User:BrerRabbit101/Graham Hancock
New Atlantis and Pseudoarchaeology
[edit]This long thread of interpretations dating back to the 16th century has culminated today in what some are calling the "New Atlantis" phenomenon. It combines New Age beliefs with "a unique blend of anti- and pseudoscience."[1] They maintain many of the same beliefs of Atlantis; however, the continent has been stripped of the name given by Plato and it has been presented as "new thinking" [2] Writer Graham Hancock’s work is an exemplary illustration the force driving this movement: pseudoarchaeology. This title has been earned from the authors’ inflexible stance toward evidence and their neglect of context, two critical features of academic archaeology.[3]
Graham Hancock
[edit]Hancock, in the tradition of Erich Von Daniken and his bestseller Chariots of the Gods, sparked a tremendous revival of alternative interpretations of the past with his 1995 book The Fingerprints of the Gods.[4] This book outlines his theories on the origins of civilization: that there was an advanced civilization that was destroyed at the end of the last ice age, as well as that the elite survives spread to all continents, bringing civilization to the "primitive" indigenous peoples of the world.[5] Hancock, like many other writers on the subject, sees connections between the ancient cultures of the past all over the globe and seeks to tie them together with a universal, hyperdiffusionsist theory. This time, however, the lost civilization did not come from Atlantis, but Antarctica. Taking form Charles Hapwood’s theories of "earth-crust displacement" and Rand Flem-Ath’s interpretations of the phenomenon, Hancock hypothesized that Antarctica had once been at 30 degrees closer to the equator and had suddenly “slipped” in its entirety to its present location, a consequence of a magnetic pole reversal.<ref>Hancock 1995Cite error: The opening <ref> tag is malformed or has a bad name (see the help page). This new interpretation on the old myth pulls from a wide variety of "evidence" in support of his claim, drawing from a wide variety of disciplines within science, art, and religion; however, with each assertion comes fallacious thinking (see Michael Shermer's Why People Believe Weird Things) and contradiction against existing academic knowledge, making this work ineligible for scientific consideration.