Out-of-place artefacts

The catalogue is short enough to work through, which is unusual and useful.

The Coso artefact, found in California in 1961 inside what was described as a geode, was identified by members of the Spark Plug Collectors of America as a 1920s Champion spark plug; the encasing material is iron oxide corrosion, not rock. The London Hammer from Texas is a nineteenth-century miner's hammer in a concretion — carbonate concretions form around objects quickly in the right chemistry, which is why the process is a standard undergraduate topic rather than a mystery. The Klerksdorp spheres from South Africa, offered as machined, are natural hematite and pyrophyllite concretions, described in the geological literature with their grooves explained as sedimentary lamination. The Baigong pipes in Qinghai are fossilised tree casts, iron-stained, examined and published by Chinese geologists.

The suppression claim fails on its own terms. The identifications above were made and published by exactly the specialists the claim says are hiding them; the papers are in print, indexed and free to read. An archaeology that wished to bury an artefact would not first publish its composition.

The genuine article in this space is instructive by contrast. The Antikythera mechanism is a real, astonishing, precisely dated Greek geared computer from the second century BC — and it was never suppressed. It sits in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens and has generated a large peer-reviewed literature, because a genuine anomaly is a career, not a threat.