Interesting concept – catastrophist archaeology. Looks like some people are awake and not asleep at the wheel. Tomorrow night a 5m cosmic rock will sail past the earth, just 3700 km from the surface. These things are happening on a regular basis as keeping an eye on the NASA near earth objects list will demonstrate – yet mainstream is mainly in denial. This post, filched from https://pdfhost.io/v/JXc9ywWAU_It_V6_Issue_3 … on behalf of the Australian archaeological magazinem DigIt volume 6 issue 3, page 26-39 … is by Marc Young of Flinders University in South Australia. He is also a member of the Comet Research Group, based in Arizona. He starts by saying big impacts, including extinction events such as the dinosaur killing asteroid strike, are few and far between. However, every day upwards of 100 tons of interplanetary cosmic dust falls into the atmosphere as the earth orbits around the sun, becoming trapped in our atmosphere. This is mostly very small stuff but whenever earth passes through a meteor stream with an origin in a disintegrating comet the amount and size of the pieces can increase. Such meteor streams are formed by outgassing comets as well as disintegrating comets as they round the sun and move out again. Meteor streams on a near earth or earth crossing trajectory can include substantial pieces of rock. See Farrin and Orofino, 2021, for more information. Disintegrating comets and their meteor streams can represent significant risk, which is cyclical. Pieces that range between 1cm and 1m frequently impact the upper atmosphere. Occasionally, objects in the range of 10m to 50m are encountered – but currently, as far as archaeologists are concerned, they are not considered relevant. They obviously do not keep up with astronomy which has recognised the problem for some time. Recent events, he goes on, suggest archaeologists need to update in order to these things seriously, and the rest of the article catalogues a number of known prehistoric impact events that have directly affected the human world. However, how can an atmospheric airburst be detectable in the archaeological record?
One suspects it will take a while for archaeologists to catch up with reality as it took almost 50 years for them to take earthquakes seriously as an explanation of site destructions. This was all due to French leading archaeologist Claude Schaeffer suggesting earthquakes had been a major factor at the end of EB, MB, and LB, as it was thought at the time earthquakes were limited and did not affect large areas. Even though the ridicule Schaeffer experienced was prior to Plate Tectonics, which should have brought a reassessment of mainstream thinking on the subject, Schaeffer lost his job and spent most of the rest of his life writing up the various volumes of Ugaritica, on his excavations at Ras Shamra [ancient Ugarit]. No apologies have ever been heard, publicly.
Young kicks off with the February 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor that detonated 30 km above Russia after being seen to race across the skies above the Urals. Even at that height it was able to project 500 kilotons of kinetic energy towards the surface [Kartashova, 2018]. He adds, this was a cosmic impact at the lowest end of the scale. He then adds a few more that are thought to have occurred over the last few centuries, rarely accepted by mainstream. We even have people who believe the 1908 Tunguska airburst was a UFO spaceship exploding. Tunguska flattened approximately 80,000 trees in a remote part of Siberia. The local indigenous inhabitants have even recorded it in their mythology as an intrusion by a shaman into a dispute between two clans.
In August of 1930 three airbursts from three fragments of a parent body exploded over the Brazilian Amazon, burning and clearing swathes of the rainforest. In 1935, there was an airburst over British Guiana which also flattened miles of rainforest. From 551BC to AD2000 the Chinese records show 300 meteorite falls resulting in human casualties or fatalities [Yau, 1994]. Between AD1321 and 1361 several rains of meteors fell over Yunnan Province, killing people and animals . They were witnessed over an area of 25,000km. In AD1490 a rain of iron meteorites fell over Ch’ing-yang killing 10,000 people [Yau, 1994].
Then we have Tall el-Hammam which affected not only the city on the tell but many surrounding towns and settlements [as yet to be excavated][Silvia, 2015]. It is even possible that the catastrophic end of MB Jericho was due to the same meteor airburst, and this is on the opposite side of the Jordan but still in the vicinity of the Dead Sea. The excavators of Jericho, in the 1930s and 1950s, for example, would not have thought of thinking in terms of a meteor airburst. They were out of the question for archaeologists back in the day – but no excuse nowadays. Phil Sillvia has of course written several articles for SIS journals. Evidence suggests the airburst flash boiled the outside surface of pottery, leaving the inside surface untouched. Mudbricks were scorched and boiled according to Young, and the walls of buildings were shorn near their base by the strength of the blast. Including the four or five storey palace. It exploded over the Dead Sea and produced a plume of hypersaline water over a wide area, sterilising the soil. They say no major earthquakes are thought to have occurred contemporary with the airburst, which seems a trifle unlikely as the destruction layers of MB sites across the Levant seem to say otherwise. Jericho is a prime example as in the Bible it was destroyed by a trumpet blast from God. This has always been considered a reference to an earthquake. However, the use of the number 7, as in the 7 circuits of Jericho by Joshua, merely signifies the end – as in 7 days of the week, and 70 years of a human life etc. One has to wonder if the Joshua conquest story is really about a conquest by God rather than by a band of incoming immigrants. If so, the sites could have been destroyed at different points in time but gathered up by a later editor as a single conquest narrative, making use of traditions recording their destruction, such as the lost Book of the Wars of Yahweh.
Young then skips thousands of years to arrive at the Younger Dryas boundary event which is projected to have involved multiple Tunguska like airbursts. One of these occurred over Abu Hureya in Syria, not too far from Gobekli Tepe in what is now Turkey. Young claims it was destroyed in an airburst comparable to the Tunguska event in AD1908 – but 12,000 years earlier, or there abouts. In this instance, the site was reoccupied after a short abandonment, which has been used to reject the hypothesis. Further, Young tells us that temperatures on Greenland at this time dropped suddenly, by 9 degrees celsius, within a single year. Glacial conditions across various parts of the northern hemisphere then lasted for around 1200 years = the Younger Dryas period [see Powell, 2022].
He then discusses science articles that have fallen afoul of the deniers, such as Pinter and Ishman, 2008. Many of these involve local and international teams of scientists yet what they have said is ignore or ridiculed, especially by western archaeologists. Here is Young’s gripe as he is writing in an archaeological magazine. He adds, there seems to be a crusade against pseudo-archaeology as the old guard defend their corral. This is much like the situation when Clovis First came under pressure from more and more younger scientists and archaeologists not so long ago. It took a long while to silence the old guard and no doubt this is what will happen now. Mainstream really do not like the idea of catastrophism – in any shape or form. It imples uniformitarians is a load of cobblers*.
*Cobblers in the old days mended shoes and boots, mainly the soles of footwear that had worn down. Why they should be associated with telling lies I don’t know, although there must be a historical parallel somewhere. Perhaps they had a reputation for exaggerating the need for renovation.