Faking History

by Jason Colavito

  40. Investigating Graham Hancock’s 7,000-Year-Old Mexican Pyramid

  One of the most memorable factoids in Graham Hancock’s Fingerprints of the Gods (1995) is his claim that a circular pyramid just south of Mexico City is more than 7,000 years old, and probably 8,500 years old.[333] It certainly made an impression on me when I read the book back in 1996, and I always wanted to know more. It was a challenge though. The pyramid is named Cuicuilco, but Hancock won’t tell you that for reasons that will become clear later. According to Hancock, archaeologist Byron S. Cummings excavated the pyramid in the 1920s and discovered that it was buried beneath a layer of lava that geologists of the era dated to between 7,000 and 8,500 years ago. The pyramid, Cummings claimed, was the “oldest temple” in the Americas since any structure beneath the lava flow must be older than the eruption that buried it.

  If true, this would be the best hard evidence ever found for Hancock’s imaginary lost civilization, which he believes spread around the world at the end of the last ice age. So, it was somewhat surprising to me when I first read Fingerprints that Hancock declined the opportunity to further investigate this hard evidence in order to provide proof positive of his lost civilization. Why did he stick with soft claims about myths and stellar alignments when the geologic proof was staring him the face? How could science have missed a 7,000-year-old lava flow that spread, according to Hancock, over more than sixty square miles?

  In fact, Cuicuilco is the oldest pyramid in Mexico. But it dates back to 900 BCE, not 7,000 or more years ago. So, Hancock is partly right. But here’s the kicker: The lava that covered the pyramid came from an eruption that occurred between 300 and 400 CE. When Byron S. Cummings excavated in the 1920s, he did not have access to modern dating techniques. His outdated estimate (discussed below) cannot be relied upon in light of modern, more accurate dating. This same volcanic flow buried the nearby Copilco site, which radiocarbon dates place in the Preclassic period—about 5,000 years too late for Hancock’s faulty estimate.

  Hancock claims Cuicuilco has been “ignored by historians and archaeologists, who do not believe that any civilization capable of building a pyramid could have existed in Mexico at such an early date.”[334] This site was so completely ignored, in fact, that archaeologist only excavated at the site in the 1920s, 1955, and most of the 1990s. All of these archaeological investigations must therefore have been part of a vast conspiracy to hide evidence of a lost civilization, or else Hancock is wrong. As it turns out, Hancock’s claims about the pyramid were second- or third-hand. His source was Charles Hapgood’s notorious Maps of the Ancient Sea-Kings (1966), a work of colossal pseudoscience. Hapgood carefully noted that the geologists who investigated the site estimated the age of the site by estimating how long it would take for the sediment atop it to gradually pile up. But Hapgood notes that this method is flawed and that early radiocarbon dates returned an age of 709 BCE to 414 CE, numbers Hancock fails to note in order to preserve the mystery.[335] Given that Hancock’s own source understood the importance of the radiocarbon evidence, it is unconscionable that Hancock simply wished it away. Journalist that he was, Hancock should have understood the need to report the facts at least as fairly as Hapgood.

  Hapgood attempted to rebut the radiocarbon dates with Cummings’ 1920s reports about earlier culture layers dating back 2,000 years (c. 50 BCE) and 6,500 years (c. 4450 BCE), but modern research has shown that the site was first occupied around 1200 BCE with the first phase of building around 800 BCE. These occupations match Cummings’ culture layers. The discrepancy in dating is due to Cummings’ use of highly inaccurate sediment deposit rate estimates to guess dates. Modern radiocarbon dates are much more exact.

  It seems Hancock left out the name of the pyramid so it would be harder to look up the information that contradicts his claims about it. There is one last thing Hancock didn’t tell his readers: Cuicuilco is open to the public. Anyone can go and visit and see for him- or herself the “evidence” for the 8,500-year-old pyramid. If there really was a conspiracy to suppress this site’s true history, running tours to the place seems like a weird way of doing it.

  41. Atlantis, the Bible, and High Technology

  In March 2011, the National Geographic Channel screened an hour-long documentary chronicling the efforts of Hartford University archaeologist Richard Freund to find the lost city of Atlantis. According to Freund, his research indicated Atlantis was located near Cadiz in southern Spain, and the city was destroyed by a tsunami. He also claimed to have found the actual archaeological remains of the lost city. The program, titled Finding Atlantis, presented a few intriguing finds and then spun those discoveries into a web of pseudoscience masquerading as science.[336] Nevertheless, the documentary created a media sensation due to the imprimatur of the National Geographic Society and the unfortunate timing of the program, airing just days after a tsunami devastated much of northern Japan following a 9.0 magnitude earthquake. Reporters were quick to accept the Atlantis claims and to draw parallels between the lost city and events in Japan. An article in Newsweek by Simon Winchester, the bestselling British author, uncritically proclaimed the find genuine and ranked Atlantis beside Pompeii on the list of great lost cities.[337]

  Freund’s claim was the latest in a long line of attempts to find a reality for the lost continent outside the imagination of its creator, the Greek philosopher Plato (c. 428-348 BCE), who invented the continent as an allegorical way of criticizing the civilization of contemporary Athens. No evidence for Atlantis has been found in any ancient material (writings, inscriptions, pottery, etc.) prior to Plato’s dialogues the Timaeus and the Critias (c. 360 BCE). This chapter will discuss what would be needed to prove the existence of Atlantis, and then it will evaluate Prof. Freund’s claims, followed by a discussion of two other improbably claims about ancient Greek mythology. First, this chapter will review an attempt to link the Atlantis story and Greek myth to a fringe belief that the planet Venus nearly destroyed earth in prehistory, and then it will examine a scholarly publication claiming that Homer’s epic poems prove the existence of advanced robotics and hydrofoil naval technology in the Mycenaean age.

  Proving Atlantis

  To begin thinking critically about the media circus surrounding Robert Freund’s claim that Atlantis had been found in Spain, let’s first consider how one would prove that a new discovery was “really” Atlantis. It isn’t as simple as finding an ancient site and then trying to match it to Plato’s description, no matter how loosely one interprets Plato’s texts (composed c. 360 BCE).

  A major hurdle is proposing a plausible method of transmission whereby knowledge of a given site can be retained and communicated through the centuries. How would Plato have known the details of whatever archaeological remains you’ve dug up? In his dialogues, Plato claims that his knowledge of Atlantis derives from an ancient Athenian statesman named Solon, who lived three centuries earlier and who got his information in turn from the Egyptians. If we take this at face value, we would need to prove a relationship between Egypt and the unnamed site prior to the age of Solon (638-538 BCE) and Egyptian knowledge of the site’s layout, politics, internal organization, and destruction. We would also need to prove how and where Solon’s information was retained and communicated for roughly three centuries between him and Plato. Needless to say, there is not a single scrap of evidence—no statue, no vase painting, no inscription, no papyrus fragment, no wall painting—nothing that indicates Egyptian or Greek knowledge of anything like Atlantis prior to 360 BCE.

  Contrast this with an actual documented instance of historical memory. In the Iliad (c. eighth century BCE), Homer records the story of Troy, long believed to have been a legendary city as mythical as Atlantis. But Homer included bits of genuine Bronze Age information, including references to a helmet made of boar’s tusks[338] that was used only in the Mycenaean Age (prior to 1200 BCE), which indicated a core of genuine history underneath layers of myth. (Plato’s Atlantis story contains no Bronze Age or earlier details
.) The Greeks, however, lived among the ruins of the Mycenaean Age but knew so little of that time that they assumed the ruins were the work of giants called Cyclopes[339] and they thought the men of that era demigods. These same people who believed giants built their ancestors’ homes somehow retained street-level knowledge of Atlantis but not their own cities?

  Homer’s geographic information (indirectly) led the German explorer Heinrich Schliemann to a site in Turkey where he found a city that has been identified as the site of Troy.[340] However, Homer’s information was not perfectly accurate, but rather highly distorted, the result of imperfect transmission across centuries, contaminated with error and more recent information.

  But this is not all the ancient evidence. Homer was not alone in mentioning Troy—an entire series of myths and epics (known as the Epic Cycle) by many hands recorded parts of its story, as did vase paintings. We also have Bronze Age Hittite records (c. 1250 BCE) recording interactions with Wilusa (another name for Ilion, or Troy) as well as hostility between Wilusa and a group called the Ahhiyawa, identified as the Achaeans (Greeks) of Homer’s Iliad. The Hittite records confirm that a ruler named Alaksandu once reigned in Troy, just as in Homer the son of Troy’s king is Alexander (also called Paris). Alaksandu worshipped the god Apaliunas, identified as Apollo, the god who protected Troy and Paris-Alexander in the Iliad. These identifications, while somewhat controversial, are accepted by the majority of scholars as indicating Hittite knowledge of Troy.

  In this case, we have contemporary records, an archaeological site, and later Greek recollections of genuine Bronze Age material. These many strands work together to tell us that the site Schliemann found in Turkey is the place known as Troy. What do we have to support claims for Atlantis? We have Plato’s (fictional) dialogues, and nothing else. The Egyptians, who recorded interactions with ancient peoples ranging from the Minoans and the Mycenaeans to envoys from the Near East, are silent about Atlan-teans. The Greeks included Atlantis in no myths, legends, or epics. Nearly every ancient city that was genuinely prominent in the Bronze Age has myths associated with it, even if that city ceased to exist in later ages, as Martin Nilsson explained in his classic The Mycenaean Origins of Greek Mythology back in 1932. But somehow Atlantis got left out. Even many ancient authors themselves were fairly certain Plato made it all up.

  In absence of any evidence outside of Plato for Greek knowledge of Atlantis, and in the absence of any plausible way for the Greeks (or even the Egyptians) to have known about the destruction of Atlantis, or proof that they did, we must conclude that Atlantis was what Plato meant it to be: a fictional double for Athens.

  Atlantis in Spain?

  With this information, what can we say about claims that Atlantis was found in Spain?

  Richard Freund, who previously appeared in a 2004 Nova special where he identified artifacts found in Israel as part of the legendary Temple treasure lost after the Roman invasion of Jerusalem, argued that a site on the southern coast of Spain near the city of Cadiz is Plato’s Atlantis as well as the biblical city of Tarshish, a trading center mentioned briefly in the books of Chronicles, Kings, and elsewhere. The theory itself is not new. E. M. Whishaw proposed the theory in a 1928 book, Atlantis in Andalusia, including an identification of Plato’s city with the ancient port of Tartessos and thus the biblical city of Tarshish. Tartessos was an ancient civilization of the first millennium BCE widely discussed in antiquity and whose cultural area is known archaeologically as spreading throughout southern Spain. Richard Freund merely adopted the Spanish Atlantis theory wholesale, but unlike Whishaw, backed it up with an allegedly new archeological discovery. Freund claimed that the Spanish site near Cadiz conforms to Plato’s description of Atlantis because geophysical scans indicate that the city stood on an island surrounded by water, as Plato described. Nevertheless, epistemological and logical problems remain.

  Plato, however, said Atlantis was “larger than Libya and Asia together” (the buried island Freund advocates is nowhere near that large), and composed of several concentric rings with artificial canals connecting the rings of land in a riparian system (again, the Spanish site has not been proven to match). Finally, Plato claimed that the island was destroyed by an earthquake 9,000 years before Plato’s time (c. 9,400 BCE). Again, the Spanish site does not match. Initial radiocarbon dates place it anywhere from 5,000 to 2,400 years old.

  Nevertheless, Freund argued that the circular shape of the site and the fact that it was possibly destroyed by a tsunami proved that the site was the legendary Atlantis, and he repeatedly emphasized how close the match was—close if you agree to change the facts that Plato wrote to “more plausible” versions. Doing so, of course, means that Freund is free to reconstruct an imaginary Atlantis of his own devising, one which is very different from Plato’s but which he can imaginatively recreate to match anything he happened to find on the ground.

  Especially ludicrous is his attempt to explain a carving of a warrior holding a sword and a shield as a soldier “guarding” an aerial map of Atlantis, claiming the circular shield with its pattern of concentric circles, so very similar to other ancient shields, was really a 2,000-year-old remembered tradition of the layout of Atlantis! This in an age that did not make any other aerial maps! Earlier, Freund and his team were giddy with excitement after finding geometric-shaped rocks that they thought were the walls of Atlantis. They were completely natural in formation, but still Freund counted them as “evidence” on the grounds that Atlanteans “might” have built walls with them anyway—underwater, apparently, since they formed beneath the ocean.

  There is no doubt, of course, that there is a real archaeological site buried in southern Spain. What it is exactly, we just don’t know. However, let us give Freund the benefit of the doubt and agree that everything he claims about its age and layout are true. What does this tell us? Nothing, actually. Freund can propose no method by which this fallen city is somehow remembered in street-level detail from Spain to Egypt to Greece over the course of thousands upon thousands of years without leaving a single trace in the records of Egypt or Greece or anywhere else. Not a single inscription, or papyrus, or statue, or vase painting. Nothing at all from 5,000 BCE until 360 BCE when Plato wrote the Timaeus and the Critias, the first ever mention of Atlantis. By this standard, we must take the Cyclopes, the Odyssey, the Underworld, and the Golden Fleece as true people and events, too, since they are amply better documented in the ancient record. Or, alternately, we must seek out Thomas More’s Utopia.

  Most disturbing, I think, was Freund’s attempt to argue that Atlantis was really the biblical city of Tarshish. This is the entirety of what is known of Tarshish: “every three years once came the ships of Tarshish bringing gold, and silver, ivory, and apes, and peacocks.”[341] Obviously, Freund said, this is Atlantis because both Tarshish and Atlantis dealt in “metals,” the only ancient cities, he said, to do so. This is patently false, since other ancient sites, like Colchis on the Black Sea, were famous for their metalworking. Incidentally, southern Spain boasts neither apes (native to sub-Saharan Africa), nor peacocks (native to India and parts of sub-Saharan Africa), nor ivory (Africa again). This kind of Bible-mongering serves little purpose except to try to rope in Atlantis as confirmation of the Bible’s literal truth—something Freund inadvertently emphasized when using biblical terminology such as the “holy of holies” to describe decidedly non-Hebrew sites. It is no coincidence that Richard Freund’s specialty is biblical archaeology and Judaic studies, not Classical, Bronze Age, or Neolithic archaeology.

  But let us grant him his point and pretend that Atlantis is Tarshish. If this is true, then we have a contradiction. Tarshish traded with the Israelites during the reign of Solomon, traditionally around the tenth century BCE. This is thousands of years after Plato’s Atlantis sunk beneath the waves (9400 BCE), and at least a thousand years off from the proposed dates when the Spanish site was destroyed (possibly c. 2000 BCE). Never mind that the books of Chronicles and Kings were likely compose
d no earlier than 560 BCE, at which time Tarshish must still have been an active port—one still in operation when Jonah tried to sail there in the Book of Jonah (composed c. 500 BCE).[342] So Tarshish and Atlantis, like Schrödinger’s cat, both exist and do not exist, are active and destroyed, simultaneously. The only way to make the two into one is to change Plato, and once you change Plato you are no longer looking for “Atlantis” but are instead naming whatever you find in honor of Plato’s fictional allegory.

  Apparently Freund dropped into an active Spanish archaeological investigation into an actual ancient city, ongoing since 2005, and has hijacked it to generate publicity for his research into the connection between Solomon and Atlantis to prove the Bible true. Here is what the Spanish anthropologist Juan Villarias-Robles told the Telegraph newspaper about Freund:

  Richard Freund was a newcomer to our project and appeared to be involved in his own very controversial issue concerning King Solomon’s search for ivory and gold in Tartessos, the well documented settlement in the Donaña area established in the first millennium BC. He became involved in what we were doing and provided funding for probes through his connections with National Geographic and Associated Producers. He left and the film company told us the documentary would be finished in April or May. But we did not hear from him and are very surprised it has appeared so soon and makes such fanciful claims.[343]