Early life
 | This section is empty. You can help by adding to it. (February 2024) |
David Keys is an English archaeologist. He has been archaeology correspondent for the London based daily paper, The Independent since 1986, as well as a writer on historical climate change, and contributor to television programs on archeological subjects. [1]
His book Catastrophe: An Investigation into the Origins of the Modern World (2000) on a 6th-century AD climatic disaster has had a mixed reception – he and his theory were featured in the 2000 Television pilot to the PBS series, Secrets of the Dead .
| | This section is empty. You can help by adding to it. (February 2024) |
| | This section is empty. You can help by adding to it. (February 2024) |
Keys' book Catastrophe: An Investigation into the Origins of the Modern World (2000) theorizes that a natural disaster caused changes during the 6th and 7th centuries in the whole world, including Christian territories, that contributed to the end of ancient civilization and initiated what is now known as the medieval era. Key's work expands on that by Mike Baillie in Exodus to Arthur: catastrophic encounters with comets (1999) in which the primary evidence for the event is dendochronology (shown by narrow rings around c. 540 CE), as well as acidity in Greenlandic ice cores (suggesting volcanic activity), as well as accounts of historians such as John of Ephesus, Procopius, and Cassiodorus on changes in climate, including dimming of the sun. Keys adds further information from East Asia and develops his own version of the theory; [2] he attributes the changes to a volcanic event in East Asia, in 535 AD, possible at Krakatoa. [3]
Keys' propositions seem not to have been either submitted for academic publication or subject to peer review. No referrable critique is available.
Keys' popular book Catastrophe has been subject to many reviews, readily available elsewhere.
The work has received mixed reviews: Publishers Weekly criticized the book, writing that "Huge claims call for big proof, yet Keys reassembles history to fit his thesis, relentlessly overworking its explanatory power in a manner reminiscent of Velikovsky's theory that a comet collided with the earth in 1500 B.C." [4]
A mainly critical review in The New York Times Book Review by Malcolm W. Browne concluded that "Still, this book must be taken seriously, if only as a reminder that survival in a world threatened by real dangers hangs by a very slender thread". [3]
British archaeologist Ken Dark commented that "much of the apparent evidence presented in the book is highly debatable, based on poor sources or simply incorrect. [...] Nonetheless, both the global scope and the emphasis on the 6th century AD as a time of wide-ranging change are notable, and the book contains some obscure information which will be new to many. However, it fails to demonstrate its central thesis and does not offer a convincing explanation for the many changes discussed". [5] [6] Archaeologist Brian M. Fagan referred to it as "investigative journalism" and "an interesting and, at times, compelling narrative (and good television)" concluding that "Keys is right to draw attention to the importance of short-term climatic change, but, in our present state of knowledge, the deterministic and somewhat sensationally written Catastrophe goes too far." [7]
Keys has warned against the United Kingdom becoming a republic. In an Independent article published a few days after the coronation of Charles III and Camilla, he wrote: "In most examples of the abolition of monarchies in major countries, their demise was followed by a strengthening of the right and the erosion of democracy, justice, equality and liberty." [8]
Fimbulvetr is the immediate prelude to the events of Ragnarök in Norse mythology.
Processual archaeology is a form of archaeological theory. It had its beginnings in 1958 with the work of Gordon Willey and Philip Phillips, Method and Theory in American Archaeology, in which the pair stated that "American archaeology is anthropology, or it is nothing", a rephrasing of Frederic William Maitland's comment: "My own belief is that by and by, anthropology will have the choice between being history, and being nothing." The idea implied that the goals of archaeology were the goals of anthropology, which were to answer questions about humans and human culture. This was meant to be a critique of the former period in archaeology, the cultural-history phase in which archaeologists thought that information artifacts contained about past culture would be lost once the items became included in the archaeological record. Willey and Phillips believed all that could be done was to catalogue, describe, and create timelines based on the artifacts.
In geology, catastrophism is the theory that the Earth has largely been shaped by sudden, short-lived, violent events, possibly worldwide in scope. This contrasts with uniformitarianism, according to which slow incremental changes, such as erosion, brought about all the Earth's geological features. The proponents of uniformitarianism held that the present was "the key to the past", and that all geological processes throughout the past resembled those that can be observed today. Since the 19th-century disputes between catastrophists and uniformitarians, a more inclusive and integrated view of geologic events has developed, in which the scientific consensus accepts that some catastrophic events occurred in the geologic past, but regards these as explicable as extreme examples of natural processes which can occur.
The volcanic winter of 536 was the most severe and protracted episode of climatic cooling in the Northern Hemisphere in the last 2,000 years. The volcanic winter was caused by at least three simultaneous eruptions of uncertain origin, with several possible locations proposed in various continents. Most contemporary accounts of the volcanic winter are from authors in Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, although the impact of the cooler temperatures extended beyond Europe. Modern scholarship has determined that in early AD 536, an eruption ejected massive amounts of sulfate aerosols into the atmosphere, which reduced the solar radiation reaching the Earth's surface and cooled the atmosphere for several years. In March 536, Constantinople began experiencing darkened skies and lower temperatures.
Pseudoarchaeology—also known as alternative archaeology, fringe archaeology, fantastic archaeology, cult archaeology, and spooky archaeology—is the interpretation of the past by people who are not professional archaeologists and who reject or ignore the accepted data gathering and analytical methods of the discipline. These pseudoscientific interpretations involve the use of artifacts, sites or materials to construct scientifically insubstantial theories to strengthen the pseudoarchaeologists' claims. Methods include exaggeration of evidence, dramatic or romanticized conclusions, use of fallacious arguments, and fabrication of evidence.
Graham Bruce Hancock is a British writer who promotes pseudoscientific theories involving ancient civilizations and hypothetical lost lands. Hancock speculates that an advanced ice age civilization was destroyed in a cataclysm, but that its survivors passed on their knowledge to hunter-gatherers, giving rise to the earliest known civilizations of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Mesoamerica.
Prehistoric archaeology is a subfield of archaeology, which deals specifically with artefacts, civilisations and other materials from societies that existed before any form of writing system or historical record. Often the field focuses on ages such as the Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age, although it also encompasses periods such as the Neolithic. The study of prehistoric archaeology reflects the cultural concerns of modern society by showing interpretations of time between economic growth and political stability. It is related to other disciplines such as geology, biology, anthropology, historiography and palaeontology, although there are noticeable differences between the subjects they all broadly study to understand; the past, either organic or inorganic or the lives of humans. Prehistoric archaeology is also sometimes termed as anthropological archaeology because of its indirect traces with complex patterns.
Environmental archaeology is a sub-field of archaeology which emerged in 1970s and is the science of reconstructing the relationships between past societies and the environments they lived in. The field represents an archaeological-palaeoecological approach to studying the palaeoenvironment through the methods of human palaeoecology. Reconstructing past environments and past peoples' relationships and interactions with the landscapes they inhabited provides archaeologists with insights into the origin and evolution of anthropogenic environments, and prehistoric adaptations and economic practices.
According to the Deuteronomistic history in the Hebrew Bible, a United Monarchy or United Kingdom of Israel existed under the reigns of Saul, Eshbaal, David, and Solomon, encompassing the territories of both the later kingdoms of Judah and Israel.
Fingerprints of the Gods: The Evidence of Earth's Lost Civilization is a 1995 pseudoarcheology book by British writer Graham Hancock, which contends that an advanced civilization existed in prehistory, one which served as the common progenitor civilization to all subsequent known ancient historical ones. The author proposes that sometime around the end of the last ice age this civilization ended in cataclysm, but passed on to its inheritors profound knowledge of such things as astronomy, architecture and mathematics.
Michael G. L. Baillie (1944-2023) was a leading expert in dendrochronology, or dating by means of tree-rings, and Professor of Palaeoecology at Queen's University of Belfast, in Northern Ireland. In the 1980s, he was instrumental in building a year-by-year chronology of tree-ring growth reaching 7,400 years into the past.
Bonfire Shelter is an archaeological site located in a southwest Texas rock shelter, near Langtry, Texas. This archaeological site contains evidence of mass American buffalo hunts, a phenomenon that is usually associated with the Great Plains hundreds of miles to the north. This site is the southernmost site that has been located in North America, where mass bison hunts have taken place.
Nazi archaeology was a field of pseudoarcheology led and encouraged by various Nazi leaders and Ahnenerbe figures, such as Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler, which directed archaeologists and other scholars to search Germany's archeological past in order to find material evidence supporting an advanced, Aryan ancestry as alleged and espoused by the ultranationalist Nazi Party.
Jeffrey Goodman is an independent American archaeologist with training in geology and archaeology. His early career was in oil exploration.
The philosophy of archaeology seeks to investigate the foundations, methods and implications of the discipline of archaeology in order to further understand the human past and present.
The Ancestral Puebloans, also known as the Anasazi, were an ancient Native American culture that spanned the present-day Four Corners region of the United States, comprising southeastern Utah, northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, and southwestern Colorado. They are believed to have developed, at least in part, from the Oshara tradition, which developed from the Picosa culture. The people and their archaeological culture are often referred to as Anasazi, meaning "ancient enemies", as they were called by Navajo. Contemporary Puebloans object to the use of this term, with some viewing it as derogatory.
The Late Antique Little Ice Age (LALIA) was a long-lasting Northern Hemispheric cooling period in the 6th and 7th centuries AD, during the period known as Late Antiquity. The period coincides with three large volcanic eruptions in 535/536, 539/540 and 547. The volcanic winter of 536 was the early phenomenon of the century-long global temperature decline. One study suggested a global cooling of 2 °C (3.6 °F).
Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilisation is a 2015 book by British pseudoarchaeology writer Graham Hancock, published by Thomas Dunne Books in the United States and by Coronet in the United Kingdom. Macmillan Publishers released an "updated and expanded" paperback edition in 2017.
Michael R. Rampino is a Geologist and Professor of Biology and Environmental Studies at New York University, known for his scientific contributions on causes of mass extinctions of life. Along with colleagues, he's developed theories about periodic mass extinctions being strongly related to the earth's position in relation to the galaxy. "The solar system and its planets experience cataclysms every time they pass "up" or "down" through the plane of the disk-shaped galaxy." These ~30 million year cyclical breaks are an important factor in evolutionary theory, along with other longer 60-million- and 140-million-year cycles potentially caused by mantle plumes within the planet, opining "The Earth seems to have a pulse," He is also a research consultant at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City.