cladking Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Origyptian Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
>
> > And the evidence that
> > all those ancient structures are merely the bones
> > that remain after millennium of picking them clean
> > by locals and bounty hunters makes reverse
> > engineering exceptionally problematic.
>
> This is the problem with Egyptology. Rather than
> factoring in the facts that there is so very
> little evidence and all the so called cultural
> evidence is from tombs they just want to say these
> must also be tombs and mustta been built by ramps.
> Rather than studying these bones to gather the
> data to determine how they were built they study
> the bones of the builders instead.

In my opinion, they're not really studying the "builders" at all, but rather are studying who they think are the builders but who really are an adaption culture who stumbled upon an already ancient infrastructure.


> ...
> The pieces will start falling in place as soon as
> people demand scientific testing and the results
> of the little testing already done. These things
> did not require rocket science to build and they
> don't require rocket science to properly reverse
> engineer.

Before the internet, the discipline was comfortable behind closed doors and was held by a small number of academicians who focused on preserving the self-consistent paradigm. Contradictions in the model were largely ignored as outliers -- why dwell on one 1,600 ton block of stone when there were millions of smaller blocks that could far more easily be accounted for? Don't worry about how they transported all those megaliths despite the lack of any evidence of the required technology; the fact is those things are there and must have gotten there "somehow". Forget about the unfathomable precision; the builders had an unlimited amount of time to work each stone with toothpics and sand until it fit just right. On and on it went, with experts in the humanities and little input from the quantitative sciences. After all, what relevance does an ancient civilization have to modern chemists, physicists, and engineers? Egyptology enjoyed being on the sideline for centuries, off the radar of the hard sciences, until now.

But the internet is changing all that, with its ability to make information available to virtually everyone, no longer requiring any rite of passage to gain access, and the discipline is well-positioned to experience a huge transformation in the coming years. We've only just touched the surface.