Hey, did I sign on to a natural history museum or the BPRD?!

So, a little background on my museum work.  I'm being employed to help unearth, organize, and archive any information on a specific donor to the museum and his contributions to the collections.  Said donor's name is Daniel Hector Talbot.  And, not to put too fine a point on it, but the man was totally out of his mind.  In the best, most fascinating way possible.

Talbot was born in 1850, and while still in his childhood he decided that he wanted to be a doctor (not to cure anyone, mind you, simply for the knowledge that he could apply to scientific pursuits.  Translation:  He wanted to take things [read, people/animals] apart and see how they worked).  His father, however, fast tracked him into the family brick making business (which was probably just as boring as it sounds).  Talbot weaseled his way out of that job pretty quickly, it seems, because the next references one sees of him relate to him becoming a lawyer of sorts (where did this law degree come from?  No clue.)

Now at the same time that Talbot had moved into the law business, (1870 or so), soldiers returning from the Civil War were being given, as payment for their service, plots of land and 'scrips', papers which indicated that they owned said plots of land.  Said scrips/land were not to be sold or traded, but Talbot, being the clever and resourceful (amoral?) man that he was, dug out a loophole in the legalese which allowed land scrips to be bought, sold, and traded.  With this to his advantage, Talbot proceeded to amass quite the fortune.  Now wealthy, he proceeded to use his questionably gotten gains to finance all his stifled scientific dreams.  He went on umpteen collecting trips, from Labrador (in Canada), to Mexico (he went through Texas in the process, and can be credited with making some of the first jokes about the state), during which he engaged in the Victorian naturalist's passion of 'if it looks interesting, kill it, take it apart, and preserve it in formaldehyde/stuff it and mount it'.  In reading his journals one can find accounts of days where he and his team shot some forty birds (each!), and were still complaining that they weren't able to get more.  It's astonishing anything was left once Talbot moved on.  He also went to various scientific conventions in Iowa and elsewhere, which results in him essentially photobombing (newspaperbombing?) several important historical events, including the eclipse of 1878, where he rubbed elbows with Thomas Edison.

When he wasn't galivanting around the country doing his best to make things go extinct, however, Talbot largely seemed determined to become the genetic equivalent of Dr. Frankenstein.  He set up an experimental farm outside of Sioux City, where he proceeded to tinker with nature in some very strange ways.  Specifically, be began various breeding experiments.  Some of these actually made sense, such as his managing to develop a breed of 'mule footed' or solid hooved pigs, to combat the fact that pigs with cloven feet were falling ill and dying at the time.  Others, however, were pretty much the stuff of nightmares, such as genetic crosses between bison and zebras or bisons and regular cows, resulting in offspring so big that the mother had to be killed so the calf/foal/unholy abomination could be delivered.  Apparently there is one such mutant offspring stuffed and mounted floating around in Iowa somewhere, though I can't say that I really want to see it. 

But all did not stay champagne and caviar (and genetic anomalies) for Talbot.  In the bank panic of 1893, his bank recalled the loan he had taken out, rendering Talbot abruptly bankrupt with virtually all his possessions to be delivered to the bank.  Several years prior to this event, however, Talbot had bequeathed the whole of his collection and enormous library to the Iowa City University, to be delivered after his death, and this fact caused a legal battle of epic proportions as to who had the rights to the specimens, weird animals, and latin editions of the Necronomicon (I'm kidding about the last one.  Maybe.)  The University ultimately recieved the items, and Talbot slunk into the shadows, dying destitute in a shack in 1911 (he did make a valiant effort to sue the bank and regain at least some money, but this flopped.)

Then, as if this all wasn't dramatic enough, in 1897, three years after his library was absorbed by the university, the library where the books were stored caught fire (in the middle of a convention for firemen, proving that fate has a nasty sense of humor).  Of the multitude of volumes that were lost, Talbot's were some of the few to survive.  In point of fact, the book cases containing said books were the only parts of the library still standing.  (Cue Twilight Zone theme at this point.)

And this is the man who it is my job to research.  Every day reveals some new quirk or questionable behavior on Talbot's part, and every day I feel more like some kind of weird detective *cough* Hellboy *cough*.  I'm just waiting for a contract with Mephistopheles or a book written in some eldritch Elder Tongue to fall on my head.  And even if neither of those appear, there's never a dull moment in the company of Daniel Hector Talbot, the man who proves that truth really is stranger than fiction.

My feelings on Atlantis, or Historian Eruption no. 1

An acquaintance and I got into it recently in regards to the supposed discovery of Atlantis in Spain.  He’s very persuaded by the findings, me, I’m not so sure that Atlantis as we think of it EVER existed.  So let’s examine some facts, shall we?

The story of Atlantis was relayed down, supposedly, from an Ancient Egyptian priest, to Solon, a legendary Greek lawgiver, to Critais, a contemporary of Socrates and Plato, and thus to Plato who wrote it down to plague archaeologists forever more.  Atlantis is described as a city of rings located near the Pillars of Hercules, which is generally accepted as being the strait of Gibraltar.  Said city was supposed to be highly advanced, produced several kinds of metals, and then, shortly after launching an attack on Athens, sunk into the ocean. 

According to Freund, one of several people to posit this theory and the main one behind current explorations, Atlantis is located in the mudflats of a national park in Spain, which was originally a bay.  Some satellite photos have supposedly shown concentric looking rings that might match the tiered description Plato gives.  Then there is the fact that there appears to be remnants of manmade structure in the ocean nearby.  Finally, there are some geological readings that seem to suggest that there is a layer of methane – a gas caused primarily by living things – beneath the surface of the mud flats, and some bumpy marks that might be walls.  A nearby area is also known for producing several kinds of metals, and there is a supposed ‘memorial city’, built in the memory of the supposed Atlantis, located inland from the site.  Two tiny carved figures found in the surface by the team also are used as proof.

As a historian and a skeptic, however, I have issues with all of this.  If you go back and reread the prior paragraph, you will notice that I use words like ‘appears’ and ‘supposed’ and ‘might’ a lot.  And that is not just my bias talking – the documentary that posits all of these elements uses these same subjective terms throughout.  For a start, the rings on the ground are pretty vague and don’t match the overlaid diagram conclusively.  You can see what you want in them.  And is there any real proof that they are manmade?  Nothing yet.  Find me a wall that was made by actual people and I’ll take that part seriously.  One should also remember that the earth is spectacularly good at creating bizarrely regular shapes.  Anyone who has ever been to the Giant’s Causeway in Ireland can tell you this.

The underwater rocks, meanwhile, the actual geologist in the documentary states are natural formations.  One of the other researchers insistently suggests that people might have used the natural rocks to build, but insistence is also NOT PROOF.  The geological readings and methane are also nothing without some actual physical evidence of people living there.  The fact that three kinds of metals are mined in the area is worthy of note, but even that points to an entirely other city, named Tartessos or Tarshish (the former pronunciation is Greek, the latter Hebrew), which the documentary suggests is ALSO Atlantis. 

As for the memorial city and the figurines, the former is impractical and the latter decidedly odd.  That the ‘memorial’ was probably a religious site I do not doubt.  That it was specifically modeled after the destroyed city?  This makes very little sense.  The design provided for Atlantis is round.  The ‘memorial city’ is square.  If one was going to replicate one’s own city, I would think one would bother to match the original shape.  As for the figurines, their appearance has more in common with those found in the Roman and Etruscan or else Mesopotamian civilizations, and were found on the very surface of the plateau, which seems a bit odd given that everything else of supposedly Atlantean origin has been buried for millennia.  It gets even weirder when one considers that the supposed ‘symbol of Atlantis’ that Freund proposes (a man standing next to a series of rings and holding something) is of a decidedly petroglyphic and Neolithic cast, thus not matching the style of the figurines.  Also, the concentric rings in the image have much in common with basic spiral and labyrinth patterns found all over the world, thus making the image nothing special when put under scrutiny.

And if we return to the story of Atlantis itself, there’s the fact that even in ancient times, people were arguing about Atlantis.  There was not necessarily any agreement on just how real Plato’s story was, and whether or not it was bald faced invention.  Also bear in mind that, even if the story’s origin was true, it had been passed down orally through at least four different people.  Anyone who has ever played telephone can tell you that information mutates as it is transmitted.  Now think about a transmission spanning generations.  The story is bound to be inaccurate.  

Add on top of this the fact that there is at least one other area in the Mediterranean that also suffered catastrophic collapse, one that sounds a helluva lot like Atlantis.  Santorini, once called Thera, is the example in question.  Thera suffered one of the largest volcanic eruptions in history, which destroyed most of the island.  In a single day, a powerful trade center of the Minoan Empire sunk into a volcanic caldera and was lost.  Notably, like the Atlanteans, the Minoans were also a powerful trade power, were technologically advanced for their time, at one point were in control of/launched an attack on Athens, and Thera itself was a city of rings, an island surrounded by an island.  The documentary tries to discredit this theory by saying that the collapse of Thera did not immediately destroy the Minoan Empire, but that does not change the reality that the Minoans suffered heavy damage from tsunamis and earthquakes, as well as the loss of a major trade route, all in the course of a day or so, and their culture went belly up and was conquered not long afterward. 

And what is the point of all this ranting?  Well first, I’d like people to not take things at face value.  There may be a city buried in the mud flats, but insisting that it is Atlantis without anything but an arseload of inference and assumption and NO PROPER EXCAVATION is just plain stupid.  I am also of the opinion that reading history too literally, especially a story that was debatably myth even when it first surfaced, is unwise.  There is, as shown, more than one place that has elements of Atlantis.  The supposed city in the Spanish mudflats possesses the correct location, but it lacks concrete evidence aside from some nearby mines.  Thera possesses an accurate course of events and appropriate technology for its people, but its explosion was not an immediate death knell.  What can we deduce from this?  That the story of Atlantis is, most likely, an amalgam of tragedies.  Whether Plato heard the story or made it up from whole cloth, it seems to combine elements from the falls of several different cultures or areas, all of which are cobbled together and passed down to form what we think of as Atlantis.  This does not, however, make the site that may or may not be buried in Spain less important, but it should be valued as an archaeological discovery in its own right and not hampered with the baggage of the Atlantis mythos.  If the excavation team becomes too fixated on the idea that they’ve found a legendary city, evidence to the contrary could be discarded and the whole thing would go to hell in a handbasket. 

As Sherlock Holmes more succinctly puts it:  It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.