In Search of Ancient North America
by Heather Pringle
John Wiley and Sons, Toronto, 227 pages, $34.95

The Message of the Sphinx
A Quest for the Hidden Legacy of Mankind
by Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval
Doubleday Canada, Toronto, 362 pages, $34.95
reviewed by Geoff Olson



How old is the Sphinx? The question, and its paradigm-busting potential for Egyptology and history as a whole, is the subject of the compelling book The Message of the Sphinx.
    Robert Bauval, a Belgian engineer, and Graham Hancock, former East Africa correspondent for the Observer, have authored previous best-sellers on archaeological mysteries of the ancient world. Here they combine forces to question the conventional wisdom regarding ancient Egypt, and step bravely into the academic no man's land that lies between history and prehistory.
    It was Bauval who made the discovery that the Great Pyramids are exact likenesses, in position and scale, of the three stars in the belt of Orion. Hancock, for his part, claims that the precisely engineered structures of the Gizeh plateau are repositories of complex astronomical data. In The Message of the Sphinx the authors conclude that the Ancient Egyptians were heir to a civilization much greater and older than their own.
    The most compelling support for this theory was announced in 1993, when evidence was presented at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that the Sphinx is thousands of years older than was previously thought. This haunting monument, the authors assert, with its refashioned, possibly once-leonine head, was created in 10,500 BC, and the creators of the Sphinx were survivors of a primordial catastrophe that wiped out most of their civilization.
    Hancock and Bauval point to the "followers of Horus" in ancient texts as dim memories of these survivors, and suggest the ancient Egyptians were inheritors -- not originators -- of their complex cosmology. The pyramids were completed at a later date than the Sphinx, and the authors present the extraordinary possibility that these enormous structures (particularly the great pyramid of Khufu, with its complex galleys and passages) were not meant as tombs at all but as architectural maps of a region of the heavens known as the "duat", centred in Orion: the cosmogenic realm where souls are spawned and return upon death.
    On the less controversial end of the archaeological spectrum, In Search of Ancient North America presents ancestral whisperings from the earth: the voices communicated in "stones and bones and shards" from our own back yards.
    Heather Pringle, a Vancouver-based science writer, spent several years accompanying such archaeologists as Jacques Cinq-Mars to their excavations. Cinq-Mars, like Hancock and Bauval, is flouting the received wisdom on a particular prehistoric date -- in this case, the settlement of the New World. Paleolithic hunters are believed to have crossed the Bering Strait into what is now Alaska, but carbon dating of material from the Bluefish Caves in the northern Yukon indicates a human presence dating back 25,000 years -- much earlier than conservative academics believe.
    Pringle visited a total of eight sites of archaeological interest across the U.S. and Canada, including the hard-scrabble environment of the lower Pecos, with its mysterious rock art (reflections, one researcher believes, of an archaic shamanistic religion inspired by peyote). The "immense geological riddle" of the Hopetown Earthworks gets a look, and so do the killing fields of Head-Smashed-In, Alberta, where great herds of bison were manoeuvred and driven off a precipice. The result is an engaging first-person account of the hard science -- and the occasional magic -- of archaeology.
    One minor theme in Pringle's book is that indigenous peoples, whatever their spiritual bond with earth, were not always particularly eco-conscious. Says one researcher, studying the human effects on islands off the southern California coast: "They were anything but wise conservators. . . . like human beings anywhere, if they had a choice between ideology and eating, they picked eating. And they extirpated species left and right." Writers like Kirtpatrick Sale, Pringle states, "strip ancient tribal cultures of their basic humanity. They transform what were once real men, women, and children into saints and turn the prehistory of the continent into a kind of hagiography. But archaeology offers little support for such a utopia: Indeed it refutes such notions."
    The authors of both books make one thing plain: science is no inviolate set of commandments -- it's an imperfect, very human enterprise that gives us only a provisional snapshot of reality. But it's still the most reliable path to knowledge we've got.

Geoff Olson is a Vancouver editorial cartoonist and
writer whose work is on-line at http://daf.com/~Geoffolson/index.htm.

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