Ancient Web: Michael Cremo Built a Web Museum for Forbidden Archeology

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Some websites are useful records of ideas without making those ideas reliable science. Michael Cremo's Forbidden Archeology site is one such artifact: an elaborate home for an alternative account of human origins, still wearing its 1990s publishing structure.

Visit Michael Cremo's website.

The homepage promotes Forbidden Archeology, a 1993 book coauthored with Richard L. Thompson. It uses a question about humankind's origins to lead visitors into interviews, lectures, publications, a travel diary, news reports, and a collection called the Museum of Forbidden Archeology. The footer carries a copyright span beginning in 1996.

The site's central claim is that archaeological evidence for much greater human antiquity has been ignored, misclassified, or suppressed by conventional scholarship. That is the authors' argument. It does not reflect the scientific consensus on human evolution, which draws on multiple mutually supporting lines of fossil, archaeological, and genetic evidence.

Exhibits, publications, and the online speaker circuit

The book introduction describes the book's ambition and credits its authors. The online museum points toward purported anomalous discoveries and images offered as material supporting Cremo's interpretations.

Another group of links directs readers to media appearances, lectures and papers, recorded interviews, and scheduled talks. Those pages show how an independently maintained website could serve as book catalog, press office, lecture archive, and an ongoing argument with mainstream research.

The archive extends outward to other domains associated with Cremo's work, including pages named Human Devolution and ForbiddenArcheology. Their appearance demonstrates the author's web publishing network, not evidence that the scientific claims have been independently validated.

The difference between preserving an argument and endorsing it is important here. Older personal sites often allowed authors to distribute primary texts and interpretations outside traditional editorial gatekeeping. They could preserve unusual research trails and also give poorly supported theories the appearance of a catalogued scientific archive.

For historians of Internet culture, Cremo's site is most useful as evidence of how fringe science presented itself during the early commercial Web: persistent menus, author-centered essays, press excerpts, and a self-defined museum without a traditional museum's curatorial review.

Explore the site's museum and source links.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.