One episode of this program, purportedly discussing the connection between the Maya and the Creek Indians of Georgia, was enough to convince me of the abject wretchedness of this also-ran. It doesn't take one very long to conclude that Scott Wolter is jumping onto the conspiratorial bandwagon. His problems are (1) he knows next to nothing about archeology; (2) his "evidence" is beneath ridiculous; and (3) the "experts" he interviews are patently non-expert. His examination of a purported Maya site in northern Georgia begins with some ominous verbiage about The Government (ooh!) refusing to allow him to access the site--although they posed no objection when he later flew over it and mapped it with LIDAR. He offers up a random pile of stones as evidence that talented architects constructed ceremonial cairns and temples and what-not--even going so far as to suggest that well-known Mayan sites in Mexico and Guatemala, in fact, looked like mere piles of rocks until archaeologists (!) came in to reconstruct them, apparently stone-by-stone. We next examine a boulder with the most primitive circles and dots-within-circles carved into it (quite poorly carved, though the glyphs incised in legitimate two-thousand-year-old Maya monuments and stelae are remarkably sharp) and conclude--along with an "expert" in Mayan archeology--that it represents a star map and a comet impact and such. (Most entertainingly, the putative university expert in Mayan archeology is entirely ignorant of the correct pronunciation of Chichen Itza.) Lord have mercy, what next? Oh, yes: we see the vaguest of ridges on the top of this boulder and are told that they are "cupules" (I think he meant "cupolas," but the expert archaeologist didn't question the term: he was evidently bluffed out by the lesser expert who vociferated more loudly. We next examine a putative Georgian artifact that supposedly resembles yonder Mayan artifact and--after being told that they're "almost identical" (which they're not)--we learn that they represent a shaman, which is interesting, given that shamans are a feature of animist religions and do not occur in Mayan culture. (The image looked like Xipe Totec or Itzamna or some deity but, alas, was whisked away before the viewer could collect a solid gawk at it.) Please, PLEASE do yourself a favor and find another way to spend sixty precious minutes of your life that can never be recovered.
