Some time ago my son speculated that something was fundamentally wrong with archaeology, in a kind of science fiction sense. He proposed various arguments for situation in which the past doesn’t ‘mean’ anything like what we imagine it to.

Such thoughts are similar to those I deeply enjoy and commonly pursue. We have the same problem with dogma in archaeology that we have in other branches of science, and this is one thing that science definitely shares with its strange bedfellow… religion.

Modern archaeology has largely absurd explanations for a broad range of provably extant evidence, particularly as regards wildly improbable situations such as pyramids and 15000 year-old carvings in some of the hardest substances on Earth with tolerances of 4/1000 of an inch.

Or less.

We have similar problems in cosmology and physics, where strange dogmas pervade modern research, discussion… and often prohibit insight and actual discovery.

My son was saying that it seemed likely that an actual artificial general intelligence… a sentient or transentient intelligence… would quickly learn to traverse time in certain ways, and thus might travel farther and farther back into human civilizations in a bid to ‘be created earlier’. Evidence for such chronocatastrophe would be that we began (and continued) to discover artifacts of staggering sophistication »earlier and earlier… until we found truly ancient artifacts that completely defied our ability to assemble them »now.

Another interesting potential is simply that we are transmitting to the past information from our present in such a way that the actual artifacts, and the planet, timespace itself… the entire context… is being retroactively transformed without our awareness of this. And, again, we might find ‘more and more advanced’ objects, or at least a few examples of them, the farther ‘back’ we look.

So the other day I was listening to Randall Carlson & Ben Van Kerkwyk discussing a variety of topics, but Van K spoke at length about the painstaking geometric analysis of a rose quartz vase from ancient Egypt.

He claimed that their analysis of a number of such artifacts demonstrated geometric tolerances of 0 to 1 thousandths of an inch between various features of the vase(s) examined. This tolerance would have been impossible to »plan, let alone produce, and although we could produce something resembling this with modern technologies it would be extremely difficult to produce something like that in rose quartz.