Alum, YouTuber Milo Rossi to present on campus
A UMaine alum is digging his way to success via YouTube.
Milo Rossi, also known as Miniminuteman to his over two million followers, has made a name for himself in the content creation space with his thoughtful and irreverent videos about archaeology – specifically, the hoaxes and conspiracy theories sometimes born of the work in that field. You can find his YouTube channel here.
Rossi, who graduated from the University of Maine in 2022, is returning to the college of his heart always to deliver a presentation at the Collins Center for the Arts on October 22. His talk is titled Combatting Archaeological Pseudoscience through Social Media and will feature an illustrated lecture on his work – work which began as a student and developed into his profession.
It can be difficult to define success in the world of online creation, but by any metric, there’s no denying Rossi’s ascent to the upper echelon. There’s the aforementioned follower count – two million-plus – and the number of views of his videos (more than 27 million and counting), but even those numbers don’t do his work justice.
In an arena where so many build their brands on the clothes they wear (or force their pets to wear) or the lifestyle they lead, Milo Rossi has instead used his intellectual interests to grow into a popular public figure. Rather than desperately, thirstily seeking ways to go viral, Rossi opts to share his passions with his followers, doing so in an engaging and fun way that entertains, yes, but also educates.
Long story short – we can dig it.
(The following is a Q&A with Milo Rossi. These answers have been edited for length and clarity.)
What is it about archaeology that fascinates you so deeply?
Milo Rossi: I think the thing that inspires me the most about archaeology is that it is the deepest level of history that we can tell. It’s something that transcends our history books and the things that have been recorded and the stories that have been handed down through time. It is a chronology of human experience across the planet. And with that comes, I think, an immense amount of beauty and diversity, seeing how different groups of people adapted to different environments, understanding how great migrations happened and how different types of spirituality arose and the different customs and systems of belief that arose in different parts of the world. I think that it’s really beautiful to be able to see how nuanced the quilt of humanity became as it crossed the globe. And I think it’s something that’s also really beautiful in that we’ll never fully have the entire picture of it. Archaeology is like trying to create a puzzle where you only have five of the pieces left and maybe you’ll find an extra under the couch. There is fragmentary evidence for a lot of it, and it’s really amazing to also see how much information we are able to glean from that fragmentary evidence.
Even though it is something that is a needle in a haystack, we are able to learn so much about our past because of the interdisciplinary nature of the field. Archaeologists are people who work alongside so many other types of scientists in order to interpret the evidence that they have found. And I think that’s also a really beautiful part of it and why I really try to preach not only the interdisciplinary nature of archaeology, but also the importance of having multiple fields of interest and having levels of general understanding in multiple branches of science because it is that general understanding across the board that will help you interpret these things. I apply my knowledge of environmental science all the time in archaeology because the Earth’s climatic history is something that had impacted humanity since we took our first steps. And so I think it’s really important to be able to look at it from a broad perspective and be able to rely on the work of other diligent scientists who are able to apply their understandings and their niches to help us learn more about our past.
In what ways did your UMaine experience influence your path?
MR: Going to the University of Maine was inspiring for me not only for my declared field of environmental science, but also for my love of archaeology. When I arrived at the University of Maine in 2018 as an incoming freshman, I had declared my major as environmental science. Before the University of Maine, I went to a voc-tech high school where I studied environmental science for four years. I graduated with thousands of hours of experience in the field and was advised that it would make a lot of sense for me to continue with that career path – very good advice. Again, I never really thought I would end up doing archaeology science communication for a living, and so it made a lot of sense to continue investing into my passion for environmental science and that branch of studies.
When I was looking for places to go to university, I quickly found the University of Maine, which has one of the oldest – if not THE oldest – climate change institute in the country. They had such a wonderful ecology and forestry program, and so I was really inspired by that. It’s also on the East Coast. I’m a New Englander. I love New England. I kind of thought it was a perfect fit. I made my way up for the freshman weekend, and I absolutely fell in love with the place. Once I actually started attending in September of 2018, I had to take a few elective courses, one of which happened to be Intro to Archaeology with Dr. Dan Sandweiss, and that class really rekindled the passion that I had for archaeology. Before I went into university, I was actually looking to pick a school based on pursuing an archaeology major, but was again kind of advised against it by some advisors in my school, which I don’t really blame them for, but going to UMaine for environmental science and then also having that passion for archaeology rekindled in my first semester was really important to me.
It would be another two or three years before I would actually start doing science communication, but after taking that archaeology class, I realized that it was something that I wanted to pursue as well and added it to my degree, I believe later that year, if not the beginning of my sophomore year. I think by the time I had graduated UMaine, I had taken just about every anthropology class that they offered. A combination of the curriculum and the staff at the University of Maine really helped kindle that passion that I really never thought I was going to be able to find a career or a path in.
How did you wind up becoming a YouTube creator? What led you to that place?
MR: I ended up becoming a content creator on YouTube almost by accident. I had a friend recommend to me, you know, “Oh, you’d be pretty funny on TikTok. You should totally do some videos on there. I think people would get a kick out of you.” And so I reluctantly decided to give it a shot. This was back in the summer of 2021, which was the summer after my junior year of college. At the time, I was working on an internship where I was doing what I thought would go on to become my career, working doing environmental site remediation. And not long after I started on TikTok, I started making videos about my lifelong passion – archaeology. I would just make videos talking about various archaeological topics and things that I thought were interesting. And people loved it. I found that there were a lot of people who were really interested in the stuff that I had to say and in the topic of archaeology. And at the same time, as I started to make more archaeology content and more archaeology content was recommended to me, I started to see how much archaeological misinformation there was.
And so that’s when I started to kind of do what I do best, which is debunking pseudo-archaeology and misinformation. After being pretty frustrated with seeing how much misinformation there was out there – misinformation that people who love archaeology were being exposed to without knowing how bad the info actually was – I started making videos talking about it and breaking down the points and using my own expertise to try and inform people. And people loved that even more. It took about, I think, four or five months before I hit a million subscribers or followers on TikTok; that was really how I got my start. From there, I decided in my senior year to branch out onto YouTube. Since TikTok is a short-form platform, I didn’t really have enough time to really talk about it all, the nuance and detail of a lot of these different topics. Expanding to YouTube gave me a bit more of a platform to delve into it all. A lot of my audience followed me, for which I’m very grateful.
And that’s really how I got my start.
Do you have a favorite disproved/debunked theory?
MR: Ah, favorite conspiracy that I’ve debunked. Man, if I were to pick one that I am probably the most entertained by, it would have to be the “mudflood” theory, a theory that there was a giant mudflood that buried, I think it was the Tartarian Empire, which is this hypothesized lost, advanced civilization, and the timeframe for this lost, advanced civilization is the mid-1800s. I don’t even know how this conspiracy could arise in the first place where it’s believed that a lost empire existed in, you know, the last 150 years and somehow was wiped from the Earth by a giant mudflood. It was also one of the first videos that I ever made – the first video that I ever made on YouTube was debunking the mudflood Tartaria theory, which was really fun and so I think it always holds a special place in my heart.
But if I were to also pick a second type of conspiracy that I’m the most fond of that I’ve worked with, I would say the one that was probably the most impactful was my debunking of Graham Hancock’s first season of Ancient Apocalypse, where he hypothesizes a lost, advanced globespanning civilization of the last Ice Age. And the reason I’m really proud of that one is because it achieved an immense reach, with the first episode having more than five million views, and also that it is something that is so palatable to a mainstream audience – something that seems so believable – that I think it was immensely important for me to be able to apply my expertise and be able to give the audience of that show the information that they deserve to be able to draw their own conclusions about what I believe was the misleading information represented in it.
So I think if there’s one conspiracy that I feel the most proud of being able to work against, it would be that one. It was amazing to see so many people in the comments talking about how they watched this show, they thought it sounded pretty good, they didn’t know anything about archaeology, and they kind of just … believed it because they didn’t have any prior experience. Being able to offer that perspective and help people be able to draw their own conclusions, inform themselves and challenge something that they’re being told was immensely gratifying.
Have you ever explored a topic, only to find that the actual truth is equally strange in its own way?
MR: I feel like I am constantly uncovering topics that have conspiracies around them, but as I delve into the truth, I end up finding that it’s even more strange. It makes me wonder why so many conspiracies crop up when the truth is often just as, if not even more interesting. One of my favorite niches that I’ve been exploring a lot recently is land masses and regions that were lost during sea level rise at the end of the last glacial maximum. I did a video recently on Doggerland, discussing the land mass between continental Europe and the British Isles, which is fascinating because there was once a whole piece of land there that is now underwater. There were settlements and people that lived there and undoubtedly cultures that existed there, and we just have fragmentary evidence now because it’s been submerged.
I also made a video talking about the Green Sahara, which is a time period up until about 7,000 years ago when monsoonal rains turned the Sahara Desert into a massive grassland. This was also a place where people would have existed and lived and thrived, but as the water began to disappear from the region, many of those cultures dispersed. It really makes me wonder what sorts of civilizations are lost in the sands of that desert, civilizations that existed in a time when it wasn’t a desert, but a much more lush and productive environment.
It’s very easy to extrapolate the unknown into something extraordinary, that the sands of that desert are the ruins of Atlantis or the ruins of some other lost advanced civilization that once ruled the world. But the reality is that there are likely countless civilizations that have yet to be discovered in the untouched corners of these regions of the world. And they’re probably not some highly advanced civilization, but the amount we can learn from them is likely still immense. And the thing that makes them so special is that they are people just like you and I, people who found a home out there, who developed a culture out there, who developed systems of belief and methods of irrigation and forms of animal husbandry or warfare or faith – all these different things that cropped up in different ways for different people in different parts of the world with different use cases.
I think adding more pieces to that quilt of humanity is something that is even more delightful than the idea that there was once one homogenous civilization around the world.
Why do you feel so strongly about not just uncovering historical fact, but sharing it with the world?
MR: The reason I’m so adamant to discuss these topics is not just because of pyramids or long-lost advanced civilizations – it’s because it’s the difference between fact and fiction. I think pseudo-archaeology on its own may not be all that harmful, but it is part of a greater branch of anti-intellectualism that is plaguing our country. I think that it encourages people to distrust science, it encourages people to listen to those who will wield identity politics and fear tactics over those who have actually done research, and this can lead to a myriad of damaging and dangerous outcomes.
I don’t think I have met a single conspiracy theorist in my time doing this content who JUST believes in the lost advanced civilization. It very frequently goes into things about modern politics, the government, etc. These theories, while not intrinsically tied to others, can be a slippery slope that can lead to some much, much more dangerous and harmful conspiracy theories.
And so that’s why I think it’s really important to stand up for this stuff, that it isn’t just about, you know, the pyramids and what I think about archaeology. It’s about what’s right and what isn’t, and once that line gets blurred, people can be blinded by it and become much more susceptible to dangerous misinformation.
(Photos courtesy Milo Rossi)