Prehistory Decoded

Last September Eric Betz published an article on the Astronomy and Discover websites. These are popular websites, with a lot of readers. Now, I have no idea who Eric is. I think he’s a journalist, not a scientist or archaeologist. But anyway, he wrote this bad article. I contacted the Astronomy website editors to point out its errors but got no response whatsoever. Hence this response. Let’s take a look at what Eric Betz said in his article. Gobekli Tepe: the world’s first observatory? He asks? And then he says ‘Pseudoscience and genuine archaeological mystery surround humanity’s oldest known temple. But was it the World’s first astronomical observatory?’. Ha, well, immediately my hackles are raised with his use of the word ‘pseudoscience’, and I wonder where he’s going with this piece. It just sounds like sloppy journalism. Now, the problem with this word is that its often thrown around willy-nilly by people who are not scientists and who really have no idea how science really w