Updated: Columbus State Professor Shares Views on PBS’ `Secrets of the Dead’

April 1, 2014

COLUMBUS, Ga. — A Columbus State University professor of anthropology and archaeology will offer his expertise in the form of commentary for an episode of the PBS series “Secrets of the Dead” airing at 10 p.m. Wednesday, April 2.

Warren Church, whose anthropology program is part of CSU’s Department of Earth and Space Sciences, said his contribution to the PBS series episode titled “Carthage’s Lost Warriors” was filmed last June in a New York City hotel room.

Wednesday’s episode explores the theory of German professor Hans Giffhorn that Carthaginians crossed the Atlantic 1,500 years before Christopher Columbus, landing first in South America. Giffhorn told Church that the CSU professor’s comments were included in the episode, which has already aired in Germany.

“It may be a brief appearance as I was clearly not on board with the show's premise,” Church said.

Since joining Columbus State’s faculty in 1999, Church has conducted extensive research into the ancient Chachapoya people of the northern Andes in Peru. His research was featured in a June 2004 issue of National Geographic magazine. Since 2002, he’s also offered similar commentary for two History Channel specials and one for the National Geographic Channel, serving as an archaeological consultant for a BBC special.

Church holds anthropology degrees from Yale University and the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Church said he didn’t have much information about the PBS episode, “but the trailer cover looks like something from Season 2 of Game of Thrones.”

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Update: Dr. Church was later made aware of a new trailer for tonight's episode that happens to reference his nearly 25 years of research in the Andes and offers a snippet of his interview for the "Secrets of the Dead" episode. He said there's growing consensus among archaeologists that the Kuelap people referenced in the trailer and the Chachapoya, who he has studied more extensively, "represent a culmination of 10,000 years of local indigenous cultural development in the Andes prior to back-to-back conquests by the Inca, followed by Spain." Ninety percent of the population was apparently wiped out by conflict and disease, he said.