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Book Review of: The Lost Colonies of Ancient AmericaA Comprehensive Guide to the Pre-Columbian Visitors Who Really Discovered America Price: $13.68 Availability: Usually ships within 24 hours | |
Review of
The Lost Colonies of Ancient America, by Frank Joseph (Softcover, 2013) (You can print this review in landscape mode, if you want a hardcopy) Reviewer: Mark Lamendola, author of over 6,000 articles. I've read a few of the twenty-seven other works by Frank Joseph. Of the ones I have read, this is his best one yet. The others that I have read are good, but he took his craft to the next level with this one. In the other books, his frustration over the close-mindedness of the mainstream archeology establishment was a bit too evident to the reader. Not that he didn't have valid points. I just felt he didn't validate them in a convincing manner. Often, he'd cite something that was intellectually dishonest and I was left with a feeling that there was another side to the disagreement or a major point by the opposition conveniently left out. Not this time. For example, he talked about a horse skeleton found in a particular location. The official explanation was that a farmer buried it there. But then Frank Joseph showed (not merely told) why this was implausible in the extreme. It wasn't a brush-off of the official explanation, it was a rigorous examination of the pertinent facts. There was only one correct answer, and Frank Joseph gave it. As for the "other side," Frank Joseph gave us the lame "explanations" as they unfolded in a verbatim interview. The other side did do the brush-off thing. When asked for evidence or to explain why this or that normal procedure (e.g., carbon 14 dating) wasn't done, the establishment "expert" was clearly on the defensive, losing credibility with every sentence he spewed forth. This particular skeleton isn't that of a Spanish horse, but of a horse of a different origin. It predates the official date of introduction of horses of that type to North America. In fact, it predates the arrival of the Spanish to North America. This artifact proves that the Spanish were not the first to bring horses to North America. Horse history in North America is a huge point of contention, as it obliterates the official timeline for when various peoples arrived in North America. For example, where did the natives get their Appaloosa horses that they had long before the official timeline would permit their existence in North America? I'm using the horse issue just as an example to illustrate what Frank Joseph achieves in this book. It's a minor issue in relation to the text as a whole. He has many more examples, and they are just fascinating to read about. Wait until you get to the vocabulary ones; if you haven't been able to let go of the establishment view previously, those examples should do the trick. As with his other books, he provides compelling (in my layman's opinion, conclusive) evidence of pre-Columbus visits to North America by people who didn't walk across the Bering Straits to get here. In this book, he looks at evidence that the Americas were visited by travelers from Africa, Asia, and Europe long before Columbus was born. Established experts don't like to be made wrong, especially when it's done by people they don't recognize as subject matter expert peers. It's embarrassing and it undermines their credibility. So the typical response is to deny, obfuscate, and fabricate. That same response arises in the face of new evidence. This has long been the culture in a wide range of fields, from nutrition to religion. Anyone familiar with the history of western medicine knows that Pasteur and others who advocated the basic hygiene that's now standard today were vilified in their time--how ridiculous to assume that invisible critters were making people sick! The plague hit because drinking water had bugs in it? No way! Prevailing "knowledge" and reality sometimes don't intersect. Understanding that this resistance to reality is normal and ubiquitous among the establishment practitioners in field after field helps us understand that Frank Joseph and others conflicting with establishment archaeology are running into classic primate behavior rather than any real scientific dispute. So we arrive at yet another work that devastates the establishment view of how the Americas were discovered, explored, settled, etc. This book is full of rigorous examination and incontrovertible evidence to back it up. I'm also pleased to see that Frank Joseph kept up his practice of providing ample, high-quality photographs. These are scattered throughout the book and are black and white. Something that is a huge red flag for me is when an author relies on photos that are either grainy or out of focus. But a trademark of Frank Joseph's work is the photos just do not go there. He takes great pains to include only photos that clearly illustrate an artifact or in some other way provide clarity for the reader. As with his other works, this one strikes me as an effort primarily to educate rather than advocate. But I feel this one stresses the former much more than previous works. I might score the previous works I've read had as 90/10 educate/advocate. This one's closer to 98/2. Just my impression. This book consists of an introduction and 14 chapters running 274 pages. As with other works by this author, this one is heavily resourced (19 pages of bibliography/backnotes). |
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