When Milo Rossi took Introduction to Anthropology during his freshman year at the University of Maine, a switch flipped in his brain. All the time he’d spent as a child pouring through copies of National Geographic magazine and checking out archaeology books from the library suddenly came back into focus.
“It just totally rekindled that flame for archaeology I’d had since I was a little kid,” Rossi said. “I knew that was going to be a part of my life, one way or another. And it turned out social media was the way to do that.”
Rossi, who grew up outside of Boston and graduated from UMaine in 2022 with a degree in environmental science and anthropology, is now arguably the most popular archaeology content creator on social media, with more than 2 million followers on both YouTube and TikTok. His work has taken him around the world, and has become his full-time career.
Rossi will give a free talk at his alma mater at 7 p.m. Tuesday, “Combating Archaeological Pseudoscience with Social Media,” at the Collins Center for the Arts, co-presented by the Hudson Museum.
“It’s really, really special to be invited back to the University of Maine to give a talk at my own school,” Rossi said. “This is really where it all started for me. I started making videos right here in Orono.”
Daniel Sandweiss, the UMaine anthropology and climate studies professor who taught Rossi in that class, said his former student has a knack for communicating science that is incredibly important in a world rife with misinformation. Sandweiss, who serves as president of the Society for American Archaeology, even invited Rossi to speak at his organization’s annual meeting next year.
“Milo has combined a background in archaeology, a deep understanding of the difference between science and pseudoscience, and a compelling screen presence to become the most viewed real archaeologist today,” Sandweiss said. “[That’s why] I invited him to do a workshop on using social media to combat pseudoscience in archaeology at our annual meeting in 2025. We all have a lot to learn from him.”
Rossi joined TikTok in 2021 and began making archaeology videos, and in 2022, he started making longer-form videos on YouTube. He’s since traveled all over the U.S. and to Turkey and Peru to film, and has made multi-part series about everything from particularly bad examples of archaeological pseudoscience to a four-part series debunking the work of British writer Graham Hancock, who has had two series of his show “Ancient Apocalypse” on Netflix.
“The fact that they give a platform to this guy, Graham Hancock, who spouts utter nonsense is infuriating to me,” Rossi said. “The fact that there’s multiple seasons of ‘Ancient Aliens’ on the History Channel is ridiculous. There’s a lot out there to combat.”
Rossi speaks with rapid-fire, youthful enthusiasm peppered with off-color jokes. He’s sarcastic, witty and unforgiving in his commitment to dunking on purveyors of pseudoscience. All of that humor is always in service of his main goal, however, which is to educate the public about real science, and not made-up stories and conspiracy theories.
“It’s not directly about people saying that the pyramids were built by aliens, or that actual human giants once existed. It’s really about what is true and what is false,” Rossi said. “There’s an oversaturated market for BS on social media. I’m trying to put the real information out there.”
Besides, Rossi firmly believes that facts are far more interesting than fiction.
“There’s a reason I have a tattoo of Otzi the Iceman’s tattoos, which are the oldest tattoos ever discovered,” Rossi said, referring to the 5,200-year-old mummy found preserved in the ice in the Italian Alps in 1991. “It’s totally fascinating and so unbelievably cool. That’s way cooler than dumb [stuff] about UFOs.”
