Ancient structures

Class of megalithic, pyramidal, subterranean and astronomical constructions whose methods, precision, dating or scale are argued to exceed their conventional attribution

Ancient structures are a global class of megalithic, pyramidal, subterranean and astronomical-alignment constructions whose methods, precision, dating or scale are argued to exceed the technological capacity of the civilizations conventionally credited with building them. The class spans the Great Pyramid of Giza, Puma Punku, Sacsayhuamán, Göbekli Tepe, Stonehenge, Adam's Calendar, the Bosnian pyramids, Mount Kailash and comparable sites on every inhabited continent. Five accounts of who built them compete: the engineer Christopher Dunn holds that the Great Pyramid was a working machine and not a tomb; Graham Hancock holds that the surviving sites carry the knowledge of a lost human civilization of the Ice Age and rejects the ancient-astronaut reading of Erich von Däniken as "an unnecessary argument"; the researcher Marcell Fóti holds that the precise stones were cast and not carved; exopolitical writers attribute the sites to Anunnaki, Seeder or Pre-Adamite builders; and the archaeologist Flint Dibble holds that the Ice Age record shows only hunter-gatherers and no advanced civilization. The anthropologist Franco D. Rossi reads the attribution of Andean stonework to aliens as a marginalization of Indigenous achievement, quoting von Däniken's remark that the Aymara "were stone age people" with "no technology to cut this block". The class sits within Lost civilizations, with the sunken-place side at Lost continents (Atlantis, Lemuria), and is the built-evidence side of the Cataclysmic destruction of a prior advanced civilization and of the Antediluvian civilization, and the machining and propulsion claims attached to it belong to Advanced ancient technology.

Interpretive frameworks

The accounts are not mutually exclusive, and several researchers combine two or more.

The lost-civilization account has an extreme-antiquity wing. The Russian geologist Alexander Koltypin dates weathering and jointing at Mediterranean and Turkish megalithic sites to hundreds of thousands or millions of years before the present, and the engineer-physicist Andrei Sklyarov's Laboratory of Alternative History conducted field measurement of cyclopean and polygonal joints in Egypt, Peru, Bolivia, Mexico and Greece toward the same conclusion.

Anomalies cited

Megalithic joints

At Sacsayhuamán, Ollantaytambo, Cusco, Puma Punku, Tiwanaku and the Osireion at Abydos, stones weighing up to several hundred tonnes are fitted without mortar in non-rectilinear joints. The researcher Ben van Kerkwyk describes them as "perfectly shaped together" blocks in which "the lines curve where they join, the face angles change", a construction he holds requires three-dimensional planning beyond Bronze Age tool evidence. The ancient-sites investigator Jay Anderson, describing a diorite outcrop at Sacsayhuamán, says the precision cutting "is not possible with a Bronze Age toolkit".

Precision and acoustics

According to van Kerkwyk, measurement of Egyptian stone vessels has documented surface flatness and tolerances comparable to modern machining, and germanium-detector measurements of precision vases found them radioactive where non-precision vases and base-rock samples were not. Dunn extends the machining argument to the Great Pyramid itself: his The Giza Power Plant sets out to show that it was not a tomb. Fóti's cast-stone account answers the precision question differently: the vessels and statues were produced by pouring granite grains with water glass into a mould, a process he calls geopolymerisation, and the case for it turns on natron as the reagent. Resonance studies inside the Serapeum granite boxes are said to record consistent standing-wave tones suggesting acoustic function as a design criterion.[citation needed]

Subterranean and astronomical sites

The Andean legends, according to Anderson, describe a vast labyrinth below ground connecting Cusco to Sacsayhuamán; the broader tradition of underground cities attributed to pre-flood civilizations includes the Derinkuyu underground city in Cappadocia, and the tradition reaches into the Inner Earth frameworks of the deeper interior. Stonehenge, Göbekli Tepe, Nabta Playa, the Nazca Lines, Adam's Calendar and the North American Medicine Wheels are held by their investigators to be aligned to solstices, equinoxes or particular stars, and the Nazca geoglyphs, visible only from altitude, are argued by some researchers to have been made for aerial observers.[citation needed]

Dating and the Younger Dryas

Göbekli Tepe, usually dated to about 9600 BCE, is the site on which the lost-civilization account and conventional archaeology meet most directly. Dan Richards, speaking to Joe Rogan, says the pillars date back 11,600 years and appear to have been purposely buried at the time of the Younger Dryas climate catastrophe. Hancock argues that no one can "wake up one morning with no prior skills, no prior knowledge, no background in working with stone and create something like Gobekli Tepe", which he reads as evidence of a precursor tradition, while Dibble holds that "what we find is the ephemeral traces of hunter-gatherers rather than some sort of advanced civilization." Robert M. Schoch's water-erosion redating of the Great Sphinx of Giza places its earliest phase before the Younger Dryas; Egyptologists date the monument to the reign of Khafre.[citation needed] Cyclical-cataclysm frameworks tied to precession propose destruction intervals of about 12,000 years, with survivors rebuilding at diminished capacity.[citation needed]

Contested sites

Giza

Dunn holds that the Great Pyramid was not a tomb and that its precision and internal features point to a working machine. The Egyptologist Zahi Hawass answers with the excavated record: he says he found the tombs of the pyramid builders about a mile south of the Sphinx, and that the names in the cemetery show the pyramids were built by Egyptians and not by slaves. He adds that his excavations in front of the Sphinx temple found the harbor of Khafre, which he links to the transport of non-local stone.

Gunung Padang

Danny Hillman Natawidjaja's team published its findings on the terraced hill of Gunung Padang in Indonesia in the journal Archaeological Prospection, and the journal later retracted the paper. Hancock says the journal "came under such huge pressure" after the site featured in his television series that the paper was retracted, and that Natawidjaja's team had asked instead that criticisms be published alongside it.

Yonaguni Monument

The geologist Masaaki Kimura is, in Dibble's words, "absolutely convinced that Yonaguni has been worked extensively by human hands"; Dibble adds that Schoch's initial impression was that the formation was man-made and that he later changed his view.

Bosnian pyramids

The Bosnian pyramids are identified by Semir Osmanagić as the oldest pyramidal complex; the identification is disputed.[citation needed]

Attribution to non-human intelligent beings

The ancient-astronaut reading attributes construction to direct assistance from non-human intelligent beings and is associated with Erich von Däniken, Zecharia Sitchin and Giorgio Tsoukalos; Hancock credits von Däniken with alerting people to mystery in the past but holds the answer he came up with an "unnecessary argument". Rossi, reporting from a 2018 fan convention of the television programme Ancient Aliens, finds that its sites lie almost always in settler-colonial or post-colonial contexts, where Indigenous construction of them is questioned and light-skinned aliens are credited instead.

In exopolitical accounts the sites are attributed variously to the Anunnaki (Mesopotamian and Egyptian complexes especially), the Seeder races (including the Intergalactic Confederation Seeders), conducting planetary seeding as deep-time genetic and architectural cultivation, the Pleiadians or Andromedans (astronomical-alignment traditions), or to pre-cataclysm human civilizations with reverse-engineered extraterrestrial technology.[citation needed] The Ra account is cited for sixth-density beings assisting with the construction of the Great Pyramid by manipulating consciousness rather than by physical tooling.[citation needed] Michael Salla places the ruins of cities flash-frozen beneath the Antarctic ice, in a continent he identifies with Atlantis, on the testimony of Corey Goode's military informant.

Key sites

This non-exhaustive list of ancient structures gives the sites whose claimed anomalies are most often cited, with the anomaly claimed for each.

Open questions

References

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