Kenneth Feder. professor of anthropology at CCSU, is an expert in archeological… (photo: Courant.com)

Kenneth Feder, an anthropology professor at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain, has become a go-to guy for TV show producers looking for someone to debunk bizarre archaeological claims. Whether it’s the odd belief that aliens built Stonehenge, or the one that extraterrestrials built the pyramids, Feder has something to say.

“I am usually the beacon of sanity in a sea of madness,” Feder says. “Sometimes I think I do TV shows too often. Sometimes, I really should ask the name of the show before agreeing to it. Once I did a show, and then found out later it was called ‘William Shatner’s Weird or What?’ That title doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.”

This week, Feder is on safer ground, appearing on a show on the National Geographic Channel. The episode of “The Truth Behind” airing on Thursday, Dec. 22, is titled “The Truth Behind: Atlantis.” It studies believers in Atlantis, and debunkers like Feder. The show sides with the debunkers.

Atlantis — at least, the debunking of the myth of the idyllic city lost in a tidal wave thousands of years ago — is a subject near to Feder’s heart.

“There’s no direct evidence, no artifacts, no buildings out there,” Feders says on the show. “That doesn’t make any difference, because a number of people have such a commitment, such a visceral desire to believe Atlantis was real, it borders on the religious. They’re fundamentalist Atlantis-ologists.”

The TV show talks to many of those believers, including a group that thinks they may have found evidence of an ancient submerged city off the coast of Bimini, and others who study the Mediterranean Sea, especially the area around Crete, for evidence of a sunken civilization.

Feder’s beliefs are scattered throughout the show. “The Atlantis myth is the myth that just keeps on giving,” he says on the program. “It just never goes away.”

Feder, 59, a New York City native who now lives in West Simsbury, says people who put a scientific spin on the Atlantis myth “make me crazy,” especially because the pieces of literature that began belief in Atlantis — Plato’s dialogues “Timaeus” and “Critias,” written about 360 B.C. — were intended as fiction, and depict the residents of Atlantis as villains.

“One thing people tell you about Atlantis, is that it was the perfect society, great technology, they had it all figured out,” he says. “But if you read the original story, they’re the bad guys. They had turned evil. In Plato’s story, Atlantis was like the empire in ‘Star Wars,’ powerful, sophisticated and bad.

“Plato’s whole point was to tell a cool story to teach a lesson. … the same story as in ‘Star Wars’ … about how good overcomes evil even when evil is rich and powerful and mighty,” he says. “Other Greeks who read it understood that. It’s only fairly recently that people started saying, ‘wait a minute, that’s a true story’.”

Feder originally drew the attention of TV producers by writing “Frauds, Myths and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology,” a book that debunks many popular unproveable historical claims, such as the Cardiff Giant, Piltdown Man, the Shroud of Turin and Noah’s Ark. The book is now in its eighth printing.

Feder says that some of his colleagues shake their heads when he does show after show, and tell him that he shouldn’t bother to respond to outlandish claims, that to dignify the conversation with a rebuttal is giving the myths and their followers too much scientific credibility. Feder disagrees.

“I think we abdicate our responsibility by ignoring them,” he says. “Our obligation is to say, look folks, there really is a fascinating, verifiable human past that is much more interesting than the junk that gets made up by popularizers. You don’t have to make up any stories about Stonehenge to make it fascinating.”

But Feder has a good sense of humor about his side job: “There are certain times when I flip on the cable where if it weren’t for psychic kittens, Hitler and Atlantis, they’d have nothing to do shows on because they’re all on one of those topics,” he says on the show.

And he knows that no matter what he says, people who believe in Atlantis won’t budge. He says so on the show, which, in giving him the last word, points out the absurdity of Atlantis claims:

“Unless we dig up every square inch of the Earth’s surface, drain the oceans — hello? — and then dig up every square inch of the submarine sediments, and show, ‘hey, it’s not here,’ you’re still going to end up with people probably saying ‘well, maybe they developed rockets and they went into outer space’.”

Written By: Susan Dunne

Source: The Hartford Courant

Richard Freund talking about the Lost City of Atlantis

A U.S.-led research team may have finally located the lost city of Atlantis, the legendary metropolis believed swamped by a tsunami thousands of years ago in mud flats in southern Spain.

“This is the power of tsunamis,” head researcher Richard Freund told Reuters.

“It is just so hard to understand that it can wipe out 60 miles inland, and that’s pretty much what we’re talking about,” said Freund, a University of Hartford, Connecticut, professor who lead an international team searching for the true site of Atlantis.

To solve the age-old mystery, the team used a satellite photo of a suspected submerged city to find the site just north of Cadiz, Spain. There, buried in the vast marshlands of the Dona Ana Park, they believe that they pinpointed the ancient, multi-ringed dominion known as Atlantis.

The team of archeologists and geologists in 2009 and 2010 used a combination of deep-ground radar, digital mapping, and underwater technology to survey the site.

Freund’s discovery in central Spain of a strange series of “memorial cities,” built in Atlantis’ image by its refugees after the city’s likely destruction by a tsunami, gave researchers added proof and confidence, he said.

Atlantis residents who did not perish in the tsunami fled inland and built new cities there, he added.

The team’s findings will be unveiled on Sunday in “Finding Atlantis,” a new National Geographic Channel special.

While it is hard to know with certainty that the site in Spain in Atlantis, Freund said the “twist” of finding the memorial cities makes him confident Atlantis was buried in the mud flats on Spain’s southern coast.

“We found something that no one else has ever seen before, which gives it a layer of credibility, especially for archeology, that makes a lot more sense,” Freund said.

Greek philosopher Plato wrote about Atlantis some 2,600 years ago, describing it as “an island situated in front of the straits which are by you called the Pillars of Hercules,” as the Straits of Gibraltar were known in antiquity. Using Plato’s detailed account of Atlantis as a map, searches have focused on the Mediterranean and Atlantic as the best possible sites for the city.

Tsunamis in the region have been documented for centuries, Freund says. One of the largest was a reported 10-story tidal wave that slammed Lisbon in November, 1755.

Debate about whether Atlantis truly existed has lasted for thousands of years. Plato’s “dialogues” from around 360 B.C. are the only known historical sources of information about the iconic city. Plato said the island he called Atlantis “in a single day and night… disappeared into the depths of the sea.”

Experts plan further excavations are planned at the site where they believe Atlantis is located and at the mysterious “cities” in central Spain 150 miles away to more closely study geological formations and to date artifacts.

Written By: Zach Howard (Editing by Barbara Goldberg and Greg McCune)

Source: Reuters

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A team of researchers from Spain’s Higher Council for Scientific Study (CSIC) are examining a marshy area of Andalusian parkland to find evidence of a 3,000-year-old settlement.

They believe that Tartessos, a wealthy civilization in southern Iberia that predates the Phoenicians, may have had its capital in the heart of what is now the Donana national park.

Until now historians had dismissed the region as a possible site believing that it had been submerged since the ice age. But it is claimed new evidence suggests the waters may have receded in time for the Tartessians to build an urban centre, which was later destroyed in a tsunami.

The Hinojos marshes, an area close to the mouth of the Guadalquiver river where it meets the Atlantic, have now been pinpointed as the site most likely to provide evidence of a lost city.

Archaeological findings have already proved the existence of Tartessian culture at sites on the opposite bank of the river.

“If they existed on the other side, they must also have been here (in Donana),” Sebastian Celestino, the archaeologist leading the project told the newspaper El Pais.

“There were earthquakes and one of them caused a tsunami that razed everything and which coincided with the era in which Tartessian power was at its height.”

Aerial photos show the existence of large circular and rectangular forms that could not have been produced by nature.

The images, together with literary accounts by ancient Greek geographers have given weight to the theory that a great Tartessian city once existed within the park.

The Tartessian civilization, which developed in southern Spain between the 11th and 7th centuries BC and became rich trading gold and silver from local mines, has long been linked by mythologists to the Atlantis legend.

While the Spanish researchers refuse to speculate on whether they are on the brink of discovering Atlantis others believe their research could be a breakthrough in a centuries old quest.

“Evidence is mounting that suggests the story of Atlantis was not mere fiction, fable or myth, but a true story as Plato always maintained,” said Georgeos Diaz-Montexano, a Cuban archeologist who has spent the last 15 years searching for the submerged city.

“Atlantis is not exactly where the CSIC is looking, but it is close,” he claimed.

The theory is just the latest in a long list of suggested locations for Atlantis, including various Mediterranean islands, the Azores, the Sahara desert, Central America and Antarctica.

Written By: Fiona Govan

Source: Telegraph

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MSNBC.com reported this week that undersea archaeologists have found the ruins of an ancient city on the bottom of the Caribbean Sea, and researchers claim that it is the fabled and lost city of Atlantis. It is believed that the satellite photos show apyramid and other city-like structures, and the researchers believe that what they’ve found even predates the Egyptian pyramids.

The archaeologists have so far refused to divulge their identities or the location in the Caribbean. They say they are raising money for an expedition to confirm their findings.

Source: MSNBC.COM

The Mir-1 and Mir-2 mini-subs, which carried out 52 dives in Lake Baikal last summer, have recently resumed their research in the world’s deepest lake. Research earlier this year discovered evidence that most of Lake Baikal is much younger than the widely accepted age of 25 million years.

“We are planning to start an expedition to search for Atlantis. We will certainly use Mir submersibles during this expedition if they are not involved in other state-sponsored programs then,” Mikhail Slipenchuk said.

He added that the search for Atlantis, as well as studies of Lake Baikal, will be aimed at attracting public attention around the world to the urgent issue of oceanography.

Atlantis is a legendary island first mentioned in Plato’s dialogues Timaeus and Critias, which is believed to have sunk into the ocean around 9600 BC.

Atlantis has inspired literature, from science fiction to comic books to films, for centuries. Its name has become a byword for any advanced prehistoric lost civilizations.

Further details will be available from the conference website.

The website for Heliotopos Conferences, organisers of the conference can be found here.

Lake Atitlan (image souce: Wikipedia)

GUATEMALA CITY (Reuters) – Scuba divers are exploring the depths of a volcanic lake in Guatemala to find clues about an ancient sacred island where Mayan pilgrims flocked to worship before it was submerged by rising waters.

Samabaj, the first underwater archaeological ruins excavated in Guatemala, were discovered accidentally 12 years ago by a diver exploring picturesque Lake Atitlan, ringed by Mayan villages and popular with foreign tourists.

“No one believed me, even when I told them all about it. They just said ‘he’s mad’,” said Roberto Samayoa, a businessman and recreational diver who grew up near the lake where his grandmother told him legends of a sunken church.

Samayoa dived for years at the lake, often stumbling across pieces of pottery from the Mayan pre-classic period. In 1996, he found the site, with parts of buildings and huge ceremonial stones, known as stelae, clearly visible.

He named it Samabaj, after himself, but only in the past year have professional archeologists taken an interest, mapping the 4,300-square-foot (400-square-meter) area with sonar technology and excavating structures on a raised part of the lake bed.

Researchers believe this area, 50 feet below the lake’s surface, was once an island until a catastrophic event, like a volcanic eruption or landslide, raised water levels.

The rising lake drowned the buildings around 250 A.D., before the height of the Mayan empire, and ceramics found intact there suggest the inhabitants left in a hurry.

“We have found six ceremonial monuments and four altars and without doubt there are more, which means this was an extremely important place from a spiritual point of view,” lead archaeologist Sonia Medrano told Reuters in an interview.

The Maya built soaring pyramids and elaborate palaces in Central America and southern Mexico before mysteriously abandoning their cities around 900 A.D.

Medrano, whose work is funded by the U.S.-based Reinhart Foundation, says the island has ruins of small houses for about 150 people and is crammed with religious paraphernalia, leading researchers to believe Samabaj was a pilgrimage destination.

Worshippers probably flocked there from the surrounding area, hiring boats from the shore to row them out to the island for prayer and contemplation, Medrano said.

Excavating in the murky, green water is challenging, with artifacts hard to see and buried under thousands of years of sediment.

The exact location of the site is a closely guarded secret, since the archaeologists want to protect it from looters who fish in the ruins for artifacts to be sold, sometimes for thousands of dollars, on the black market.

Source: Reuters

Written by: Sarah Grainger

Read Original Article Here

Fox believes that the lost city was situated between the east coast of Greenland and the west coast of Baffin Island; a region where he considers the geography to be very similar to that of Atlantis as described by Plato.

Source: NZTV

Note: Video is no longer available.

He said: “The site is one of the most prominent places for the proposed location of Atlantis, as described by Plato. Even if it turns out to be geographical, this definitely deserves a closer look.”

Google, in reply to the claims, says that the undersea grid lines are data artefacts rather than sunken streets.

“What users are seeing is an artifact of the data collection process. Bathymetric (or sea-floor terrain) data is often collected from boats using sonar to take measurements of the sea floor. The lines reflect the path of the boat as it gathers the data. The fact that there are blank spots between each of these lines is a sign of how little we really know about the world’s oceans.” In the past a number of amazing discoveries have been made in Google Earth including a pristine forest in Mozambique that is home to previously unknown species and the remains of an Ancient Roman villa. Geospatial applications like Google Earth and Google Maps are proving invaluable in a varity of uses including scientific, cultural and social endeavours. They are tools to helping us to understand and discover more about the world in which we live. For now Atlantis remains lost but who knows what may be revealed in the future!

Written By: Alistair Langston

Images Copyright Google Earth

The purpose of the meeting was to gather specialists of all the different disciplines involved in highlighting the scientific aspects of this fascinating theme.

Greece was the most appropriate location for hosting this conference, as the ancient Greek great mind Plato formulated the Atlantis hypothesis.

Three years have elapsed since the 1st International Conference on the Atlantis. Hence, not only has this allowed for enough time for people to recollect thoughts on the subject, but also there were strong indications that a possible revolution was in the making.

This was an ideal opportunity to learn about Atlantis and discuss new findings. The conference was held in Greece at the National Hellenic Research Foundation in Athens on November 10th / 11th, 2008. In addition a pre-conference tour was available on Sunday 9th of the Pan-Hellenic sanctuary of Delphi which lies at the foot of Mount Parnassos.

Full details of the Atlantis 2008, second international conference can be found here

A detailed program of events of the conference available here

If you wish to join the Atlantis Conference group with Linked In, click here.

Join the Atlantis Group in Facebook.