Tabloid Archaeology and the "Mysterious" Mummies of Eastern Turkestan (originally appeared in a slightly different form in Discovering Archeology in 1999) by Nathan Light Archaeology has long been dramatized for Hollywood. But at least films such as those in the Indiana Jones series do not claim to be science. Television documentaries are another matter: Even PBS broadcasts some documentaries that seem to borrow from the sensationalist "TV tabloid" model, reinforcing myths and stereotypes to lure audiences. Myths of all cultures, including those of our own media-saturated modernity, reflect the desire to know about heroic ancestors and their history-shaping deeds. Myths simplify the past. Modern myths portray human prehistory as sharply divided into continents, races, and stages of cultural evolution (stone, bronze, and iron ages; hunting and gathering, nomadism, agriculture). Such myths help us reduce the immense complexity of the past to manageable units, but they become mental prisons when we do not recognize them as simplifications. The research carried out by archaeologists and anthropologists becomes grist for media myth-making about the past. Certain documentary films reinforce myths as much as they enlighten viewers about science. They compress years of painstaking research into safaris in pursuit of bones and artifacts, and they reduce complex human lives to specimens and skillful analyses to lucky breaks. Television is not the only culprit, but it is a pervasive medium that speaks far louder than the scholars who might dispute its distortions. Scientists know that their reputations will suffer if they make rash claims about cold fusion or cures for AIDS -- such work has strict standards of proof, and when data is inconclusive multiple interpretations must be allowed. Anthropologists and archaeologists interpret ambiguous data from the real world, where controlled experiments have only a limited role, so they have to avoid overly ambitious interpretations. But when they get involved with documentary projects, scriptwriters often spin their work into grandiose tales of lost and "mysterious" cultures. The recent Mysterious Mummies of China, a NOVA/WGBH documentary first aired on PBS last January, demonstrates how fact is distorted when filmmakers strive for drama and make complex topics one-dimensional. Discounting work by generations of European and Asian archaeologists and linguists, the film purports to present the first examination of the mummies and cave paintings found in the Tarim Basin in the deserts of northwest China. It turns a century of rich archaeological results into a fast-breaking exclusive, presented as if these finds had never before been seen by outsiders. The work of Victor Mair of the University of Pennsylvania and his colleagues is portrayed as if these were investigative reporters working for television tabloids, rather than researchers building on years of work by many scholars. The film relies on Western myths about Indo-Europeans when it claims that the mummified corpses prove early contact between European and Chinese civilizations, and even suggests that this contact had a unique impact on the development of Chinese civilization. In fact, it has long been recognized that Tokharians -- whose language has affinities to western branches of Indo-European -- lived along the borders of China at least two thousand years ago, but the significance of this contact for cultural history seems slight. In addition to asserting that Indo-Europeans from Europe brought new technologies and words to the Chinese, the film ignores the far more important evidence of contacts between early Iranians (who were also Indo-European speakers) and Chinese. The film is doggedly Eurocentric: It compares the three thousand year-old conical hat found on the corpse of a supposed shaman priestess to the witch's hats from Medieval European imagery. Plaid cloth from Tarim graves is compared to Celtic Tartans from northwestern Europe. Such links are stretched beyond science to mere speculation. Rather than exploring this wealth of archaeological evidence and all of the questions it raises, the documentary recounts what appears to be a completed story. It begins in 1987, when Mair "stumbled" across the mummies in a museum in northwest China. It ends in a dramatic denouement at a Buddhist temple complex where the researchers "discover" a painting of a red-haired and red-bearded figure. Although this image has long been known to scholars and dates from only the seventh century A.D., the filmmakers present it as a new discovery proving that the mummies who predate the painting by more than a thousand years were Tokharians with European features. In fact, scholars widely debate who the Tokharians were and what they looked like. A number of groups living in Inner Asia two thousand years ago are described in both Greek and Chinese sources as having red hair and blue or green eyes. And in any case, there is no way to conclude that these "Europoid" corpses were Indo-Europeans. Nonetheless, the narrator insists "there is no uncertainty about the ethnic origins" of the tall corpse with light hair and a long nose: She must have been European. Preliminary studies of the mummies' clothes and of their mitochondrial DNA point to ties with people to the north and west in Eurasia and perhaps even to Europe. But these are only a few of the many pieces of evidence that must be taken into account to understand the cultural and genetic relationship of these corpses to present peoples of Europe and Inner Asia. Euro-American scholars and their publicists should not get so excited about finding people who look like themselves that they present only evidence for European connections, while neglecting artifacts of a more complex past. Tabloid archaeology obsesses about ancestors and origins: Who were these first people? Were they like us? Can we be the first to film them, the first to penetrate their mysteries? It abhors historical complexity and ambiguity, so it treats present-day local Uyghurs as primitives whose history and cultural changes are immaterial: Only their origins matter. The documentary concludes that modern Tarim villagers are remnants of a "people long dead and neglected [who] have emerged to reclaim their place in history, ... an ethnically European people, [who] breached China's fabled isolation 1,000 years earlier than previously thought." But fragmentary evidence from archaeological discoveries, paintings, and manuscripts thousands of years and many miles apart can provide no such "startling conclusion." And China's "fabled isolation" is exactly that -- a fable. The belief in an isolated China and the idea that a European ethnic group could migrate to the Tarim without extensive cultural and genetic exchange along the way are both rooted in European myths about racial distinctiveness. Add to this the idea that contact between Chinese and Europeans 3000 years ago represents encounters between "two of the greatest civilizations on earth," and racial mythologies are clearly overshadowing fact. Apparently knowing nothing about their culture, the filmmakers and researchers visit a poor Uyghur home only to compare their way of life with that of the mummies from thousands of years before. To persuade us that the Uyghurs are descended from the Tokharians, they are described as if they have preserved their sheep breeds, craft technologies and dietary habits for 2,000 years, never mentioning that Islamic cultural influences have been strong here for nearly a millenium. The film denies modern Uyghurs membership in the present, suggesting instead that their way of life harbors "living relics, fragments of an ancient time preserved like the mummies themselves." Such talk reflects nineteenth-century ideologies of cultural evolution, in which past agricultural civilizations became objects of fascination, while the impoverished farmers of the present were condemned as backwards relics. Professional anthropologists avoid presenting living people as outside of history, or caught in the past. In the Mysterious Mummies of China, the local Uyghurs are seen only as objects of research who are ignorant of their own past, but in another more balanced NOVA archeological documentary, The Siberian Ice Maiden (first shown on PBS in the fall of 1998), a native Altay historian describes what she believes is the cultural and genetic relationship between the ice maiden and modern Altayans. Modern Uyghurs also understand the relevance of the mummies being discovered in their homeland, so to present them only as ignorant peasants and living specimens reinforces a Eurocentric myth of science in which Western researchers go to decode and explain other people's history to them. When archaeologists search for patterns of migration and cultural and genetic exchange, they recognize that cultures are not static and research results rarely permit only one interpretation. And increasingly they know they must deal with the cultural and political impact of their discoveries on people in the present. But, like tabloid reporters, the creators of the Mysterious Mummies of China have neglected the details of scientific discovery in order to highlight an entertaining narrative form. They saw the devil in the details, while scientists see details as the path to truth. Although valuable for creating some public interest in a little-known part of the world, this film ends up as much a document of media mythology as a record of science.