Dmitrii Blyshko1; 1 University of Houston, United States
Discussion
The genesis of post-Soviet alternative archaeology was an attempt of certain public scholars and amateurs to go beyond the image of trivialized and domesticated prehistory as produced in the institutionalized system of Soviet archaeological knowledge. Alternative archeology emerged as a public effort to construct a new epistemological space of potentially eternal study of the past; in a way, it had to make the past enigmatic again. Late Soviet archaeology primarily focused on studies of primary sources rather than a search for new interpretations of the human prehistory, with standards of verification close to those of natural sciences. This approach made the past look mostly known. New - alternative - ways of doing archeology failed to produce verifiable historical knowledge yet appealed to the general public and acquired a loyal following. In the proposed paper, I will examine such forms of and inspirations for alternative archeological knowledge as philosophical anthropology, intellectual prehistory, mysticism, and science fiction that sought to transform the past into a terra incognita and bring back the enthusiasm of historical discovery.
