Racist pseudoscientific sources, moreover. So much for deconstructing Eurocentric narratives.
Not without a single surprise, Jones’ article was published first in Ancient American magazine a fringe, hyper-diffusionist periodical that features many articles about how ancient peoples in the Americas had contact and help from smarter, more technologically advanced, white people from places like Europe well before Columbus arrived.
[…]
Collin’s dissertation cites Ancient Origins, Richard Thornton, and Dell Dowdell, and each of these sources variously or indirectly promote ideas about Native Americans which can be considered racist. Dowdell, the creator of nephicode.com, actively promotes the notion that Native Americans are the descendants of white Mormons and he believes the Earth is only as old as one of the cave paintings mentioned earlier in this article. Conspiracy theorist Richard Thornton publishes pseudoarchaeological claims of Maya settlements in Georgia. And Ancient Origins is a website that traffics in all manner of fake, fraudulent, and fantastic archaeological news, books, and media for profit. Authors they promote range from racists to general conspiracy theorists.
Coming across any one of these in a dissertation for a PhD should be enough to put all that dissertation’s sources in question. There were, perhaps, a dozen or more questionable sources of this caliber.
