<HTML>Thanks for that, Litz. Your position is much clearer to me now. I agree with almost all of what your wrote above. It is sensible.
However, the point I would differ on is your presentation that new ideas are being "dismissed" in the case of Hancock and his ilk (that is not to deny that some new ideas are indeed given short shrift, only later to be proven more worthy than was thought initially). In fact, there is no "new thinking" in the LC notion, as presented by GH and other "alternatives." It's old hat. It's been tested again and again and again in various guises and it has always failed. Ken Feder's article here on this site documents this clearly and concisely: it's old news. If archaeologists are dismissive, this is the reason. They've seen Nazca, and Machu Picchu, and the Maya, and the pyramids, and so on (ab)used repeatedly in mystery-mongering works that present them as inexplicable "mysteries" when they are really problems that, each year, find more and more by way of a solution. For GH to operate at all, he has to simply ignore all this work -- much of it done decades ago. Hence his ridiculous plea to be exempt from the standards of scholarship, since he is not an historian, his celebration of his selectivity, and so on. He is not producing anything of value at all. It's all be done before and got nowhere then. He's just repackaged it, and it will get nowhere now.
It is the testing of claims that really interests me, and it is why I am involved in this whole alternative-conventional debate at all. I am convinced that what makes science and liberal scholarship truly unique in the history of human thought is the process of testing of claims. Anyone, after all, can make an ingenious claim. It's in the sorting of the brilliant from the banal that the real pay-off lies.
As far as I can see, the alternatives do no testing whatsoever of their ideas -- they just seek to construct a case out of whatever materials are available, no matter how threadbare and shoddy. I hope this not what you mean by "thinking outside the box"? Because I call it pseudomethod.
Do you, Mark and Litz, think that this is a valid way to proceed?
I <i>certainky</i> don't.
Best regards,
Garrett</HTML>
