> In that sense, ancient History & Archeology is going through a similar moment as cooking did a while back.
Not really. Anthropology and archaeology had its great "everything we thought we knew is wrong" moment about 50 years ago. There already has been major reassessments of the interpretation of archaeological finds, say reassessment of the Mayan civilization after their writing was discovered, or the reorganization of "mainstream" Mesoamerican history after Aztec tales about the Toltecs turned out to be not as truthful as initially believed. A more recent debate has been whether or not the Roman Empire actually fell, which isn't really conclusively settled until perhaps 15-20 years ago.
But you wouldn't know that from pop archaeology, which is still stuck a hundred years in the past. And people like Hancock aren't helping--he's not introducing any challenges to mainstream archaeology, just retreading 140-year old theories (in other words, from the worst era in terms of archaeology being inherently and vehemently racist) that have already been debunked.
The whole, "did Rome fall, or did it just morph into the modern European states?" thing has sort of been overblown. Even the Medievalists (my old camp) have always recognized that the traditional story European states told themselves about their origins weren't entirely accurate.
But those stories weren't created out of thin air. Evidence of continuity abounds. Interwar scholars like Henri Pirenne overstated their case, leaning into economics at the expense of politics.
Most historians and archeologists today are firmly in the "fall" camp. I'm generally with them. A couple of recent books:
Bryan Ward-Perkins. _The Fall of Rome_. Oxford, 2006.
Peter Heather. _The Fall of the Roman Empire_. Oxford, 2007.
There are two good studies that could be read as leaning towards cultural and economic transformation while still acknowledging that there were political breaks:
Peter Brown._The World of Late Antiquity_. Norton, 1989.
Peter Brown. _The Rise of Western Christendom_. Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.
Brown is the giant of 20th century Late Roman scholarship (he practically invented the idea of "Late Antiquity" in the 1971 first edition of that book, which I eagerly consumed as an undergrad in 1975). The main strength of Late Antique studies is in a worldview that acknowledges the continuities of Roman civilization in the East _during and after_ 476 (for me, the really critical period was in the 6th and 7th centuries when Constantinople failed to support its colonists on the frontier, and the consequent abandonment of settlements which were by then behind barbarian lines -- aptly described in the contemporaneous "Life of Saint Severian").
On Hancock: He's undoubtedly a grifter at this point. Anyone who has studied Plato seriously (as all good students of history and archeology from the Golden Age into at least the Renaissance have) will know the legion of arguments supporting the modern consensus that Atlantis was no more real than Numenor (which it inspired).
Not really. Anthropology and archaeology had its great "everything we thought we knew is wrong" moment about 50 years ago. There already has been major reassessments of the interpretation of archaeological finds, say reassessment of the Mayan civilization after their writing was discovered, or the reorganization of "mainstream" Mesoamerican history after Aztec tales about the Toltecs turned out to be not as truthful as initially believed. A more recent debate has been whether or not the Roman Empire actually fell, which isn't really conclusively settled until perhaps 15-20 years ago.
But you wouldn't know that from pop archaeology, which is still stuck a hundred years in the past. And people like Hancock aren't helping--he's not introducing any challenges to mainstream archaeology, just retreading 140-year old theories (in other words, from the worst era in terms of archaeology being inherently and vehemently racist) that have already been debunked.