Discoveries of advanced pre-flood civiliztions

Seeing more evidence of highly advanced cultures, before the "Flood" circa 9000BC. Wondering if they may have invented coinage way back then.?????
America unearthed/ Destination Unknown/ Ancient Aliens have made pretty interesting finds.
Would ancient aliens and those pre-flood cultures need coins? Coins are getting to be old hat now and in a different culture maybe such things as ownership and value might have no meaning. Why view their ancient cultures like ours today....but there again there are no aliens and stuff like that..,.but food for fantasy.

 

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Why are you so suspicious about academics?

What also strikes me about your reaction about academics is that you are talking about academics in the form of one group as if it were some sort of conglomeration. Academics are inviduals and not one group.

Of course you can also be critical of academic publications, after all, they do not only consist of facts, but also of possible theories related to those facts. But then be critical of the content (provide substantiated criticism)
and not their function. And of course, academics are sometimes wrong just like any other person in the world. but that does not seem to me a reason to mistrust them.

 

Archaeological methods have improved drastically with the advent of new technologies - consider the time of Giovanni Belzoni in Egypt, circus strongman turned into archaeologist - early to mid-nineteenth century. Archaeologists at the time were treasure hunters who destroyed layers of civilization to unearth mummies, golden goodies and the like. Flinders Petrie brought a modicum of science to the field in the latter nineteenth century and actually studied pre-history. He developed an influential system of sequence-dating which led to more modern procedures and caution when excavating. Now aerial observation, remote sensing, and satellites have become common.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Battista_Belzoni

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flinders_Petrie

 

Well, CRAP! You just took the wind outta my sails for a new company I was starting: "Home-Based Archaeology Kit". Includes instructions, credits for flying your machinery, how-to's to hire wanna-be lackey archaeologists to your team. Fast, easy way to crack open ancient treasure and where to sell them!

 

You mean of a large proportion of modern professional academics?

Long experience and detailed knowledge.

Interestingly paternalistic tone you adopt. But words are cheap. Lets see how you stand when it comes to assessment of substantiated criticism.

Try downloading this for starters

https://www.academia.edu/33034920/Maria_Graham_and_the_Problem_of_Small_Change

If you cannot figure out the sort of thing that is going wrong with modern professional “scholarship” after you have read it, let me know, and I will explain what you missed.

Rob T

 

And now another anonymous fellow writing in condescending terms about that true scholar, Flinders Petrie.

“A modicum” indeed!

What parts of his work have you studied in detail? Have you visited the web site of the modern Petrie Museum? Have you spotted the great blunder modern professional archaeologists made in their presentation of his work? Have you visited the Museum itself to discuss the error with the staff?

Flinders Petrie ought be spinning in his grave

Rob T

 

This attitude is laudable in many ways, but it has a dark side too. We're all affected by confirmation bias, and we all have our individual biases as well. That's why the search for knowledge must be a collective effort - aided of course by those who depart quite vociferously from the academic consensus. But when a failure to accord an academic consensus due respect snowballs, we get the disasters of vaccine and climate denialism.

By all means examine the facts for yourself, and I welcome the many times you've presented your interesting and educated reasoning in this forum. But if you fail to accord due respect to a consensus of those who have spent their lives collectively examining a wider range of facts, and applying the best available methods to those facts, then you just come across as arrogant; plus, I fear, your readers are more likely to dismiss you as a crank. (After all, we're neither experts nor even dilettantes in many cases. Who are we going to go with? The experts, or the apparent crank? I hasten to add I'm not asserting you're a crank, just that your disrespecting the academic consensus sometimes makes you appear so.)

Well, yeah, where you're the one deciding what counts as competent. Then in the next breath you go on to say:

It's fair to say you have a pretty low opinion of what you call "modern professional academia." Maybe you think this is a fair disregard for incompetent scholarship, but stated so generally, it's clearly a failure to accord due respect. From your tiny area of expertise (everyone's area of expertise is tiny!) you can't possibly be in a position to generalize like that.

My understanding is that Feyerabend, who was a philosopher (not an historian or archaeologist) examining the nature of truth in science, held an extreme position on whether science ever discovered truth. Extreme then when Kuhn was a big deal, even more extreme now.

This is something I know little about, so I'm asking this from a position of great ignorance. Does the alternative narrative go something like this, though? Positivist archaeologists, who just measured things, had turned archaeology into a desert because no "interpretation" (in a very broad sense) was allowed. This was followed by a kid-in-the-candy-shop overenthusiasm for interpretation, causing the "disasters" you allude to, and which has now been largely corrected. But it's surely a mistake to long for that old positivist desert, no?

 

To be frank I have studied Egyptian Archaeology and Languages in detail at one of the world's leading institutions in that field and worked with scholars who are now amongst the most eminent professors in the field, co-students of mine at the time.

 

Interesting - and have any one of of these very erudite fellows made critical comment on the Petrie Museum web site? One might say there are only two really major blunders on it - except for the fact they are both repeated about 6,000 times...…

It would be rather troubling if none of them have even heard mention of it, I would say.

Perhaps you could invite them to CoinTalk in case any want to try defend the fiasco

Rob T

 

Rob, for the benefit of us who are neither experts nor dilettantes, just CTers who find the topic (and this discussion) interesting, would you be be willing to summarize the errors repeated so often at Petrie Museum? I admit to being too intellectually lazy to immerse myself into this matter to the extent that I could likely figure it out for myself, but you could well inspire me (and perhaps others) to do more reading.

Steve

 

Nope, that is why we have to check our ideas against the facts. Clinging to the skirts of the eminent may give a feeling of security or, if you aspire to a career, help you up the greasy pole. But swapping your own bias for a communal (and very often politically dictated) bias is a retrograde step.

I welcome criticism so hope they will try. I published plenty, so if signs of crankiness are there please point ‘em out.

Respect is due to facts and logic, persons have to earn it, and not just by putting on a fancy costume.

The idea that science cannot ever legitimately claim to have discovered a general truth seems to have been the normal position ever since Democritus, before 400 BC. Feyerabend was more interested in putting Voodoo on a par with science. Berkeley, Yale and LSE gave him professorships for it

Prior to WWII most archaeology was done by passionate amateurs. Some was good, some not so, but there was no central misdirection going on. I agree there was a “positivist” phase after that in archaeology. It seems primarily to me to have been a push by a then rather small bunch of professional in a turf war with the amateurs - to get power over the subject. Adopting a kind of puritanical dismissal of theory altogether was a useful platform from which to scoff at all amateur efforts. I can point to a good study bearing on that if you wish. Then, as you say, once the professionals got control of the subject we had the kid-in-the-candy-shop over enthusiasm, every bit as bad as the worst sort of amateur theorising. So its just your “has now been largely corrected” bit I disagree with. To me it seems that critical rationalism has almost been stamped out these days. People generally seem blind to the gross errors that turn up way too often. Kings new clothes.

Rob T

 

Thanks for asking Steve - at last we are getting to some facts!

OK, Petrie went out and personally collected 4,000 ancient weights, mostly from Egypt. Before the days of computers, or even pocket calculators, he figured out a number of different ancient systems of weight, and had a shot at saying what all the standards were, and then, how and why each weight best fitted which standard. Must have taken thousands of calculations by hand, and the results all neatly written up in very accessible summary tables in pen and ink (published 1926 as I recall).

Peter Ucho – the guy who masterminded the political coup at the World Archaeology conference in 1986 – got control of the Petrie museum and got all the weights that had been loaned out to the British Museum and the Science Museum returned to the Petrie. He made comments about scholarship not being compatible with commercial collecting, and since (at that time) the BM did collaborate with collectors, it seems he thought it somehow beyond the pale.

Anyhow he also raised a big grant to put the collection on line. By now it was about 6,000 weights. Cost was about 30K for the weights – the result should be easy enough to find on the web. There is a nice picture of each weight, and generally a measurement of size in cm. But they did not record the actual weight of the weight!

The first Englishman to travel to Egypt for scholarship, John Greaves, c. 1640, went there to study ancient weights and measures. Newton studied his results. Petrie followed up on them. The whole deal was exactly about the weight and the weight standards. But nobody at the Petrie seems to have had foggiest idea why they were doing what they were doing. Aside from getting paid that is.

As well as not recording the weights, they changed all the accession numbers, and did not record the old Petrie numbers for cross reference. So basically obliterated Petrie’s scholarship, at least as far as the web site goes.

What do you think? Clever?

Rob T

 

I did and read it. It is interesting to see who benefited from not having small change (hundreds of years ago in England), and how they tried to make it look like that was good for the people. Now we have Visa which is everywhere you want to be and they take about 4% off the top and get high interest on what is not paid that month. I think they have almost convinced us and our legislators they are doing us a favor by eliminating cash from the system. (Please don't notice the seller is getting 4% less than you think you are paying. The financial services industry is doing very well, thank you.)

 

Credit card (banks) are good at screwing people on both ends/ service charges/ loanshark interest rates Plus, security problems when cards are compromised. I prefer cash any day to plastic. Even better in old days where you carried gold/ silver coins for transactions/ no inflation

 

Except, of course, when there was a big new strike of silver or gold.

 

Many thanks, you must be one of the very few who read right to the end!

So now I will try connect this up to the main theme here. Previous generations of fiercely independent thinkers in the UK and the US have seen the events in London around the 1690’s, the time of the formation of the Bank of England, as a kind of swindle perpetrated on the English general public. This was the view of eg Tom Paine, William Cobbett and Alexander Del Mar.

In 2002 Thomas Sargent, Nobel Laureate Economist, sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank, advanced a different thesis, involving the suggestion that the prominent government advisor at the time, John Locke, (traditionally seen as the founder of British Empiricism) was “an idiot”.

Does it seem even inherently likely that Locke was “an idiot”? Should we not fear that Sargent was failing to act as a dispassionate historian, but rather was concocting an alternative story line? A story line assisting public relations for the Banking industry, who after all, he seems to have some financial relationship with? A story line that diverted attention away from stories of banking swindles?

It is that I fear, in a world where scholarship is now dominated by professionals, who have financial as well as scholarly aims, in situations when funding comes from people outside scholarship altogether.

In case my views have appeared rather black and white - I will add the I spent a year of rather fraught negotiation over publication of ‘Maria Graham’ with an editor who is an independent amateur. It went to publication due solely to the backing of two referees – both of them professional scholars. The world is never black and white.

Rob T

 

Concerning the ‘Hancock edition’ of the SAA magazine

http://onlinedigeditions.com/publication/?m=16146&i=634462&p=2

I never looked at this journal before, but was surprised at what I found in this issue

The pieces by the President (Page 3) the Executive Director (page 4) and especially an invited Professor (page 6) all give the impression of an interest in politics rather than research. As if these people were not so much archaeologists, as political activists who chose archaeology as a means to their end. Troubling since this is exactly what I seem to see at UCL since Ucho took over, leading to the dire results I mentioned earlier at the Petrie Museum.

But what troubled me most was the piece by Hoopes (p. 21 ff) . The world of course has its fair share of the credulous folk, always has and always will. I judge Hancock writes amusing bunk, and I suspect most of his readers know that really, but still find it amusing. The joke is as old as Lucian – who of course wrote about visits with extraterrestrial life in the 2nd century AD - but with the joke title “True Story”. Hoopes however seems to have spent a good deal of his academic career debunking some nonsense about Mayan 2012 prophesies. Surely that too is just nonsense, and there are more sensible ways to spend time. Like actually doing archaeology for instance.

But Hoopes, despite the editor claiming the “great care” archaeologist take, relies in his SAA piece upon an unconvincing popularist writer called Calavito to slur L Frank Baum as somehow associated with “spooky archaeology”. That interests me because some years ago I had a bit of an advisory role regarding a proposed Money Museum at the World Bank in Washington. The intended theme was the intellectual battle between stability and liquidity in the history of money. The plan was to highlight the Wizard of Oz story and its links to the Bimetallist campaign of William Jennings Bryan. All along I thought the plan excellent but feared it was too controversial for World Bankers to go along with, and so I was not surprised when it fell through, it seemed somewhat acrimoniously.

Given the SAA President’s stated support for Global interests (page 3), and the very dubious attempt to slur Baum as a somehow linked to spooky archaeology (page 23)...well.... Hey! An incautious person might start to think these archaeology fellows were involved in some sort of conspiracy…….

Rob T

 

There is so much that is very odd about your reply Rob (for instance you deciding what is proper for an academic to research!) and its astonishing lack of understanding of the subject.

For instance:

Frank L. Baum was involved with the Theosophical Society, hence the link. It is spelled out quite clearly in the article. No slur intended. If theosophy is not your cup of tea, that would explain your ignorance of the subject and not knowing of Baum's involvement and his connection to 'spooky archaeology'.

 

Its now very clear that your aim is to defend professional archaeology without regard to the mangling of evidence that entails. I make two points:

DA > “No slur intended”

This edition of the SAA journal is almost entirely devoted to slurring people supposedly associated with what the authors call “spooky archaeology”. Authors implying along the way it is “poisonous” and “evil”. How is that not a slur?

DA > "your ignorance of the subject and not knowing of Baum's involvement and his connection to 'spooky archaeology’."

I said the supposed link was “dubious”, and you deduce I did not know about it? That is logically incompetent.

Baum joined the Theosophical society in 1892. So what? Edison joined it in 1878. William James joined it in 1882. These are not “fringe” people. James was widely regarded as top philosopher in the US – operating from a Harvard base. Is there any evidence that any of these guys defended theories about ancient aliens? I have yet to see it.

Hancock is playing a game with the credulous, but so is Hoopos. My advise is: steer clear of both of them.

Rob T