Mesopotamia, and Mesoamerica. Hancock argues that evidence is found in ancient monuments, which he believes are much older than archaeologists say, and also in myths like Atlantis. He recycles the ideas American congressman Ignatius Donnelly put forward in his book Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882), which have been long discredited. Archaeologist Flint Dibble says Hancock's claims "reinforce white supremacist ideas, stripping Indigenous people of their rich heritage and instead giving credit to aliens or white people". Hancock's claims and methods are regarded as pseudoarchaeology. In Archaeological Fantasies Garrett G. Fagan points out that pseudoarchaeologists cherry pick evidence and misrepresent known facts. When apparently factual claims in their works are investigated it turns out that "quotes are presented out of context, critical countervailing data is withheld, the state of understanding is misrepresented, or critical archaeological information about context is ignored". Fagan gives two typical examples from Hancock's book Fingerprints of the Gods (1995): Hancock wrote that "the best recent evidence suggests that" large regions of Antarctica may have been ice-free until about 6,000 years ago, referring to the Piri Reis map and Hapgood's work from the 1960s. What is left entirely unmentioned are the extensive studies of the Antarctic ice sheet by George H. Denton, published in 1981, which showed the ice to be hundreds of thousands of years old. When discussing the ancient Bolivian city of Tiwanaku, Hancock presents it as a "mysterious site about which very little is known" and that "minimal archaeology has been done over the years", suggesting that it may date to 17,000 years ago. Yet in the years prior to these statements dozens of studies had been published, major excavations were conducted and the site was radiocarbon dated by three sets of samples to around 1500 BC. The Maya are portrayed by Hancock as only "semi-civilized" and their achievements as "generally unremarkable" to support the thesis that they inherited their calendar from a much older, far more advanced civilization. Orion correlation theory One of the many recurring themes in several of Hancock's works has been an exposition on Robert Bauval's Orion correlation theory (OCT). OCT posits that the relative locations of the three largest pyramids of the Giza pyramid complex were chosen by the builders to reflect the three stars of Orion's Belt of the constellation Orion. The pyramids are aligned to the cardinal direction within a fraction of a degree, however they are mismatched