Ancient Infrastructure: Remarkable Roads, Mines, Walls, Mounds, Stone Circles [Hardcover]

William R. Corliss (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 406 pages
• Publisher: Sourcebook Project (November 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 091555433X
• ISBN-13: 978-0915554331
• Product Dimensions: 9.9 x 7.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,405,030 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An Excellent Overview, May 6, 2001

By 

SPB (Surrey, England) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ancient Infrastructure: Remarkable Roads, Mines, Walls, Mounds, Stone Circles (Hardcover)

This book is divided into 8 main sections dealing with a variety of archaeological topics, for example Water Control Structures or Ancient Roads and Bridges. Each section contains summaries of the more interesting, and anomalous, examples from that subject area. The author repeatedly comments that "size alone is not considered anomalous in this catalog". Having said that, he generally goes on to list the largest examples in each topic!

Each entry is rated 1-4 on available published material, 1 being extremely well researched, 4 being unacceptable, poor-quality data. It is then rated 1-4 on anomalousness, 1 being revolutionary and 4 being well-explained. All in all there are 16 entries with a highly anomalous 1 rating and 7 of these relate to possible ancient (pre-Viking) contacts between the Old and New Worlds. Only 1 of these highly anomalous entries also receives an extensively researched 1 rating, this being "Stonehenge's Remarkable Rectangle"...an astronomical alignment at stonehenge which can only occur at that precise latitude, implying that the builders went out of their way to build it there for precisely that reason. A further six highly anomalous entries receive a well researched, probably real 2 rating.

Many famous archaeological sites are covered for one reason or another, including the likes of Teotihuacan, Eater Island, Carnac, Avebury, Giza, Machu Picchu, Petra, Copan, Tikal and Cuzco. Some famous anomalies are here...the Nazca lines in Peru, the Costa Rican stones spheres, the Malta cart-tracks and the Oak Island Money Pit but there are plenty of less well-known sites in the book to keep everyone interested. My personal favourite is an intriguing, if brief, reference to an Inca tunnel system below Cuzco, the entrance dynamited by the Peruvian police to prevent loss of life to the Indiana Jones-style hazards.

The book is well researched and interesting. As it says on the cover, it is a "catalog of archeological anomalies" so you should not expect too much depth to each entry. Each entry provides an overview of the archaeological site and the perceived anomaly before providing a list of references for further investigation. This is, indeed, the strength of the book...the fact that it is so thoroughly referenced which certainly makes up for the brevity of many entries.

I give the book 4 stars rather than 5 simply due to the lack of depth of some entries although I accept that it is intended as an overview of anomalous infrastructure and not an in-depth study. It deserves to become a classic of Fortean archaeology and is far more readable than Cremo and Thompson's "Forbidden Archaeology". An excellent buy.