our human ancestors? The answer … is, well, not much. Claims about an extraterrestrial presence on Earth in the ancient past are almost always based on indirect evidence and almost always … based on a low opinion of human intelligence… The problem with such claims … rests on the fact that if they were here, the ETs … [didn’t leave] behind any direct or definitive material evidence… Archaeologists have not found … fragments of crashed spaceships in ancient stratigraphic layers… Interestingly, scientists have not been close-minded on this issue and have seriously considered the POSSIBILITY that artifacts reflecting extraterrestrial visitation to Earth MIGHT conceivably exist… Carl Sagan [in a 1963 article] … actually proposed that geologists should investigate ancient strata in the search for material evidence left behind by extraterrestrial visitors to Earth in antiquity.” (Pg. 142-143)
He says, “something out of the ordinary definitely fell to Earth sometime in late June or early July 1947 just outside of Roswell, New Mexico… the RAAF was the hub of Project Mogul, a secret program with the goal of spying on the nascent nuclear program of the Soviet Union… the thing that fell to Earth near Roswell… can be explained most simply as a failed Project Mogul balloon train. In fact, all photographs and contemporary eyewitness testimony points in that direction…” (Pg. 146-147)
Of ‘geoglyphs’ such as the Nazca lines in Peru, he explains, “Perhaps the most obvious place to put gods and spirits is in the sky… it’s no wonder that all over the world people have constructed enormous monuments honoring them and that would be fully visible only from their perch on high… certainly visible and pleasing to a God residing in Heaven.” (Pg. 150)
He mocks “the ancient-alien-visitors-to-Earth hypothesis spread by folks like Giorgio Tsoukalos of the cable show ‘Ancient Aliens,’ in which it was claimed that Serpent Mound was built to somehow mark a fueling station for extraterrestrial spacecraft. Seriously. Serpent Mound is actually located on the rim of an ancient meteor crater… This high level of iridium in the soil under Serpent Mound led a researcher …. Interview on ‘Ancient Aliens’ to suggest …extraterrestrial visitors … fueled their spaceships with iridium and needed to collect the stuff wherever they landed…” (Pg. 153-154)
About ancient art that is claimed to portray ‘spacemen,’ etc., he comments, “The belief that ancient art must be interpreted as representational, depictions of creatures the artists actually saw, originates in a fundamental misapprehension of art in the first place… we all recognize that the imagery in their paintings are the result of creativity, imagination, some might say their genius. Apply the same perspective to ancient artists and the anthropomorphs become imaginative depictions of spirit beings, not strange renderings of ETs.” (Pg. 160)
Of ‘young Earth creationists,” he observes, “if the world is only six thousand years old and, therefore, people and dinosaurs have overlapped in time… Human bones might be found in dinosaur … remnants of their feces… it would mark definitive proof of the coexistence of human beings and dinosaurs…” (Pg. 182) Of the famous Glen Rose prints, he states, “Researcher Glen J. Kuban… has intensively research the Paluxy River man tracks for more than two decades and has explained the prints as resulting from one of four processes:… fakes carved during the 1930s… the misidentification … of elongate impressions as giant human prints when they were … produced by … three-toed dinosaurs… if the dinosaur was walking back on its heels (leaving no impression of its clawed toes)… they might look like the impressions left by giant human feet… erosional elements that … are elongate and misidentified as footprints… random marks that can be made to look vaguely footlike if you try hard enough.” (Pg. 195)
Turning to the “ongoing pilgrimages to Sedona by people seeking spiritual enlightenment,” he says, “New Agers appear to desire something from ancient people, and sense of enlightenment, harmony, balance, and connectivity that they crave but can’t find in their materially rich, but spiritually impoverished, modern Western lives… [this is] little more than a modern version of the idealized ‘noble savage’ myth of the seventeenth century.” (Pg. 212)
He says of the search for Bigfoot, “Grainy, poorly focuses, and bouncy film or video are weak evidence … It certainly doesn’t bode well for the science of Bigfoot that supporters keep returning to … the Patterson-Gimlin film… because that seems to be their best photographic evidence. It must be troubling … what, with all of the improvements in video recording since 1967 and with all of the people out there looking for Sasquatch, all of them holding cell phones with cameras that produce … high-resolution images… there isn’t anything better than those sixty seconds of footage.” (Pg. 217)
He concludes, “You …may disagree with my skepticism about some of the sites presented here, but that’s the beauty of science. Throughout this book I have pointed out… the kinds of physical evidence that must be found in order to support claims… Find irrefutable evidence, publish it, and have it reviewed by archaeologists and historians. At that point I will happily congratulate you… and begin work on a new, updated edition of this book. Until then…” (Pg. 248-249)
This book will be “must reading” for those seeking a critical perspective on dubious claims made by many persons.
October 6, 2025
I first ran across Dr. Feder in the Pseudo-Archaeology podcast, and enjoyed his sometimes snarky take on debunking. I'm happy to see his humor is in full force in this book, as he debunks claims about American sites and sets us straight archaeologically.
September 30, 2025
I enjoyed this book, but I enjoyed his first one about 50 sites more.
July 28, 2025
Absolutely hilarious, and a lovely read!
The images all felt relavent, explained nicely, and were high enough quality to get a reasonably detailed look.
The author is spunky and sassy, and has written easily one of the most entertaining archeology books out there!
The images all felt relavent, explained nicely, and were high enough quality to get a reasonably detailed look.
The author is spunky and sassy, and has written easily one of the most entertaining archeology books out there!
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews