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Archaeology Quotes

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Archaeology Quotes

“To talk of the first humans is to hammer a signpost into an ancient river saying 'no humans beyond this point', no matter the ever flowing stream around it's base. There is nothing essential to humanity, no single feature that intrinsically caused one creature to be human where its parents were not... However hard you try to define every point before the signpost as non-human, and every point after the post as human, the river flows continually.”

HumanityHistoryArchaeologyHistory Of MankindEarly Humans
Book:Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth's Extinct Worlds
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“THE BARROW In this high field strewn with stones I walk by a green mound, Its edges sheared by the plough. Crumbs of animal bone Lie smashed and scattered round Under the clover leaves And slivers of flint seem to grow Like white leaves among green. In the wind, the chestnut heaves Where a man's grave has been. Whatever the barrow held Once, has been taken away: A hollow of nettles and dock Lies at the centre, filled With rain from a sky so grey It reflects nothing at all. I poke in the crumbled rock For something they left behind But after that funeral There is nothing at all to find. On the map in front of me The gothic letters pick out Dozens of tombs like this, Breached, plundered, left empty, No fragments littered about Of a dead and buried race In the margins of histories. No fragments: these splintered bones Construct no human face, These stones are simply stones. In museums their urns lie Behind glass, and their shaped flints Are labelled like butterflies. All that they did was die, And all that has happened since Means nothing to this place. Above long clouds, the skies Turn to a brilliant red And show in the water's face One living, and not these dead." — Anthony Thwaite, from The Owl In The Tree”

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Author:Anthony Thwaite
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“The earth is a dynamic place [...] with multiple different processes of deposition and erosion under way at all times. You can make guesses based on style and weathering, but fragments of worked stone that have been in the open for an unknown period can't be dated by their archaeological context, because there is none. Carbon-dating organic materials in the sediment in which they were found won't work, either, because they were never entombed and preserved in sediment. And in fact no other objective and widely accepted method of dating can tell us how old they are. For these reasons archaeologists have to discount artifacts found on the surface when coming to any conclusions about the age of a site, even though the artifacts themselves may obviously be ancient.”

EarthDatingPreservationGeologyArchaeologyErosionDynamicDeposition
Book:America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization
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“The New York Times was here, CNN, they were all holding their stories until the dates came back. And I was thinking maybe they'll come back at 20,000 years ago maybe even 25,000 years ago, and I'll be out of here clean. This is going to be easy. But the date that came back was 50,000--ancient beyond all imagining and right at the limits of radiocarbon. Since then we have OSL-dated the deposit and those dates also came back in the range of 50,000. So we've got it dated two ways, but still the skeptics keep saying that what we've found can't be a human site and that our artifacts must be works of nature because they're so different from the artifacts found at other sites. To which my response is: 'Well... you've never dug a 50,000-year-old site in America, right? There's a first time for everything.”

ScienceHumanityDatingJournalismSkepticismArchaeologyDeep Human History
Author:Albert C. Goodyear
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“Grima explained that the primary tool in establishing Malta's prehistoric chronology had been radiocarbon-dating (based on the rate of decay of C-14 stored in all formerly living matter). My views about C-14 are on the record. I think it should be only one amongst several tools and techniques brought to bear on the dating of megalithic or rock-hewn sites. It is a truism, but worth repeating nevertheless, that C-14 cannot date stone -- only such organic materials as are found around or in association with stone ruins. It is an assumption (more or less safe depending on the stratigraphy and general circumstances of the site but still, at the end of the day, an assumption) that organic materials found close to megalith B or trilithon A or dolmen C, etc., do in fact date from the same period as the quarrying and erection of the megaliths concerned.”

DatingArchaeologyPrehistoryMegaliths
Book:Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization
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“The Atlantean Road by Stewart Stafford A snake of stones beneath the waters Soldiers march past spectral daughters Phantom travellers To work or home Atlantean lives replay in foam The water drowned out extinct times Of joy and war Of love and crime The divers rapt by sound immemorial Echoes entombed Sweet voices choral The flame of Erasmus and barking sounds Of canine guards and strangers found The road roused from silent sleep To tell explorers how ancients weep © Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.”

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Author:Stewart Stafford
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“The evidence presented in this book, for the most part, was recorded many years ago by men of integrity who worked in the fields of archaeology and Egyptology. That much of this evidence was misunderstood only reveals the pressing need for an interdisciplinary approach to fields that have until recently been closed to nonacademics and others outside the fold of formal archaeology and Egyptology. Much of our ignorance of ancient cultures can be placed at the feet of closed-minded theorists who ignore evidence that does not fit their theories or fall within the province of their expertise. Sometimes it takes a machinist to recognize machined parts or machines! As a result, much of the evidence that supports a purpose for the Great Pyramid as anything other than a tomb has been ignored, discounted without serious consideration, or simply explained away as purely coincidental. Is it coincidence that the Great Pyramid is so huge and so precise? That the King's Chamber contains so many indications that tremendous forces disturbed it or were created within it at one time? Are the exuviae, the chocolate-colored granite, the resonating chambers with their giant granite monoliths placed above, and the unique properties of the quartz crystal present in vast quantities in the granite complex all coincidental? Can the design and physical tests of the movement of sound inside the Grand Gallery be just a happy accident?”

IntegrityEngineeringPyramidsArchaeologyMegalithic MonumentsEgyptologyAncient Advanced Technology
Book:The Giza Power Plant: Technologies of Ancient Egypt
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“I have a habit of being an archaeologist of my own past, a sentimental collector of personal artefacts which may at first glance appear random, but each of which holds a unique significance. As the years pass me by, I find that the number of objects within my possession begins to accumulate. A torn map. A sealed letter. A boat full of paper animals. Each item encapsulates within itself a story, akin to an outward manifestation of my inner journey.”

NostalgiaCollectingArchaeology
Book:The Desire for Elsewhere
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“Abandoned weapons and corpses may be washed away, removed by animals, dismembered by the victors as trophies, or buried, burned, or otherwise disposed of by the vanquished after defeat. It is reasonable to expect that direct archaeological evidence of warfare will be limited, and that it will actually tend to underestimate the frequency and bloody nature of past conflicts.”

SexViolenceEvolutionAggressionEvolutionary PsychologyMaleArchaeology
Book:Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World
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“Le Guin has a point. Obviously, we have no idea how relatively happy the inhabitants of Ukrainian mega-sites like Maidenetske or Nebelivka were, compared to the lords who constructed kurgan burials, or even the retainers ritually sacrificed at their funerals; or the bonded labourers who provided wheat and barley to the inhabitants of later Greek colonies along the Black Sea coast (though we can guess), and as anyone who has read the story knows, Omelas had some problems too. But the point remains: why do we assume that people who have figured out a way for a large population to govern and support itself without temples, palaces and military fortifications – that is, without overt displays of arrogance, self-abasement and cruelty – are somehow less complex than those who have not?”

PhilosophyHappinessAnthropologyArchaeology
Book:The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
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“I was particularly impressed by the varying degrees of weathering and erosion seen on the different moai, which could be telltale signs of major discrepancies in their ages. The levels of sedimentation around certain moai also impressed me. Some moai have been buried in up to an estimated six meters of sediment, or more, such that even though they are standing erect, only their chins and heads are above the current ground level. Such high levels of sedimentation could occur quickly, for instance if there were catastrophic landslides, mudflows, or possibly tsunamis washing over the island, but I could not find any such evidence (and landslides or tsunamis would tend to shift and knock over the tall statues). Rather, to my eye, the sedimentation around certain moai suggests a much more extreme antiquity than most conventional archaeologists and historians believe to be the case--or believe to be possible.”

PossibleAntiquityArchaeologyErosionEaster IslandMoaiSedimentation
Book:Forgotten Civilization: The Role of Solar Outbursts in Our Past and Future
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“Just 3 years of research between 2009 and 2012 witnessed a profound change in archaeological understanding of the geoglyphs of the southwestern Amazon. Previously they'd been thought to be just 750 years old; now, without any real attention being drawn to the implications, they'd become 2,000 years old. To put this in context, an error and subsequent correction on a similar scale would certainly attract a great deal of attention if it concerned Western architecture--indeed it would be like discovering that the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe such as Chartres and York Minster were not, in fact, works of the late medieval period but had actually been built by the Romans.”

UnderstandingImplicationsArchaeologyGeoglyphs
Book:America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization
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“Egyptologists claim that Khufu began construction of his pyramid so it would be completed in time to accept his corpse. I should imagine that while he was considering what style of pyramid he wanted, he would have been consulting his architects and engineers to see what was feasible. He also might have been interested in knowing how long it would take to build and how much it would cost. Using today's technology, modern stonecutters have estimated that it would take at least twenty-seven years just to quarry and deliver the stone. I wonder how long it would have taken Khufu's men using simple, primitive methods?”

HistoryPyramidsArchaeologyDeep Human HistoryAncient CivilizationsMegalithic Monuments
Book:The Giza Power Plant: Technologies of Ancient Egypt
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“It now remains for those who are absolutely convinced that the ancient Egyptians constructed the pyramids using primitive techniques to build a pyramid themselves, using those same techniques that they propose the Egyptians used. As part of such an attempt, it would help if they cut out just one seventy-ton block of granite from the Aswan quarry, which is located five hundred miles away, using their hardened copper chisels or dolerite balls and then transported the block to the Giza Plateau with their barges, ropes, and manpower. If the proponents of traditional theories of constructing the pyramids are able to accomplish this feat, then we should give serious consideration to their proposals about pyramid construction.”

EngineeringPyramidsArchaeologyMasonryAncient CivilizationsMegalithic MonumentsEgyptology
Book:The Giza Power Plant: Technologies of Ancient Egypt
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“Armies of marching men told of that blight of nations old or young—war. These, and birds unnamable, and beasts unclassable, with dots and marks and hieroglyphics, recorded the history of a bygone people. Symbols they were of an era that had gone into the dim past, leaving only these marks, {Symbols recording the history of a bygone people.} forever unintelligible; yet while they stood, century after century, ineffaceable, reminders of the glory, the mystery, the sadness of life.”

ArchaeologyGrand CanyonAncient CivilizationsPetroglyphs
Book:The Last of the Plainsmen
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“Sticks and Stones I dreamt a fossil came to life and told a tale of his former wife Did she beat him? Where? She broke his fingers on the stairs And tore out lumps of his orange hair How could she? Then she gave him pride of place At an archaeological feast in his honour A prehistoric horse was the main course! © Stewart Stafford, 2020. All rights reserved.”

Domestic ViolenceFossilsDomestic AbuseArchaeologyFeastPrehistoricSticks And StonesPrehistoryFossilPrehistoric Fantasy
Author:Stewart Stafford
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“They are also difficult to reconcile with archaeological evidence of how cities actually began in many parts of the world: as civic experiments on a grand scale, which frequently lacked the expected features of administrative hierarchy and authoritarian rule. We do not possess an adequate terminology for these early cities. To call them ‘egalitarian’, as we’ve seen, could mean quite a number of different things. It might imply an urban parliament and co-ordinated projects of social housing, as with some pre-Columbian centres in the Americas; or the self-organizing of autonomous households into neighbourhoods and citizens’ assemblies, as with prehistoric mega-sites north of the Black Sea; or, perhaps, the introduction of some explicit notion of equality based on principles of uniformity and sameness, as in Uruk-period Mesopotamia. None of this variability is surprising once we recall what preceded cities in each region. That was not, in fact, rudimentary or isolated groups, but far-flung networks of societies, spanning diverse ecologies, with people, plants, animals, drugs, objects of value, songs and ideas moving between them in endlessly intricate ways. While the individual units were demographically small, especially at certain times of year, they were typically organized into loose coalitions or confederacies. At the very least, these were simply the logical outcome of our first freedom: to move away from one’s home, knowing one will be received and cared for, even valued, in some distant place. At most they were examples of ‘amphictyony’, in which some kind of formal organization was put in charge of the care and maintenance of sacred places. It seems that Marcel Mauss had a point when he argued that we should reserve the term ‘civilization’ for great hospitality zones such as these. Of course, we are used to thinking of ‘civilization’ as something that originates in cities – but, armed with new knowledge, it seems more realistic to put things the other way round and to imagine the first cities as one of those great regional confederacies, compressed into a small space.”

CitiesHierarchyAnthropologyArchaeologyEgalitarian
Book:The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
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“Europe sapped Antiquity under the Syrians, the Iraqis, the Egyptians. Our triumphant nations appropriated the universal with their monopoly on science and archaeology, dispossessing the colonize populations by means of this pillage of a past that, as a result, they readily experienced as alien: and so brainwashed Islamist wreckers drive tractors all the more easily through ancient cities since they combine their profoundly uncultivated stupidity with the more or less widespread feeling that this heritage is alien, retroactive emanation of foreign powers.”

HistoryEuropeMiddle EastExploitationAssimilationArchaeologyAppropriationOrientalism
Book:Compass
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“Because of the tendency of engineers to focus more on engineering matters rather than on archaeology, history, or anthropology, they are often accused of stripping artifacts of their cultural context and cherrypicking the evidence. Yet as an engineer, I strongly argue that the engineering context is, in fact, a cultural context in and of itself--one that is less susceptible to ambiguity than the cultural context of mummies and potsherds, which can be added decades or even centuries after a building has been completed.”

CultureHistoryEvidenceEngineeringEngineersAmbiguityArchaeologyArtifactsMummies
Book:Lost Technologies of Ancient Egypt: Advanced Engineering in the Temples of the Pharaohs
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“Engaging specialists in interpreting ancient artifacts in Egypt is absolutely necessary in establishing a credible hypothesis. Without their input, there cannot be a comprehensive understanding of the past. For instance, the pyramids on the Giza Plateau were built not by Egyptologists or archaeologists but by engineers and craftsmen. It is not surprising, therefore, that Egyptologists overlook engineering features and nuances that would be recognized immediately by those who are trained in those disciplines.”

EngineersHypothesisPyramidsSpecialistsArchaeologyEgyptologyAncient ArtifactsCraftsmen
Book:Lost Technologies of Ancient Egypt: Advanced Engineering in the Temples of the Pharaohs
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“His type was the shy, bookish nerds, which was exactly what he’d been until he joined the Army. He’d been a late bloomer, hitting a second growth spurt after nineteen, when he’d shot up six inches in two years and packed on the muscle that made it possible for him to do his job. But the external changes hadn’t changed who he was inside, and he was still the sci-fi and fantasy loving guy who read scientific journals for fun.”

BonesSuspenseAfricaRomantic ThrillerLucyArchaeology
Book:Tinderbox
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“In North America the evidence is that hunter-gatherers bounced back quite successfully within less than a millennium of the onset of the Younger Dryas, and thereafter there is a thin but fairly continuous archaeological record. What is mysterious is not so much the early appearance of mound-building in this new age--perhaps as early as 8,000 years ago, as we've seen--or the sophistication of sites such as Watson Brake 5,500 years ago, nor even their obvious astronomical and geometrical connections to later vast earthworks such as Moundville and Cahokia, but that in this early monumental architecture of the New World memes of geometry, astronomy, and solar alignments consistently appear that are also found in the early monumental architecture of the Old World at iconic sites such as Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid of Giza. A tremendous leap forward in agricultural know-how, coupled with the sudden uptake of eerily distinctive spiritual ideas concerning the afterlife journey of the soul, also often accompanies the architectural memes. It's therefore hard to avoid the impression that some kind of 'package' is involved here.”

MysteryEvidenceLegacyAfterlifeArchaeologyHunter GatherersYounger DryasEarthworksMonumental ArchitectureMound Building
Book:America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization
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“After the first Neanderthal skeletal remains were identified in Europe in the nineteenth century it was, for a very long while, one of the fundamental unquestioned assumptions of archaeology, a matter taken to be self-evidently true, that other "older," "less-evolved" human species never attained, or even in their wildest dreams could hope to aspire, to the same levels of cultural development as Homo sapiens. During more than a century of subsequent analysis, and despite multiple additional discoveries, the Neanderthals continued to be depicted as nothing more than brutal, shambling, stupid subhumans--literally morons by comparison with ourselves. Since the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century, however, and with increasing certainty as the evidence has become overwhelming, a new "image" of the Neanderthals as sensitive, intelligent, symbolic, and creative beings capable of advanced thought processes and technological innovations has taken root among archaeologists and is set to become the ruling paradigm.”

CultureRemainsParadigmAssumptionsArchaeologyNeanderthals
Book:America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization
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“At locations scattered all across North America from Alaska to New Mexico and from Florida to the state of Washington, more than 1,500 Clovis sites have been found. These sites have yielded more than 10,000 Clovis points and tens of thousands of other artifacts from the Clovis toolkit (40,000 at Topper alone [...]). yet among all these archaeological riches, it bears repeating that the sum total of Clovis human remains found in 85 years of excavations is limited to the Anzick-1 partial skeleton.”

RemainsArchaeologyArtifactsDeep Human HistoryClovisExcavations
Book:America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization
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“C’era forse un posto più noioso al mondo del British Museum? Se c’era, Will non voleva sapere quale. Vasi. Monete. Brocche. Intere sale piene di piatti. Secondo Will doveva esserci uno scopo per mettere in mostra delle cose, e il fatto che fossero vecchie non significava necessariamente che fossero interessanti. Solo perché erano sopravvissute al tempo, non significava che tu volessi guardarle”

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Book:About a Boy
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“Similarly, others think that the mined copper has gone “missing,” and that this perceived absence of artifacts in North America was further evidence for trans-Atlantic trade. I learned that this misunderstanding arose because most people are totally unaware that thousands of copper artifacts made by Native Americans have been found around Lake Superior and are still regularly discovered to this day. The reality is that these so-called missing copper artifacts were simply lost over vast stretches of forests, lakes, rivers, and prairies. One can only guess how many missing artifacts are actually out there. If the size and extent of the prehistoric copper mines around Lake Superior are any indication, thousands of artifacts are still likely to be found.”

ArchaeologyArtifactsCopperNative American History
Book:Great Water: The Lost Mines of Lake Superior
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“To become aware of what is constant in the flux of nature and life is the first step in abstract thinking. The recognition of regularity in the courses of the heavenly bodies and in the succession of seasons first provides a basis for a systematic ordering of events, and this knowledge makes possible a calendar. ... Simultaneously with this concept, a system of relationships comes into the idea of the world. Change is not something absolute, chaotic, and kaleidoscopic; its manifestation is a relative one, something connected with fixed points and a given order.”

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Author:Hellmut and Richard Welhelm
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“Many questions come to mind. How influenced by contemporary religions were many of the scholars who wrote the texts available today? How many scholars have simply assumed that males have always played the dominant role in leadership and creative invention and projected this assumption into their analysis of ancient cultures? Why do so many people educated in this century think of classical Greece as the first major culture when written language was in use and great cities built at least twenty-five centuries before that time? And perhaps most important, why is it continually inferred that the age of the "pagan" religions, the time of the worship of female deities (if mentioned at all), was dark and chaotic, mysterious and evil, without the light of order and reason that supposedly accompanied the later male religions, when it has been archaeologically confirmed that the earliest law, government, medicine, agriculture, architecture, metallurgy, wheeled vehicles, ceramics, textiles and written language were initially developed in societies that worshiped the Goddess? We may find ourselves wondering about the reasons for the lack of easily available information on societies who, for thousands of years, worshiped the ancient Creatress of the Universe.”

ScienceReligionWomenResearchGoddessPaganArchaeology
Book:When God Was A Woman
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“Archaeology is a deeply conservative discipline and I have found that archaeologists, no matter where they are working, have a horror of questioning anything their predecessors and peers have already announced to be true. They run a very real risk of jeopardizing their careers if they do. In consequence they focus--perhaps to a large extent subconsciously--on evidence and arguments that don't upset the applecart. There might be room for some tinkering around the edges, some refinement of orthodox ideas, but God forbid that anything should be discovered that might seriously undermine the established paradigm.”

TruthCareersConservativeQuestioningOrthodoxyPredecessorsJeopardyArchaeology
Book:Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization
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“Following Alexander the Great in his conquest, and challenging two most ancient European historical assumptions: Firstly, Is the Ancient Europe’s progressive scientific drive the result of the Roman’s or Greek’s ancient cultural heritage?, and the Second: Why is the question - are the Macedonians, Greeks or Slavs, so troublesome, in the minds of both commoners and historians?”

GodSoundHistoryHistorical FictionMetaphysicsArchaeologyAncient RomeAncient GreeceName Of GodSlavs
Book:Metaphysics of Sound
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“The survey revealed, in areas quite close to known and even famous and well-visited Mayan sites such as Tikal, more than 60,000 previously unsuspected ancient houses, palaces, defensive walls, fortresses, and other structures as well as quarries, elevated highways connecting urban centers, and complex irrigation and terracing systems that would have been capable of supporting intensive agriculture. Previously scholars had believed that only scattered city-states had existed in an otherwise sparsely populated region, but the Lidar images make it clear, [...] that 'scale and population density had been grossly underestimated.”

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Book:America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization
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“In the one hundred thirty years since Petrie published his seminal studies of the pyramids and temples of Egypt, the hand tools and building and sculpting tools used by men and women have improved exponentially in capability and efficiency and hard drives are better known as integral devices in a computer. Yet we are taught that during the three thousand years that the ancient Egyptians flourished on this planet, the tools used by men and women did not change. How could this be? The finely crafted and precise boxes inside the pyramids at Giza were supposedly created in the fourth dinasty, 2500 BCE, or forty-five hundred years ago. The finely crafted and precise boxes inside the rock tunnels of the Serapeum were supposedly created in the eighteenth dynasty, 1550-1200 BCE, or thirty-five hundred years ago. We are asked to believe that in a one-thousand-year span, the ancient Egyptians did not make any significant improvement in their tools and methods for cutting hard igneous rock. We, however, have examined the results of their labor, and it is clear that the Egyptians were not stupid people. In fact, they were geniuses in their accomplishments, yet we are to accept that while they tapped into the awesome power of the human spirit and creativity, they did not ask, over the course of a full millennium, how they could do their job better--how they could demand less pain and strain from their workforce, how they could do more with less effort, how they could reduce injuries and provide workers with more time off. If there is any mystery to ancient Egypt, it is why a paradigm that was established one hundred thirty years ago still holds force among many Egyptologists and archaeologists.”

CreativityToolsTemplesEngineeringAccomplishmentsPyramidsWorkforceArchaeologyEgyptology
Book:Lost Technologies of Ancient Egypt: Advanced Engineering in the Temples of the Pharaohs
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“If a failure to preserve and consider potentially controversial evidence has frustrated a full understanding of the Hypogeum, then the same is also true for the megalithic temples and even the prehistoric cave sites in Malta. Thus, Mifsud points out that archaeologists excavating Ghar Dalam cave in the early twentieth century [...] 'discovered several knives, scrapers, borers and burins in previously undisturbed deposits, and although stratigraphically Pleistocene, they have been arbitrarily attributed to the Neolithic'.”

EstablishmentArchaeologyDeep Human HistoryNeolithicPleistoceneMegalithic
Book:Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization
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“The fully qualified Indian marine archaeologists who had dived on the structure in 1993 had not hesitated in their official report to pronounce it to be man-made with 'courses of masonry' plainly visible -- surely a momentous finding 5 kilometers from the shore at a depth of 23 metres? But far from exciting attention, or ruffling any academic feathers, or attracting funds for an extension of the diving survey to the other apparently man-made mounds that had been spotted bear by on the sea-bed -- and very far indeed from inspiring any Tamil expert to re-evaluate the derided possibility of a factual basis to the Kumari Kandam myth -- the NIO's discovery at Poompuhur had simply been ignored by scholarship, not even reacted to or dismissed, but just widely and generally ignored.”

AuthorityAcademiaArchaeologyMasonryDeep Human HistoryCataclysmMarine ArchaeologyUnderwater Structures
Book:Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization
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“One also finds, even to this day, some amazing works such as the aforementioned Sachsayhuaman and the Coricancha in Cusco, where no mortar of any kind was used. It was stone-on-stone, with astonishing accuracy of fit. In the Inca toolkit, as found in the archaeological record, only copper and bronze chisels have been found, along with wooden measuring instruments and stone pounders or hammers. Conventional archaeologists contend that such tools were responsible for the refined workmanship seen in Cusco and other 'Inca' areas. However, the stone used - granite, andesite, and basalt - are harder than the majority of the tools used, and thus could not have been responsible for the work. The same is true of Tiwanaku and the connected site of Puma Punku. Massive megalithic blocks with sculpted surfaces are found at these locations, made of local sandstone, which would be difficult to shape with bronze chisels and stone hammers. However, the real enigmas are the even harder andesite and basalt stones, cut and shaped with such precision that modern engineers, stone masons, and other professionals question how such work could have been achieved without at least 20th century technology.”

EngineeringArchaeologyMasonryDeep Human HistoryPrehistory
Book:Aftershock: The Ancient Cataclysm That Erased Human History
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“What we have been taught is that the ancient Egyptians were in posession of only simple hand tools, and that the only metals available to the Egyptians of the fourth dynasty, when the Giza Pyramids were built, were copper, gold, and silver. What is inferred, therefore, is that absent the tools made from these materials, the simple abrasive experiments actually demonstrate the stone-working methods of ancient Egypt. We are told that the ancient Egyptians had not yet developed the knowledge to extract the raw materials necessary to produce iron and steel. It has been suggested that they may have used meteoric iron, because they found it lying on the ground, but they did not mine the ore and smelt it in a foundry. Support for this view is the lack of evidence that they used tools made of any material other than copper, stone, and wood. Yet absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Although sophisticated tools made of iron or steel may not yet have been discovered in the archaeological record, what has been found is not adequate enough to explain how the artifacts were created.”

KnowledgeToolsMetalsEngineeringArchaeologyArtifactsMasonry
Book:Lost Technologies of Ancient Egypt: Advanced Engineering in the Temples of the Pharaohs
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“No investigation of the human story in the Americas [...] can ignore the role of Siberia as a crossroads in the migrations of our ancestors. Moreover, despite the fact that only a tiny fraction of its vast area has yet been sampled by archaeologists, we already know that anatomically modern humans were present in both western and Arctic Siberia at least as far back as 45,000 years ago. We know, too, that DNA studies have revealed close genetic relationships between Native Americans and Siberians that speak to a deep and ancient connection.”

InvestigationDnaArchaeologyIce AgeDeep Human HistoryMigrations
Book:America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization
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