-Caveat Lector- http://www.discoveringarchaeology.com/articles/013101-15,000mistake.shtml The 15,000-Year Mistake The ancient city of Tiwanaku, high in the Bolivian Andes on the extreme southern end of Lake Titicaca, is one of the world’s most impressive archaeological sites. Pseudo-archaeologists certainly agree. With outlandish assumptions built on shaky "science," they have made Tiwanaku a staple within their fantastic world. Many of today’s leading pseudo-archaeologists use Tiwanaku to some degree in their tales of the strange and mysterious. Graham Hancock, arguably the best known of the lot, is no exception. Tiwanaku takes center stage in his Fingerprints of the Gods: The Evidence of Earth’s Lost Civilization (1995).Hancock holds Tiwanaku in great esteem because he believes it to be 17,000 years old. That’s a long way from what professional archaeologists have documented for the royal city of the Tiwanaku Empire: It was built sometime between 400 B.C. and A.D. 100. How could Hancock make a 15,000-year mistake? For the answer, we must look to Arthur Posnansky.Posnansky is a member of the pseudo-archaeologists’ pantheon of heroes. A German by birth, Posnansky spent much of his life in Bolivia, where he conducted 50 years of single-minded research on Tiwanaku. The book that grew out of this research, Tihuanacu: The Cradle of American Man (1945), is a pseudo-archaeology classic. The question of Tiwanaku’s age troubled Posnansky, just as it had Pedro de Cieza de León, who in 1549 was the first European to see the ancient city. All who have since gazed upon its terraced pyramids, sunken courtyards, and towering stone walls have wondered: When had the ancients raised Tiwanaku? The grandest of all the city’s monuments was the magisterial Gateway of the Sun — a massive, square archway carved from a single piece of stone.To "solve" the age dilemma, Posnansky turned to archaeoastronomy, a field that, though relatively new in the 1920s, had been anticipated in the eighteenth century by English antiquarians who noticed that Stonehenge was aligned with the summer solstice. Posnansky’s early twentieth-century use of archaeoastronomy made sense because he viewed the Kalasasaya, Tiwanaku’s large, rectangular central compound, as a South American Stonehenge — a solar observatory located on the astronomic meridian and a magnificent stone calendar. Posnansky reasoned that during solstices, while standing at the center gateway of the west wall of the Kalasasaya, the sun should rise at the outer edges of the stone pillars that cap the north and south ends of the opposite east wall. He considered such astronomical precision logical since the architects of Tiwanaku had been skilled enough to design the monumental city in the first place. But when he measured the declination between the sun and the pillars, he discovered that the sun was a striking 18 degrees off. How was it possible for the venerable architects to have made such a horrific error? The only way Posnansky could figure to solve the riddle was to conclude that the architects of Tiwanaku had, in fact, built the structure with complete accuracy — what was wrong was the position of the sun. The way to discover the true age of the Kalasasaya, therefore, was simply to calculate when in the past the sun would have risen over the appropriate stone pillars. After completing a complicated set of calculations — and salting his text with the technical jargon of astronomy — Posnansky made a startling discovery: Tiwanaku was built in 15,000 B.C., when the sun rose directly over the corners of the pillars. The discrepancy between the sun today and the remains of the Kalasasaya can thus be explained by the movement of the sun in a mathematically determined manner. Hancock eagerly accepts Posnansky’s date, calculated in 1928 to 1930, and says in a sly aside with just a hint of conspiracy that "not a single orthodox historian or archaeologist was prepared to accept such an early origin" for the ancient city of Tiwanaku. Posnansky’s calculations appear scientific and precise, but like most pseudo-archaeology, the interpretation is a house of cards. Surprisingly, we learn this from Posnansky himself: "If, at the solstices, one observes the sunrise without the aid of instruments, it will be noted that it does indeed still come up on the corners of these pillars." Thus, the only way his interpretation makes sense is if we assume the architects of Tiwanaku, working in 15,000 B.C., laid out the city with precision surveying tools comparable to those used in the late 1920s. Why does Hancock accept Posnansky’s interpretation with such obvious gusto? Because he is intent on proving that a highly advanced, though now lost, civilization built the world’s greatest ancient monuments — from the Egyptian pyramids to Machu Picchu. Fingerprints of the Gods is the story of his globetrotting search to identify these mysterious people. But Hancock’s plot only works if we are willing to picture our forebears as learned mystics schooled in the secrets of the universe, as men and women who were far superior in knowledge to any of the indigenous peoples who inhabited the world in the past. Without these underlying beliefs, Hancock’s and Posnansky’s accounts are simply science fiction. Fingerprints of the Gods makes interesting reading, but only if not taken too seriously. The gullible investigator in this detective story has been led down a blind alley by a clever guide, and he has come up empty-handed. Rather than stumbling upon an archaeological mystery, he has merely created one. MCharles E. Orser, Jr. is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Illinois State University and Adjunct Professor of Archaeology at the National University of Ireland at Galway. ================================================================= Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT FROM THE DESK OF: *Michael Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends ================================================================= <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! 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