Archaeological Evidence for Atlantis
Archaeology
Archaeology in the USA was in its pioneering period until the 1920’s. Many of the major discoveries in the areas of Classical Archaeology such as Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Greece, had been made and reported while American Archaeology was still in kindergarten. In the past, American Archaeology was often a pastime for those in other professions. Those engaged in it were a hybrid breed of artifact collectors and scientists with a generous overgloss of old-time scholarship. There were people who wanted to possess things and those who wanted to know about them. Today, the public is intensely interested in archaeology when it is brought to their attention. It is up to the informed archaeologists to fan this ember of interest into flame.
Sykes often stated that Atlantis was part of our past, whether we liked it or not. History and archaeology are the same, and myth, legend, and folklore, which have been shamefully neglected, must be treated as the wispy fabric uniting history and archaeology. History is a chronological series of facts and Atlantis would inevitably be included as one of them. These concepts are brilliantly discussed in his two articles:
The Problems Facing Archaeology Today in the New World Antiquity of September 1977, and Archaeology And History in the New World Antiquity of January 1979.
In an article titled More Petroglyphs in the June 1957 issue of New World Antiquity, Sykes lobbied for a central clearing house for radiocarbon dates and reports, as there were twenty-five major laboratories issuing such dates at the time. He thought it was high time that somebody undertook the registration of rock carvings, petroglyphs, and hieroglyphs found in the Americas, as this had already been done with great success in Europe and the Middle East. A point that frequently cropped up in Sykes’ research was the wide-spread similarity between petroglyphs found in widely separated parts of the world.
The placing of intelligent beings on Earth thousands of years ago requires no new excavations or findings of skulls or artifacts, only a realistic look at the data now available. Atlantologists concluded that concrete proof of the remains of submerged Atlantis are to be found in the Old and New World, specifically Egypt, the Caribbean, Yucatan, Peru, and the Andean Highlands. It was necessary to fill in the gap between the destruction of Atlantis in 10,000 BC and present day cultures.
Significant Twentieth-Century Archaeological Finds
The following is a summary of important archaeological finds in the early 1900’s during the era of Sykes’ Scientific Atlantology:
Donnelly’s Atlantis, the Antediluvian World published in 1882, focused the world’s attention on the Azores, a group of islands one third of the way between Portugal and North America. Explorers assumed that the Azores, being the mountain peaks of Atlantis and one of the few sole traces of the continent above water, would be the perfect place to find remnants of the lost culture. Other islands in the Atlantic, apart from the Azores, which lie directly on the Atlantic Ridge, are Ascension, St. Helena, Tristan da Cunha, Gough Island, and St. Paul Rocks. For centuries, numerous explorers traveled to the Azores to search for traces of Atlantis but nothing ever turned up. Atlantologists eventually decided that it would be impossible to find anything after all this time because in Atlantean times the Azores were the top of a mountain; thus, the trove of Atlantean-origin articles would be twenty-two-thousand feet down and buried under several hundred feet of mud. In the January 1959 issue of Atlantis, Sykes wrote The Azores as an Atlantean Center.
F.R. Watts studied prehistoric trackways in Oxfordshire, and found abundant evidence that early in the second millennium BC, before Roman times, members of an unknown race surveyed the British Isles. Existing remains of the survey included mark-stones and circular mounds known as barrows, tumuli, castles, or if covered with trees, clumps. Mark-stones indicated a sacred area at the intersection of two or more trackways. In the 1920’s, Alfred Watkin was hard at work on his theory of Leys or Straight Tracks linking outstanding points in Britain and his efforts led to the formation of the Straight Track Club. Watkin published The Ley Hunters Manual in 1927, a ninety page book containing one-hundred-and-twenty photographs and site diagrams, and a wealth of information on the best methods to be used in tracing alignments and identifying markstones. In the January 1971 issue of New World Antiquity, Alfred Watkin’s book, The Old Straight Track was reviewed. New horizons were later opened up by Professor A. Thom who suggested tying up the carefully mapped Straight Tracks with astronomical alignments. Other investigators in the field included A. Carr Gomm, A. Middleton, and Rudges.
Stonehenge is proof that 20,000 or more years ago, primitive man knew far more about the stars than his modern successor. In the November 1965 issue of Atlantis, L.M. Young published New Light at Stonehenge.
The New Grange site or Brugh Na Boinne is the site of a pyramid in Ireland, excavated by Professor M.J. O’Kelly. In the February 1964 issue of Atlantis, Violet Deerling published Brugh Na Boinne: Nowadays Known as the New Grange Site. The Brugh or Palace of the Boyne (home of the Irish Zeus) was once an immense pyramid covered entirely with shining white quartz or Stones of the Sun. The three acre site is now overgrown by trees and its pyramidal form no longer apparent. It was once surrounded by a great stone circle. There are enormous monoliths whose scribings have mystified archaeologists. Strabo mentions that Brugh Na Boinne was the center of the Western or Atlantean Mystery Cult.
The idea of Atlantis in North Africa was first evoked by Bory de Saint Vincent who published a book on the Fortunate Islands and Atlantis in 1803. In 1907, Etienne Felix Berlioux presented a series of papers to the Academy of Sciences at Lyons titled Morocco and the Atlanteans. Scientists investigated the possibility that North Africa, including the Sahara Desert, could have formed part or been contemporary with Atlantis. In the Benin expedition between 1897 and 1899, a brass temple and a stable for fourteen-hundred horses was discovered, although there were no horses in East Africa at the time. Portions of the brass temple are now in the British Museum. Leo Frobenius, the famous German anthropologist, stated that there had been an Atlantean-type civilization in what is now the Ife country of Nigeria.
After the publication of Pierre Benoit’s novel Atlantide in 1920, there was a spurt of exploratory efforts in North Africa in the hope of finding the lost city of Queen Antinea. Both Gattefosses, R.M. and Jean, were authorities on Atlantis and North Africa. Jean Gattefosse resided near Casablanca for several years and assumed that the center of the Atlantean civilization in the final stages, shifted from an island continent to North Africa; thus, ruins of cities were to be found from the Atlantic coast to the Nile. Lieutenant Brenans of the French Camel Corps discovered magnificent petroglyphs in the Tassili n’Ajer range of hills in the middle of the Sahara Desert in 1933, made some sketches, and sent them to Paris. As a result, Professor Henri Lohte went to North Africa to investigate but the work was suspended during World War II and did not resume until 1956. A thorough investigation of rock art in North Africa and South Spanish caves (dated at 11,000- 7500 BC) indicated that there was a common culture in these regions. Count Byron de Prorok conducted several expeditions and discovered the mummy of Queen Antinea (or one of her royal descendants), which he brought to England in the early 1930’s. In the April 1965 issue of Atlantis, Sykes published The Tassili Petroglyphs.
Brigadier R.P. Gatehouse made a several year study of the famous Southern Rhodesian ruins of Great Zimbabwe which lie on the Sabi River seventeen miles southeast of Fort Victoria, and noted in 1959 in a letter to the editor of Atlantis, that no one had yet answered the who, when, and why of the ruins encompassing a Great Temple and an Acropolis built on a nearby rocky hill. The two main schools of thought were African natives or people migrating from the Mediterranean, Abyssinia, Persia, or Egypt via the Great Rift Valley. The ruins show a level of architectural engineering and mathematical skill that was not present in Africa at the time of their construction. There are no inscriptions or hieroglyphs. A soapstone bird and a thousand ounces of golden ornaments were uncovered. The ruins had been tentatively dated at BC 3000. In the November 1970 issue of New World Antiquity, Sykes published Zimbabwe and the Outside World.
Caribbean Archaeological Research
Over the years, Sykes persuaded people to explore the Caribbean because he believed that if we could manage to bridge the gap between the 300 BC beginnings of culture in Central America and the establishment of the Maya calendar some 8500 years earlier, then we have made a huge step in producing concrete evidence of the existence of the Atlantean culture. In the July 1966 issue of Atlantis, Sykes published The Caribbean. The Caribbean is rendered more interesting by the fact that many Old World nations reached America and the Caribbean in the distant past. Traces of their passage are confined to geographical names, occasional artifacts, and memories in myth and legend. Unfortunately, there were only a small number of archaeological expeditions to Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica in Sykes’ time. Political problems were a deterrent to archaeology on Cuba and Haiti.
Sykes agreed with Professor Robert Dietz, Rene Gallant, and Professor Michael Kamienski, that somewhere about 10,000 BC, several large meteorites dropped in the region of the Caribbean. One fell in what is now the Caribbean Sea, creating a depression surrounded by a crater wall which lasted until about 5000 - 3000 BC when the Atlantic broke in. By products included the Carolina Bays and the Georgia Tektites, and the shock waves cause the mid-Atlantic Ridge to be submerged under a torrent of water that resulted in the Atlantic Ocean as we know it today. There were many casualties and a mass migration of survivors onto the mainland.
The Maya arrived on the mainland about 300 BC, complete with knowledge of writing, mathematics, astronomy, architecture, medicine, jewelry, and a calendar more accurate than that used in Europe until the 18th century. Pictures in Maya codices relate to short journeys by sea. Records are scanty and include the Popul Vuh and Book of Chilam Balam. The Book of Chilam Balam mentions the time when the worship of the Sun was replaced by worship of the Moon. Back to section top.
In the May 1967 issue of Atlantis, James Lockwood published Haiti: An Archaeological Mystery. Haiti is completely unknown to modern archaeologists. The last serious exploratory efforts were done 1790 to 1810 by M.E. Descourtilez, who published Voyages d’un Naturalist en Haiti in 1803. Descourtilez recorded grottoes and caverns worked by man at Dubeda, and described bizarre and grotesque idols. In 1966, Professor Manson Valentine unearthed a cache of sophisticated artifacts ten feet below the surface of Gonova Island off the coast of Haiti.
In the March 1952 issue of Atlantis the article titled Cuba and Atlantis by Feo Garcic Jucres was translated by Roberto Perez de Acevedo, President of the Cuban Institute of Archaeology. It states that the possibility that the island of Cuba was once in some way related to the supposed submerged continent of Atlantis was discussed at the Cuban Institute of Archaeology in 1951, and the debate, from a purely scientific view-point, established that there might be archaeological evidence in Cuba to support the theory. In Punta del Este, or Isle of Pines, there are prehistoric caves with petroglyphs and astronomical symbols, and a staircase leading to a rudimentary observatory.
The Bahamas, a group of seven-hundred small islands, stretch from the southeast of Florida as far as Cuba. The Bimini Islands of this group lie fifty miles east of Miami, and the largest of the Bahamian islands, Andros, lies south of Bimini. Sykes’ interest in Bimini began when he first published a report on the Horace Gouvieva finds in Bermuda in 1958, and since that time, he watched with interest every bit of field work and checked up very carefully on all the source material. In the January 1978 issue of New World Antiquity, Sykes published The Bimini Question. Back to section top.
Dr.'s Manson Valentine and Rebikov discovered a sunken temple off the Bahamian island of Andros. Bimini is a hot topic and believed to be the home of the Temple of Translucent Walls as referred to by Augustus Le Plongeon (1896-1906), Colonel Churchward (1906-1930), Paul Schliemann (1912), Alexis Tolstoi (1930), and Mitchell-Hedges (1920’s). Sykes believed that Bimini was known to the Egyptians, at least from the reign of Hatshepsut onwards, and the name itself is a combination of the two gods Min and Bin, both concerned with eternal youth. Sykes was originally resistant to the idea of Bimini being associated with Atlantis, but after a lifetime of research which included Egyptian, Phoenician, Greek, Roman, Irish, and Welsh sources, Sykes concluded that the Bimini-Andros-Miami complex and Murias, the encircled city of the west to the Tuatha De Dannann, an early Celtic tribe, were one and the same. Murias may have been destroyed by the great meteor strike off the Carolina coast. Sykes believed that the Bimini-Murias site was an administrative complex, temple, and trading post with its own harbor, and until 3000 BC, the island had many Old World visitors including Etruscans, Minoans, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Basques, Bretons, Celts, and Norsemen. The Bimini Temple survived due to its location on a hill. Sykes expressed concern about the absence of a common objective among investigators working on the underwater sites between Florida and Jamaica, where everyone was only concerned with their own discoveries and failed to appreciate the immensity of the bigger picture.
Central & South American Archaeological Research
South American explorers in the early 1900’s included Siebert, Wilkins, Professor Marcel Homet, Dr. Daniel Ruzo, H.S. Bellamy, Professor Peter Allan, Edmund Kiss, and Dr. Arthur Posnansky. The origin of the ancient high cultures of the New World has always been an enigma for archaeologists. It was hypothesized that these cultures must have originated from outside the American continent.
Sykes believed that the Amazon Basin, of over a million square miles of forest and jungle, probably hid a number of early cities that would give us a key to the early stages of civilization in the Americas and even, perhaps, give us the long sought link with Atlantis. The entire region from the mouth of the Amazon to the Pacific Coast is filled with petroglyphs.
There is a list of sites in Peru containing important remains of early cultures in J. Alden Mason’s Ancient Civilizations of Peru. In April 1966, the London Press reported that Professor Menzies, an American oceanographer, took four underwater photographs of stone pillars bearing glyphs and drawings at a depth of fifteen-hundred yards off the coast of Peru. The report was documented in Sykes’ article, Underwater Archaeology off the Peruvian Coast, which was published in the May 1966 issue of New World Antiquity. Back to section top.
In the May 1959 issue of Atlantis, Sykes wrote The Nazca Figures. Nazca in Peru has the distinction of having some of the most mysterious figures ever encountered by archaeologists. The desert site is forty miles long and less than ten miles wide. The numerous figures of animals, insects, and birds, some of which are acres in extent, cannot be seen from the ground — they can only be examined from the air. The figures include a bird four-hundred feet between wing tips; a spider with one huge foot clinging to a post; and an odd geometrical figure twenty-five-hundred feet long. How the builders managed to lay out these designs with such accuracy is a mystery. The International Explorers Society of Coral Gables, Florida concluded that a balloon of some kind was needed, and made a balloon designed from a drawing on an ancient Nazca pot.
In the Mexican myth of Aztlan, Aztlan was a far locality surrounded by water from which came the first settlers and culture bearers, who landed in ancient Mexico as ambassadors of civilization. Professor Posnansky gave his interpretation of the Mexican folklore myth concerning the water that lay between Mexico and Aztlan; it referred to the waters of Lake Titicaca that had to be crossed in order to get to Tiahuanaco. He believed that the myth of Atlantis, as a land mass between the continents of Europe, Africa, and America, was possible but not proven. Posnansky believed that the legendary Aztlan of the Mexicans was Tiahuanaco. Tiahuanaco and Mexico are culturally related, and since Tiahuanaco is of greater antiquity, it could well have been the original metropolis.
In the August 1959 issue of New World Antiquity, in an article titled An Early Account Of Tiahuanaco, Edmund Kiss postulated that Atlantis was the motherland of the colonies of Mexico and Tiahuanaco, and the referred to body of water in the myth was the Atlantic Ocean which separated the Americas from the land mass of Atlantis.
The Incas called Lake Titicaca, Mama Cota or Mother Water, and believed it to be the site of the creation. Many of the creation legends of Latin America start with the first men digging themselves out of caves to the surface after a major catastrophe that preceded the Deluge.
In the November 1951 issue of Atlantis, Sykes wrote The Mystery of Titicaca. The Lake Titicaca Complex, one-hundred miles from the coast and twelve-thousand feet above sea level in the Andes in Peru and Bolivia, is the record of a cultured race that ceased to exist about the time of the Atlantean disaster 11,500 years ago. This possibly prediluvian site deserves special attention not only because there are traces of cities, temples, and harbors thirteen-thousand feet above sea level, but the shortage of oxygen at this height renders life most difficult. Scientists deduced from examination of strandlines that thousands of years ago Lake Titicaca was five times bigger than today and reached as far as Tiahuanaco, and the Andes district was two-thousand to three-thousand feet lower in elevation with a milder climate. There are several cultural layers in the area and scientists estimated that the culture of Tiahuanaco must have existed at the intermediate strand line that occurred at the same time as the final stages of Atlantis. The Complex is the remnant of a vast inland sea measuring four-hundred-and-sixty by thirty to one-hundred miles. The main cultural remains are those of the town of Tiahuanaco which now lies thirteen miles from the shore of the lake, but which then were situated on an island in the middle of the lake. Tiahuanaco was a port, built at a time when water stretched across the Andean Plain. The Tiahuanacans constructed all of their temples and other buildings deep into the soil, as if they anticipated they would have to withstand earthquakes.
The famous monolithic gateway of the Kalasasaya temple, on which the well-known calendar frieze was found, was broken in half at one time. The Kalasasaya temple seems to have been both a Sun temple and an astronomical observatory. The structure was carved out of a single piece of andesite, an extremely hard material that blunts all but the hardest of steel tools. It is unknown how the builders managed to handle this material and cut it as if it were cheese.
The Titicaca culture was a center of artificial cranial deformation, a factor always related to the cultures of the final Atlantean period.
If the Titicaca ruins stood alone they would constitute one of the wonders of the world, but they are actually but one of a whole chain of fortress cities and temples stretching as far north as Columbia.
In August 1952, Dr. Daniel Ruzo found himself twelve-thousand feet above sea level on the Marcahuasi Plateau, near the town of San Pedro de Casta, eighty kilometers from Lima, Peru. Knowing his fondness for prehistoric studies, a friend had shown him a curious photograph taken in 1944 by an amateur photographer. The photo showed a perfect head, Head of the Inca, which actually profiled fourteen human faces of different races, which could be seen from various angles and viewpoints. The heads were chiseled in the bare rock at about twenty-five meters from the ground. The plateau proved to be the site of one of the greatest mysteries of human prehistory, showing traces of prehistoric works of defense, habitation, and hydrology in an area covering three square kilometers. There were twelve artificial lakes and canals leading to outlying agricultural lands terraced between the plateau and the valley fifteen meters lower down, and hundreds of gigantic sculptures of men and beasts (including animals that never existed in America). There are African lions, camels, horses, turtles, penguins, frogs, dogs, monkeys, seals, and elephants. Many of the sculptures could only be seen clearly at certain angles or specific times of day under certain light conditions. The ancient Egyptians worshipped the God Thueris, a symbol of fertility and benefactress of women in childbirth, and Thueris is represented as a female hippopotamus standing on her hind legs and carrying in her human hands a symbol of life in the form of an elongated figure eight. There are five sculptures of Thueris in Marcahuasi, one of which sits on the remains of a truncated pyramid.
In 1953, Dr. Antonia Pompa y Pompa, the Secretary General of the Mexico City Institute of Anthropology and History, loaned Dr. Ruzo a lecture room at the National Academy of Sciences of Mexico, to enable Ruzo to give his first lecture on the Masma culture. Scholars and scientists, including Marcel Homet and Peter Allan, have since visited Marcahuasi, and publicly testified that the carvings were made with a sculpturing technique now lost, and date back to the Megalithic era. H.S. Bellamy spent ten days on the plateau and claimed that the sculptures were not natural formations. Dr. Ruzo believes that the plateau was both a fortress and a temple, and the structures were created by a legendary race that peopled Peru even before the predecessors of the Incas.
Ruzo’s findings were well documented in the September 1967 issue of Atlantis, in The High Level Culture Traced Through Megalithic Ruins, The Work Of Daniel Ruzo, by Luis Felipe Angell.
Professor Marcel Homet, a Professor of Classic Arabic at Algiers and in charge of Missions for the French and Portuguese governments, studied the principal monument of the Guineas Plain — Pedra Pintada Rock. Marcel Homet published The Pedra Pintada-Painted Rock in the January 1953 issue of Atlantis. The rock is an ellipsoid with a large diameter of one-hundred meters, a small diameter of sixty meters, and a height of thirty meters. It has three faces. The main face of the Pedra Pintada has a surface area of three-hundred square meters covered with hundreds of drawings dating back 10,000 - 8000 BC. These pictographs of suns, boats, tortoises and letters, and numerical tables based on religious elements/sacred numbers (3,5,7) rather than the decimal system, are convincing proof that in remote times there was a high degree of civilization where the majority knew how to read, write, and count. Homet claims that the remnants of the race now living in Brazil sprung from a superior civilization that has strange similarities with that of the Mediterranean Basin, including burial practices, jewelry, and cranial indices. He also noted that some of the drawings recalled those found on Egyptian monuments showing the main tools used for the movement of large stones.
In 1967, Karen Stothert Stockman of the Bolivian Academy of Sciences wrote a monograph titled Pre Colonial Highways of Bolivia, which described the pre-Inca road from La Paz to Yungas via Palca. The author hypothesized that the road might be part of a network established by the Tiahuanaco culture as the Incas only dominated Bolivia for a few years; thus, it seemed more likely that pre Inca peoples carried out the work. The well constructed roadway cut into mountainsides with switchbacks and drains, obviously involved a considerable standard of engineering. The publication was reviewed in the July 1970 issue of New World Antiquity. Back to section top.
And then there’s El Dorado — also known as The Golden City, Harvil, Manoa, Ciboa, and Ophir — possibly located somewhere in the Andean Highlands. In the November 1974 issue of New World Antiquity, Sykes published The Golden City. In Sykes’ day there were many enthusiastic researchers seeking this lost city that was reputed to harbor millions of dollars worth of gold hidden by the Incas from the Conquistadors. The exploration of Amazonia in search of the Golden City began in the 1500’s, and there were many deaths related to starvation, fever, and hostile Indians. One of the most famous explorers was Colonel P.H. Fawcett, who had served with distinction in the British Army in World War I, and set out in 1925 to explore the Amazon. He had heard tales among the jungle Indians about a lofty building in the forest with doors and windows of stone, and the inside lit up by a great crystal pillar "which shines so brightly as to dazzle the eyes". Fawcett was never seen again.
United States Archaeological Research
There are three serpent mounds in Ohio in Ross County, Adams County, and the Brady Lake Complex. The largest and finest serpent effigy in the United States is the one situated in Bratton Township, Adams County, on the east bluff of Ohio Brush Creek near the village of Loudon. The quarter of a mile long embankment of earth represents a gigantic serpent in the act of uncoiling, and in the open jaws, an oval mound of earth resembling an egg sits partly within. Sykes speculated that the voyage of Medea in the Argo to North America was connected to the advent of Serpent Worship there.
Archaeology in the United States has had to overcome many obstacles.
In 1944 and 1945, it became apparent to archaeologists in the United States that the program of federal dam and reservoir construction was soon to destroy thousands of archaeological sites around the Columbia and Missouri Rivers and their tributaries, as well as rivers in Texas, California, Georgia, Carolinas, and Virginia. Billions of acres of valley lands would be flooded. A salvage program set up by the Smithsonian Institution, National Park Service, National Research Council, American Anthropological Association, Society for American Archaeologists, and American Council of Learned Societies, in order to study and salvage at least 10% of the sites. Many sites are menaced by bull dozers today. Robert L. Stephenson wrote about this issue in the July 1956 edition of New World Antiquity in Salvage Archaeology in the United States.
Sykes believed the whole area from Baffin Island to Key West was littered with artifacts from past visitors.
Prehistoric Archaeological Research
In the March 1978 issue of New World Antiquity, in Both Sides Of The Coin, Sykes said, "History and archaeology are but two facets of the same coin... History, which once appeared to be solid and firm, is now turning out to be an onion; no matter how many layers you peel off, there is always another one underneath."
In 1954 in New World Antiquity, Commander Richard E. Lambert wrote Antiquity of America in which he discussed the possible significance of the Carbon-14 date of arrowheads found around Folsom, New Mexico, and burnt bones at Lubbock, Texas at 9883 years, and human bones near Natchez, Mississippi tested by the fluorine process dated not less than 11,000 years old. An arrowhead extracted from the skeleton of a mammoth near Clovis, New Mexico indicates the presence of man between 18,000 and 15,000 BC, when the now extinct mammoths roamed there. Based on prehistoric artifacts in the southwest and similar ones discovered in Mexico and Central America, anthropologist of the University of Texas, Dr. Alex D. Krieger believed that man migrated to this hemisphere during the Fourth Ice Age. Dr. George F. Carter, chairman of the Isaiah Bowman School of Geography at John Hopkins University, claimed that the bare minimum age of artifacts found in San Diego, California to be 100,000 years.
In 1955 in New World Antiquity, in A New Approach, editor Egerton Sykes commented on the fact that European archaeologists and prehistorians have been fortunate in their research because they have records of many earlier nations and races that provided sufficient historical data to identify important sites. The absence of historical records in the Americas (in a readily identifiable or translatable form) has always been a serious handicap to the investigator of the past history of the Americas. It is unfortunate that stone monuments cannot be dated by most modern and scientific methods of evaluating dates; thus, we must evaluate the past history of the Americas via the myths and legends handed down to us.
In February 1956, in a letter to New World Antiquity, Dr. George F. Carter explained his thesis that man was in America prior to the ice recession. His ideas were based on a date of 21,500 years for a probable hearth at La Jolla; more than 23,800 years at Tule Springs, Nevada; and 20,000 years at a cave in New Mexico. In a later issue in 1955, Carter brought attention to a report in Science about the C-14 dates of artifacts in the Sandia Cave near Albuquerque, New Mexico estimated at least 25,000 years old — at least three to four times as old as the Folsom material.
In February 1956 in New World Antiquity, Sykes wrote Pushing the Threshold of History Back in which he stated,
"For many years, the orthodox-minded have criticized the exponents of the theory of Atlantis, by saying that there are no historical traces of civilization earlier than that of Mesopotamia... However, Mr. Zaki Saad, the Director of Excavations for the Egyptian Government, who has been working at Heluan near Cairo on a site for the last seven years, has unearthed proof that the 1st Dynasty of Egypt had been preceded by at least one-thousand years of stable and civilized government... The effect of these discoveries will be to narrow considerably the gap separating the date of termination of the Atlantean culture and that of the beginning of its first known successor."
Fitting Atlantis into World History
In June 1963, Sykes wrote The Wheel Turns Full Circle in Atlantis, in which he declared that the time had come for a reformulation of our idea of world history from 12,000 BC onwards. He wrote,
"The first step is the assumption that for us all, history begins from the aftermath of the great catastrophe. I carefully abstain from saying what the catastrophe was: Atlantis going down; the acquisition of our present moon; the crashing of the nucleus of Halley’s Comet; the descent of a large asteroid; or some other event of a cosmic nature. Whatever it was, it brought the then civilization to an end and reduced the survivors to a state of barbarism within a very short time. We know very little about the nature of the cultures that were destroyed... It may be taken that sailing ships and galleys were in use on a wide scale, not only are there many petroglyphs dating back to this period but also there are numerous stories and legends involving both... That the Sun was an important deity is obvious, that serpents and lions, both winged and unwinged, formed part of the religion is known... there were two competitive cultures: the Atlantic and the Pacific... The members of the Atlantic culture may have been all Rhesus Negative... The whole system of writing has always been sharply split between two diametrically opposed systems: Glyphs and Letters... The Glyphs, which include the scripts of the Chinese, the Egyptians, the Mayas, and Aztecs, represented a series of unnecessary complications in the transmitting of ideas, in that only the initiated could manage to read them, and even then, the chances of inaccuracy were fairly large. But this type of system is the one that was in use at the time of the catastrophe... Obviously what has been stated above only constitutes the bare outline of a thesis..."
In May 1966 in Atlantis, Sykes wrote Atlantis. A Prelude To A Restatement Of The Question in which he stated,
"Atlantis is not separated from us by a gulf but rather by a series of post Atlantean cultures which fill up most of the gaps between 10,000 BC and the early historical period of 5000 BC... Atlantis has to be put in proper prospective as, possibly, the earliest manifestation of culture known to the Western World and, as such, constituting the root from which nearly everything else in the Western World has sprung... It is hard to fathom the reason for the reluctance of many people to accept the Atlantis concept. Admittedly, it means putting the clock of history back a few thousand years but that has been done before and both archaeology and ancient history have survived the process without scars... Atlantis fell into a normal historical pattern just as much as the earliest Egyptian, Babylonian, or Chinese cultures. The fact that it occurred some thousands of years earlier does not mean that any startling differences in human behavior are to be anticipated. The pattern of evolution has been consistent ever since the existence of the first tool-using primates a million years ago and Atlantis and its culture will fit quite comfortably in it. But Atlantis is none the less interesting for that. It is the earliest culture of which we have any records."
In January 1969 in New World Antiquity, Sykes published The Nature of History in which he wrote,
"... the Eddas. These records of Nordic history which were carefully set down by Snorri contain accounts of wars, natural disasters, marriages and slayings... They may have the only account of the beginning of an ice age known to mankind... the Hindus moved into India in the historic period and that the only records of this are in the Vedas... Indian history, incidentally, started thousands of years before the arrival of the Hindus... In the case of Britain, the builders of Stonehenge, Avebury, Callinish, and of the hundreds of other stone circles laid out for astronomical and calendrical purposes are a part of history... Primitive man in Britain was certainly cultured in the arts, as the Sutton Hoo jewelry shows, but most histories of the land start from 55 BC with the arrival of Caesar... The recent announcement by Professor Gordon, of Brandeis University, that the Parahyba Inscription is genuine, gives a reasonable start for the history of Brazil at 1250 BC or so. About 1910, Leo Frobenius, the famous German explorer, announced the discovery of an early (5000 BC or before) civilization in the Ife Country in the highlands of Nigeria... When it comes to the Near East, the situation is just as bad. A collection of a ton and a half of documents, many in Coptic, brought to Britain in 1896, has so far had one paper fully translated and there is a promise of another being done by 1975. This averages forty years to a document, for a ton and a half, one would estimate another six to eight thousand years would be needed. The collection is the Genzia; its home is Cambridge University. This is but a portion of the story; there are probably twenty times as many early documents in Western Europe, all of great historical importance, and having as little chance of ever being investigated. It is fortunate for the civilized world that the Dead Sea Scrolls are in the hands of Israel, that way there is an excellent chance of their being translated... for Irish officialdom, history began with the arrival — or was it the departure — of St. Patrick. The trifling detail that the Irish pre-Christian culture was on an extremely high level and dated back to at least 2000 BC is carefully swept under the carpet wherever possible..."
In Sykes’ 1973 Atlantis editorial, Presenting a Coherent Picture, he states, "In other words, Atlantis was an historical event and should be treated as such. It was neither romantic nor glamorous, just plain sober fact. As such, it is a far more interesting study than most, as in its working out we shall solve most of the great mysteries of the past.”
In May 1978 in New World Antiquity, Sykes wrote an editorial Where Does History Begin? in which he stated,
"... no matter how far we manage to go we have not so far managed to get at the roots of any of the main cultures: Chinese, Vedic, Sumerian/Babylonian, Egyptian, Maya, Andean, Megalith Builders... They all appear on the scene with a background of several thousands of years of scientific knowledge, writing — except the Megalith Builders — astronomy... And what is more they are completely alien to each other. This implies that if they had a common origin it must have been in the remote past, as it would have taken a minimum of 3000 years for them to have differentiated to such a marked extent... We have only scratched the surface of the potentialities of Stonehenge... There are two things that are limitless: the first is time and the second is the cosmos, galaxies 3000 million light years away have already been detected by astronomers. In both cases the concept is infinite."
Underwater Archaeology
One of Sykes’ favorite themes was the fact that Atlantean remains could be found by looking on the ocean bed — the only place where the destructive hand of man had not yet penetrated, and where there was still a chance that walls and buildings remained undisturbed, protected by the waters. Sykes always maintained that off the islands of the Caribbean was the best place to find records of Atlantis.
There are underwater causeways in the British Isles, Easter Island, and Ponape — origins unknown, referred to in the June 1949 issue of Atlantis, in Causeways Under Water by V.G. Howe.
March 1967 marked the third conference on Underwater Archaeology co-sponsored by the University of Miami and the Council of Underwater Archaeology. A dozen speakers described new developments in equipment and methodology, and there was much discussion about the need for cooperation between archaeologists and divers. The event was documented in the March 1967 issue of New World Antiquity in the article, Underwater Archaeology, by M. Barbrook
In 1969, Sykes attended an exhibition in Brighton, England, which displayed the latest equipment designed to aid in oceanography, and was pleased that more archaeological finds were likely to be made over the next few years owing to the fact that industries were increasing efforts to obtain offshore oil and gas. The display of bathyspheres; models of underwater habitats; communication and position finding equipment; and miniature submarines, added up to a magnificent representation of how far man had progressed in the evolving field of Underwater Archaeology in a few short years. In the March 1969 issue of New World Antiquity, Sykes wrote Underwater Archaeology.
In 1969, The Marine Archaeology Research Society Inc secured its charter and announced that its main objective was to explore archaeological remains below the surface of the coastal waters of Florida and in the Caribbean Sea. Sykes was delighted to be appointed the representative for Britain.
Bermuda
In September 1958, Sykes reported in Atlantis magazine that Mr. Horace Gouvieva, a follower of Hoerbiger and Zhirov, made an underwater discovery while diving with friends off the coast of Bermuda. At a depth of twenty-five feet, he found stone columns twenty-four feet long and eighteen inches square resting on their bases, with a layer of additional columns underneath them with a thin covering of sand. The depth is not great but enough for the structure to be submerged for several millennia. Sykes applauded the accessibility of the ocean using low cost aqua lungs. The enormous expense of employing bathyspheres or even submarines had hampered all previous efforts in this direction.
The Caribbean
The series of contemporary underwater sites between Florida and Jamaica are the remains of an earlier culture that was eliminated in two stages: first, by a meteor strike in 10,000 BC, and second, in 3000 BC, when the Atlantic Ocean breached the Lykontian Plain walls. Sykes thought that Aves Ridge, which runs northwards from Venezuela to the Virgin Islands, was a portion of the mountain wall that separated the Caribbean from the Atlantic, and the granite rocks along the ridge are relics of the time when the region was hit by a large meteorite thirty to fifty miles in diameter that penetrated into the earth. In 1969, Duke University ship Eastward went on a three month marine geology expedition during which they dredged up more than a ton of granite rocks off Aves Ridge. In 1965, Commander V. Ralph Sobieralski suggested that there had been a causeway connecting the Bahamas Bank with Palm Beach.
In 1969, Dr. Manson Valentine suggested that a recently discovered underwater temple near Andros had shape and dimensions similar to the Turtle Temple at Uxmal. Dr. Valentine discovered more remains later off North Bimini, and dated the culture at BC 10,000. In 1970, after a five month expedition, Dr. Valentine discovered a wall seven-hundred yards long under twenty-five feet of water off Bimini. In the September 1969 issue of Atlantis, in Underwater Structures Found Off North Bimini And Andros Islands , and in the March 1970 issue of Atlantis, in Recent Developments At Bimini, Sykes explained that he was not convinced that the ruins were part of Atlantis but thought they may hold part of the key of the origin of the Maya.
In the 1970’s, Robert J. Brush of Miami reported two underwater stone structures in the Andros region. He named the main structure the Coliseum because of its size and shape. The find was reported in the November 1978 issue of New World Antiquity in an article titled A Possible Underwater Structure Near Andros Island.
Peru
In the May 1966 issue of New World Antiquity, in an article titled Underwater Archaeology Off The Peruvian Coast, Sykes described how Dr. Menzies, an American Professor of Oceanography, while taking a series of several hundred photographs off the coast of Peru at depths averaging fifteen-hundred yards, managed to include among them four or five showing stone pillars bearing glyphs and drawings of some kind. Sykes commented that either the water level had risen or the land level had dropped, and “now that the door has opened a small crack we are extremely uncertain as to the nature of the hidden treasure which we have discovered."
Italy
In January 1972, in an article titled Underwater City, Atlantis magazine reported that huge colonnaded porticos, temples, and innumerable statues had been photographed twenty feet below the surface of the bay of Pozzuoli near Naples. It is believed that the ruins date from the era of Emperor Trajan, and it is known that they stood at sea level in the second century AD. The ruins appeared to have remained intact in spite of geologic disturbances, giving Sykes hope that similar vestiges would be found in the future on the slopes of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.
Spain and Portugal
The Ancient Mediterranean Research Association held an important Congress in Cadiz, Spain in 1973. Maxine Asher, an archaeologist and explorer of underwater cities off the coast of Spain, organized the event as described in the March 1973 issue of Atlantis in Sykes’ article, The Cadiz Congress Of 1973.
In 1979, two Soviet professors Dr. A.A. Aksyenov of the Oceanographic Institute and Dr. Marcello Vasconelos of the Fishery Research Institute announced a remarkable discovery made by a recent expedition on the Ampere Seamount between Madeira and the Portuguese-Spanish coast. The event was described in the May and November 1979 issues of New World Antiquity in Russian Discoveries On The Ampere Seamount by Egerton Sykes and Russian Under Sea Discoveries On Atlantis by Mr. Barinov. The research vessel Kurtachov took eight undersea photographs showing lines of brick or stone walls plus fragments of a wide flight of steps. The pictures were taken from the Horseshoe archipelago that is linked with the islands of Madeira, Porto Santo, and Dezerta, and with the Gettysburg bank. Sykes stated that the ruins could not be part of Atlantis but may be contemporary. An Atlantean site would more likely be found a mile or so south of the triangle formed by Santa Maria, St. Miguel, and the Formigas Rocks, at the eastern extremity of the Azores. He believed the finds to be part of the European African continental shelf and probably submerged about 6000 BC.
Atlantean Artifacts
Atlantean Treasures?
In May 1974 in Atlantis, Sykes wrote Atlantis — A Fresh Concept, in which he stated that in addition to citing four of the seven Atlantean cities and their attendant Temples, Sykes had traced and unearthed a whole series of Treasures,
"...including a couple that are now within a hundred miles of where this is being written... for the last twenty-five years every item of possible interest in this connection has been carefully card indexed. Now the bits of the jigsaw puzzle have dropped into place forming a coherent pattern linking Atlantis with the present day... Twenty five years ago, with a different purpose in view, a list was drawn up of the sacred Treasures of the Tuatha, of the Welsh, and of the Aesir. The fourteen sections of this compilation provided a handy base for the beginning of operations... There was a certain amount of duplication, showing that many of the Treasures had been sought by all without success. Some of the objects could scarcely be described as Treasures... Nevertheless it was interesting to realize that I had actually handled one of the treasures before the last war without being aware of its import..."
In the May 1968 issue of New World Antiquity, Sykes published Votan the Third: The Snake Priest. A Phoenician Sea Captain? According to Brasseur de Bourbourg, Bishop Zumaguerra burnt a large quantity of Quiche material in 1691, including a manuscript entitled Proof That I Am A Snake by Votan the 3rd, which told of a voyage to the Court of King Solomon where the writer described to him the wonders of the New World. Votan was one of the gods of the Popul Vuh. Sykes believed one of the High Priests of the Snake Clan used the name of the god.
Elephants in America?
Some carved Mayan stonework known as Stela B from Copan in Central America, which closely resembles a definite period of Cambodian art, has representations of what are certainly Indian elephants (Note that the Stela B at Copan dates from the mid-8th century AD and is earlier by two centuries than its parallel sculptures in Cambodia). John L. Stephens once said that the elephant is an unknown animal in America, yet near Bogotá in Columbia, at a very high altitude, is the Field of the Giants — an extensive plain covered with the bones of mastodons. A. Hyatt Verrill, who discovered the Cocle culture in Panama in 1924, stated in Old Civilizations of the New World (New York, 1943) that he had no doubt that the Cocle culture in prehistoric times had either seen elephants; had domesticated some species of mastodon; or were in direct communication with the Orient, as he uncovered idols that were clearly elephantine. Verrill believed that the Cocle were the most ancient of known advanced cultures in Central or South America. In the September 1948 issue of Atlantis, P.L. Collignon published Elephants in America.
Ancient Vase-Batteries?
In the May 1954 issue of Atlantis, W. Savitsky published Electro-Plating in the Ancient World. In the Iraq Museum in Baghdad there is an interesting find made at Khujut Rabu to the southeast of Baghdad — a fourteen centimeter high clay vase with its largest diameter eight centimeters and a thirty-three millimeter circular opening at the top. The vase was found among undisturbed relics of the Parthian Kingdom (250 BC - AD 224). Inside the vase was a cylinder made of sheet copper of high purity, and the top and bottom asphalt plugs had centers formed by a solid piece of iron. The purpose of this assembly may have been to generate an electric current. Similar vase-batteries have been found near Tel’Omar and at Ktesiphon when Sassamides ruled Persia (AD 224 - 651).
Atlantean Silver Belt?
Jean Gattefosse, who resided near Casablanca for many years, discovered the Silver Belt — a royal relic of Atlantean times — in a 1st Dynasty tomb, which later vanished. Gattefosse assumed that in the final stages of the Atlantean civilization, the center had largely shifted from the Island Continent to North Africa. Sykes published the story in the May 1952 issue of Atlantis in The Story of the Silver Belt.
Mummies on Both Sides of the Atlantic
In Grafton Elliot Smith’s Migration of Early Cultures, he states that the Guanche technique of mummification was analogous to that of the 21st Dynasty Egyptians, and described some mummies as being in a sitting position like those of Peru. Le Plongeon stated that the sandals on the feet of a statue at Chichen Itza were the same as those found on the feet of the Guanche mummies. Jean Gattefosse and botanist Emile Jahandiez published a paper in the 1920’s titled The Possible Atlantean Origin of Chenopodium Ambrosioides, an aromatic plant cultivated for the treatment of an intestinal parasite. In 1806, in correspondence of De Broussonet with Alexander Humboldt, he stated, "I have opened up a large number of Guanche mummies; it seemed that they had all been filled partly with various aromatic plants, among which I recognize Chenopodium Ambrosioides." According to traveler Paul Marcoy, this plant was employed for Inca period mummies in Peru. In the November 1958 issue of Atlantis, Jean Gattefosse published Guanche Mummies.
Who Made The Crystal Skull?
The famous, exquisitely carved, eleven pound, life-size Crystal Skull with a moveable jaw and cut from a block of rock crystal, was discovered by Mitchell-Hedges in a Maya temple in Lubaantun, British Honduras. Rock crystal was universally believed by the ancients to be places of frozen holy water that never melted. Sykes believed that the Crystal Skull was pre-Aztec, and that the skull was laboriously fashioned and evolved over centuries by ancient mankind, not as a sign of death, but a symbol of universal knowledge in the form of a God’s Head. Frank Dorland, of Mill Valley, California, worked on the skull for two years. Dorland made a microscopic examination of the surface for grinding patterns and could find no evidence of iron-age tools. Dorland discovered that the entire skull is so designed that it is illuminated completely in a fully darkened room by one small power pencil thin light beam that could easily be concealed in the base on which the skull stands.
Documents from Sykes' personal files re: a remarkable crystal skull. [.pdf, 3.4 MB]
Fraudulent North American Artifacts?
Sykes often remarked, "the whole area from Baffin Island to Key West is littered with the artifacts left behind by the various people who visited there from time to time."
In June 1962 in Atlantis, Sykes published Possible Old World Origin of Certain Petroglyphs in North America , which discussed the question of whether the various inscriptions in Hebrew, Phoenician, and possibly Numidian, and objects of Egyptian and Roman origin, found in western and central states of America, were genuine or not. Most of the experts were in favor of a fraudulent origin. One factor for consideration was that for seafarers the only routes would be up rivers; thus, any relics not within easy reach of a navigable river are suspect. The reaches of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers likely represented the westward limit of possible areas for investigation.
Continue to Archaeology page 2 - Archaeoastronomy
Continue to Archaeology page 3 - Theories of Archaeoastronomy