Tuesday, March 02, 2010

Ian Hodder: All Our Theories Were Wrong - LexiLine Journal 539

Göbekli Tepe is featured at Newsweek online in an article from the March 1, 2010 issue of Newsweek magazine. At History in the Remaking: A temple complex in Turkey that predates even the pyramids is rewriting the story of human evolution, Patrick Symmes writes: "

"The new discoveries are finally beginning to reshape the slow-moving consensus of archeology. Göbekli Tepe is 'unbelievably big and amazing, at a ridiculously early date,' according to Ian Hodder, director of Stanford's archeology program. Enthusing over the 'huge great stones and fantastic, highly refined art' at Göbekli, Hodder -- "who has spent decades on rival Neolithic sites" -- says: 'Many people think that it changes everything…It overturns the whole apple cart. All our theories were wrong.
[Klaus Schmidt - chief archaeologist at Göbekli Tepe -  theorizes that] it was the urge to worship that brought mankind together in the very first urban conglomerations. The need to build and maintain this temple, he says, drove the builders to seek stable food sources, like grains and animals that could be domesticated, and then to settle down to guard their new way of life. The temple begat the city."
All of THEIR theories (the theories of mainstream archaeology and astronomy) were wrong.

OUR megalithic archaeological and astronomical theories, on the other hand, are looking better all the time.

We have always linked the stones to astronomy and both to ancient belief.
There is more to these stones than just having an ancient sundial in your backyard.
The ancients were doing important things with these ancient megalithic sites.

Schmidt's rather esoteric idea that the temples were the reason for human urbanization and agricultural domestication is of course far-fetched. Forget that.

A hat tip and thank you to Boris of our LexiLine group for calling this Newsweek article to my attention.

Why Study Ancient Mankind and the Past? - LexiLine Journal 538

I just wrote this to someone interested in my work who themselves was studying mankind's ancient past:
"In this field, the fun is in the doing.

I for example work almost entirely for myself, beacuse I am sincerely interested in what actually happened in ancient history.
It is my way of uncovering and tracing - for me - what I think to be the tracks of mankind.

Whether others agree with me or not or whether one is "correct" or not in some future "court" that decides these things,
I doubt very much that it matters."
I hope we have a lot of members in our group who share that view.

WANTING to know is the first prerequisite to learning new things
and making new discoveries,
especially for ourselves,
but we seldom have any guarantees
that we are right in our conclusions
about any of these things.

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