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Atlantis: Discovered at Last?
Henry G. writes "The BBC is reporting that recent satellite pictures may show the location of the fabled city of Atlantis, as described by Plato. It is in Southern Spain, though, and not on an island as is commonly believed. Here's an image of the concentric rings over the alleged area." This story has gotten a lot of submissions; it's worth noting that it's also shown up off Cyprus, or near Cuba, or is Crete, or... It is worth noting that that Ubar was found this way.
I'm probably at the karma cap. Mod up a funny troll instead, it lightens the mood
I always thought that Santorini and its adjacent islands were "Atlantis": it was one big island,but it went pompeii and thus you get a big ring of smaller islands. They have excavated and found ancient stuff, of course, etc. Same with Crete. How far do you think the story of Atlantis travelled geographically?
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Nope, I don't see it either. I think this is one of those BBC stories that sounded good until they started writing it ...
... is that part of Spain really so inaccessible that we can't just call up the local museum operator and have 'em go see if they see Atlantis in their neighborhood... heh heh, okay, scratch that.
... how on Earth can we be so sure that we've interpreted a few clay tablets here and there correctly? I know this is an arcane science, with its own rules and regulations, but I can't help feeling that such fundamental issues as the difference between the word for "coastal land" and "island" could have radically confused our understanding of ancient history...
... hmm ... odd analogy I suppose, but I'm just too lazy to smooth out the wrinkles. Like so many archaeologists before me, perhaps?
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What I don't get is why someone just doesn't go there and start having a look around? Great, we've got satellite images
Bad Idea.
Still, this story highlights just how much we take for granted in archeology today. We can't even deal with language barriers today, here and now, and the issues they can cause for two human beings trying to understand each other
Its like, great, we've got the source, but what the heck kind of CPU does it run on, and what version of the compiler do we use to build the project with? Give someone a "snippet of C" and have them re-build the PC with it
That, and the fact that most 'modern' schools of archaeology seem to have been founded by Christian Faith movements over the years, leads me to a very nasty suscpicion that we've completely misunderstood the Ancients, too many times to be sure
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
would be if we discovered a very old, very advanced civilization that threw historians a curveball. For example, what if some ancient civilization was just as advanced as us but nuked themselves out of existence? This could explain much: the gods of Greek mythology, etc. Just a thought.
Don't be a looter...and yes, I know that it's spelled with an "A" instead of an "E".
The original Antiquity article is here.
Aside from a great deal of speculation about correlations between Egyptian records, tales of the Peoples of the Sea, and a selective reading of the Dialogues, the only "data" the author points to are the satellite images which may be the remains of rectangular structures. Nothing in situ to indicate dating.
As there is almost certainly evidence of Bronze Age settlements practically anywhere one cares to dig along the Mediterranean coast of Spain, this article is roughly the equivalent of speculating that an unattributed burial in a 6th century Wessex tomb must necessarily be the remains of Arthur.
Trusted by cats.
There's a chain of islands called the Mid Atlantic ridge, which, if the water level were lowered 300-500 feet (as it was before the end of the ice age) would be a very large island. You could even call it an island continent.
Plato said atlantis was 9000 years before him, or about 11,500 years ago. We've only learned in the past couple of decades that almost exactly at that time, the mean temperature of the earth raised a significant amount in a short amount of time. If a bunch of ice (North America had a mile-thick layer of ice) melted all at once, and you lived on an island continent, it would seem that your island sank into the ocean.
Someday I'll be proven correct. I just know it.
WWJD? JWRTFA!
As with all of these things, the trick is that you're shown the message while listening to it, and you tend to make it fit. It's even more convincing after a few listens -- it really sounds like, "There was a little toolshed where he made us suffer, sad Satan." Almost poetic.
So, rings? They have the scientific method backwards. If, say, a meterologist was looking through some satellite photos happened to notice some rings, that is one thing. But some dude looking for rings in satellite photos is totally different.
Of course, the whole thing is probably an optical illusion, a la the face on mars, but I'd probably be grasping at straws too after a couple years of searching for (likely non-existent) patterns in satellite images :)
IAAA (I am an archaeologist)
... broad sweeps of history and identifying trends therein. eg one can say that over a 100 year period this site switched from using pots made at site y to those made at site z. We can't always say why those changes occurred - although historical facts help. Looking at a single pot can't tell us an awful lot.
Archaeology is great for looking at the 'duree longue'
With your C analogy (IAAACP - I am also a C programmer) we'd look at lots of snippets of code identify differences between them, date them (except there is no scientific method for dating code) and hypothesise as to what changes and why.
Archaeology is not a science, certainly not an 'arcane science'. It's a discipline which employs (amongst other things) scientific techniques, such as C-14 dating.
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Michael Shermer's book "Why People Believe Weird Things" does a decent job of summing up the problem and how it works with ideas like this: People's minds are wired to look for patterns. They look for patterns that relate to other patterns they're familiar with, mostly, or those are the ones they think they see anyway. Show me a Rorschach blob, or a random scattering of data, and I'm going to try to figure out what it means. Faces on Mars! My fate, written in the tea leaves! Your character, in the lines on your palm! And so on.
In the case of Atlantis, though, it takes a special kind of thinking to ignore all the obvious political context for Plato -- his and his family's opposition to the way Athens had gone, the whole Republic-as-an-ideal-Sparta thing -- but to seize on the few physical details he describes for Atlantis. They're not missing the forest for the trees: they're imagining the forest where they imagine there's a tree. Based on two rectangles near some concentric circles, no less. Yow.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
except there is no scientific method for dating code
...If you're examining the raw data off the disk, look at the encoding. Is it big-endian or little-endian? Or is it ASCII or EBCDIC?
Sure there is. Look for deprecated system calls, or relatively new "requirements" (such as stdafx.h in C++ programs in Visual Studio. That really pisses me off.)
Then there's less reliable methods such as timestamps
It still requires some knowledge of how coding practices have changed, though.
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I'd say that the use of concentric rings would be relatively common in very early settlements as a basic form of self defense. Hill forts with circular earthen walls are found in England and Ireland. It is simply the shortest and simplest wall you can make around a site. I wouldn't be surprised if prehistoric settlers in Spain and England were in contact and used similar construction styles. To say that this is an automatic sign that it is Atlantis is like saying everyone who wears a baseball cap must be on a major league baseball team.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
No it isn't. Many aspects of archaeology are non-repeatable. Excavation is the obvious example. If you cannot have a control and it is non-repeatable then I'd argue that it is not a science.
Secondly, although archaeology uses many scientific techniques, it is fundamentally subjective. Once you've excavated a site, got dates from objects and contexts one is still left with the subjective opinions of the primary excavator. What was Stonehenge for? Different archaeologists have different views, though they all may agree on the layout, size and age of the site. And don't even get started on Biblical archaeology!
Even before that though subjectivity comes into play - where do we dig? where are the bounds of the excavation? what methods of excavation are we going to use?
Check out some of the writings of Ian Hodder or Phil Barker to explore some of these ideas further.
BTW, IAAA.
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