Writing · 22 articles
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Contested claims checked one at a time, and reference pages on how each instrument works and what it cannot see. Newest first.
Two kinds of page. Claims, checked takes one contested claim, states it at full strength, gives both cases and closes with a label. The method explains one instrument and the number that says how often it is wrong. There are also five subject pages for the places and periods themselves.
Claims, checked · Refuted · 9 August 2026
"Mainstream archaeology suppresses this." The strongest real examples, checked
Refuted as stated, and there is a real problem underneath it that deserves a better name. Findings that contradict the model get published, and Göbekli Tepe is the proof. What actually happens is slower and less dramatic: unfashionable questions go unfunded, and negative results go unpublished. Those are real, and they are not suppression.
Claims, checked · Under review · 9 August 2026
Did a cosmic impact cause the Younger Dryas?
Unresolved, and properly so. It is a live scientific controversy with four papers arguing it out in one journal between 2021 and 2024, both sides peer-reviewed and both still publishing. Neither side is fringe. Anybody telling you it is settled, in either direction, is telling you about themselves.
The method · 9 August 2026
Electrical resistivity tomography, and why a second instrument matters more than a better one
Pass a current between electrodes, measure the voltage, and invert for the distribution of resistance underneath. Air resists enormously and damp limestone does not, so a void stands out. In 2025 it was applied inside the Great Pyramid and found the same corridor the muons found. It reached about 2 metres in, not nine.
The method · 9 August 2026
Ground truthing: what it means, and who actually does it
Ground truthing means checking a remote detection against something independent. Walking the site is the strong form. Comparing against an existing heritage record is the weak form, and it is the one we use, because the author of these surveys has never been in the field. Most lidar coverage does neither and reports the candidate list as the finding.
The method · 9 August 2026
How to score your own survey against a national monument record
Choose the block by a written rule before you fetch any data. Run the detector unchanged. Pull the monument records for the block. Match candidates to monuments at a stated tolerance, sweep it, and break the result down by monument type. The type breakdown is where the useful information is, because that is where the zeros show up.
Claims, checked · Speculative · 9 August 2026
Is Graham Hancock right? A checkable answer, claim by claim
The right answer is not one answer. Break the position into its separate claims and they score differently: one is a live scientific controversy, one is solidly established, several are unsupported, and one is a genuinely good argument that mainstream archaeology has answered badly. Treating it as a single yes or no is what makes the conversation useless.
The method · 9 August 2026
Muon tomography: seeing through a pyramid by counting particles
Cosmic rays hitting the upper atmosphere produce muons, which rain down constantly and pass through hundreds of metres of rock. Put a detector under or beside a large structure, count how many arrive from each direction, and a void shows up as an excess. It measures density along a line of sight. It cannot tell you what the void is.
Claims, checked · Under review · 9 August 2026
Nanodiamonds: three papers, two teams, and a citation that does not exist
The marker has been attacked by two separate teams in two separate papers, and it has not been abandoned. Worth knowing before you cite any of it: the two papers are routinely conflated, including by us in an early draft, which produced a citation that would send a reader to a paper that does not exist.
The method · 9 August 2026
Recall and precision, explained on real archaeology
Recall is the share of the real monuments your survey found. Precision is the share of your candidates that are real. They pull against each other, and almost every published lidar survey reports neither. Over 16 square kilometres of Salisbury Plain we scored 33.1% recall and 23.8% precision. Over Bodmin Moor, 28.7% and 5.7%.
Claims, checked · Candidate · 9 August 2026
Sea level was 134 metres lower. What that does and does not explain
The sea level part is solid and larger than most people think. It was about 134 metres lower at the Last Glacial Maximum, and the coasts people would have lived on are genuinely submerged. What it explains is why we should expect gaps. What it cannot do is fill one.
The method · 9 August 2026
The Herculaneum scrolls: how virtual unwrapping reads a scroll that cannot be opened
X-ray CT scan the carbonised scroll, trace each papyrus layer through the 3D volume, flatten it computationally, then detect ink on the flattened surface with a trained model. The hard part is not the geometry. It is that the ink is carbon and the papyrus is carbon, so there is almost no contrast to find.
Claims, checked · Refuted · 9 August 2026
The impact and the lost civilisation are two different claims
That sentence contains two claims welded together, and they have nothing to do with each other. One is a live geophysics controversy with peer-reviewed papers on both sides. The other is a claim about human societies with a completely separate and much thinner evidence base. Separating them is the most useful thing anyone can do here.
Claims, checked · Under review · 9 August 2026
The recall argument is available to Hancock, and here is exactly where it stops
The first half is true and we can prove it with our own numbers. Our detector recovers about a third of known monuments and is blind to entire classes. What the argument cannot do is get from a measured blind spot to a specific thing inside it, particularly one that would also leave evidence outside.
The method · 9 August 2026
The tile boundary that hid a scheduled monument
We missed a scheduled round barrow twice over, for two unrelated reasons. Its footprint was 145 square metres against a 150 square metre minimum. It also sat 12 metres from a tile edge, inside the border where the relief model is computed from padding. That border is 8.6% of every tile.
The method · 9 August 2026
The tolerance problem: one setting, and the recall figure moves by a factor of five
To score a survey you must decide how close a candidate has to be to count as a hit. That distance is the tolerance, it is almost never published, and it decides the answer. On Bodmin Moor our recall runs from 9.6% at 25 metres to 46.8% at 100 metres. Same detections, same monuments, one setting.
Claims, checked · Under review · 9 August 2026
There is no Younger Dryas crater. What that costs both sides
No crater of the right date has been identified, and that is a real cost to the impact case. It is not a disproof. An airburst leaves no crater, and airbursts are real. But an explanation for why the evidence is missing is not itself evidence, and the impact case has to carry that.
The method · 9 August 2026
What is a local relief model, and what does it hide?
A local relief model subtracts a smoothed copy of the terrain from the terrain itself, leaving only what sits on top. A half-metre barrow on a steep hillside becomes as obvious as one on a flat field. It also deletes anything wider than its smoothing kernel, and it fails near the edges of your tiles.
The method · 9 August 2026
What is lidar, and what can it not see?
Lidar measures ground height by timing laser pulses from an aircraft. Filter out the returns that hit vegetation and you get a model of the bare earth under the trees. It sees shape, not age, not material and not anything flush with the surrounding ground. It also cannot tell you what a shape is.
The method · 9 August 2026
What would a random candidate list have scored?
Recall rises when you add candidates, whether or not they detect anything. So the number that says what a recall figure means is the one a scatter of random points scores on the same ground. On Bodmin Moor, 470 random points score 28.2%. Our detector scored 28.7% with 470 candidates.
Claims, checked · Refuted · 9 August 2026
What would actually settle the Younger Dryas argument
It is resolvable, and both sides could agree on the test in advance. Pre-register a marker, a set of sites, a measurement protocol and a threshold, then have laboratories that have never published on this run it blind. The reason that has not happened is not that the question is unanswerable.
The method · 9 August 2026
Why a survey that only finds bumps will never find a pond barrow
A pond barrow is a deliberate hollow, not a mound. Our detector accepts positive relief only, so it cannot find one at any setting. Over Salisbury Plain it recovered 0 of 5, and no tuning would have changed that. A survey can be blind to a whole monument class and still report a respectable overall figure.
The method · 9 August 2026
Why is one sun angle barely better than noise?
A hillshade lights the terrain from an imaginary sun. Anything running parallel to that light casts no shadow and disappears. We measured it: across 4 square kilometres, eight sun angles found 1,195 distinct features between them, and the average single angle found 17.2% of them. The floor you would get from pure noise is 12.5%.
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