Remember the myth of the lost white race of Mound Builders? It’s currently en vogue thanks the resurgence of white supremacist and white nationalist thinking among racists emboldened by the coarsening public discourse encouraged by the Trump campaign. Never one to miss a cultural moment, on Columbus Day here in America—a day Native Americans protest as honoring the destruction of their culture—Graham Hancock announced on his blog yesterday that he plans to overcome the relatively disappointing sales of last year’s Magicians of the Gods by exploring whether North America’s Native American mounds were actually the work of his lost ancient civilization, the one that he identified in both Magicians and its predecessor, Fingerprints of the Gods, as “white.” … I would like to explore the possibility (a) that these mounds are just the more recent incarnations of much more ancient, prehistoric structures and (b) that they incorporate knowledge from an earlier time and civilization, in much the same way that historical ancient Egyptian monuments from around 5,000 years ago and less also incorporate a legacy of much older knowledge and a memory of “The First Time”. Hancock’s position, as you can see, is slightly different from that of the early advocates of the lost white race hypothesis. He allows that Native Americans may have built the mounds, but only in reconstructing the lost white race’s more sophisticated knowledge. Indeed, the lost white race, he claims, might have been located right here in good old North America, or as Hancock puts it, this culture “may have had its most significant outpost, perhaps even its center in North America.”
In Magicians of the Gods, Hancock asserted his belief that a comet hit North America at the end of the Younger Dryas, and in his blog posts he hypothesized that this destroyed any remnants of an advanced Ice Age civilization. In the blog post, he said that this civilization likely dates back 60,000 years in North America: “We must now consider the possibility of stable and advanced civilizations in the Americas going back 60,000 years or more and with mysterious links to the populations that settled Australia and other far-flung regions in remote prehistory.” It is, of course, astonishing that such an “advanced” civilization thrived for tens of thousands of years and yet left not a single trace of itself anywhere on the face of the Earth, until its alleged descendants started raising up stones in its memory after 10,000 BCE. The Lost Race of the Mound Builders hypothesis speculated that the mounds of North America were the result of outside influence. There were several different strains of the theory, some attributing the mounds to Vikings and others to Toltecs, but the most popular version held that a lost white race had colonized and developed North America until they were eradicated by “savage” Red Indians, who invaded and massacred all of the white people in relatively recent historical times. This version of the myth was the underlying historical justification for the Indian Removal Act of 1830, as Pres. Andrew Jackson admitted in his 1830 State of the Union message, when he spoke of the mounds as “the memorials of a once powerful race, which was exterminated, or has disappeared, to make room for the existing savage tribes.” We find this same myth in the Book of Mormon, where the noble white race of the first Americans falls to decadent savages who are punished by having their skin darkened (2 Nephi 5:21; 3 Nephi 2:15; Alma 3:6). This line of thinking continued for a century, and not just in the United States. In Canada, the cleric George Bryce wrote in 1885, not untypically, that white appropriation Native lands was justified because each white colonizer was “the avenger of the lost race, in driving before him the savage red man.” Let us not mince words: Hancock has been quite clear that his lost race is identical with this fantastical lost white race of Mound Builders. He happily claims in Magicians, for example, that Native American lore declares that the lost race’s “white skins and beards” were so impressive that they created an “ancient tribal memory, passed down from generation to generation, of civilizing heroes….” In Fingerprints, he identified the survivors of the Lost Civilization as “white,” “white-skinned,” or “white-skinned and bearded” more than a dozen times. Most egregiously, he wrote that the ancient civilizers of the Americas “had come from the same place and had belonged to the same distinctively non-Indian ethnic type (bearded, white-skinned, etc.).” Such claims were not original to Hancock, of course. The books that he shamelessly modeled his own after, Ignatius Donnelly’s Atlantis: The Antediluvian World and Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel both made explicit the belief that the Americas were civilized by white men, as did Eugène Beauvois in France and dozens of others, all drawing on colonialist and imperialist pseudohistory dating back to the Spanish Conquest and its attempt to justify colonization through an appeal to lost white colonizers. In case you care, Donnelly followed the French Assyriologist François Lenormant in arguing that only white people were true descendants of Noah, and the other races were a separate and inferior branch of humanity from Adam’s evil son, Cain; therefore, the Flood which destroyed the Nephilim—i.e. white folk who engaged in miscegenation with non-white Cainites—and Atlantis was meant to purify the white race and had no effect on the non-white races. Lenormant was much more explicit than even Donnelly was prepared to go, arguing further in the very paragraph of the very work Donnelly quoted that the white race was “the superior and dominant race, to whom, over all others, pre-eminence must be conceded and the glory of representing humanity in its noblest aspect.” Donnelly, in Atlantis, merely applied this line of racist reasoning to America, identifying it as the “opposite continent” of Plato, inhabited by this superior white race: “Plato says that in Atlantis there was ‘a great and wonderful empire’ … Those parts of America over which it ruled were, as we will show hereafter, Central America, Peru, and the Valley of the Mississippi, occupied by the ‘Mound Builders.’” Hancock, who explicitly conceded in Magicians that his “lost civilization” was Atlantis, wants to bring this specious and racist line of reasoning, derived explicitly from a white supremacist view of the Bible, back to life as “alternative” archaeology. In addition to the echoes of the Lost Race of the Mound Builders theory, Hancock’s hypothesis also has clear echoes of the Renaissance speculation that North America was the Atlantis of Plato, as channeled through Donnelly’s analysis of the same. While Donnelly assigned America the role of the “opposite continent,” earlier writers had made North America into Atlantis itself. In 1552, Francisco López de Gómara argued that the Indies were Atlantis and America the continent: “But there is now no cause why we should any longer doubt or dispute of the Island Atlantide, forasmuch as the discovering and conquest of the west Indies do plainly declare what Plato hath written of the said lands” (trans. Richard Eden, adapted). The Welsh occultist John Dee, however, took the argument further and argued in a 1576 manuscript for the portions of North America that the English crown controlled “beinge notable portions of the ancient Atlantis, no longer—nowe named America.” Naturally, he used this as justification for first the Welsh Prince Madoc’s imaginary colonization of America and later for the right of the English crown to reclaim land that belonged to Atlantis rather than Native Americans. Graham Hancock, a British writer seemingly oblivious to the history of the ideas he resurrects, happily joins with the colonizers, conquerors, and conquistadors in fantasizing about an ancient “outpost” or “center” of a lost white civilization in America.
36 Comments
Andy White
10/11/2016 10:38:51 am
This has the next incarnation of "Forbidden Archaeology" written all over it.
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E.P. Grondine
10/11/2016 12:32:18 pm
Hi Jason -
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E.P. Grondine
10/11/2016 12:53:23 pm
Andrew Collins also has an interest:
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Kal
10/11/2016 01:46:42 pm
Why couldn't the natives have built the mounts? It makes a lot more sense than a hypothetical distant race going there to build them in ancient times. Just because the mounds were not known to the current people living there, who were displaced, and did not know their homeland, does not mean that the natives didn't make them at some point. But then, with these clearly nutty ideas, these fringe people think they're discovering when it is all made up to spin fool's gold for anyone foolish enough to buy these things.
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E.P. Grondine
10/12/2016 10:56:02 am
Hi Kal
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V
10/12/2016 11:07:10 am
It wasn't even necessarily displaced peoples who didn't know what the mounds were all about. Remember that for the longest time the purpose of STONEHENGE was forgotten BY the native population! (And in fact we may STILL not have completely reconstructed is uses and purposes.) It has as much to do with time and the influx of new cultural ideas as it does "displacement." Given the example of Stonehenge, in fact, the fringe idea that "they don't remember how/why those mounds were built so they must not be theirs" is PARTICULARLY contemptibly hypocritical.
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Tom
10/11/2016 03:24:05 pm
As you point out Mr Hancock has no scholarly sources for his strange ideas and like Von Daniken is merely recycling fairy tales
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Graham
10/11/2016 08:53:54 pm
Interesting, according to the Muurish Empire Washita (An African-American Freemen-On-The Land group.) their ancestors from Mu built the mounds thus proving that everyone else in the world should bow down to them.
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Brady Yoon
10/11/2016 09:51:44 pm
It is my opinion that pyramids made of quarried stone blocks are the evolutionary end point of an architectural motif that began as earthen mounds, with the intermediate stage being "hybrid" structures made of both stone blocks and earth. Monumental architecture, like all forms of human material culture, evolve over time from more primitive to more sophisticated forms. Moreover, mounds and pyramids are similar not merely in form, but also in function: for example, both the relatively crude mounds of North America and the more sophisticated pyramids found all over Egypt were used as tombs.
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Clint Knapp
10/12/2016 01:04:50 am
First, to assume a pyramid of quarried stone is the "evolutionary endpoint" of a motif beginning with earthen mounds would be to ignore the existence of The Louvre Pyramid which clearly draws on the same motif. One could even say its glass panels represent an evolutionary step up from sandstone blocks since glass is made from heated silica. To be frank, the term "evolutionary endpoint" is both unprovable and illogical as evolution denotes a continued change over time - even in architecture where we see old themes constantly recycled and updated.
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Brady Yoon
10/12/2016 02:24:31 am
"First, to assume a pyramid of quarried stone is the "evolutionary endpoint" of a motif beginning with earthen mounds would be to ignore the existence of The Louvre Pyramid which clearly draws on the same motif. One could even say its glass panels represent an evolutionary step up from sandstone blocks since glass is made from heated silica. To be frank, the term "evolutionary endpoint" is both unprovable and illogical as evolution denotes a continued change over time - even in architecture where we see old themes constantly recycled and updated."
Brady Yoon
10/12/2016 02:29:56 am
P.S. I shouldn't have used the specific phrase "evolutionary endpoint." What I really meant in my original comment was "evolutionary process" that could and arguably is still ongoing.
Time Machine
10/12/2016 07:46:14 am
Clint,
Time Machine
10/12/2016 07:47:58 am
Brady,
Uncle Ron
10/12/2016 10:18:30 am
"Monumental architecture, like all forms of human material culture, evolve over time from more primitive to more sophisticated forms."
Brady Yoon
10/12/2016 12:17:32 pm
Hmm, I think there's a subtle difference. What you said is certainly true: technology DOES evolve over time to allow more sophisticated architecture (there may be some steps backward, but the overall trajectory tends toward increased complexity).
Clint Knapp
10/12/2016 06:01:30 pm
Well, I was going from the fact you did use the term "evolutionary endpoint" and then you changed your argument to an ongoing process.
S D O
10/11/2016 09:54:33 pm
"It is, of course, astonishing that such an “advanced” civilization thrived for tens of thousands of years and yet left not a single trace of itself anywhere on the face of the Earth..."
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Uncle Ron
10/11/2016 10:30:04 pm
. . . and were destroyed by stone age "savages."
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V
10/12/2016 11:23:17 am
Heh, that's the one part that's remotely plausible. A technologically-advanced race is eminently capable of falling to a less-technologically-advanced race. It's more about the determination of the other civilization to get what they want than it is the relative levels of technology. Which is part of why Europeans were so dominating in the 1500s-1800s--sheer fucking determination to TAKE what they wanted. It's not the only reason, of course, but given that the Chinese were at least AS sophisticated technologically as the Europeans, and in some ways moreso, and they still wound up dominated by Europeans, well...it can't be all guns and germs, either.
Titus pullo
10/12/2016 09:19:33 pm
Europeans dud face some cultures with close technology like China but they had a more more decentralized command and control structure and some level of property rights. In other words they didn't have conscript armies fighting for an emperor who didn't give a blank about them but they tended to fight for things they would economically benefit from. In Europe you had a moch more fluid social structure than Africa or the Americas or China. Yes still a rigid class structure but unlike China one could ruse up from nothing and earn a commission and become a war hero and become part of nobility.
Only Me
10/12/2016 12:42:32 am
Isn't it amazing how much Hancock knows about a civilization he himself says was destroyed with no surviving remnants? I wonder if he is aware of how much he contradicts himself.
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Time Machine
10/12/2016 07:44:21 am
Civilization was formed out of mind expansion
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TheBigMike
10/12/2016 10:06:19 pm
You know, I've gotten to the point where I just generally do no respond or even read posts by the ridiculousness calling itself "Time Machine." However, I count myself as a member of the Colavito Forum and I must respond to this:
Time Machine
10/12/2016 07:50:58 am
>>>resurgence of white supremacist and white nationalist thinking among racists<<<
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V
10/12/2016 11:30:24 am
No, honey, this is genuine racism with a light coating of kookiness to make it look harmless. YOU can burst out laughing at it because you're a white male and not harmed by it. Ask the naive peoples in North and South Dakota if they think it's funny right now, since it's precisely the reasoning being used to destroy their holy sites and water supply in order to put in an oil pipeline whose function is to benefit the culture forced on them by WHITE people. I will give you plenty of time to find a single white GRAVE, much less a white graveyard or church, that has been deliberately desecrated in order to deny legal protections to it. I don't expect to hear a single source, because as far as I have been able to tell, there isn't one to be had. That's racist, and destructive, and hurtful to the native people, and NOT something to laugh at.
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Abstrusius
10/12/2016 07:26:27 pm
I bet there is a slot big enough in that time machine.
#BlackLivesMatter
10/15/2016 04:53:50 pm
Lots of words from whites about whites. Nothing behind the words. All designed to keep white privilege intact.
E.P. Grondine
10/12/2016 11:04:47 am
Hi TM -
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Bob Jase
10/12/2016 02:54:42 pm
The lost ancient white race may have been incredible geniuses but apparently they never invented writing or plastic as they left none behind.
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nomuse
10/13/2016 02:05:11 am
Funny how no-one seems to theorize that aliens built the Parthenon. I'd actually read that, you know. Would make a nice change.
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Clint Knapp
10/13/2016 06:01:57 pm
Behold, Marshall Klarfield's monstrosity:
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Geoffrey Sea
10/13/2016 06:48:20 pm
Just what we need here in southern Ohio. Please send him my name as a tour guide. I'm sure I can come up with some giant frogs in the holding pond of the local nuclear facility.
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Once again, some racist is convinced that we " red savages" could not have possibly been mound builders, metal workers, or smart enough to have a civilized society. No, we were gifted those things by benevolent Caucasians,or aliens from another world. He insults me and my ancestors.
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Normandie Kent
12/17/2016 11:43:19 pm
Oh they do know the Native Americans were smart enough , it just suits them better to dispossess them of their history and accomplishments altogether, so they they could feel better about dispossessing them from their lands and their lives. It's called Colonialist archeaology.
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Graham Hancock suffers from a cognitive bias and he is what I would call an author who is incognito a 'sheeple herder'.
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