Archeology claims

[Leif Roar]

In a thread about stone-age tools on another forum a couple of posters made some fairly, ah, outlandish claims. I was wondering if anyone knows the origins of any of them? I'm not looking to verify the claims (I think they're pretty safe to dismiss with some references to Britannica), just curious about where these claims come from.

The claims were as follows:

fyi, the earliest known agricultural communities were run by women [c. 12,500-7,000bc in matera, italy; on islands of malta; and in catal hyuk, turkey] and uncovering same turned up no weapons of any kind, no male idol figures and no phallic symbols... upper/later layers [when the guys had taken over] were rife with all of those...

There is also the recent finds in South America where a large valley with hills turned out to be a large valley with 20 - 30 (forget the exact number) pyramid structure that appear to date way back before, according to orthodox history, there were even primitives on the continent. And the excavations have blown apart the idea that people gathered for protection - with almost nothing that could be described as a weapon being found, & a vast array of things not found in the area, it appears this civilisation was founded for trade purposes. By whom? We don't know yet...

They have found sophisitcated communities on Thera, under the volcanic detritus, dated back 8000 years, not just the one from circa 1600 BCE.

[...]

Someone had a civilisation good enough to build the Sphinx & at least the base of the Great Pyramid well prior to 4-5000BCE

Teotihuacan was built & occupied for a long time before the cataclysm that moved the lake a couple of kilometres from the hewn docks & wharves in 12000BCE.

I'm guessing that the Sphinx and Great Pyramid thing might originate in someone confusing BCE and BP, but that wouldn't explain the reference to the base of the Great Pyramid.

 

[UrsulaV]

I can't tell you where the claims are from, specifically, but I know there's some godawful "feminist archaeology" crap from back in the day that had a lot of seeeriously questionable claims on the whole female-paeleolithic-society front, and the bits about Malta and Catal Huyuk put me in mind of that. (For the record, I'm female, and I believe women are people. And people shouldn't make up crap about archaeology.) It got picked up and popularized by the flakier elements of the Goddess worship crowd, so you see the occasional claim about archaeology supporting an ancient feminist society springing from that direction.

Can't remember the name of the writer who popularized the whole thing in the first place, unfortunately, which is probably just as well, since my list of people to kick in the shins someday is already plenty long. *grin*

 

[LordoftheLeftHand]

Disclaimer: I know nothing about archeology

The text quoted set my baloney detector off twice in the first paragraph. The phrases that caused this reaction were a reference to what was not found at a particular site:

“no weapons of any kind”
“no phallic symbols”

These look like opinions to me. Is a kitchen knife a weapon? Do they mean no sharp objects were found?

What exactly is and is not a phallic symbol? Isn’t that just opinion as well?

LLH

 

[Dr Adequate]

I don't see any weapons or phallic symbols down my way, either.

Obviously I'm living in a matriarchy.

I for one welcome our new female overlords ... overladies ... overwomen ... overwymyn ... persons of overness.

 

[Roboramma]

When I was a teenager I read a book called, "From Atlantis to the Sphinx" that made claims about the Sphinx and pyramids similar to those you quoted. It said something like that the sphinx had obvious signs of water-weathering which couldn't have happened as recently as it's said to have existed, or some such nonsense.

He also claimed that the pyramids were built by Atlanteans with mind powers, but that didn't come until much later in the book, after he'd supplied plenty of made up (but not obviously so to an uneducated teenager) evidence.

I remember being really taken in by the whole thing. I thought it was a cool idea that Antarctica had been the center of a high global civilization that went on to seed world cultures as disparate as the Maya and Egyptians. Though even then I found the last few chapters of his book stupid. Eventually I thought back on what I'd read and realised how ridiculous it all was.

Here's a little snippet of a review I found. Seems to apply to your quoted text somewhat:

In his book, Wilson relates the Giza construction scenario proposed by Hancock and Bauval which has the Sphinx built around 10,500 BC as indicated by geological evidence and corroborated by the precessional time of the Age of Leo, and then approximately 8,000 years later the completion of the Great Pyramid as indicated by the astronomical alignment of air-shafts within the pyramid. Wilson also cites Rand Flem-Ath and Charles Hapgood's research on Earth Crust Displacement which places the destruction of Atlantis at about 9,500 BC, or about 1000 years after construction of the sphinx, as reported by Plato and confirmed by evidence of animal extinctions such as the mammoths in Siberia.

From: http://www.atlantisrising.com/issue9/ar9atlan2.html
(just did a very quick search. I'm sure I could have turned up something more revealing with some actual effort! )

 

[Dr Adequate]

Weapons at Çatal Höyük

"Most of the important features of the Mersin industry can be seen in the assemblage from Catal Huyuk East although here again there are certain tools common at the latter which are not present at Mersin. Both industries are based on the production of blades from pyramidal obsidian cores. All the Mersin types of arrowhead, awls and scrapers are found in abundance at Catal Huyuk."


Obsidian arowhead from Çatal "no weapons" Höyük:

Agriculture at Çatal Höyük?

"Early cities like Jericho and Catal Huyuk were apparently not based on the new trick of planting yourself in one spot and poking seeds into the ground, then waiting until they sprouted and digging up the edible bulbs or lopping off the starchy tops. Nor were the first towns based on domesticating the wild game that wandered on the grasslands close at hand. Evidence suggests that the new cities were founded on hunting and gathering, but without the old-fashioned wandering. Urban centers like Catal Huyuk and Jericho initially took their nourishment from a surrounding overflow of wild grain and game spiced with the gastronomic joys provided by the era’s booming trade.

Dining in these Stone Age cities was very rich indeed. Fourteen different kinds of food nourished the residents of Catal Huyuk 8,500 years ago. The standard groceries ranged from meat and cereals to berries and nuts. This means the citizens were better nourished than tribal hunter gatherers. One of the main urban staples was red deer, whose herds were so abundant that the reliability of their presence is strongly indicated by both the kitchen middens and the elaborate murals daubed on the walls of Catal Huyuk’s standardized, one-plan-fits-all, three-room flats. A huge percentage of those paintings celebrate the joys hunting parties of men took in bringing down does, fawns, and bucks with arrow and bow."


Masculine symbolism in the religion of Çatal Höyük

"Mellaart, W.I. Thompson, Marija Gimbutas, and others have connected the animal art in Lascaux with the animal art of Catal Huyuk (hundreds of representations of bulls, rams, leopards, vultures, and other animals). The horse as a sign for the female Goddess in Lascaux has been replaced by Her anthropomorphic plaster sculpture, the central icon found in most of Catal Huyuk's temples. But the bison is still completely present as a non-anthropomorphic symbol of perfect male virility and energy, although, in keeping with non-ice-age Anatolia, the extinct bison has been replaced in Catal Huyuk by the aurochs bull (a massive scythe-horned beast and an ancestor of modem cattle, which was hunted in huge herds on the Konya plain). The bull is always paired with the Goddess; when bull heads are found in shrines not apparently dedicated to the Goddess, they are surrounded by breast-like knobs -- the very walls of the shrine have become the body of the Goddess, from which the bulls emerge."


Just a hint of phallic symbolism...

"The Bucrania, pillars with the preserved horns of bulls set into their plaster, omnipresent in both the city's houses and its shrines. Some shrines are filled with them -- horns, horns, and more horns -- even benches on which the priestess could lay cradled by the huge, dagger-tipped horns of the giant aurochs bull."