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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