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	ATLANTIS IN THE AMERICAS Could a New Look at Plato Clear up Many of the Mysteries of the Western Hemisphere? by George Erikson
Index of Issue 17

In 1979 when Ivar Zapp first encountered the great stone spheres of the Diquis Delta in southern Costa Rica he was struck by their size and the precision of their construction. These impressive globes, weighing up to 30 tons and measuring up to three meters in diameter, were perfect spheres to within 2 millimeters from any measurement of both their diameter and circumference. Several compelling questions occurred to Professor Zapp and to the University of Costa Rica students who accompanied many of his excursions to the sites of the spheres. Who had built them? How were they built? When?

Academic archaeologists attributed the spheres to the Chorotega Indians and stated that they were constructed 1100 to 1400 years ago. Yet there is nothing else in the record of the Chorotega, and nothing in their tool chest, that would indicate a capability to erect perfect spheres of such magnitude.

Megalithic construction appears to predate smaller and inferior construction throughout the Americas. The earliest known people of the Americas, the Olmec, left images of themselves carved in huge stones at sites ranging from coastal Gulf of Mexico cultures near present-day Veracruz to the highlands of Guatemala (see cover). Megalithic construction did not exist among the ancient Maya people nor did it exist among the more recent Inca, Toltec or Aztec peoples. Their means of reconstruction were far more primitive and were limited to reproductions of past cultures throughout the Americas. From my investigations in Peru I had determined that it was not the Inca who built Sacsayhuaman. The Inca had told the Spanish conquistadors that an earlier race of "gods had given them these structures." But it was not the earlier megalithic building cultures. Inca attempts to recreate megaliths had, in fact and in lore, been met with disasters.

If the spheres were clearly not the work of the Choretega or any here-to-fore known culture in the Americas, the "who" and "when" questions were magnified. Recent pre-Colombian cultures have demonstrated no ability to construct them. South and MesoAmerican cultures going back to 2500 BC exhibited no relationship to the spheres. How old could they be?

Even before these questions could be answered a further question ensued. Ivar Zapp asked his students to question why they were built. What was their function? Since so much thought and effort had gone into the construction, polishing, and geometric perfection of the spheres, what could their purpose have been?

Of course, Professor Zapp was only positing a question-one to which he had no answer. But the question of the spheres and their function came to dominate his thoughts. He pursued the question, much as a detective pursues a crime, meticulously and passionately. Local myth depicted the spheres as having "something to do with stars" so Ivar began mapping the sightlines of the spheres that remained in situ. Eventually he discovered that the sightlines did not correspond to our present "heavens" but that they did, in every instance, describe a geographical directional path to significant sites of the ancient world-including sightlines to Stonehenge in England, the pyramids at Giza, and to Easter Island.

Ivar realized that he was on to something significant. But he was continually frustrated by the assessment of his theories by Americanist archaeologists, who did not doubt his research, but repeatedly asserted that the spheres were "out of context." When "out of context" finds are made, they are dismissed as irrelevant, explained away in some preposterous manner, or ignored because they do not fit into traditional theory. Without a home in traditional theory they have become the fodder of absurd theories, such as interference from extraterrestrials, a most unlikely event considering our present state of evolution. And the most reasonable and likely explanation for their age and existence-sophisticated navigation-had been ruled out of the established paradigm for the Americas.

Thor Heyerdahl had proved that balsa raft navigation was a relatively simple affair when he sailed the Kon-Tiki across the Pacific in 1948. Yet science held on to the conclusions of archaeologist S. K. Lothrop who had declared that balsa raft navigation across oceans was impossible. Lothrop, who had also declared the spheres of Costa Rica "out of context," had been advised by some obscure captain that dry balsa logs took on water after a few days at sea, and without making immediate landfall to dry out, would surely have sunk. What Lothrop did not know was that the Peruvian balsa raft builders always used freshly cut green balsa logs which retained their own sap and never became waterlogged. However, Lothrop's ill-advised conclusion was adopted as doctrine. The implications of Heyerdahl's voyages were dismissed as the accomplishments of a lucky adventurer. The true history of twentieth-century archaeology shows that theory, however bad, usually triumphs over actual evidence. In the matter of the spheres, they were simply ignored, and, like Heyerdahl's raft voyages, regarded as an anomaly.

Was Central America the site if not the center of an ancient seafaring civilization? In the Timaeus and again in the Critias Plato wrote of a vast island-continent, beyond the pillars of Hercules and across the ocean, that was destroyed by a natural cataclysm. It was a cataclysm of such great magnitude that it "swallowed up" the land, called Atlantis, destroyed a great navigational culture, and left only "the bare bones" of that continent. So far-reaching were the effects of the cataclysm that even Athens was affected, and almost drowned under its force. In the aftermath of the cataclysm the surviving remnants of humanity, who had once based their great city-states on a mathematical harmony with the greater universe, lapsed into a primitive state, and, very slowly, began the process of rebuilding civilization.

Plato's rendering of the destruction of the Golden Age has been dismissed as fiction and folly by many, and has been misplaced, geographically, by others. However, his writings have provided us with a window into the magical knowledge of the past. Following his substantial lead, we have found positive and substantial evidence that Atlantis existed in a very real place, the Americas, a continent whose center is situated at the point where the great ocean currents came together and that creatively connected the diverse navigational cultures of the Golden Age.

Plato wrote of Atlantis as a great island-continent, a center of ancient knowledge, with a navigational base at its capital city. The Americas form a great island-continent with an ancient navigational base at its center. Plato also wrote of a Golden Age wherein myth and knowledge of the heavens were recreated in ordered city-states on a peaceful Earth. The sphere-builders constructed an orderly, even precise, depiction of the heavens. Were they descendants of Atlantis? If so, did they leave the legacy of their knowledge to the Olmecs and to the ancient Maya?

Unlike the Europeans that "discovered" them, the Maya were able to construct great city-states that existed for centuries without walls, without defensive fortifications, and with interconnecting roads and canals that beckoned visitors from other cities, and other continents. The keen vision of the Mayan priests, looking through an unpolluted atmosphere, allowed them to view the heavens in three dimensions, a wonderful event that only sailors of the mid-Pacific can now experience. Were they the keepers of the knowledge of the Golden Age-an age of peace and mutual understanding? Did the sphere-builders and the Mayan astronomers once interact with the peoples of other great megalithic sites, among them the builders of Cuzco in Peru, Stonehenge in England, and the Great Pyramids of Egypt?

Through an extensive examination of the archaeological sites of the Americas, and through a reevaluation of mythic tales of cataclysmic destruction-only recently confirmed by Chaos Science-we believe we have uncovered the original site of a civilization long believed to be myth-the site of Atlantis, a continent that flourished in a Golden Age, when man and the celestial universe were in harmony.

In Atlantis in America: Navigators of the Ancient World we have presented the following evidence:

Evidence that the ancient cultures of Sumer, Egypt, and of the Maya, as well as hundreds of others, all contain myths of a Golden Age that perished in a great flood.

Evidence of a continuity of language from Atlantis. The Greeks gave the name Atlantic to the ocean outside the pillars of Hercules, called Atlantis the great empire of the Golden Age, and stressed the importance of Atlas as both the first king of Atlantis, and the upholder of the heavens and of heavenly knowledge? "Atl" is not even a syllable native to the Greek language. Yet it is a key syllable in the Nahuatl and Mayan languages of the Americas. In fact "Atl" means water in Nahuatl. Nahuatl itself means people of the water (sea).

Evidence of sailings to the Americas many thousands of years ago as well as considerable proof of navigation out of the Americas. Not only have traces of cocaine, a derivative of the cocoa plant-a genetically solely American plant-been found in Egyptian mummies, residues of tobacco, in the form of nicotine, have also been found. Again, tobacco is a wholly American plant.

The diffusion throughout the Pacific, by 12,000 BC, of the genetically American sweet potato, and for the spread of the American coconut and American cotton? Land migration theories explain that birds carried seeds and the ocean currents carried floating coconuts. But every attempt to float coconuts across the Pacific has met a disastrous outcome - the sea water softens the coconuts' eyes, and micro-organisms enter the nut and destroy its meat and its ability to regerminate.

If a bird carried the sweet potato from the Americas to distant islands in the Pacific, it must have been a parrot, squawking the name of its burden as it flew, because the original name for the sweet potato in ancient Peru, "kumara", was identical in pronunciation to its name throughout Polynesia. From Easter Island to New Zealand, thousands of years before European ships arrived, this edible root with an exclusive genetic history solely in the Americas, was called kumara. Similar inventions can be argued to be similar responses by a an independent people to similar problems, and man is renowned as the problem-solving animal. But as the noted plant geographer G. F. Carter once observed, "Any fool can make an arrow-point, but only God can make a sweet potato."

Then there is the question of the parrot itself. Genetically solely American, a favorite of Pre-Inca Peruvians (to judge from its appearance in ancient tombs), and too poor a flyer to have transversed oceans on its own, the parrot would have to have traveled with navigators. Separate evolution theory has a difficult task in explaining its appearance throughout Polynesia, Micronesia, and Melanesia as well as its introduction into Asia and the Indian sub-continent, probably around 15,000 years ago.

The Golden Age of man has been dismissed as folly. But if it was truly fiction, how can we explain the existence of highly stylized rock art paintings, an expression of mythic beliefs, of similar design and similar execution (often by spit-painting) in southern Europe at Lascaux 22,000 years ago, in Australia 25,000 years ago, and in the Americas at Pedra Furada 32,000 years ago?

Among the animals depicted in the Brazilian paintings at Pedra Furada were horses and camels, both abundant in the Americas at that time, and both sudden victims of a mass extermination 12,500 years ago, thousands of years before the traditional dates for the invention of culture. Pablo Picasso, after examining the Lascaux (France) artwork of twenty-two millennia past, and comparing it to advances in twentieth-century modern art, exclaimed, "We have invented nothing!" Can historians still insist on man and civilization as recently founded in the river valleys?

As if to remind us of what has been our past fate, and what very likely will be our destiny, we witnessed, in the summer of 1994, the spectacular collision of a series of comet chunks, pieces from the disintegrating comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, with the surface of the planet Jupiter. Jupiter has been described as a "protective" planet, using its gravitational pull to lure comets toward it and away from us. Chaos Science has a different model, one in which Jupiter, from a long range effect, can steer comets in our direction! And a resonance of Jupiter with its moons regularly draws large asteroids, some a 100 kilometers in diameter, pulled out of their fixed orbits, and plunged into chaotic Earth-crossing paths. Is Jupiter a friendly, protective giant? Think again! And appreciate why some "primitive" men built intricate observatories to watch the skies.

How are we to deal with the growing realization that the ancient star temples of MesoAmerica built into their construction a display a knowledge of astronomy and mathematics that we are only now able to duplicate and understand in the last decades of the 20th century? Can we continue to dismiss these people as "gifted savages?" Can we continue to ignore their myths of destruction which spoke of conflagrations and deluges, or their foundation myths which spoke, invariably, of arrivals by sea? What portent do cyclical periods of destruction and rebirth hold for us, now that we know we are approaching the end of a cycle that is at the same instance religious, astronomical (scientific), and astrological (mythic)?

Plato described Atlantis as an island continent with a sophisticated naval culture at its center. A look at the globe shows that only one continent could have had a sea-faring culture at its center. Plato's tale about an advanced civilization, across the great sea, that was suddenly and forever destroyed was off target only in one detail, albeit a major one-"forever" was too long a time. The civilization was destroyed, the capital and all the great coastal cities did sink, but the continent, after great flooding, and great destruction, remained. That continent is what we now call the Americas. But then it was Atlantis, home to a seafaring people who had almost slipped from memory. Plato did not merely preserve their name. He put them in their rightful context... at the heart of the Golden Age of Myth.