Literal truth or religious allegories? Many Bad Archaeologists
believe that religious writings are actually technical or
scientific treatises that have been misunderstood; or they are
the infallible word of the god of choice; or they are
collections of half-remembered history. Take your pick, but
don’t put all your eggs in one basket by choosing just one
option if you want to be a really Bad Archaeologist. Open any
Bad Archaeology book or website and you are almost certain to be
confronted with pieces of ancient literature, especially those
of Judaism, Christianity and, to a lesser extent, Islam. We also
see the use of texts less familiar to western readers, such as
the Mahabharata, more often than not in nineteenth-century
translations. The Torah (the first five books of the Jewish and
Christian Bible) is an especially fruitful ground for Bad
Archaeologists, whether they want to use it to construct an
alternative chronology for the universe of less than ten
thousand years or want to use it as a source of inf