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35 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of a precious few, April 4, 2000
- "Antiquity is full of the praises of another Antiquity still more remote", says Voltaire (quote on p.7). Authors Zapp and Erikson go to great lengths in order to show us that the Antiquity of the Golden Age, as extolled by magniloquent poets and ancient philosophers and as described in our global treasury of myths, was not the mere fruit of the imagination of "pre-scientific humans" or even the outpourings of some hypothetical "collective unconscious", but existed de facto. On little under 400 pages readers are presented with a most impressive array of cultural and archaeological evidence for the existence of prehistoric seafaring civilizations spanning the entire earth - though each would have had its own center - and living in relative harmony for millennia on end.However, since the evidence presented falls within a range of quite ambitious proportions and the material is very heterogeneous, Zapp and Erikson have not been able to analyze and discuss it thoroughly; references are few for the breathtaking number of claims the authors make, and one misses a more consistently concomitant exposition of the old-paradigmatic views and interpretations of mainstream archaeologists, though this would of course bore some readers terribly and also have doubled or tripled the size and price of the book. The way it is, readers will have to take the evidence at face value and suspend a definitive judgment until after the authors' suggestions - exceedingly fertile - have been meditated on and possibly backed up by independent research/reading. Archaeology is in itself not enough to make prehistory come alive before our eyes. Though considered irrelevant by those educated in a strictly materialistic and rationalistic worldview, tools such as spiritual insight or religious experience, intuition, synderesis, Platonic anamnesis and a solid cultural background are indispensable for correctly appreciating who our ancestors were and what they were capable of. This has nothing to do whatsoever with romanticizing the past or with imposing extravagant and feeble-minded vagaries upon the unknown. Our ancestors were fully human (in fact, we don't seem to compare favorably to them ourselves) and therefore possessed the characteristics by which the human being is safely distinguished from all other creatures, namely transcendental intellect, free will and theomorphic constitution. It is time we give up the childish, chronocentric outlook by which we keep judging older periods as inferior to our own, and rid our minds of the silly association of technology with human excellence, as if even the lowliest elements of true culture stood a chance of surviving under the oafish influence of an all-encompassing, technology-obsessed society (see comments on p.181). Though Zapp and Erikson warn us not to fall into the traps of evolutionary-inspired preconceptions about the primitiveness of prehistoric people and remind us of the mechanisms by which weak or even opportunistic theories are formulated and then kept intact by political, academic and religious forces (e.g. see p.56 about how Beringia came into being in 1590), they cannot avoid contamination entirely themselves and seem to go on placing Java Man and the australopithecines somewhere in our family album and thinking the Middle Ages (800-1300 A.D) a time of darkness and savagery. Their caustic criticism of the Catholic Church (e.g. p.284) may at first seem justified, but is actually very simplistic and completely ignores the many centuries of sanctity and intellectual achievements evidenced within the spiritual framework of Christian Europe (both Orthodox and Catholic). The authors seem to have missed a great deal of the complexity of a culture that was capable of accomodating such disparate characters as Cortez and Saint Catherine of Siena. However, in view of the central theme of the book, certain heedless statements (and some cases of rash compromise with modern and highly unstable scientific theories and claims - Chaos science, unreliable dating techniques, etc) are made up for by a multitude of excellent notes on knotted chords (p.25-7), astronomical observatories vs. agricultural clocks (p.53), scientific claims inherited from theology (p.57), the eminence-of-initial-excavation principle (p.61), Clovis man vs. Pleistocene fauna extinction (p.81), NDT-based preconceptions (p.98), mythmaking and precision measurement (p.183), cyclical time and qualitative numbers (p.225-6), astrology vs. astronomy (p.233), erosion of the sphinx (p.266), ocean travel experiments (p.295-8), resistance to imported concepts (p.336), apart from a vast amount of general archaeological data. But why exactly did I say this otherwise poorly organized book was "one in a precious few"? Because it approaches the issue of prehistoric Atlantis without attributing ancient achievements everywhere to extraterrestrial interventions, without trying to portray the Atlanteans as lovers of a technology which has left no trace, without trying to squeeze every sign of civilization in the Americas into a post-Sumerian-pre-Columbian time gap, and without supposing peoples of the past would have accepted every glass bead they were shown as a blessing. Cultures are shown to tend to start out not "jumbo-sized" but intellectually full-fledged and then, as they grow older, decline; myth is shown to be an adequate way of expressing and preserving cosmology and other sciences, the Atlantean life style is shown to be highly recommendable even for the humans of today, and people everywhere and everywhen (again modern man may be an exception) are shown to be brave, inventive and for the most part perfectly aware of what is good for them and what is not. And, whatever the book's minor flaws, that's good enough for five stars and a great read!
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