Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [258]
In it she discounts Szabo’s uranium-series dates (concordant) on butchered bone supplied by herself because she doesn’t believe in the method. She does the same with Naeser’s 2 sigma zircon fission track dates for two tephra layers that we proved by a cross-trench and direct tracing of the stratigraphy to overlie beds exposed in the archaeological trenches. Needless to say, she never showed us a draft of this ms or even told us she planned to publish anything on Hueyatlaco!”
Steen-McIntyre added: “The ms I’d like to submit gives the geologic evidence. It’s pretty clear-cut, and if it weren’t for the fact a lot of anthropology textbooks will have to be rewritten, I don’t think we would have had any problems getting the archaeologists to accept it. As it is, no anthro journal will touch it with a ten foot pole. Right now I don’t even have a copy to send you. The editor’s copy is still in Santa Fe and my working copy disappeared into the office of Science 80 (AAAS) months ago and, despite howls and threats, has yet to be returned.”
Steve Porter wrote to Steen-McIntyre (February 25, 1980), replying that he would consider the controversial article for publication. But he said he could “well imagine that objective reviews may be a bit difficult to obtain from certain archaeologists.” The usual procedure in scientific publishing is for an article to be submitted to several other scientists for peer review. It is not hard to imagine how an entrenched scientific orthodoxy could manipulate this process to keep unwanted information out of scientific journals. The manner in which reports by Thomas E. Lee about the Sheguiandah site were kept out of standard publications provides a good example of this (Section 5.4.1.2).
Steen-McIntyre wrote to Porter (March 4, 1980): “Often it is next to impossible to get a controversial paper published that even indirectly challenges current archaeological dogma; George Carter is a case in point!” In a letter to Steen-McIntyre, Carter had called the dominant clique of New World archeologists “priests of the High Doctrine” and complained that they bragged among themselves about having blocked him from publishing in the major journals. He compared his treatment to a modern Inquisition. Steen-McIntyre then stated: “I had thought to circumvent these ‘true believers’ by publishing in an obscure symposium volume, but no such luck.”
The competence of Steen-McIntyre’s associates was also called into question. Steen-McIntyre informed Porter: “there’s the old saw that Fryx wasn’t in his right mind when he did the work. Those folks forget that I saw the stratigraphy too, and once you get into a cross-trench, it was relatively simple, thanks to a magnesium-stained bed that traced on the excavation wall like a pencil mark!”
On March 30, 1981, Steen-McIntyre wrote to Estella Leopold, the associate editor of Quaternary Research: “The problem as I see it is much bigger than Hueyatlaco. It concerns the manipulation of scientific thought through the suppression of ‘Enigmatic Data,’ data that challenges the prevailing mode of thinking. Hueyatlaco certainly does that! Not being an anthropologist, I didn’t realize the full significance of our dates back in 1973, nor how deeply woven into our thought the current theory of human evolution had become. Our work at Hueyatlaco has been rejected by most archaeologists because it contradicts that theory, period. Their reasoning is circular. H. sapiens sapiens evolved ca. 30,000–50,000 years ago in Eurasia. Therefore any H.s.s. tools 250,000 years old found in Mexico are impossible because H.s.s. evolved ca 30,000– . . . etc. Such thinking makes for self-satisfied archaeologists but lousy science!”
As demonstrated in this book, the stone tools of Hueyatlaco are not an isolated example of “impossible