(Article By Alex
Whitaker, 2011)
Abstract:
When Shelley wrote in his famous sonnet Ozymandias
�Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.!', he raised
an important question - Why exactly do we have archaeology? What
purpose does it serve beyond providing a source of reflective fascination? In
the light of the current emphasis on
archaeology, perhaps it is time to start looking beyond the
discoveries themselves and appraise what more the discipline
might have to teach us. This article looks at the things we
haven�t yet found, nor ever will find, and what if any bearing they
have on the archaeological record.
In archaeological terms, each new discovery adds to the context
of previous discoveries, and it is this procedure that has
enabled us to begin building the picture we have today of our
journey as a species. In itself this has been an obviously
valuable exercise as it has provided a better understanding of
our development, but along with the artefacts, monuments, cities
and civilisations, we have also begun to unearth a new set of
questions, questions that go beyond physical artefacts and
beyond the realms of archaeology. It is not the facts but rather
an absence of them that is beginning to reveal itself. Our
ignorance of the facts, as particularly demonstrated by the
human fossil record, which still amounts to a single handful of
bones worldwide from anytime before a million years ago,
compels us to see that we are only just emerging from a period of ignorance, and
before that from a time when our origins were based on
mythology. It seems hard to believe that the legendary cities of
Troy and Knossos (amongst others) were simply considered as
Greek fiction until the 1870s, the same time
that the 150 million year long dinosaur dynasty was also first
officially recognised. It appears then that the spade has begun
to reveal something beyond the remains themselves, for in this
age of rediscovery we are also revealing a record of absence,
absences both of continuity and facts. Indeed many of the
discoveries we have made are surrounded by vast �negative
spaces� in the record, a fact that becomes more apparent the
further back we look.
Although
today we are being provided with a steady stream of discovery from our
more recent journey, there remain several noticeable absences in
the record. In respect of the recent human
record we may say that the end of the last great ice-age at approximately
10,500 BC was a particularly pivotal time, following which
humanity began its journey into the �civilised� state that we
find ourselves in today. This same date is the most probable
candidate for the numerous myths of a �great-flood� as we
speculate that the world experienced waves of ice-melt for the
following few thousand years. Before this date in time, we encounter a �negative
space� both in the archaeological record and the oral tradition,
as seen in the number of origin myths which include a watery
start, with little if any mythology to represent the vast
250,000 year ice-locked period preceding the post ice-age flood
event. It is also during this harshest of environments that we
have now become aware of at least two �bottlenecks� in the human
population, with speculation of humanity being reduced to a mere
15,000 persons following the �Toba Incident� around 70,000 years ago
(1).
One of the most important realisations from the examination of
these �negative spaces� therefore, has been the recognition that
our struggle towards �civilisation� has not been the systematic,
constant and gradual rise from savage primate to upright
homo-sapiens that was long believed to be the case: rather the
path has been
staggered and shows both rises and falls, linked in with
the natural and dynamic cycles of the mother-earth and the
celestial spheres.
It is to one particular date after the Ice-age that the rest of
this article is orientated, a date that stands out amongst others.
It marks the time at which several civilisations
make their appearance simultaneously at different places around the
ancient world as well as being recognised as the �K/T� boundary
between history and prehistory. It was at this time that
records began to be written. Something unique happened around
3,100 BC which caused a shift in human culture and which was
marked by the appearance of several great civilisations such as
the Sumerian, Indus Valley, Egyptian and European, resulting
in the building of some of the largest and most enduring human
structures ever made. It was at this time that most of the
greatest megalithic structures in Britain, Malta and Egypt were
constructed. Along Western Europe several prominent existing
megalithic monuments such as Stonehenge and Carnac were
modified, while numerous civil-scale megalithic constructions
were built along the length of the western coast of Europe and
the Mediterranean.
The preference for solar orientation in these new structures
also coincides with the transfer from a predominantly female,
earth-mother worship to what is recognised as a male,
solar-orientated worship, with a male deity. It is also at this
time that one begins to see something beyond architecture and
artefacts with the introduction of systems of apparently
deliberate linear placement of sacred places; also, rather
surprisingly, located according to both longitude and
latitude. There is sufficient evidence now (apart from the
locations of the sites themselves) to support the proposal that
an ancient meridian once ran through the Egyptian site of
Heliopolis/Giza, and that the subsequent placement of other
�sacred� sites across Europe, the Oracle centres of the
Mediterranean, and several Capital cities of the middle east
were placed according to a working belief in a higher design,
associated with geometry and the connection of sacred sites. The
same ideas prevail in the esoteric beliefs of the body Chakras,
perhaps offering us an origin to such a system through the
belief in a living earth-mother. At present, the recognition of
such ideas is still in its infancy, but there is no doubting the
linear mentality of our ancestors or their geometric
�fingerprint� which lies across the landscape to this day. It is
no coincidence that this same linear mentality appears soon
after in the new-world, along with cultures strongly influenced
by pyramid building and solar worship.
Whatever it was that inspired the global �Atlantean�
construction phase at around 3,100 BC, it is noticeable that the great constructions
were not followed by greater constructions, but rather a decline
in skills resulting in the subsequent rise and fall of newer
cultures, each adding to an obliteration of the memory of what happed at
this apparently historically significant moment in time, uncannily echoing
the cyclic prophecies of the Indian Yuga�s and the �Ages� of
the Mayans. The Mayan calendar system offers us an exact
start date of 3,114 BC and the Indian Kali Yuga began at 3,102
BC
(2).
It is also incidentally the very time Aubrey Burl calls the
�Dark-Age� of [European] prehistory due to the lack of human
fossil record, and the same time that the great Chinese,
Sumerian, Indus Valley and Egyptian dynasties are believed to
have begun.
Inscriptions from the time show that the early Egyptian
dynasties only lasted a couple of hundred years before the
country was �torn apart by civil unrest�, marking the end of the
great pyramid phase. The Sumerian �Lament of Ur� records the
collapse of the Sumerian civilisation at the same time. In
Neolithic Western Europe and the Mediterranean (i.e. Malta), the
same pattern is repeated, in each case achieving unprecedented
success in construction but disappearing soon after. That these
cultures were connected has been demonstrated by the discovery
of seals, pottery and other associated evidence of trade, makes
it likely that they were closer connected than we think, perhaps
also through religion, language, art or the sciences. Although
we know very little about the events behind this global
phase, the same date marks the simultaneous rise and fall
of several cultures and is curiously marked by the commencement
of two particular calendar systems: The Indian �Kali Yuga�, and
from the other side of the world, the Mayan Long-count which
comes complete with a very specific end date too called the
�End-time�, predicted as falling on Dec 21st, 2012 AD.
Inscriptions for this calendar system are written by using a
complex combination of dots and dashes.
The oldest record of the long-count inscription
actually comes
from the Olmec site of Tres Zapotes, written in 31 BC, a
thousand years before the Mayan culture or any mention of an
�end time�. The site had been occupied since around 1,500 BC by
the Olmecs, who have been called the �mother-culture� of Meso-America,
and who are still one of the least understood.
Archaeological research on the Olmecs suggests a multi-cultural
society living in the Mexican gulf, with roots tracing back to
at least 1,500 BC. They built the first pyramid complexes and
ball courts, left the first evidence of writing and several enigmatic stone monuments portraying heads with African
and Asian features; their art includes numerous portrayals of
people with beards and moustaches (facial features not present
in the Amerindian genotype), with characteristics suggestive of both
Oriental and Eurasian profiles. It has been long proposed by
Van Sertima and others that a transatlantic cross-cultural
exchange existed in pre-Columbian times. The long-count stele
from Tres Zapotes also confirms that it was the Olmecs and not
the Mayans who developed the sophisticated long-count calendar.
Although it is commonly claimed that the Mayans were responsible
for the long-count calendar system, this discovery shows that
they inherited an existing system from the Olmecs, who
presumably placed a great significance on the date, which has been
recorded into Mayan mythology as the end of the last great
cycle, and the beginning of the present one. The start date of
the Olmec calendar therefore, marks the very time that many of the
great old-world civilisations arose; including the Chinese,
Indus Valley, Sumerian, Egyptian, Mediterranean and western
European megalithic builders (associated with the �beaker
people�). This date then is an apparently significant date both
in the old-world and new-world. The mysterious Olmec culture (or
more to the point, the origins of the Olmec culture) is arguably
therefore one of the most relevant archaeological mysteries
today.
Our prejudice for prophecy today places huge
question-marks over such ideas, but there is little doubt that
prophecy and prediction featured highly in ancient cultures. We
are told for example that the time and place of Cortez's arrival
in America was accurately predicted, allowing him to become a �Trojan
horse� to the Aztec civilisation. Similarly, the Sybil�s of the
ancient oracle centres were renowned for their enigmatic prophecies for several hundreds of
years. The first modern treatise on the subject of prophecy was
carried out in 1952 by Carl Jung who wrote a landmark book on
the subject (3) in
which he explored the idea that events which happened
synchronously might have a meaningful connection. This profound
work, at first greatly misunderstood, has since been reinforced
by modern experimentation in the field of quantum science. We
now find ourselves on the cusp of re-learning an apparently lost
science, in which a universal synchronicity is being proposed,
but which cannot be explained with traditional modern
terminology. Jung�s acausal synchronicity takes on an even more
profound meaning when one views the predicted Great-ages of both
the Mayans and Indians which appear to share a start date no more than 12
years apart; the same start date that marked the simultaneous
rise and fall of several civilisations worldwide. Should Jung be
right in his supposition that such synchronicity might involve a
�shared connection�, then we find ourselves in the situation of
dismissing a source of ancient wisdom at the very time that such
wisdom tells us to consider it, and that is the elephant in the
room.! It brings into play the absences between cycles and the path
that rises and falls, suggesting that there is a mystery to life
in origins and continuity.
Perhaps it is this combination of absence and the cyclic nature
of time that makes these prophecies and proto-myths so difficult
to decipher today. They remain in our consciousness like elusive
memories of a dream, both tangible and intangible at the same
but we have learnt from the discovery (loss) of cities such as
Knossos and Troy that myths can and do often hold an essence of
truth in them. Plato�s now infamous story of �Atlantis�, which
he reported to have been destroyed by catastrophe provokes not
just the image of a sophisticated golden age, but rather the
overwhelming subsequent absence of it, an absence caused by
loss. Regardless of the truths behind these prophesies and
myths, they offer us a vague reflection of our fragile
reincarnated presence through archaeological discovery and
stories of catastrophe as we find ourselves living in the
long-shadow of the predicted Mayan �end-time�. The geological
record confirms humanity as being witness to similar events in
the near past. It seems relevant that James Lovelock, the
prophetic figure behind the Gaia eco-revolution in the 1960�s,
recently announced his belief that it was already too late for
humanity which he predicted no more than 30�40 years in its
current state
(4).
Whatever the truth of the Mayan predictions, modern computer
simulations appear to be in agreement with the fact that
humanity is about to face a dramatic global collapse. Should
such a catastrophe be looming on the horizon, then for those of
us still seeking the truth of the Atlantean myth, we have only
to look in the mirror for an answer.
(The
Mayan
Prophecy: 2012)
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