Is There More Than One Way of Interpreting the Past?
Product ID: VC14
Report Topics:
- How we look at artifacts that have survived from the past depends on what preconceived ideas we have of what directions history has taken or not taken—and just how much humanity has forgotten
Full Report:
The world is suddenly destroyed by an earth-shaking cataclysm. All civilization collapses everywhere. Those few who manage to live through the disaster are reduced to subsisting in a minimal post-apocalyptic culture whose only purpose is to grow food for survival. Yet despite what has happened, these people still hold clear memories of what once existed, and they gather together what little is left of their science and technology that still works.
To their children, born into a devastated landscape, the survivors try to pass on the stories and the few precious remaining examples of their former world. But the children, growing up in a very different and severely limited environment, do not have the context necessary by which to fully comprehend what their parents once knew as part of their bygone lives in a lost era of technological wonders.
The parents soon die off, and the children can only transmit the stories and the artifacts as best they can to their own children. Yet with each sharing from one generation to the next, the old history is slowly turned into legend and myth. The artifacts that still operate begin to wear out, or attempts are made to copy them into cruder forms. These lost remnants are eventually considered to be magical by those who no longer comprehend how they work. They fall into the possession of religious and political leaders who have inklings of their true scientific nature, but keep them secret, to be used for their own selfish displays of power.
In time, over the passage of centuries, all that remains behind are fables of a dimly remembered Golden Age, when gods once rode through the air in flying chariots, lived in magnificent cities, and spoke to each other over great distances with lightning bolts.
Finally, a thousand years in the future when civilization is eventually once again achieved, a new renaissance of learning and a new age of reason begin to dawn.
But rather than looking for their true origins, the new scientists instead attempt to divorce themselves from their mythical past. The blossoming of a new intellectual establishment begins to think of itself as being the pinnacle of all preceding cultural development, and anything which existed before it is deemed to have been only formative and archaic.
In such a limited, egocentric atmosphere, no future academic historian or archaeologist would dare to believe in old myths about a primordial period of advanced science, or recognize the existence of anomalous artifacts which do not fit the accepted viewpoint of linear progressive history.
In this manner, the real chronicle of the origins of civilization, of the existence of ancient yet more highly developed peoples and their knowledge, is deliberately suppressed. Whole chapters of true history are either ignored or remain lost. And until there is a fundamental change in both the paradigm and attitude concerning historical discovery, these records are destined to always be considered undecipherable.
What has been portrayed here is by no means a speculation on possible future events. This is, in fact, the state of conservative historical research in our own world today.
Everywhere we look - whether it be in ancient Egypt, China, Central America, Africa, the Pacific or South America - time and time again we encounter the stories of lost eras of sophisticated technologies, and are confronted by strange artifacts and knowledge which do not conform with the prevailing concept of an exclusively primitive past.
Over the last two hundred years that the sciences of anthropology and archaeology have been exploring our heritage from bygone eras, every bone, every artifact, every evidence of human remains and cultural product that has emerged from the earth has been made to neatly fit into a general picture of the past, to try to prove what can be called the linear progressive theory of history.
The prevailing viewpoint is that, since our very beginnings, we have been constantly advancing upward, ever slowly climbing along an envisioned route of intellectual as well as collective cultural evolution, then suddenly becoming enlightened to the first fruits of civilization only a relatively short time ago, and finally reaching the pinnacle of modern technology we have achieved today.
This rather self-centered view of the past, however, contains a number of major assumptions which tends to also make it self-limiting. If, according to the linear model, we have been continually taking increasingly more sophisticated steps upward, then that means all artifacts should exhibit a developmental process from simple to complex form over the course of time.
The reciprocal corollary of this is that the farther back in time we go, then the less intelligent humanity had to have been, and the more basic and cruder their remains must be shown to be. As one modern-day paleo-anthropologist succinctly put it, ancient equals savage equals stupid. There is no room for exception, for any deviation from the rule, no matter how slight, which would prove the whole linear theory very wrong.
The result, tragically, is that at times some modern anthropologists, archaeologists and historians have been forced by their own predetermining theory to be very selective about what artifacts they choose to work with, and which they choose to reject, because it may not fit the preconceived linear progressive model. And even when faced with obvious examples of past advanced technology, modern experts can only propose a multitude of often ridiculous primitive methods to try to explain away how such objects were made, or how highly developed scientific data somehow became incorporated into their designs by mere happenstance.
In truth, there is a growing number of anomalies surfacing from the distant past which do not in any way fit the establishment’s concept of linear history. They are called “anomalies” because they reveal an inherent sophistication very much out-of-place from the contemporary ancient or prehistoric remains among which they were discovered.
In reality, these artifacts demonstrate one of two possibilities. Either they were the product of another more advanced culture of unknown origins that once lived side by side with the less sophisticated but more recognized cultures - just as we today in the technological twenty-first century live alongside certain tribal peoples of New Guinea, Africa and South America. Or the artifacts are remnants of an older forgotten yet more advanced civilization that for some unknown or unrecognized reason was destroyed and lost to us, except for these few tantalizing remains that were passed down through the later survivors.
Either of these choices, however, are deemed unacceptable to modern conservative researchers, for it goes completely against the prevailing concept of linear progress. There is no room for the existence of peoples or cultures in the past that show signs of having possessed any degree of sophistication whatsoever. When confronted with actual evidence, the only course of reaction is to either deny its authenticity, explain it away as somehow being a singular fluke of primitive production, or simply to ignore it.
The time has now come to listen to what the old stories are trying to tell us, and what the artifacts are revealing about our very real but forgotten antiquity. The missing pages in humankind’s past, and the revelations coming forth from the study of out-of-place artifacts, are calling to us to completely re-evaluate what we know and especially what we assume to know.
The moment has arrived to earnestly start searching for and finding a much wider spectrum of the events of our true origins than we have ever imagined possible. We must throw off the imposed limits placed on us by today‘s “accepted“ viewpoints, and bear witness to the real panorama of our past that stretches to the very beginnings of our existence itself.
The time has come to take off the horse-blinders. The time to find a new interpretation of the past has now arrived.
[Copyright 2008. Joseph Robert Jochmans. All Rights Reserved.]
