Customer Reviews

Mysteries of Ancient South America (The Atlantis Reprint Series)

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One might have some intrepidation about a book with "Atlantis" on the cover or flourish like "the place where civilization really began." However, there is a lot of interesting material in this reprint of the 1947 book. Global cataclysms affecting mankind is now again a popular topic (The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes: How a Stone-Age Comet Changed the Course of World Culture), and Wilkins mines legends for hints of past events. He does make assumptions in connecting many things with Atlantis, hypothesizing that the survivors came to Central and South America. Were they from the fabled Atlantis, other voyagers or both? See also In Search of Quetzalcoatl: The Mysterious Heritage of American Civilization.

He dates the Atlantis destruction at the end of the last Ice Age, more or less, as many do. Indeed, there seems to be a cosmic impact event then, but others have questioned if it makes sense for an advanced people to exist during the Stone Age and place them during the Bronze Age and destroyed in a different event (see The Destruction of Atlantis or The Lost Empire of Atlantis). Wilkins can be loose and speculative with his datings, but his suggestion of earlier arrival in the Americas has since been vindicated (The Settlement of the Americas: A New Prehistory).

The background on the lost explorer Fawcett and his quest for lost cities in the Amazon is interesting and has been reintroduced to modern audiences recently in The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon. One wonders in the age of satellites if any lost cities could still exist, but occasionally they are still found. Sometimes Wilkins relies on too many lost, unpublished or otherwise hard if not impossible to find manuscripts. Where are they now? The fascinating discussion of underground worlds is sometimes marred by relying on the musings of mystics. And where is the biblography that the contents claims should be in the back of the book? The stories of giants are another forgotten but possibly truth-based race from past times. Overall, Wilkins has gathered together tidbits and rumors of a long-lost time.

The author is actually Harold T. Wilkins, as the book cover states. This is, along with Wilkins's other volume on South American mysteries, extremely interesting and chock full of theories and facts not found elsewhere. Great fun to read.