Friends of ASOR present the next webinar of the 2025-2026 season on January 7, 2026, at 7:00 pm EST, presented by Amanda Hope Haley. This webinar will be free and open to the public. Registration through Zoom (with a valid email address) is required. This webinar will be recorded and all registrants will be sent a recording link in the days following the webinar.

We all remember a time when the History Channel was about history, documentaries bored us with facts and black-and-white footage, and everyone knew Indiana Jones, Daniel Jackson, and River Song were swashbuckling adventurers (not serious scientists). When the did the lines between fiction and fact blur? Did it start when thorough public history education was reduced to merely one year during middle school, when the Socratic method gave way to teaching-to-the-test? Although many of us are still fascinated by our ancestors and the empires they built and destroyed, the field of archaeology is shrinking when we need more access to the lessons of the past, not less.

The good news is that people are interested in ancient history. The increasing popularity of network, streaming, and web-based series that claim to “explore” ancient sites, texts, and legends prove that the work of real archaeologists is needed and wanted. The bad news is that much of their work is not accessible and may not be comprehensible for the average reader. So in that void—where more information is desired than is delivered—sensationalism and fiction have taken hold. Worse, those fictions are proliferated by social media which reward clicks (and therefore ad revenue) instead of facts.

Both researchers and readers must understand the problem before us: troll farms are creating and multiplying fake content that crowd out real news, profit-trained algorithms are pushing what we learn, and AI is making falsehood harder to detect.

Even if archaeologists were well funded and better resourced, they could not compete with the truly fake news pushed by entertainment companies and “adventurers,” whom we might call pseudoarchaeologists. Social media’s lack of conscience and sensationalists’ focus on fame and wealth make the fight with slow science and thoughtful debate an unfair one. Through publications such as ASOR’s ANE Today and BAS’s Biblical Archaeology Review, scholars have shared their findings with the public in less-technical language for many years. However, as reading rates drop among students and adults, authors are now competing with filmmakers for eyeballs, hearts, and minds. Increases in forgeries and thefts make us all wonder what is real.

The quest to recover our ancient history is not yet lost to Skynet. But it is going to take all of us—the real archaeologists in the field and the curious readers behind their screens—to reinvigorate real exploration.

Amanda Hope Haley has a bachelor of arts in Religious Studies from Rhodes College and a master of theological studies in Hebrew Scripture and Interpretation from Harvard University. She entered the publishing industry in 2005, first contributing to The Voice Bible as a translator, commentary writer, and editor. She then began working with popular nonfiction titles as a content editor, theological reviewer, and ghostwriter before her first book was published by Thomas Nelson in 2014. Amanda’s most recent book, Stones Still Speak: How Biblical Archaeology Illuminates the Stories You Thought You Knew, was released by Revell in September and encourages readers to distinguish between popular traditions and historical facts. Between writing manuscripts, she podcasts as The Red-Haired Archaeologist® and introduces sound archaeological insights to readers overwhelmed and misdirected by cinematic or culturally inherited images of the ancient world.

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Friends of ASOR is pleased to announce that the first webinars of the 2025-2026 season will once again be free and open to the public with a goal to raise $10,000 so that the entire webinar season will be free. Will you support this outreach effort with a tax-deductible contribution? All donors/sponsors with gifts of $100 or more will be recognized in subsequent webinars. Make your gift today and select “webinars” from the dropdown menu.

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