<HTML>Garrett:
I take great issue with your premise in this statement:
""Alternative" history, then, is really an alternate reconstruction of the past that openly eschews the basic tenets of historical research. "
Me thinks thou doth presume too much.
No one is attempting to re-write MOST of prehistory. In all actuality, we are merely looking at a very small portion that might be of dubious or questionable validity.
I don't think anybody here is trying to say we are all from Mars, or that anything that occurred prior to WW I is just an implanted memory myth so that we will be more controllable as a species.
Now THAT would be disregarding the basic tenets of historical research.
There is a fuzzy 1 or 2 percent involved here, and in that fuzziness we find room for alternate theories that explain the data. Please don't relegate all alternate theories of history as your debunkable "alternative history"...
For example, there are plenty of archeologists who debate the reason for the disappearance of the Mayan culture. Since nobody REALLY knows for how or why it happened, all we have are competing theories...
or, as they should more appropriately be called:
alternate histories.
Your smugness and contempt for that which is potentially equally valid and possibly more inclusive than current religious..., er, I mean... scientific dogma is very disturbing.
If two theories account for the data, and neither has real supporting evidence, then we can't just take the <b>first</b> one and label it the right one by virtue of its birthday.
That would be extremely unfair, and dramatically unscientific.
Yours,
Anthony</HTML>
