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NEWS October 2024
OCTOBER 2024 The recent cyber attack on the Internet Archive is deplorable and can be reasonably compared with the repeated burning of the Great Library of Alexandria. I have used the Wayback Machine extensively, but, until the full extent of the permanent damage is clear, I am unable to assess its effect on Atlantipedia. At […]Read More »
Joining The Dots
I have now published my new book, Joining The Dots, which offers a fresh look at the Atlantis mystery. I have addressed the critical questions of when, where and who, using Plato’s own words, tempered with some critical thinking and a modicum of common sense.Read More »
archaeoastronomy
David, Gary, A.
Gary A. David is an independent American researcher and author dealing with archaeological ruins and rock art of the American Southwest. His focus is on the Hopi tribe of northern Arizona and its archaeo-astronomy. Although he has not written directly about Atlantis, he has contributed a number of interesting papers relating to subjects peripheral to our study here. Most of these are available on the Academia.edu website(a).
David has also written about the Orion Correlation Theory (OCT) of Bauval & Gilbert, which claims that the alignment of the three stars in Orion’s ‘belt’ is reflected in the layout of the three principal pyramids at Giza.
David has expanded on the OCT of Bauval & Gilbert identifying important sites throughout Egypt that he believes constituted a more extensive reference with other heavenly bodies in what he calls the Egyptian Stellar Template(e).
He goes further and claims that he “stumbled across an Orion Correlation that the ancestral Hopi Indians constructed in Arizona from about 1050–1300 AD. In this case, every major star in the constellation corresponds to a specific masonry village site. The terrestrial replication of the celestial pattern is simply uncanny.” (b)
David has published an informative paper(c) on the Maltese Cross and its variants as found around the world. He pointed out its use in the Americas by the ancient Olmecs and has laid great emphasis on its place in the inherited culture of the Hopi people.
>David has also proposed that Votan was a diffusionist deity with counterparts known by other names such as Kukulkan, Quetzalcoatl or Viracocha in different pre-Columbian American civilisations. However, he goes further placing Votan’s origins in the Old World suggesting that he may have been Phoenician or Hebrew, citing Adrian Gilbert and Andrew Collins in support of this(f).<
Additionally, he has also highlighted the use of the swastika in a more benign way by the Hopi of northern Arizona along with its innocent use in other cultures including the Minoans, as well as in 20th century USA(d).
(a) https://colorado.academia.edu/GaryADavid
(b) (99+) (PDF) Orion’s Global Legacy—A Celestial Plan | Gary David – Academia.edu
(c) https://www.academia.edu/8661701/The_Maltese_Cross_Hopi_Indian_Version_of_a_Knights_Templar_Symbol
(d) https://www.academia.edu/8661508/The_Four_Arms_of_Destiny_Swastikas_in_the_Hopi_World_and_Beyond
(e) https://www.academia.edu/8635347/The_Blazing_Star_of_the_Nile_Egyptian_Stellar_Template
Archaeoastronomy *
Archaeoastronomy is a relatively new scientific discipline, which as the name implies combines archaeology and astronomy, particularly in the study of ancient megalithic monuments and their possible alignment with various celestial bodies.
Arguably the most famous example is Stonehenge, but our globe is littered with ancient monuments incorporating solar, lunar or astral alignments. Not all are as impressive or accessible as Stonehenge, Callanish or Newgrange but in remote places such as Nabta Playa or Fajada Butte (see Hadingham[1308.152]).
The subject was initially considered by some to be a ‘fringe’ topic, but in 1999 Clive Ruggles was appointed Professor of Archaeoastronomy at the University of Leicester(a) and is the author of the encyclopedic Ancient Astronomy [1310]+.
The University of Maryland has had a Center for Archaeoastronomy since 1978(c).
The subject has never been central to Atlantis studies but has hovered in the background, with writers such as Egerton Sykes(b) and Graham Hancock[855][1119] who employed aspects of the discipline in their publications.
Giulio Magli (1964- ) is an Italian archaeaostronomer with a website in English(e) dedicated to the application of the discipline in Egypt. In 2013, Magli proposed that aspects of the Göbleki Tepe site are related to the recent appearance of Sirius in the night sky around 9300 BC(f). Andrew Collins and Rodney Hale argue against this interpretation(g), which is perhaps understandable as they support a linkage with the Cygnus constellation. A 2004 paper by Magli, on precessional effects in ancient astronomy(h), has recently been applied by Lenie Reedijk to her contention that the Maltese temples were oriented to Sirius[1631].
A further application of the discipline was employed by Martin Sweatman and Dimitrios Tsikritsis who used it to interpret the carved symbols at Göbekli Tepe. In a 2017 paper(d) they concluded that the pillars there were used to record meteor showers and cometary encounters. They believe that one such encounter involved the explosion or impact of part of Encke’s Comet around 13,000 years ago, which triggered the Younger Dryas Event that kick-started the Neolithic Revolution. Scientists who have worked on the site responded critically(i), which in turn evoked further comments from Sweatman and Tsikritsis(j).
Sweatman later expanded their theory in his book Prehistory Decoded [1621].
The Sixth Oxford International Conference on Archaeoastronomy and the Seventh Annual Meeting of the Société Européenne pour I’Astronom~e dans la Culture (SEAC, European Society for Astronomy in Culture) was held jointly on the days around the summer solstice of 1999 at the Museo de la Ciencia y el Cosmos, in the historical city of La Laguna, in the island of Tenerife. One hundred participants from more than 20 countries of the five continents and almost 60 talks indicate undoubtedly the relevance of this meeting. The Proceedings of that Conference are available online(l) offering a global view of the subject.
Noah Brosch of Tel Aviv University offers a wide-ranging paper on ancient sites and artefacts around the world that clearly had astronomical functions(k).
Archaeoastronomy is one of only a few dozen words with four consecutive vowels.
[1310]+ Available online: https://archive.org/details/an-encyclopedia-of-cosmologies-and-myth-in-ancient-astronomy-clive-ruggles/mode/2up *
(a) Professor Clive Ruggles — University of Leicester (archive.org)
(b) Seachild: Fields of Study: Archaeological Evidence 2 – Archaeoastronomy
(c) https://terpconnect.umd.edu/~tlaloc/archastro/
(d) Wayback Machine (archive.org) *
(e) Archaeoastronomy egypt (archive.org)
(g) https://www.andrewcollins.com/page/articles/Gobekli_Sirius.htm
(h) https://arxiv.org/ftp/physics/papers/0407/0407108.pdf
(j) https://www.academia.edu/33931844/MORE_THAN_A_VULTURE_A_RESPONSE_TO_SWEATMAN_AND_TSIKRITSIS (See the end of the paper)
(k) (99+) (PDF) Thinking about Archeoastronomy | Noah Brosch – Academia.edu
Ogburn, Scott
Scott Ogburn is an Adjunct Professor in the department of Landscape Architecture at Temple University, Pennsylvania. His interests include archaeoastronomy, the influence of astronomy on sacred architecture, as well as sacred geometry.
MUFON, possibly the world’s oldest UFO network have sponsored a lecture by Ogburn on the subject of Atlantis entitled Legends and the Sacred Architecture of Ancient Atlantis, touching on structures at the Great Pyramid, the Sphinx, the Osirian Temple at Abydos, the Gateway of the Sun in Bolivia, and the ruins of Puma Punku(a).
>A number of his papers are available on the academia.edu website(b).<
Cunningham, Derek
Derek Cunningham is the author of a website(a) with an extensive amount of material devoted to archaeoastronomy. His core idea is that there existed in ancient times a World Map based on the the Cygnus constellation, echoing some of Andrew Collins’ work[075].
Included on his site is an article that somehow links a painting, allegedly a map, in the Lascaux Cave with a location in Viet Nam’s Gulf of Tonkin, which Cunningham describes as having “dimensions and geographical features similar to Plato’s description of Atlantis.” He later adds that “of all the various locations proposed, this is the only site that appears consistent with Plato’s description.” As a layman I found the article and the site in general, totally confusing, forcing me to lie down in a darkened room.
However, I cannot deny that Cunningham has put a lot of work into his site and he does have fans(b), but his ideas are too ‘way out’ for me.
His most recent ‘discoveries’(c) include an association of the layout of the Stonehenge complex with the Milky Way!
Cunningham has published his theories in two books, Khyung The Stone Age Astronaut[954] and 400,000 Years of Stone Age Science[955].
He later extended his studies to the remarkable terraced walls of Sacsayhuamán near Cuzco in Peru. In a 2014 illustrated article in Popular Archaeology online magazine, he claimed that the angles of the adjoining ends or sides of the irregular yet tightly fitting stones have astronomical significance!
Cunningham, has now turned his attention to angles inscribed at ancient sites, which he now claims can be associated with astronomical features and events. His extensive article(e) on the Migration and Diffusion website deals with a great many numbers that I shall leave others to evaluate.
Sacsayhuamán
(a) See: https://www.midnightsciencejournal.com
(b) https://thothistheibis.wordpress.com/tag/brodgar-complex/
(c) See: https://atlantipedia.ie/samples/archive-3055/
(e) https://www.migration-diffusion.info/article.php?year=2016&id=486
Younger Dryas *
Younger Dryas is also known as Dryas III was a mini Ice Age that lasted from around 10,700 BC until around 9600 BC. It is named after a wildflower called Dryas octopetala that flourished during this relatively short period. In Ireland, the period is known as the Nahanagan Stadial and in Britain as the Loch Lomond Stadial. For about thirteen hundred years the glaciers had been slowly retreating until within a short timespan temperature dropped and they began to advance again. The cause of this cooling is not entirely clear. One view is that a sudden release into the North Atlantic of vast quantities of freshwater that had been contained by huge ice dams is assumed to have closed down the Gulf Stream, resulting in a twelve-hundred-year lowering of global temperatures. There is evidence that the change only took one or two decades. The same threat is said to exist today with the possibility of the melting of the Greenland ice cap. It also seems that this YD cooling ended with the same rapidity.
In 2011 a paper by Nicholas Pinter et al offered a critical review of the evidence available at that time which, from their perspective, did not fully support the YDIH(z).
A recent application of archaeoastronomy by Martin Sweatman and Dimitrios Tsikritsis led them to conclude that the carved symbols at Göbekli Tepe recorded an encounter involving the explosion or impact of part of Encke’s Comet around 13,000 years ago, which triggered the Younger Dryas Event that provided the impetus for the Neolithic Revolution. Sweatman later expanded their work in his book Prehistory Decoded [1621] and an article on the Ancient Origins website(k). In June 2021, Sweatman had a paper entitled ‘The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis: a review of the impact evidence’ published in the journal ‘Earth Science Review’ of the University of Edinburgh(u).
Kevin A. & Patrick J. Casey maintain that a globally catastrophic event occurred 13,000 years ago(j). The kernel of their theory is that originally the Earth had two moons that at some later point collided, producing our current Moon, while the remnant of the second one eventually exploded over North America kick-starting what we refer to as the cooler Younger Dryas period. They are adamant that it was not a comet or asteroid that caused the devastation, and so clash with the conclusions of Richard Firestone and his colleagues.
A completely different view is expressed in Rod (Carl) Martin’s latest book [1623], where he proposes that the Younger Dryas ended as a result of a catastrophic event. Is it possible that there were two cataclysmic episodes? John Ackerman, a keen follower of Immanuel Velikovsky claims that there were two such events related to “the capture of the Moon into its current orbit,” marking the beginning and the end of the Younger Dryas period(q).
A somewhat technical paper, published in July 2020, challenges the comet impact theory because of geochemical anomalies, Instead, they argue that the YD event was a consequence of volcanic activity(s), rather than an impact! Martin Sweatman refutes this in a paper on Graham Hancock’s website(i).
In 2015, a paper constraining the impact date to within 100 years using Bayesian statistical analyses, now proposed as 12,835 -12,735 years ago(h).
Coincidentally, Emilio Spedicato independently concluded that it was a cometary impact in the North Atlantic that was responsible for the Younger Dryas. Subsequently, when temperatures rose again it resulted in the flooding of vast areas of low-lying landmasses that in Spedicato’s opinion included Atlantis, which he locates in Hispaniola.
Conflicting evidence regarding the possibility of the Younger Dryas being caused by such an impact is impartially outlined on the internet(a).
The November 2013 issue of the BBC Focus magazine (p.30) had a brief article on the impact theory, noting that the northern hemisphere saw a drop of as much as 15°C around 11,000BC. In the absence of a suitable impact crater of the right age, there is still much scientific scepticism(b).
However, in early 2017, further possible evidence of an impact at the start of the Younger Dryas was offered by a team led by Christopher Moore of the University of South Carolina, when they identified a distinct layer of platinum in the soil that coincided with the start of YD. Commenting on this anomaly Moore noted that “Platinum is very rare in the Earth’s crust, but it is common in asteroids and comets.”(e) In 2019, Moore published further data(m) supporting the extraterrestrial impact theory, based on studies carried out on sediments, which date back 20,000 years, from White Pond Lake, situated in southern Kershaw County, South Carolina. “Other examples of excessive platinum grains have been found across Europe, western Asia, Chile, South Africa(r) and North America.” (n)
In early 2018, two papers were published online(i), reinforcing the YD impact theory and adding evidence that the event resulted in a conflagration that “may have consumed ~10 million km2, or ~9% of Earth’s terrestrial biomass.” Related to this is a paper by Andrew Collins that draws attention to the ‘Usselo horizon’, a charcoal-rich layer of between 1 and 8 inches, found on all continents, indicating widespread fires, now dated to 12,900 years ago(l). An additional paper by Hans Kloosterman offers additional background information on the charcoal-rich layer(ab).
Ice cores from Greenland indicate a further cooling period circa 6200 BC that may be related to the abandonment of many Neolithic settlements during this period. Other periods of abrupt climate change have been identified from 3800 BC to 3500 BC and 2800 BC to 2000 BC.
The fact that Plato’s apparent date for the demise of Atlantis, circa 9600 BC, roughly corresponds with the current, best estimate for the date of the Younger Dryas is interesting but unfortunately not conclusive proof of any direct connection. In the absence of any supportive archaeological evidence, a linkage between Atlantis and the Younger Dryas will have to remain a matter of faith rather than fact. Interesting but inconclusive.
In 2017, Graham Hancock reviewed the Younger Dryas debate over the previous decade in a lengthy essay(v). This was prior to the publication of America Before. He finished with the following comment. “Perhaps the lost civilization that I have spent the last quarter of a century trying to track down had its most significant outpost, possibly even its heartland, in North America in the period BEFORE the Younger Dryas cataclysms of 12,800 to 11,600 years ago?” Hancock is inferring here that there was a single global civilisation, a hyperdiffusionist stance that I consider indefensible.
A short paper by John Patrick Hill offers a theory that requires more than faith to accept it; he wrote “Just over 12 thousand years ago, the world was struck by an immense meteor group. It destroyed all of North America and much of Europe and went weIl beyond……… I found proof to support that the creators of the Giza Three and Stonehenge used the Barringer Crater in Arizona as part of the geometry for their massive structures.” Later he reveals that at “Giza, when one takes the distance between the outside corners of the three large pyramids there, that distance is equal to 0.72 miles, the exact distance (diameter) at Barringer.” An expanded version of his paper is available online(t).
In another paper Hill(aa) says that “the Younger Dryas Meteor Event struck 12.8 thousand years ago and it was so large, it is wrote down not only in geologic records but also in holy books, as Noah’s Flood.”
Recent discoveries in northern Sudan of dozens of skeletons, the majority of whom were killed by flint-tipped arrows, have led to the suggestion(c) they were the result of food shortages resulting from the Younger Dryas that in turn led to warfare over diminished food availability.
I note that Robert Schoch claims that there is no evidence to support the Younger Dryas impact theory, instead, he believes that “it was most likely due to reduced solar activity at that time, a solar shut-down.”(o) Schoch’s wide-ranging critique has been refuted by the Comet Research Group.(p)
In 2020, James Lawrence Powell (1936- ), a noted geologist, author, former college president and museum director entered the Younger Dryas debate with the publication of Deadly Voyager [1911]. In it, Powell offers wholehearted support to the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis (YDIH), understandably generating a favourable review from Graham Hancock(w).
In 2020, Tony Petrangelo argued that the Younger Dryas event did not destroy Atlantis, but that it was more compatible with the story of Phaeton(ac).
Even more important, is that Powell’s book induced a number of heavy-duty critics of YDIH, including Michael Shermer to change their opinion(x).
Powell offered a further review of the YD debates in a 2022 paper(y).
(b) https://www.livescience.com/39362-younger-dryas-meteor-quebec.html
(f) https://www.space.com/17676-comet-crash-ice-age.html
(h) https://cosmictusk.com/new-paper-younger-dryas-boundary-impact-date-constrained-within-100-years/
(i) https://www.dailygrail.com/2018/02/a-comet-impact-13000-years-ago-set-fire-to-10-of-the-planet/
(j) https://www.academia.edu/38380799/13k_Theory_Atlantis_Revisited.pdf
(k) https://www.ancient-origins.net/history-important-events/younger-dryas-0012216
(l) https://www.andrewcollins.com/page/articles/Lommel.htm
(n) https://edition.cnn.com/2019/10/29/world/ice-age-extraterrestrial-impact-scn/index.html
(o) https://www.robertschoch.com/plasma_iceage.html
(p) https://cosmictusk.com/comet-research-group-responds-to-robert-schoch/
(q) Firmament and Chaos (archive.org)
*(s) https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/31/eaax8587
(t) Archive 6555 | (atlantipedia.ie)
(u) The_Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesis_MBS.pdf (ed.ac.uk)
(v) The Younger Dryas Impact research since 2007 – The Cosmic Tusk
(w) https://grahamhancock.com/deadly-voyager/
(x) In praise of intellectual honesty – The Cosmic Tusk
(y) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00368504211064272
(z) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0012825211000262
(aa) Migration & Diffusion (migration-diffusion.info)
(ac) https://atlantis.fyi/blog/atlantis-and-the-younger-dryas-impact-hypothesis
Morien Institute
The Morien Institute provides an extensive ‘ancient history’ website(a) that “is a non-profit research and education organisation striving to make ancient astronomy, astro-archaelogy, and research into the mysteries of the ancient world accessible to people with differing abilities. We also run various projects that are designed to make our skywatching activities, our research into the Celtic mysteries, and our enquiries into the sunken remains of Ice Age civilisations around the world, accessible and inclusive to everyone. This reflects the wide range of ability of those people already involved, and the many ways we focus on what can be achieved simply by trying“.
>The site had a small section devoted to Atlantis studies and had a daily news service. It also had a useful overview of archaeoastronomy.(b) The site has not been updated since some time in 2019.<
(a) Morien Institute – index to the various research projects of the Morien Institute (archive.org)
(b) https://web.archive.org/web/20210517045231/http://www.morien-institute.org/astro-arch.html *