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| April 20, 2002 03:08PM |
<HTML>Apologies for the slightly eclectic title, but this is intended as a continuation (of sorts) of <a href="[www.thehallofmaat.com]; which in turn was a continuation of <a href="[www.thehallofmaat.com]; (... ad infinitum, I suspect). All of which hopefully explains my interest in trying to attract Mike Smith's attention in my title ...
While poking around on the internet earlier today, I came across the following: <a href="[news.scotsman.com] the Depths</a> (a review of episode one of "Flooded Kingdoms of the Ice Age", which appeared in the Scotsman on 16 February 2002). I've done a quick check, and realise that Kat provided a link to this article at the time (<a href="[www.thehallofmaat.com]
. Seeing as it didn't generate much of a thread, though, I thought I'd just repost some of the more salient bits below (it's worth reading in its entirety, though):
*****
Martin Dean, director of St Andrews University’s Archaeology Diving Unit, was one of those watching the first part of Hancock’s TV series, Flooded Kingdoms of the Ice Age. And he wasn’t impressed at all.
"The example he showed of what he said was a man-made feature under the sea off Malta looked decidedly like a natural feature," he says. <b>"Underwater limestone is well-known for hoodwinking non-specialists into thinking that it is man-made because of the way it erodes into rectangular shapes.</b>
"That was why you got those grooves which he identified as cart tracks. Well, they’d have to be quite large cart tracks because he seemed to be standing at least a metre deep in one. <b>It’s just like limestone country here in Britain and Ireland - on the Burren in Co Clare or at the top of Malham Cove in the Yorkshire Dales. You get these plinths and dykes, these features that divide the rock up into rectangular and square shapes that look man-made. Everywhere there is limestone, there is the possibility of something that looks like a lost city.</b>
"I’ve been involved in an investigation into one myself - off the Adriatic coast of Italy. There were these fishermen’s stories that they could see a town through the water. They were just natural features. The ‘Bimini Road’ [a rock formation off the Grand Bahamas that looks like a seabed street] is just the same."
To Dean, who has been diving since 1967, Hancock’s claim that marine archaeologists are obsessed with exploring shipwrecks at the expense of ignoring manmade structures on the seabed is preposterous.
"It’s just not true. A lot of research is taking place into it - even off the coast of Britain in the Solent, the University of Southampton is looking at paleo-landscapes. There are similar projects off the coast of the US, India and Australia and many other countries as well. There’s a lot of effort about this."
Marine archaeology is, he says, a lot less straightforward than Hancock’s dives and his incredibly detailed 676-page book suggests. If - a rather largish if - such structures do indeed exist, they may have been knocked down by tidal waves or eroded by wave action. "Even if that doesn’t happen," says Dean, "you get the run-off from the land and sediment deposits covering the landscape. So a lot of them are laying under layers of sand and gravel and mud by now and it’s quite difficult to investigate."
But what about those 2,000 objects recovered in the grab from Gulf of Cambay? "In archaeology, context is everything. You can’t reach firm scientific conclusions based on what comes up in a grab. It just isn’t the same as systematically looking at where every individual item is found. Any archaeological site on the seabed does get contaminated by material that washes around from other sources."
In other words, an object could have been thrown overboard from a passing boat or drifted along underwater (like the pollution the NIOT team was initially investigating). And the carbon dating? According to some archaeologists, it gives distinctly unreliable readings from material that has been underwater for thousands of years.
The most obvious objection to Hancock’s thesis is that coastal cities from 8,000 years ago wouldn’t exist in isolation. Any society sophisticated enough to produce cities would also have had a hinterland that bore traces of that more advanced culture. So far, at least on land 400ft above the Earth’s lost land, no such signs have been discovered ...
*****
To the best of my knowledge, not much has been said either on this MB or over at GHMB about the chapters in <i>Underworld</i> dealing specifically with Malta. I think it would be interesting to discuss some of GH's claims, but I guess that'll have to wait for another time. In the meanwhile, I just wanted to post some images of these various limestone features mentioned by Martin Dean above.
Regards,
Damian</HTML>
While poking around on the internet earlier today, I came across the following: <a href="[news.scotsman.com] the Depths</a> (a review of episode one of "Flooded Kingdoms of the Ice Age", which appeared in the Scotsman on 16 February 2002). I've done a quick check, and realise that Kat provided a link to this article at the time (<a href="[www.thehallofmaat.com]
. Seeing as it didn't generate much of a thread, though, I thought I'd just repost some of the more salient bits below (it's worth reading in its entirety, though):*****
Martin Dean, director of St Andrews University’s Archaeology Diving Unit, was one of those watching the first part of Hancock’s TV series, Flooded Kingdoms of the Ice Age. And he wasn’t impressed at all.
"The example he showed of what he said was a man-made feature under the sea off Malta looked decidedly like a natural feature," he says. <b>"Underwater limestone is well-known for hoodwinking non-specialists into thinking that it is man-made because of the way it erodes into rectangular shapes.</b>
"That was why you got those grooves which he identified as cart tracks. Well, they’d have to be quite large cart tracks because he seemed to be standing at least a metre deep in one. <b>It’s just like limestone country here in Britain and Ireland - on the Burren in Co Clare or at the top of Malham Cove in the Yorkshire Dales. You get these plinths and dykes, these features that divide the rock up into rectangular and square shapes that look man-made. Everywhere there is limestone, there is the possibility of something that looks like a lost city.</b>
"I’ve been involved in an investigation into one myself - off the Adriatic coast of Italy. There were these fishermen’s stories that they could see a town through the water. They were just natural features. The ‘Bimini Road’ [a rock formation off the Grand Bahamas that looks like a seabed street] is just the same."
To Dean, who has been diving since 1967, Hancock’s claim that marine archaeologists are obsessed with exploring shipwrecks at the expense of ignoring manmade structures on the seabed is preposterous.
"It’s just not true. A lot of research is taking place into it - even off the coast of Britain in the Solent, the University of Southampton is looking at paleo-landscapes. There are similar projects off the coast of the US, India and Australia and many other countries as well. There’s a lot of effort about this."
Marine archaeology is, he says, a lot less straightforward than Hancock’s dives and his incredibly detailed 676-page book suggests. If - a rather largish if - such structures do indeed exist, they may have been knocked down by tidal waves or eroded by wave action. "Even if that doesn’t happen," says Dean, "you get the run-off from the land and sediment deposits covering the landscape. So a lot of them are laying under layers of sand and gravel and mud by now and it’s quite difficult to investigate."
But what about those 2,000 objects recovered in the grab from Gulf of Cambay? "In archaeology, context is everything. You can’t reach firm scientific conclusions based on what comes up in a grab. It just isn’t the same as systematically looking at where every individual item is found. Any archaeological site on the seabed does get contaminated by material that washes around from other sources."
In other words, an object could have been thrown overboard from a passing boat or drifted along underwater (like the pollution the NIOT team was initially investigating). And the carbon dating? According to some archaeologists, it gives distinctly unreliable readings from material that has been underwater for thousands of years.
The most obvious objection to Hancock’s thesis is that coastal cities from 8,000 years ago wouldn’t exist in isolation. Any society sophisticated enough to produce cities would also have had a hinterland that bore traces of that more advanced culture. So far, at least on land 400ft above the Earth’s lost land, no such signs have been discovered ...
*****
To the best of my knowledge, not much has been said either on this MB or over at GHMB about the chapters in <i>Underworld</i> dealing specifically with Malta. I think it would be interesting to discuss some of GH's claims, but I guess that'll have to wait for another time. In the meanwhile, I just wanted to post some images of these various limestone features mentioned by Martin Dean above.
Regards,
Damian</HTML>
| Subject | Author | Posted |
|---|---|---|
|
Damian Walter | April 20, 2002 03:08PM |
|
Damian Walter | April 20, 2002 03:09PM |
|
Damian Walter | April 20, 2002 04:11PM |
|
Damian Walter | April 22, 2002 03:24PM |
|
Damian Walter | April 20, 2002 03:10PM |
|
Damian Walter | April 20, 2002 03:12PM |
|
Martin Stower | April 20, 2002 05:31PM |
|
Edward | April 21, 2002 02:23AM |
|
enki | April 21, 2002 02:56AM |
|
Damian Walter | April 21, 2002 08:31AM |
|
Mike Smith | April 21, 2002 08:46AM |
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