Graham Hancock on inveterate archaeologists
Robert K. G. Temple’s
Trenchant Criticisms of
“the Academic world”.
Part Four:
Graham Hancock on inveterate archaeologists
by
Damien F. Mackey
“There might be room for some tinkering around the
edges,
some refinement of orthodox ideas, but God forbid that
anything should be
discovered that might seriously undermine the
established paradigm”.
Graham Hancock
Whilst I do not necessarily agree with all of the esoteric - though
often most interesting to read - theories put forward by the likes of Robert
Temple and Graham Hancock, their colourful jibes at the monolithic disciplines
that are conventional archaeology and Egyptology I find to be both humorous and
resonant with my own sentiments.
Part One:
https://www.academia.edu/35925085/Robert_K._G._Temples_Trenchant_Criticisms_of_the_Academic_World_ “If it were not for the activities of a few polite and
genteel 'trouble-makers' like Nibbi and O'Mara, Egyptology would become totally
petrified and incapable of ever generating a new insight”.
Part Two:
Friedman on ‘failure of
nerve’.
Part Three:
“They’re frightened that if they find stuff
under there, it’s going to blow all their books and all their history out of
the window. They started to investigate it but then they stopped. So they must
have known there’s stuff there but they’re worried”. Latifa Yedroudj
The following juicy bits are taken from Graham Hancock’s book, Magicians of the Gods:
The evidence is mounting, though most of the later construction is of
high quality, that the edifice of our past built by historians and
archaeologists stands on defective and dangerously unsound foundations. ….
….
I’m used to archaeologists making the sign of the evil
eye and turning their backs on me when I show up at their excavations.
….
A
little later, in 1994, Schmidt came across the report of the Turkish-American
survey done thirty years earlier and stumbled upon a single paragraph that
mentioned the presence of worked flints alongside fragments of limestone
pillars lying on the surface at Göbekli Tepe. “I was a young archaeologist,” he
explains, “I was looking for my own project, and I immediately realized that
there could be something of significance here, perhaps even another site as
important as Nevali Cori.”
“Which your predecessors had missed, because flints
and architectural pillars are not normally associated in the minds of
archaeologists?”
I’m hoping he’ll get my hint that he, too, might be
missing something at Göbekli Tepe because of the established paradigm, but he
seems oblivious and replies, “Yes, exactly.”
….
Columnar
basalt does form naturally—the famous Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland is
an example—but at Gunung Padang it has been used as a building material and is
laid out in a form never found in nature.
“The
geophysical evidence is unambiguous,” Natawidjaja says. “Gunung Padang is not a
natural hill but a man-made pyramid and the origins of construction here go
back long before the end of the last Ice Age. Since the work is massive even at
the deepest levels, and bears witness to the kinds of sophisticated
construction skills that were deployed to build the pyramids of Egypt, or the
largest megalithic sites of Europe, I can only conclude that we’re looking at
the work of a lost civilization and a fairly advanced one.”
“The
archaeologists won’t like that,” I point out.
“They
don’t!” Natawidjaja agrees with a rueful smile. “I’ve already got myself into a
lot of hot water with this. My case is a solid one, based on good scientific
evidence, but it’s not an easy one. I’m up against deeply entrenched beliefs.”
The
next step will be a full-scale archaeological excavation. “We have to excavate
in order to interrogate our remote sensing data and our carbon dating sequences
and either confirm or deny what we believe we’ve found here,” says Natawidjaja,
“but unfortunately there’s a lot of obstacles in our way.”
When
I ask what he means by obstacles he replies that some senior Indonesian archaeologists
are lobbying the government in Jakarta to prevent him from doing any further
work at Gunung Padang on the grounds that they “know” the site is less than
three thousand years old and see no justification for disturbing it.
“I
don’t deny that the megaliths
at the surface are less than three thousand years old,” Natawidjaja hastens to add, “but I suggest
they were put here because Gunung Padang has been recognized as a sacred place
since time immemorial. It’s the deepest layers of the structure at between
12,000 and more than 20,000 years old [sic] that are the most important. They
have potentially revolutionary implications for our understanding of history
and I think it’s vital that we be allowed to investigate them properly.”
….
What I could not do when I wrote Fingerprints,
because the data was not then available, was identify the exact nature of the
cataclysm that had wiped out my hypothetical lost civilization. Instead I
speculated on a number of possible causes, notably the radical “earth crust
displacement” theory of Professor Charles Hapgood which, though endorsed by
Albert Einstein,8 has
since found little favor among geologists. This absence of a credible “smoking
gun” was one of the many aspects of my argument that was heavily criticized by
archaeologists. Since 2007, however, a cascade of scientific evidence has come
to light that has identified the smoking gun for me. It’s all the more
intriguing because it’s the work of a large group of impressively credentialed
mainstream scientists, and because it does not rule out, indeed it in some ways
reinforces,
the case for massive crustal instability that I made in Fingerprints of the
Gods.
….
Even
in 2013 the archaeological vandalizing and defacing of the site was well
advanced with a hideous raised walkway in place, but what has happened since
our last visit is almost beyond words to describe. A massively ugly wooden roof
now looms over the megalithic enclosures, entirely covering them, and hulking
platforms loaded with tons of stones have been suspended beneath it to prevent
the roof from blowing away in high winds. These platforms, together with the
struts supporting the roof and the prominent “no entry” signs scattered around,
make it almost impossible to see the megalithic pillars or to appreciate their profound, original
beauty and spiritual power.
What
the archaeologists have done—of course, they claim they did it to “protect” the
site—is a travesty, an abomination, a masterpiece of ugliness, and we, the
global public, whose heritage Göbekli Tepe is, are left cheated and bereft. I
simply cannot understand the minds that could have boxed in, caged and
imprisoned Göbekli Tepe in this way. I cannot begin to imagine what they were
thinking. And even if the roof is “temporary” as is presently claimed—until, no
doubt, a larger one is put in place—that is no excuse. Better no roof at all
(the site has managed very well without one for nearly nineteen years since the
first excavations began) than even five minutes of this vile
“temporary” horror.
Besides,
I have grave doubts about how “temporary” it will be. It has taken almost a
year for the German Archaeological Institute to put the roof up (they were
already working on it during our previous visit in September 2013), a lot of
money has been spent on it, and I fear we will not see it removed and replaced
with something more aesthetically appropriate to the majesty and mystery of
Göbekli Tepe for a very long while.
As to a night visit, and my plan to
see the stars with the megaliths around me … What a joke! The roof has cut
Göbekli Tepe off entirely from the cosmos. It feels almost like a deliberate,
calculated act of disempowerment—as though someone among the powers that be
suddenly woke up and realized how dangerous this ancient place has become to
the established order of things and how subversive it potentially is to the
system of mind control, very much including control of the past, that keeps
modern society in order.
….
It is notoriously difficult to know, with any useful
level of certainty, the age of anonymous, uninscribed stone monuments. Carbon
dating of associated organic materials is only useful when we can be absolutely
certain that the materials being dated were deposited at the same time as the cutting
and placing of the stone we are interested in. In the case of many megalithic
structures this is impossible. Surface luminescence dating, which we saw in
Chapter Ten has already produced some anomalous results at the Pyramid of
Menkaure and at the Sphinx and Valley Temples of Giza, has not yet been widely
taken up by the archaeological establishment and has never been applied to the
monuments of the Andes. In the absence of useful objective tests, therefore,
the next routine strategy is to look at architectural style and methods. Just
as different styles of pottery can often provide reliable indications as to
what culture in what period made a particular piece, so too with architecture.
The rule of thumb is that very different styles and approaches to the
construction or creation of stone monuments, even if they stand side by side, are
indicative of the involvement of different cultures working at different
periods in the past.
Unfortunately this logical and reasonable technique of
stylistic dating is not popular with archaeologists studying the monuments of
the Andes—perhaps because, if they were to deploy it here, as they do
elsewhere, they would be forced to question the established theory that the
Incas made everything. Archaeology is a deeply conservative discipline and I have
found that archaeologists, no matter where they are working, have a horror of
questioning anything their predecessors and peers have already announced to be
true. They run a very real risk of jeopardizing their careers if they do. In
consequence they focus—perhaps to a large extent subconsciously—on evidence and
arguments that don’t upset the applecart. There might be room for some
tinkering around the edges, some refinement of orthodox ideas, but God forbid
that anything should be discovered that might seriously undermine the
established paradigm.
[End of quotes]
And so it goes, on and on.
Great stuff!
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