Edward gets punk'd?

Over the past few years Edward Ashby has been an indefatigable opponent of the various conspiracy theorists who claim that an ancient race of Celts - or Phoenicians, or Atlanteans, or extraterrestrials - were the first inhabitants of New Zealand.

After studying archaeology at the University of Auckland and taking part in various field surveys and digs, Edward became aware of how many apparently rational Kiwis had time for the claims of the pseudo-scholars. He also grew tired
of being accused of being a member of a 'politically correct' conspiracy designed to excise the true history of New Zealand's ancient white residents from the archaeological record. Weariness turned to alarm when Edward realised that many of the pseudo-scholars had links to racist and anti-semitic far right groups, and that his own hometown of Dargaville was a hotbed of pseudo-historial ideas.

Edward has taken part in a series of online debates with pseudo-scholars and also written a number of letters to institutions which have been duped or unknowingly used by the pseuds. He took a particular interest in the campaign to stop Dargaville museum from misappropriating a prehistoric pou and portraying it as an artefact from a fictional extraterrestrial civilisation.

Martin Doutre is perhaps the most high-profile of all the pseudo-scholars of New Zealand history. In his self-published tome Ancient Celtic New Zealand Doutre presents himself as an 'astro-archaeologist' and uses a series of inscrutable mathematical formulae to 'prove' that piles of stones he has found lying about on New Zealand hills are in fact the remains of 'open-air observatories' built by the same advanced ancient white race which supposedly raised Stonehenge and the pyramids. In a long debate with Edward and some of his other detractors a couple of years ago, Doutre outed himself as a Holocaust denier and a 9/11 'Troofer', as well as a pseudo-archaeologist.

Edward's history as a debunker of Doutre and other pseuds is well-known to his friends in the Archaeology Department of the University of Auckland, so when they wanted to pull his leg last week they knew just what to do. This poster (click to luxuriate in its details) was pinned to a noticeboard close to a departmental room Edward has been using: Edward sent me the poster, but he hasn't explained yet whether he fell for it...