A term introduced by Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson in Forbidden Archaeology (1993) for what they describe as the systematic screening out of archaeological evidence that does not fit the accepted account of human antiquity, applied by them above all to nineteenth-century reports of anomalously old human remains and artefacts. The concept has since become the standard vocabulary for suppression claims across the alternative field, and it is the frame Heather Lynn extends into what she calls an academic industrial complex. Two different claims travel under the name and are worth separating. Restricted knowledge as a documented institution is real: Alan Lenzi and Petra Gesche have shown that Mesopotamian scholarship ran a two-tier scribal education and marked tablets with secrecy colophons, one of which reads that an expert may show another expert and a non-expert may not see. An institutional filter that explains every modern silence is a much larger claim, and it does not follow from the first. The distinction is the useful part of the entry: the ancient practice is evidenced, the modern mechanism is inferred, and the two are routinely presented as one.
Connections
Michael Cremo · Apkallu · Ancient Astronaut Hypothesis · Triple Coverup · Breakaway Civilization