So, on Tuesday night I was interviewed by Russell Brown for a Media 3 segment on conspiracy theories. It screened last night and will screen again on Saturday morning (10:25am, TV3), or you can watch the show right now via TV3’s OnDemand page (but you are going to need Flash, I’m afraid) here.

Reviews have been universally positive… for the mustard suit I was wearing. If TV executives want to see more of my mustard suit on air, then they should know how to find me.

Yesterday I received an email from John Aldworth, the editor of Max Hill’s “To the Ends of the Earth”. He has asked me to post the following reply from Hill with respect to my book review/commentary:

Top The Ends Of The Earth. Did Greeks circumnavigate the world and settle New Zealand before the birth of Christ?

The author’s right of reply: The above mentioned book launch was held on 24th March 2013 with some 630 people in attendance. Since then the book has continued to sell far better than expected.

Matthew wrote his review while I was recovering from a life saving operation, so until now I just could not be bothered to reply to his review.

There are a number of mistakes Matthew has made, so I will address a few.

1. Matthew quotes a price for the book. His quote is incorrect.
2. Matthew states the old Maori name for New Zealand was “Aotearoa me Te Wai Pounamu”. Again another mistake.

This is what Dr Michael King wrote in his book, The Penguin History of New Zealand, published 2003, page 42: “Finally, New Zealand was certainly not known to Maori as Aotearoa in pre-European times”.

3. Towards the end of his review Matthew states there are a number of maps on page 14 – there are no maps on page 14.

Referring to world maps in the book Matthew said: “I reproduce some of them below, with Hill’s highlighting of the remarkable presence of the continent we know as Australia. As you will see the resemblance is remarkable”.

Readers may be interested to learn that before the book went to print it was given to a number of professors and ex-university staff. A copy was also given to one of New Zealand’s leading secondary schools.

As the author I received a number of written comments, phone calls and also met with one of New Zealand’s leading professors. All requested and suggested amendments were made before printing.

Of interest is a quite from Professor Kerry Howe’s book, Vaka Moana, which states that the early people of New Zealand the Patupaiarehe. Note people, not fairies.

Then there is the Fairfax news report 28.12.2012: Maori claim they were first met by a fair-skinned people. Finally there is the Coroner’s report on the finding of the skull of an unmistakably European woman who, he concluded, had been killed in the Wairarapa more than 300 years ago.

Yours sincerely

Max Hill.

Now, I will admit that I got a few page numbers wrong in my review (for example, the maps I refer to as being on page 14 are, in fact, on page 17) ((However, I don’t ever claim the old Māori name for this country is “Aotearoa me Te Wai Pounamu”; Hill is confusing my usage of what I take to be the best contemporary name for New Zealand as some claim about it being the original name. As for the claim I got the price of the book right, that was the price it was advertised at at the time I bought the PDF version of “To the Ends of the Earth”.)). So, for that I apologise.

However, I should like to note that Hill hasn’t provided any particular good reasons to doubt my criticisms of “To the Ends of the Earth”. He cites books sales, which are hardly a measure of the quality of a book’s central thesis.

For example, Erich Von Däniken’s books sell well, but that doesn’t mean his Ancient Astronaut thesis is credible. Just because Hill’s book has exceeded sales expectations, this does not tell us that his arguments are a serious threat to academic orthodoxy. Books sell well for a number of reasons and you can’t derive what that reason might be from sales alone. Perhaps if he could point towards some other critical appraisals of his book which refute the kind of arguments I presented as criticism of “To the Ends of the Earth”, then his point about the book’s reception might have merit.

This leads to Hill’s second “response” to my review, which is that the book was reviewed by current and ex-university staff and that this somehow gives his views the veneer of academic acceptibility. However, without knowing who these academics are and what their comments amounted to, this really doesn’t say much at all. We know Paul Moon read a draft of the book, because Hill cites the following piece of correspondence:

We also know that the poor students of History at St. Paul’s Collegiate in Hamilton are going to be taught pseudohistory if the following endorsement in “The Ends of the Earth” is to be believed:

If Hill really wants to claim that his book was peer-reviewed such that the reviewers were positive about the merits of the book and simply did not give him advice to mitigate some of its worst failings it would be good to know who these academics are, for (at least) two reasons.

1. Academics are usually not particularly loath to support work they think is important, so unless someone wants to claim that there is a conspiracy to suppress honest research into our past, I suspect said academics wouldn’t mind being outed.
2. It would be nice to know whether the kind of academics Hill talked with are historians or archaeologists, given that if academics have endorsed Hill’s central thesis (the Greco-Egyptian voyage) it would be nice to know if they have appropriate qualifications rather than being (I say advisedly) a mere academic ((This point is a bit of a counter to the previous one; an academic whose speciality is not, say, in our local pre-history might be loath to admit to supporting Hill’s thesis because they might recognise that they aren’t the right kind of expert to endorse such a view or they might think it looks interesting but they don’t know enough to say that they think it is warranted.)).

As for the news clippings, I do not have much more to add to my previous analysis of claims about pale-skinned peoples in Aotearoa me Te Wai Pounamu. The claim about the coroner’s finding on the Wairarapa skull is interesting but Hill’s claim that the deceased died in situ in the Wairarapa is disputed. As even the coroner admitted, the skull might be Mãori and given both the lack of a full assemblage or any other skeletal evidence showing Caucasian occupation at that time and place, it’s hardly supportive of the claim there was an established non-Māori population living there. Indeed, Wellington forensic pathologist Dr Robin Watt has suggested that the skull belongs to the member of a Dutch crew that got lost whilst mapping the coast of Australia whilst other writers have suggested it was part of a reliquary. Whilst I really don’t know how likely any of these particular claims are as explanations, they certainly fit in better with what else we know of the colonisation of Aotearoa me Te Wai Pounamu than Hill’s Greco-Egyptian thesis.

Call for Papers: #twecon – May 21st, 2013

The author of the blog “EPISTO!,” Matthew Dentith (HORansome), is inviting paper titles and abstracts for the 4th #twecon (a Twitter-based conference), to be held on May the 21st, 2013 (from 10am NZST).

The brief for this tweet-based conference is open and thus we are accepting papers on any topic.

To submit a paper for inclusion at #twecon please tweet your paper’s title and short abstract (you may want to use a tweet for each) with the tag #twecon any time between now and the 9th of May.

Anyone may may submit paper titles and abstracts.

Details about the previous #twecon, including copies of the papers given at the conference, can be found here, here and here.

Rules:

1. Papers may be no longer than 6 tweets in length (with one of those tweets being a compulsory title/byline).

2. Each tweet must be numbered.

3. Tweets may link to images, short video clips (less than thirty seconds in length), but cannot link to written material unless it is a link to a quote, further readings, et cetera.

You should not use a link in a tweet to get around the 140 character limit.

4. Each tweet must have the following tag: #twecon

The Conference

The conference will start on Tuesday, the 21st of May at 10am New Zealand time. Please keep an eye on the #twecon hashtag during that time or visit this page (link coming) for updates.

After the opening address (at 10am) has been given, presenters may start giving their papers. In the last three years there has been no strict timetable and people have used what might be called a “modicum of common sense” to ensure that papers were given throughout the day (rather than just being lumped together in the morning).

Once all the listed papers have been given there will be a closing speech, at which point presenters and attendees are expected to go to their local alehouse, pub, coffee spot or liquor cabinet for a post-conference drink. You are not required to wear name tags during the conference, but if you want to wear a badge emblazoned “I just presented at #twecon: ask me about my paper!” during the day you will not be stopped from doing so (unless such an activity is illegal in your jurisdiction).

All papers will be archived on this website here.

Papers

It’s conspiracy theorists, not conspiracy theories, which might be the problem – @HORansome

Toi Whakaari: using marae based frameworks – @librarykris

Smells like books: Modern practices of book fetishisation – Donna Robertson

Post-disaster gardening: private commemorations and public art in Christchurch. – Cheryl Bernstein

Pleistocene Rewilding Possibilities in New Zealand – Mike Dickison

How Cats Get Famous on the Internet: Changing Approaches to Feline Celebrity – Andre Alessi

“Sad Sylvia” The repression of literary women in the mid 20th Century – Pauline Dawson

Human Migration (rightsideupsidedown) – @Colby

Motorbikes, or, how I learned to stop caging and enjoy the scared – aimee whitcroft

Orgies and cannibalism in New Zealand. A shocking tale of widespread depravity – Siouxsie Wiles

Interesting food-health associations: confounding or publication bias? – Thomas Lumley

Testing times: what does effective classroom assessment look like in the 21st century? – Stephanie

Do you have a spare fifty minutes of your life to devote to science! If so, go put on your lab coat and get to it. However, if you aren’t going to go off and cure world poverty and solve cancer, then maybe you might have fifty minutes to spend listening/watching a slideshow I recently gave to the Central Auckland branch of the New Zealand Rationalists and Humanists.