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Genetics, Archaeology & The Far Right with Dr. Susanne Hakenbeck - Episode 4 - Modern Myth
718 Plays5 years ago
This episode is about the Modern Myth of genetics, race and archaeology that permeates through far right online spaces. Discussions over one’s personal ancestry from DNA testing kits, the fall of Rome and modern migration into Europe. Dr. Susanne Hakenbeck is a senior lecturer in historical archaeology at the University of Cambridge and her recent paper, Genetics, archaeology and the far right: an unholy Trinity identifies the ways in which extremist online spaces foster racist ideas about the past. However it is in many ways the genetic research uses unclear terms and casually equates genetic population and ethnic groups that allow the data to be easily co-opted by the right.
Links
Genetics, archaeology and the far right: an unholy Trinity
@anarchaeologist @archpodnet
Credit
Music - Modern Myth & Alone at a Bar at 3 am - Danny Boyle
Recommended
Transcript
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the archaeology podcast. I call upon my ancestors to judge me and my clan.
00:00:22
Speaker
Taking up a story for the knowledge that we seek, broadening horizons in to me. It's a modern myth, oh yeah. In this age of darkness, we will fight for truth at night. In this age of lies, we will rise.
00:00:42
Speaker
Now it's clear, it's conception to hell, dear They told you what you wanna hear Why can't you see that the truth will set you free Expose this modern myth with me A myth
00:01:32
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Modern Myth with me, the anarchologist Tristan. Now today I'm talking to Dr.
Introduction of Dr. Suzanne Hackenbeck and her work
00:01:41
Speaker
Suzanne Hackenbeck of the University of Cambridge Archaeology Department. Her recent piece Genetics, Archaeology in Far Right and Unholy Trinity is going to be published in World Archaeology very soon. We've had a chance to
How do far-right groups misuse archaeological narratives?
00:01:56
Speaker
have a look
00:01:56
Speaker
at a pre-release copy of it, and see what it talks about when it comes to ideas about heritage, and how the way in which these ideas have been talked about, in terms of jidded ex and population migration, how these have been used by adherents of the far right. So, Suzanne, thank you very much for taking the time to sit down and talk. Yeah, thanks for asking me.
00:02:24
Speaker
So I want to kind of understand obviously the context of this is very much in the sense of the bewildering rise of the far right, both in Europe, America, and the online sphere when it comes to
00:02:40
Speaker
what can only be described as fascism, racism, and really awful, awful ideas. But what for you was the context for you writing this? What really said, right, I need to write something about this? Well, I think there have been conversations happening in archaeology around genetics for a while. So archaeologists, you know, many colleagues that I've been talking to,
00:03:10
Speaker
have an increasing frustration about how archaeology and genetics work together. And this really, I think this came to a head in around 2015 when there were a number, I mean it was a really big year for studies of archaeological population genetics.
00:03:36
Speaker
So a number of papers
What is the role of migrations in traditional vs. modern archaeology?
00:03:37
Speaker
came out that year that made really grand claims about the history of European populations. And in a way, some of those claims were not narratives of the past that archaeologists could recognize or
00:04:02
Speaker
You know, there were kind of grand stories about migrations, about population replacement. And these are the kinds of things that archaeology used to talk about. So there were, you know, migrations in particular have been explanatory tools for social change for a long time. But in the last
00:04:32
Speaker
let's say really since the 1960s, that was extensively critiqued. And so it feels very
How are archaeological findings simplified for the public?
00:04:41
Speaker
much like where archaeology is right now, the way in which a lot of people think about social processes in the past doesn't really fit with this idea that migrations are the prime mover, that migrations are the thing that brings about social change.
00:05:02
Speaker
So that's been a kind of internal conversation within archaeology. But I've also been through things I do in my job, in the department. I'm quite involved in public communication and academic outreach. So I'm really interested in how we can appropriately and in an interesting way communicate our research to the public.
00:05:30
Speaker
And so I started looking into how this kind of work is being received by people, you know, non-archaeologists. And that's really when I realized that there are some quite problematic ways in which the narratives that are highly simplified that come out of archaeological studies then feed into public discourse.
00:05:59
Speaker
around present
How does media distortion affect public perception of migration?
00:06:00
Speaker
-day anxieties to do with migrations, population replacement, the history of Europe, even the history of the white race. That's what prompted me to then start this research and look a bit more deeply into what's out there.
00:06:18
Speaker
so it's quite interesting that that kind of builds into you know 2014 especially when you know the when it was the European migration crisis kind of first started getting headlines where people began talking about it and that obviously formed into these weird kind of
00:06:42
Speaker
kind of almost like psychosis, social psychosis of being taken over by some foreign invaders. And it's quite interesting that despite archaeology having
00:06:56
Speaker
almost gone past this, it was still there in the wider social psyche, it's almost as if, it's almost as if we were archaeologists never actually properly communicated, actually we don't think this anymore. But the problem then comes when people kind of say, well,
00:07:18
Speaker
Why can't we talk about migration anymore? You know, like who's pulling the strings here? Who says we can't? And this is where, unfortunately, people kind of make it seem it's not that immigration and migration are forbidden, but rather that they don't match up with what's actually there in the past. I think you talk a little bit about that in what you've written.
00:07:44
Speaker
Yeah, that is a really interesting aspect of this because we can see this in wider political discourse
How do researchers' simplifications impact extremist narratives?
00:07:54
Speaker
around all sorts of things. So there are people who claim that they are not allowed to talk about certain things. These could be to do with migration, or it could be to do with empire, or it could be to do with
00:08:13
Speaker
with gender. But actually, these people talk about these topics all the time. So that in itself is quite interesting, you know, how, why there is this sense that, you know, somehow there are these topics that are, you know, they can't be talked about. And somehow, you know, the political correctness stops people from talking about these topics. And
00:08:42
Speaker
I found it was very interesting that there were these parallels in some of the research that has happened recently where I get a sense that some scholars seem to be really relieved that now suddenly we can just do away with all this theory that we've had that has focused so much on nuance,
00:09:11
Speaker
cultural complexities the way in which people relate how everything is actually really difficult and now you can really come in and say no there really were these big migrations and look you know this was the impact that these big migrations had and actually everything is really straightforward you know we we don't have to worry about you know the inter intricacies of you know what did material culture really mean
00:09:37
Speaker
Can we really determine somebody's ethnicity through material culture in the past? You know, all these really complicated
What is the importance of methodology and ethics in archaeological genetics?
00:09:44
Speaker
things around identity. And you know, how is, is it a self conceptualization? Is it an external ascription? No, no, no, you can just do away with that. And it's really clear because genetics actually tells you about someone's ancestry and then
00:10:05
Speaker
by extension also about somebody's ethnicity, and we have a very, very clear evidence for this now. Yeah, and I don't quite... I haven't quite worked out exactly why there are these parallel developments, because one, you know, what's happening in the wider world is clearly political.
00:10:32
Speaker
What's happening within archaeology, I think, is also political, but is also to do with method, with ways of just thinking about evidence and the past. It is political
How do biases affect archaeological research and public perceptions?
00:10:46
Speaker
to the extent to which everything that we do is political, but there's another aspect to it as well.
00:10:55
Speaker
Well, I think there's broader strokes. When I've talked to people, it's broader strokes about just the way in which archaeology as an institution is conducted. You know, there are bigger conversations at a professional level about what the role of an archaeologist is. There's discussions about what museums should do to decolonize themselves and
00:11:20
Speaker
You know, there's people who work at museums who basically want to keep everything the same because they own the museums and I'm not totally dunking on one individual or anything, but the V&A Museum needs to give back all its stuff. There's a lot of stuff out there that
00:11:38
Speaker
contextually provides uh it's it's almost like there's no it's like a decentralized movement um to the right again you know because what you were describing about you know people feeling as if uh political correctness has gone wrong it's the same for things like race and iq race and iq is race and intelligence has come up again um as some horrible spectre from the 20th century as this kind of like
What narratives about European ancestry are influenced by Bronze Age studies?
00:12:33
Speaker
Well, why can't we talk about race and IQ? Is that not important?
00:12:37
Speaker
are we talking about? Is this the bell beaker culture, the linear band ceramic? What kind of time period are we talking about when archaeologists are talking about migrations from Europe into Britain? If I can just add to something that you said earlier that I think is also really important, which is about this worry about political correctness gone
00:13:06
Speaker
where I think within, certainly within archeology, but also I think in the social sciences and sciences more widely, it's also actually about the appropriate method and the appropriate interpretation of the evidence that you derive from the method. And this is
How do media shape public understanding of archaeological findings?
00:13:30
Speaker
something that I find so surprising. When people go, oh, let's talk about race and IQ again.
00:13:36
Speaker
The method behind those studies has been extensively criticized. We know where the problems lie with these kinds of studies. These problems get picked up in peer review. So it's not simply a matter of saying, oh, here's one opinion, and then here's another opinion. And we can't possibly tell which one is correct.
00:14:05
Speaker
Like that's wrong, you know, because we have ways in which we can evaluate whether somebody's interpretation or somebody's study has been done appropriately and rigorously. And so, you know, within academia, that's also something that I find astonishing because there just seems to be a lot of really bad science coming out.
00:14:33
Speaker
Right. And as to your second point, where are we in time? Well, there's been a number of, so in 2015, there were a number of papers that came out. The ones were the biggest impact related to the Bronze Age, the early Bronze Age, because
00:14:55
Speaker
So just to give a bit of a timeline, so it seems the earlier studies of using genomic data focused on the Neolithic because the long established hypothesis has been that the Neolithics are the Neolithic package, but potentially also people spread out of Anatolia into
00:15:24
Speaker
into Europe. And so they have subsequently that then there were genomic studies who which ascertained that yes, that original hypothesis was largely correct. There was some input of populations from Anatolia, but there was also input from hunter-gatherers that were pre-existing in Europe. So that was relatively straightforward. But then what happened
00:15:54
Speaker
with the studies focusing on the Bronze Age is that what the evidence there seemed to show was that there was a massive population replacement in the early Bronze Age. So the people, the earlier Neolithic people seemed to have disappeared and they were replaced by these incomeers during the early Bronze Age, incomeers from the steppes.
00:16:24
Speaker
So we're talking modern day Ukraine. And that narrative ties in with an
How do far-right groups interpret archaeological findings for their ideology?
00:16:38
Speaker
earlier hypothesis that predates genomic studies completely, which saw the origins of Proto-Indo-European also
00:16:53
Speaker
um, in, in the steps in the Eurasian steps. Okay. And so two things happened. So one was that simply the, there was this very, so what came out of the genomic studies focusing on the Bronze Age, it just seemed like there was massive population replacement, which raises the question, how did that happen? Okay.
00:17:23
Speaker
And conceivably that was through violence, but there are also other hypotheses around whether the early Neolithic populations were wiped out through plague and then replaced by the incoming people in the Bronze Age. And then the other aspect of that is the link to Proto-Indo-European.
00:17:50
Speaker
So there was this tie to the language. And now Proto-Indo-European in itself, you know, there's quite a complicated area that, you know, linguistics is interested in that, but it also has a really complicated research history because it ties in with
00:18:16
Speaker
research interests in the 19th century and the early 20th century around the origins of Aryans. And so there is, it's not that the studies that have come out have gone and said, oh, let's look for these Aryans or something. That's
How can researchers prevent misuse of their work by extremists?
00:18:40
Speaker
not it. But there were kind of few steps to take
00:18:47
Speaker
from these genomic studies of population history to some people thinking, oh, well, is that the original homeland of the white race then? And I want to be- And that's primarily the problem. Yeah. And I really want to be clear that the researchers doing that
00:19:14
Speaker
doing that work weren't the ones who made that leap, but there weren't that many leaps that needed to be taken and someone did take it.
00:19:27
Speaker
And that's the next step, isn't it? It's the idea that basically a lot of these researchers may not have seen that, in fact, the way they wrote about this left it open to further interpretation in a much more standard, narrow approach. I mean, the whole thing is like there are questions even in biology and anthropology as to like, well,
00:19:55
Speaker
a lot of people don't think biological race actually exists as we understand it. This idea that you can phenotype humans into like five broad categories is a ridiculous idea. And so even trying to narrow down what white is is difficult enough. But
00:20:18
Speaker
true to their word, there were journalists and others who kind of took these ideas forward. And they
Why should archaeologists engage with the public?
00:20:26
Speaker
were the ones picking this up and making the next step. You identify several different places where journalists have taken what has been written in these articles, and they take it a bit further. And you can almost see it in the like the headlines that are made.
00:20:48
Speaker
a big problem lies with the press releases because, say, you have your academic paper, which is published in Nature, multi-authored paper, this big method section, and then you have your interpretation that's kind of cautious to a degree or formulated in a very academic language.
00:21:13
Speaker
And then the press release is the place where you can then go, well, if you want to communicate your research to the public, you then tell, you know, a simplified punchy story about your research. And, and I mean, here I really can't, I can't really, can't let the researchers off the hook because, because press releases are generally written in consultation.
00:21:39
Speaker
with the people who did the research. I mean, this is not the university press office, but going away on its own. Because the people who work in the press offices, they're not experts in these studies. They need the input of the people who actually did the work. And then from my own experience when I've done that, when I've worked with the press office, it's a kind of collaborative process. It's in the interest
00:22:08
Speaker
of the comms people that you write your story in a simple and engaging way but at the same time it's also in their interest that the science is correct, that the reporting is correct and so I think certainly the people who then sign off the press releases that relate to their own research bear considerable responsibility for how their research is then picked up in the media and then very often you find that
00:22:36
Speaker
Journalists take more or less verbatim the stuff that's in the press release. Anyway, then maybe they add some more, you know, kind of depending on which news organ you're thinking about. But, you know, if we're talking about the Daily Mail, they get really excited by stories about archaeology and
How can researchers improve communication of their findings?
00:22:56
Speaker
then really ramp them up, especially if they then see that there's some kind of angle that makes it relevant to a contemporary concern, which migration is.
00:23:08
Speaker
And so there we are. And then we've moved three steps on and we're already then, there are some stories, some news stories here that talk about, let me just go and have a look, massive migration, or they go and they go.
00:23:40
Speaker
Well, here's a funny one. Modern Europe was formed by milk-drinking Russians. That was in the Daily Mail. Which one is it? Modern Europe formed by milk-drinking Russians. Oh, for God's sake.
00:23:55
Speaker
And of course it was. I was going to ask. I'm sure that that paper, you know, the one that everybody loves and is not awful in every way possible would have a would love that they would, you know, they would lap it up.
00:24:12
Speaker
Um, I mean, I, but it wasn't only in UK. I'm, I'm pretty sure I read that in other languages as well. Um, about these kind of like mass conquerors and, you know, these violent, uh, people, um, it's not actually just the tabloids that are talking about them about this, is it? No, no, absolutely.
Can podcasting help archaeologists share research more broadly?
00:24:35
Speaker
Absolutely. And I'm in there, I have to say, you know, with my, with my own experience of, um, of, of doing, you know,
00:24:43
Speaker
press engagement based on some research that I did previously. Yeah, anything that is about conquerors or violence, people love it, journalists love it. But then I would also say it is actually possible to try to add some nuance or to tone it down a bit as opposed to dial that stuff up even further.
00:25:06
Speaker
it's not just tabloid media that actually were doing it because I remember there was the new scientist article that's right you mentioned in your thing and I remember that and I remember seeing that and thinking yeah this is kind of hackish like this is something I would read like if this was like a political pundit I'd be calling them a hack it really it read to me as not
00:25:34
Speaker
as really having an angle. Yeah. And I completely agree with you. I mean, that came out just a day or two before I submitted my revised manuscript, I think. And I thought, oh, God, this just totally proves my point. At that point, the article in The New Scientist was talking
How do Brexit myths affect interpretations of history?
00:25:59
Speaker
about genocide.
00:26:02
Speaker
genocide in the Bronze Age. And I mean, I have to say, I think certainly, you know, we have the responsibility to consider the past in its entire complexity. And if there is evidence for warfare and violence, even genocide, this is something that we need to study and we need to study it critically because, you know, this relates to the entirety of
00:26:32
Speaker
of human experience. But, you know, if you start talking about genocide in the past, then you'd better have some really good evidence when you're talking about it. Because, I mean, otherwise it's just tendentious attention grabbing.
00:26:56
Speaker
And what it then leads to is the next shocking, like, part of this. Which, I mean, I'll be absolutely honest here. The reason, like, I'm quite concerned that archaeologists are not doing enough to prominently
00:27:14
Speaker
deal with how the far right and the alt right online are using and misusing history. I mean that as a discipline as a whole, there's not a lot of
00:27:30
Speaker
There's a lot of people who
What is the historical continuity of extremist ideologies?
00:27:31
Speaker
would rather not talk on it because they're concerned about how that reflects on them personally. And the second thing is something that I've come across when I've spoken to people in private where they actually don't want to engage because they fear for themselves.
00:27:48
Speaker
you know, and for their own safety. I've spoken to several women online who have said to me that they would like to talk more, you know, provide more kind of like arguments against, you know, the alt-right, the far-right and everything, but as soon as they talk about anything, you know, they're instantly dogpiled by a number of absolutely awful people and they're effectively drowned out from any platform they have.
00:28:17
Speaker
So it's
Conclusion: Optimism for open discussions and combating misinformation
00:28:18
Speaker
the thing is, I want more archaeologists to deal with the far right and stuff like that. But there's a danger to it. But let's circle back and kind of talk about in what ways do the far right actually use this information? So what were you looking at? Well, so there was pretty unpleasant. So I just I just kind of began by just kind of
00:28:47
Speaker
randomly searching on the internet, just to kind of see what's out there. And then relatively quickly, I hit on the Stormfront Forum, also because there was some, has been some really brilliant work done by Aaron Panoski and Joan Donovan, who looked at how
00:29:16
Speaker
We looked at the impact of genetic ancestry tests on self-professed members of the far right, because what's very interesting there is that, especially in the US, it's reasonably common for anyone within the population. I mean, even people who consider themselves to be white, that there is some degree of mixed ancestry.
00:29:42
Speaker
in there. So they looked at what happens to these people who are self-confessed white supremacists if they find that these ancestry tests show that they don't exclusively have what they think of as white ancestry. So that's really interesting, but that work did not directly relate to the kinds of work that's been done in archaeology. But I found
00:30:12
Speaker
that there are conversations about archaeological evidence, especially around the origins of the white race, and then also about these studies of population demographics. I have to say the concerns about personal ancestry by far outweigh interest in
00:30:43
Speaker
in archaeology or in the past. In Stormfront, on the forum, you can very easily do a search by just putting keywords in. And so the personal side, am I really totally white? I'm a member of the far right. That seems to be a much bigger deal.
00:31:09
Speaker
But there are also some pretty sophisticated conversations going on there about the genetic archaeological genomic evidence that has come out. And also, this was another thing that I found quite shocking. I started this research. It began with a conference paper that goes
00:31:38
Speaker
back maybe two years ago. And then when I wrote it up now for publication, I went back and I rechecked Stormfront, you know, checked my numbers, I went and I looked at the keywords again, and I found that there's been this explosion. I get a tenfold explosion, I think, in some cases of the use of particular keywords, like, for example, Yamnaya. So within over the space of, you know, two
00:32:08
Speaker
two years I think, that's when I started. Interest in this has massively grown and that to me seems to be a response also to the way in which these genomic studies have so much exposure in the mainstream media. There's so much out there and then that feeds into
00:32:37
Speaker
into these conversations that you see there on the extreme far right. And sorry, what were the keywords that you were looking for? I'd be interested to know like methodology wise, what keywords, how did you identify those keywords? And how many did you come up with? I just went, what was it? I just basic stuff, archaeology and genomics, just kind of general search. Then, you know, Yamnaya, bell beakers,
00:33:07
Speaker
Neolithic, just whatever I could really think of just to see whether I could link it to particular papers. So I had about five or six, I think, that I searched. And when you were saying that they were having quite in-depth conversations, I assume that some of the conclusions that they came to may have possibly been coloured by the way they viewed the world.
00:33:34
Speaker
Um, sometimes it probably wasn't really nice to read. How did you kind of deal with, um, reading stuff that maybe wasn't so pleasant? I've, I've certainly come across some of this stuff and I find it disturbing. How, how do you kind of like, even in a research frame of mind, how do you deal with some of the more awful stuff that you're reading? Yeah, I mean it clearly, it is, it is disturbing. Um,
00:34:04
Speaker
But, you know, they weren't, well, it's still disturbing in a kind of, you know, theoretical intellectual kind of sense. I mean, where it did get me is when they, you know, they referred to, so some of those conversations are, so it's about the content of the studies and how that, you know, bolsters,
00:34:33
Speaker
a world view that, for example, where people are interested in the origins of the wide race. So that's one aspect of the conversation. The other aspect of the conversation, and this is also something that Penosky and Donovan picked up on, is this fear about how trustworthy these experts are.
00:35:00
Speaker
So, you know, can you really, you know, if you send off your some spit to some ancestry testing company, you know, will you really, you know, can you trust the results, especially, you know, when the results tell you that, you know, you're not as right as you thought you were. And then similarly, there were some references to individuals, you know, to researchers there that
00:35:29
Speaker
Um, I, I mean, that part I found really worrying, you know, when, you know, they're, they're specifically talking about individuals. Um, because then I thought, well, like, what else are these people going to do? You know, are they, would they be prepared to, you know, harass people online, which, you know, we know that oftentimes they are prepared even worse. You know, what, what are they, you know, when, when you kind of get away from, you know,
00:35:59
Speaker
do you have an understanding of the past that I find false and problematic to what other kinds of things you would be prepared to do in the present? So that's something that I found
00:36:14
Speaker
that made me very uncomfortable and funny, quite disturbing. I'm quite interested. Obviously, the right has its own kind of propaganda machines that has its own media that actually, in some ways, they have their own experts. Did you ever come across them discussing people like Stefan Molyneux, who's one of the more favorite people to kind of talk in like expert kind of language about the past and stuff like that? Do you remember? Did any names pop out at you? No.
00:36:45
Speaker
then you're lucky honestly, you're doing really well. So I want to move forward a little bit onto
00:36:55
Speaker
beyond all this kind of depressing kind of way that history is being twisted and perhaps looking forward, what do you see archaeologists and like the institutions of archaeology but also researchers and basically everybody, how do we deal with these things better? You mentioned that press releases are maybe part of a problem. How can we make things better?
00:37:24
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think I have to say I'm feeling reasonably pessimistic about what can be done to actually counter extreme far-right ideas. So in a way, I think that's maybe almost pointless to directly engage with those ideas.
00:37:53
Speaker
where it's absolutely not pointless and I think where we as archaeologists have a great responsibility is to put information out there that the public at large who are of all sorts of different political persuasions might find interesting. Because I think it's about a wider, it's about a wider conversation and that wider conversation has to start in some kind of generally
00:38:23
Speaker
agreed upon area of discourse. And I think that's where, I mean, one thing is simply just communicating about the breadth of research that people do, communicating carefully, providing information about
00:38:51
Speaker
what people were up to in the past that isn't just about grand narratives but also about, you know, interesting stories to do with, you know, individual lives. You know, with people who, you know, worked in the fields, not just, you know, kings and queens or whatever. So that's one thing. And I think the other thing that we need to do
00:39:17
Speaker
much, much better is talk about how we actually arrive at the interpretations that we make. And I think that really also ties in with what we see so much at the moment that there's this great distrust of experts. And I think there may be academics have really kind of dropped the ball because if you're
00:39:47
Speaker
In some ways, I think it's totally valid not to be expected to be believed just simply because, you know, you have a PhD or you're a professor or something. I think that's actually, you know, there's a bit of kind of skepticism there is totally valid. But then I think it's really up to us to say, well, look, here's how it did it. You know, this is what this is based on. You know, I started with this, you know, this was the kind of question that I was interested in.
00:40:16
Speaker
And then look, this is how I can show you how we got from A to B. And I think that's something that we just haven't really done enough. And I think with every study, maybe it's a bit difficult to add that into the press release, but I think it should be possible to at least provide a bit of information about just the nuance and just how difficult research is sometimes.
00:40:45
Speaker
But then there are also other forums where you can talk a bit more about just how you did your thing. Yeah, like podcasting, right? Right? Exactly. So everybody should be basically podcasting the work from this point onwards. I really think you've hit the nail on the head there. I think that's definitely where we want to go.
00:41:14
Speaker
But I find it interesting that I completely agree from quite a similar perspective in terms of opening up history to everyone. I think that's a very, very important part because so much, as you've written in this article, so much relies on archaeology being tucked away or hidden or
00:41:35
Speaker
only for certain people to kind of work with. Whereas actually, archaeology can and should be open to all. I mean, just just a final little thing. Several points. I one of my previous episodes, I spoke to Dr. Kenny Baruffi from the University of Glasgow and his his he did a paper about Brexit prehistory. Right.
00:42:01
Speaker
Now obviously I'm sure Brexit comes up at some point here because I'm pretty sure there's no doubt that like one of these like invasions was prevented by a British like a Neolithic Brexit. Have you come across the Brexit myth in the past as well? Is this everywhere? Yeah it is, it is everywhere. What is
00:42:31
Speaker
Yeah, so in my field, so I'm not a pre-historian, right? So my field is late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. And there we see the flip side. So people talk a lot about the fall of the Roman Empire. The fall of the Roman Empire has come back with a vengeance. I mean, to the point even where
00:42:58
Speaker
You know, the European migration crisis was compared to the Goths crossing the Danube, you know, and bringing down the Roman Empire. I mean, this is something that you can read that. There are journalists out there who write that kind of stuff. So that's, I think that's the kind of the opposing side
00:43:27
Speaker
of the Brexit coin. Yeah, I mean, and I mean, to that, ultimately, I also just have to defend really strongly that I think there are no, there are no real lessons from the past about the present. You know, the past is the past and the past is intrinsically really interesting. But, you know,
00:43:57
Speaker
The Battle of Adrian Paul does not inform us in any way about the European migration crisis in the early 21st century.
00:44:20
Speaker
Oh well, if only we were in the mid-21st century, that would be actually quite good, because we need to leave all of this behind us. But where will we be? We'll just be engulfed in, well, devastating climate change and sea level rises 50 years from now.
00:44:41
Speaker
Do you know what? I look forward. I look forward to the archaeology of the early 21st century. Oh yes, I study archaeology of the early 21st century. Yeah, they had words like on fleek to describe things that were good. And they had several generations of phones. You could actually date the year by the phone they had on them when they died.
00:45:04
Speaker
apart from the ones that had CEX written on the back. They obviously were from a lower socioeconomic class and got it secondhand. Yes, I can see it already. Oh, and here we've got the iPhone X phase in this part of the year.
00:45:23
Speaker
I know I but you see all these things mesh together you know this idea that like somehow history provides some sort of like basis to live your life which is ridiculous but it does I think a lot of people are disillusioned with how society is run and how society exists and I you know history is a
00:45:42
Speaker
a very good way for people to kind of feel a part of something bigger than themselves and one of the most dangerous things about the far right is that they create spaces where people feel safe and they feel like oh it's not just me I'm part of something bigger but that ends up being murderous and vile and horrible and we really need to make sure that doesn't happen.
00:46:10
Speaker
Now, I agree, and I think they're also, I mean, I think when you started, you said, you know, we've seen this recent rise of the far right, but, you know, that, this has been, we have, some of these ideas go back to the 19th century, many of the ideas that we see resurfacing now go back to the early and mid,
00:46:39
Speaker
20th century, I mean, kind of depending on where you look when you consider eugenics or the eugenics movement goes back to the 19th century, race anthropology, as was current in Germany, it's the early 20th century. There is a continuity there and there isn't, I think we've, this has been these
00:47:08
Speaker
thoughts and ideas have been there the entire time and now it's just a new moment where it rises up again. It is. It's pretty awful. But yeah, at least we have Twitter for the moment.
00:47:26
Speaker
For the moment, at least we have the ability to talk to one another, to support one another, and kind of, you know, help each other out. Speaking of which, so I find you through Twitter, if people want to read and follow the work that you do, how can they find you on the internet?
00:47:46
Speaker
It's not an invitation for trolls. I'm there, you can find me on Twitter. There's also just the standard route, you know, my contact details are on my university website. There's my email addresses there. Do you have any projects coming up? Anything of note? You said you do kind of like outreach stuff.
00:48:09
Speaker
I mean, my other thing, you'll see that from my Twitter, you know, my other kind of life is, you know, trade union activism, so...
00:48:22
Speaker
Oh, yes. I'm fully behind you on this. Oh, fantastic. Well, that is a good place to end on. That's absolutely fantastic. Thank you so much for sitting down and talking us through what you've written. We can't wait for it to be released. And yeah, we'll definitely have a link to that and obviously Twitter and everything. So thank you very much. And thank you, listener, for tuning in. OK, brilliant. Thank you so much.
00:48:54
Speaker
Yeah.