one more time

A Christian evangelist group from China recently announced that they found the remains of Noah's Ark on a mountaintop in Turkey. This means that a thousand-year search for the vessel is finally over -- again.

If you've got a fairly long memory you'll recall that this happens every few years. A well-funded group of Christian fundamentalist amateur archaeologists goes out looking for the remains of Noah's Ark, or the Ark of the Covenant, or the true cross, and -- surprise! --they find exactly what they're looking for. For many years, these pious hoaxes, engineered by the credulous and aimed at the gullible, cropped up from time to time and went mostly unanswered by the community of professional and scholastically reputable archaeologists. But no more.

Now, as discoverers of Jesus's tomb or amateur ark-aeologists sell their stories to newspapers and magazines and make the rounds of the daytime TV talk shows, they're finding themselves more and more often under fire from people who know a great deal more than they do, and have the credentials to prove it.

(I)t was word of two previous ark expeditions that helped prompt the American Schools of Oriental Research, the leading professional organization of American Middle Eastern archaeologists, to take action.

Fed up with the exposure these types of stories were getting in the media, the group last year launched a committee tasked with taking aim at archaeological frauds.

"We really just decided that it was time to take back our field," says Eric Cline, a George Washington University archaeologist. He and (Robert) Cargill (a professor of Near Eastern languages and literature at UCLA) co-chair the committee, whose membership also includes the Archaeological Institute of America and the Society of Biblical Literature.

The study of history, much like the current American political scene, now seems divided into two separate and distinct spheres. On one side are the birthers, the people who believe Obama is taking his orders directly from Moscow or Havana or Mecca or somewhere, who are certain that Jesus rode a dinosaur in the Garden of Eden, and that Noah's Ark was a real, historical vessel whose remains are out there on a mountaintop somewhere just waiting to be discovered, if they haven't been already. On the other are the people who know the difference between a fact and an opinion, and believe in evidence.

Possibly, we've entered another Dark Age, in which the great mass of humanity is condemned by their illiteracy and gross ignorance to suffer the fears and dread born of superstition, and the conviction that archaic and impossible myths are literally, historically true, while real knowledge and understanding become the exclusive possessions of an educated and sophisticated elite. So much for democracy.

When they "publish by press conference," Cargill says, the ark hunters betray their real motive: cash. "Noah's Ark quests are always about the money -- always," he argues. "This group was put together to do one thing and one thing only: make money and spread ideology by pimping both archaeology and religion."

He points out that one member of the recent expedition, Yeung Wing-Cheung, has directed a documentary about the hunt for the ark and is selling the DVD online. The Media Evangelism Ltd., meanwhile, operates a Noah's Ark theme park that needs to sell tickets.

The magic words: "theme park." These days those two words are the natural companions of two others: "suspicions confirmed."