Ancient Maritime Culture in the Bahamas

[Wernazuma III]

Originally posted by Berzerker
No, the Toltecs dont reach back that far, but like the Aztecs, their culture didn't appear from nowhere. They had their predecessors too...

That's what I expressed (shortly) in my earlier post.
But pre-Toltec culture were of a different linguistic group. So you should either concentrate on the direct links of the nahua speaking groups to Atlantis or on the Atlantean heritage of pre-toltec cultures to it.
Otherwise, the argument gets pretty fuzzy: The early mesoamerican cultures (say, Olmecs) preserved parts of the Atlantean technology and culture while lost their language. Then they got conquered by a completely different stem of Atleantean heirs who were basically barbarians but preserved bits of Atlantean language.

[Drake Tungsten]

Unless theirs was a language like Chinese where one word can mean several things

Isn't that the case for every language?

[Wernazuma III]

Originally posted by Gatekeeper

P.S. It's possible that even if records had survived the European arrival, we wouldn't have a full picture of the pre-Columbian Americas. Humans have a tendency to destroy things, it seems, at the slightest provocation. Still, we'd have more than what we have now, had history turned out slightly different.

It's not only possible, we certainly wouldn't have a full picture. Only few cultures had written or painted codices preserving their own past, most information in pre-columbian societies was "stored" orally. Since oral tradition transforms "history" to "myth" after very few generations, most indigenous groups had little "certain" knowledge of their own past further than, say, 1400, in the case of the civilizations of the Aztecs and Inkas a bit further, but even there, most of their tales about the time before, say, 1350 is pretty mythological.

The Mayans living in 1491 certainly knew less about the history of the citied abandoned some 500 years earlier than modern archeologists who systematically researched information on that history. Aztewcs knew basically nothing about the great civilization of Teotihuacán that had ruled Mexico some 1000-700 years earlier and thought it was the place where their gods had lived.

In the case of the Aztecs and Inkas, the arrival of the Spanish meant that their history has been written down for the first time in our, European understanding of history (through the efforts of such great personalities like Bernhardino de Sahagún, Garcilaso de la Vega etc.).

However, direct historical record was destroyed through the burning of many Mayan and Mixtec codices (thank you, Diego de Landa!), though the purpose was less to destroy the historical record in them but rather to destroy the devilish religious content (does that make it better? ). Also, among many peoples where there were no such figures as Sahagún, de la Vega end thelikes rescuing (considerable parts of) this knowledge, we certainly lost much oral mythology that contained some historical core we could possibly restore today.

Resuming, I think Europeans destroyed more the cultures themselves than their history, which had been only rudimentarily recorded anyway, since the concept of "history" was not that important for most Amerindian nations.

[Gatekeeper]

Good posts, Wernazuma III.

That said, I watched the Sci-Fi special (I taped it) after getting home from work early Sunday and, suffice to say, I wasn't overly impressed by it. I'm open-minded, but not to the point that I let my brains fall out. After all, I need them to live the life I'm living now, rather than some past life (a guy on the show was convinced he'd lived as an Atlantean).

Personally, I think human civilization does extend deeper back in time than archaeology and science currently allow for. But was it some space-age, high tech nation? Probably not. More likely a Stone Age or early metal age kind of arrangement.

Gatekeeper

P.S. Also, digging into the human genome might give our scientists a clue as to what we, as a species, have experienced over the millennia.

[Elok]

Originally posted by Berzerker
And they're evidence of an ancient maritime culture in the Bahamas And the Aztecs were latecomers, but they absorbed Toltec culture.

And by "ancient," you mean around the time of Christ, maybe a little earlier. Whereas Atlantis, whatever it was, went down at least 1500 years earlier than that, and that's assuming we accept the typo theory mentioned by Odin. If we take the Platonic account as accurate, these ruins are close to 10K years too late. There are plenty of cultures with advanced engineering abilities around the time of Christ; one in the Bahamas is surprising but not astonishing, and has no ties to Atlantis that I can see. The Aztec question has been addressed already; a single word similarity separated by several centuries means diddly-squat.

The exaggerated-account-of-the-Minoans theory is far more plausible than any of this stuff. I repeat: how the deuce did these people supposedly found an empire two thousand years before any of the rest of humanity even stopped hunting and gathering to survive? And what cause have we to suppose that any story from before the dawn of known civilizations, and hence from before calendars, writing or trade, is accurate?

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by Gatekeeper

Frankly, I'm beginning to think human civilization in the "New World" might be almost as old as in the "Old World." If that's the case, there could very well be remnants of cultures dating back to 5000 BC or earlier.

There could be. But i think it's very unlikely that the conquistadores and the men of the cloth responsible for the destruction you lament would have had much if any contact with any evidence of such ancient civilizations.

If europe had been invaded in the 1500's by a culture that burned all their books and killed most of the inhabitants by introduction of new deadly diseases and harsh enslavement I seriously doubt those actions would have erased much of the evidence of for instance, the mycenaean civilizations or even the much younger roman civilization. Nearly all of the information lost would be of the contemporary culture and it's immediate forbears.

[Vesayen]

People should not label anyone who analyses pre historical evidence as crazy, insane or conspiracy nuts.

Our current beliefs on humans in the immediate past are not based on a whole ton of evidence and it is entirely possibly that people advanced at different rates in certain areas. What we take as fact now, could be wrong.

I am not advocating aliens or anything that insane, merely explaining that the basis on which we rest some of our beliefs from 10,000 to 100,000 years ago is not well founded.

There is PLENTY of room left under the sun and plenty of new discoveries to be made about this era of time. The people who are truly ignorant and crazy are those who accept whatever we supposedly know about that era as fact when there could be new evidence and new discoveries to be found.

[Lancer]

"I am not advocating aliens or anything that insane"


Obviously Vesayen is an alien disinformation hybrid planted among us to say just such, well, disinformation.

[Dinner]

Originally posted by Thorn

but you won't believe me. /fact

Atleast you're right about one thing.

[OzzyKP]

Originally posted by Gatekeeper
The West knows jack about the Aztecs, since it was the West that pretty much wiped them and the Inca out. Only 500 years later have we realized what a screw up that was on our part. Men and women acting in the name of Jesus Christ and the kings and queens of Europe destroyed valuable links to human history throughout the Americas.

Basically, we made it so it'll always be difficult to fully understand just how extensive human civilizations were in the "New World" prior to European intervention.

Gatekeeper

I think the Spanish missionaries wrote several books on Aztec & Incan culture and society back in the day.

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Gatekeeper

Men and women acting in the name of Jesus Christ and the kings and queens of Europe destroyed valuable links to human history throughout the Americas.

To be fair, not all the Spanish Christians were intent on wiping the Aztecs (or other Amerindians) out.

Some of them believed that they possessed souls and should be protected by the Spanish crown.

Unfortunately Spain was far away, and the argument was not won by the likes of Bartolome de las Casas.

I suspect the recent experience of the Reconquista and the threat in the Mediterranean from the Ottoman Turks had a lot to do with the way a non-Christian non-Western civilization was viewed.

Then of course there were the microbes which did an even better job of killing than the Spanish themselves...

[Wernazuma III]

Originally posted by molly bloom

Some of them believed that they possessed souls and should be protected by the Spanish crown.

Unfortunately Spain was far away, and the argument was not won by the likes of Bartolome de las Casas.

Actually he did win the argument, but as you say: Spain was far away. Throughout the colonial period, the Crown issued "Indian protection laws" but they were simply ignored, and the wish to protect the Indians was surely not big enough as to really enforce the laws, spending considerable sums for such an attempt (even more so when the Crown actually profits from the injustice, like with the silver mines).

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Wernazuma III


Actually he did win the argument, but as you say: Spain was far away.

Yes, I should have said, 'won the argument but lost the fight'.

And a Dominican too!


And what have we here- proof the Chinese colonised Ancient Mexico!!!!

[Wernazuma III]

I'm trying hard, but I can't find the bit.

[Wernazuma III]

Originally posted by molly bloom
And a Dominican too!

Scary, hein?