L. A. Marzulli and Brien Foerster Discuss Megalithic Ruins, Decide Native People Couldn't Have Built Any of Them

I’m sure you will remember that last year Newsweek released a “special edition” devoted to conspiracy theories about secret societies. Time magazine rushed out a competing special issue as well, based on content from an earlier Life magazine special edition on the same topic. Today at the grocery store I saw yet another entry in the series under the History Channel’s logo. The magazine rack proudly displayed a shelf of Secret Societies, a thick, glossy, magazine-style History Channel review of “modern conspiracies” and similar garbage. This publication is separate from History’s official magazine and carries only the network’s logo. P. T. Barnum once said no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public, but I think perhaps understates the case 

Ultimately, the History Channel has made a devil’s bargain with fringe historians, and it is largely the network’s promotion of pseudohistory that has allowed these fringe figures to achieve a level of fame that they would not otherwise have seen. To that end, Nephilim hunter L. A. Marzulli had the protean fringe historian and frequent Ancient Aliens guest Brien Foerster on his YouTube talk show last week to promote his new book, Lost Ancient Technology of Peru & Bolivia. Foerster also appears in Marzulli’s Watchers DVD series.

Foerster argues that Peruvian cites like Sacsayhuaman could not have been built by the Inca, and he says that archaeologists refuse to “consult with stone masons” to learn why. Both he and Marzulli feel that because modern stone masons can’t conceive of putting in the work to make polygonal construction, it therefore cannot be the work of humans. (Interlocking cyclopean-style architecture withstands earthquakes better than straight layers and rectangular construction, which tends to just slide off.) As a point of fact, recent analysis has determined that the culture that preceded the Inca were responsible for Sacsayhuaman, but Foerster actually wants us to re-date the site to the Pleistocene because he doubts that the Peruvians of 500 years ago were able to cut stones into polygons. Why stone age people might have been better equipped to have done this work, he does not say except that he believes that they somehow developed a powerful civilization with tools and technology that the native Peruvians were unable to match.
 
The two men also believe that “highly polished surfaces” on many stone constructions in Peru are impossible to produce because they do not believe the Inca and their predecessors had access to any “technology” for polishing stone. Foerster adds that the “dynastic Egyptians” could not have built their pyramids because they did not have iron, and Baalbek’s trilithon stones could not have been laid by the Romans because they are too heavy. Foerster believes that construction of Baalbek began in the most ancient of times but was halted due to “something cataclysmic” (cough, Flood, cough) until the Romans reused the site. Marzulli adds that Genesis 11:3 supports this interpretation. In that passage, the people of Babel attempt to erect the Tower after the Flood: “They had brick for stone, and they had asphalt for mortar.” Marzulli interprets this to mean that “they no longer had the technology” to work in stone, rather than the more obvious interpretation that the Jews writing this in 550 BCE or so duly noted that the people of Babylon built their monumental structures in mud brick rather than the more common stone construction of Egypt and the Palestinian coast.
 
Foerster claims that the granite columns of Baalbek were “turned on a lathe,” something only giants could do. (Not true: G. R. H. Wright describes the scholarly discussion of lathe use for Roman columns in the third volume of his 2009 book Ancient Building Technology.) The columns were imported by the Romans from the Aswan quarries in Egypt during the reign of Trajan. They are in thoroughly Roman style, representing the Corinthian order, a style that did not exist prior to about 450 BCE. The oldest surviving Corinthian capital dates to 427 BCE. That the columns were not impossible to transport should be obvious since Justinian took eight of them to Constantinople where they now stand in Hagia Sophia. And just to be clear: Most of the estimated 104 Aswan granite columns used in Baalbek were not single pieces of unbroken granite but were divided into much smaller drums (technically, the large drums used at Baalbek are frustra​), as was typical of Greek and Roman construction. While the drums were meant to fit together seamlessly, today their joints are clearly visible, and no special Nephilim technology is necessary to image how they were erected.

I am not sure if the specific columns from Baalbek depicted in the UNESCO image below are of Aswan granite, but they show the same use of frustra found in the Aswan granite columns:

“Archaeologists and anthropologists … just have blinders on,” Marzulli said of these pillars.
 
Foerster next states that the Gateway of the Sun at Tiwanaku could not have been built by humans because llamas could not move it and there were no other beasts of burden. The standard account, Marzulli says, is “nonsense.” Neither for a moment considers that, you know, humans might have moved them by working in large teams. Perhaps the fact that these fine gentlemen do no real work precludes them from imagining that others might work, and work hard, for a cause.
 
Foerster then says that Atlantis was real, but not in a literal sense. Instead, believes that Atlantis is a guide to a lost Ice Age civilization. “It’s hinting at a more profound history than most teachers tell us,” he said, joining Marzulli in condemning their schoolboy vision of Received History. This is ironic because Foerster seems to think that doing so frees him to imagine any history he wants, while Marzulli simply wishes to replace the “authority” of academics with the authority of the Bible as the One True History. There is room there to drive a wedge between the two, but Foerster doesn’t seem smart enough to know this. Both men are mutually using each other, Foerster to promote himself and his eclectic vision of fringe history that spans ancient astronauts, Atlantis, and the Nephilim, and Marzulli to pull History Channel viewers into his web of conservative Biblical fundamentalism.