THE DEMOCRACY CENTER ON-LINE
"THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS - IN BOLIVIA "
Volume 29 - October 6, 1999
Dear Readers:
First, a note of follow-up regarding the unjust jailing of Adela Rojas which I wrote about last time. More than 100 readers responded by sending e-mail messages to U.S. Ambassador Donna Hrinak, calling for an investigation into Adela’s case. The Ambassador responded with a pathetic letter back, comprised mostly of cut and pasted embassy rhetoric about coca cultivation (which no one wrote to her about) along with a brief, extraordinarily inaccurate, representation of the facts of Adela’s case. While she claimed to have investigated the case "carefully", apparently all Ambassador Hrinak did was have embassy staff call the prosecutors and police and then parrot their words. I, and many others, are following up with members of the US Congress and with US media. In the meantime, Adela and her son Josue are now in the midst of their fourth month in jail, courtesy of a US-written law and a US-funded prosecution. Anyone wishing to contact the Ambassador may do so at: "dterpstr@USIA.gov".
For this issue I bring you a very different Bolivian story (another one not about politics), about a scientific expedition underway here which is now drawing international attention and which may well be on its way to proving that the famed lost city of Atlantis was real and was located right here in what is now Bolivia. I hope you find it of interest.
Jim Shultz The Democracy Center
THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS IN BOLIVIA
The lanky Scot rattles off facts and figures at the pace of a machine gun. Jim Allen displays all the signs of a man who has been obsessed with a single subject for nearly two decades. "Plato, volcanoes, Greek systems of measurement…", a trail of seemingly disconnected subjects that finally leads to the subject at hand, Atlantis. It is an obsession that may be on the verge of leading to one of the 20th century’s most stunning discoveries - that the mythic lost city of Atlantis was real and that its remnants lie buried in the center of a dormant volcano on Bolivia’s mysterious altiplano.
Atlantis - the very mention of the name conjures up images of a city lying somewhere at the bottom of the sea, covered perhaps by a glass dome with its residents walking around in a giant oxygen bubble. It is the stuff of Hollywood fantasy and its investigation a sure fire formula for besmirching a scientist’s reputation. Yet, behind the hype of Hollywood imaginations lies a real story, first recorded by a source no less than Plato.
A LEGEND BASED ON REAL HISTORY
Some 400 years before Jesus, the famed Greek philosopher recorded a history passed on from the Egyptians, about a city called Atlantis, one of the most advanced and wealthy of its era (approximately 1260 BC), a place where the very walls were plated with precious metals, gold, silver, bronze, tin, and copper. As Plato tells it, in a single day the city was entirely destroyed by a combination of torrential rains and earthquakes leaving the city buried forever under a vast tomb of mud and rock.
Plato’s account, however, was more than abstract legend, it also described the city in precise detail - that it was located on an island, "the size of Asia and Libya combined" west of the straits of Gibraltar, that it was built on a "smooth flat plain, surrounded on all sides by mountains, rectangular in shape and precisely 3,000 by 2,000 "stades" (a Greek measurement that translates out to roughly 150 miles long by 100 miles wide). Plato described the plane as being extraordinarily high above sea level and crisscrossed by a grid of canals, for irrigation and transport, with the largest of them being 600 feet wide.
ENTER, THE BRITISH INTERPRETER OF SATELLITE MAPS
In the 1970s, Jim Allen was one of the British Royal Air Force’s top experts in the new science of satellite mapping the Earth, as well as a devoted student of ancient systems of measurement. The two interests were married in his discovery of Plato’s account of Atlantis and launched a twenty year, one-man effort to find a match between a two millennia-old history and an actual spot in the Earth’s geography. Allen found that match, more precise than he had even imagined, in Bolivia’s altiplano.
The altiplano is a flat, smooth plain that rises more than two miles above sea level. It’s base is a rectangle, of precisely the same huge proportions described by Plato. It is also one of the only places in the world where the metals described by Plato could have been found (before the Spanish conquest) together in abundance, enough to make credible tales of a city with metal plated walls. Allen’s satellite photos added one more connection, a long straight canal which, when measured, Allen says, turns out to have the same 600 foot width described in the Greek philosopher’s legend.
The British discoverer then added to these facts some reasonable conjecture. Unlike a valley, with natural drainage, the altiplano is like a giant bowl which, in the event or a torrent powerful enough, could easily flood (the most likely source of the plain’s famous Lake Titicaca). While Allen and his associates are seeking specific geophysical and volcanic studies, it is clear that in a plain dotted with dormant, highly explosive volcanoes, the possibility that one could have erupted in a cataclysm of lava or earthquakes 3000 years ago is more than plausible. The Andes have also been, without question, home to advanced civilizations. The Inca Empire, destroyed by Spanish conquest, lasted but a few hundred years and, by almost all theories, was built on the cultural shoulders of other civilizations that existed hundreds, if not thousands of years before. There is also a flurry of theories and evidence that these civilizations had contact, by sea, with the empires of the Mediterranean, giving credence to how the story could have reached Egypt and in turn Plato.
Mention the "lost city’ to many Bolivians and you will hear an old and widely believed legend of a city on the altiplano, destroyed long ago - a local myth wholly separated from Plato’s Atlantis. For Allen and many others these facts and legends unite to create the stunning possibility of a city, on par with the Pharaohs’ Cairo, lost to a single cataclysmic event and remembered only by an ancient Greek history and a blurry Bolivian myth.
REACTIONS, HOSTILE AND OTHERWISE
The reaction to Allen’s findings among archeology’s elite has been to seek to bury it, as deep as Atlantis itself. One British expert called Allen’s work, "the lunatic fringe of archeology." Says a frustrated Allen, "But then I discovered that he called anything he didn’t like, ‘the lunatic fringe of archeology’. If you didn’t call it Atlantis, if you called it ‘Altiplano 3B, then it would be accepted." Allen adds, "People expect to see ancient ruins staring themselves in the face, preferably with the letters A-T-L-A-N-T-I-S two feet high. If it was that obvious someone would have discovered it already wouldn’t they?"
Allen’s latest exploration here this month has drawn a whirl of new findings and high level interest. Plato’s account tells of a city constructed out of red and black rocks, just as those found strewn all over the site the Briton is focusing on, in the center of an ancient volcano 187 miles south of Bolivia’s capital city of La Paz. Many of the buildings of the small town that sits there now are woven from the same red and black combination. Those findings and others were shared last week at a widely attended news conference sponsored by the Bolivian National Congress.
Even the possibility that Atlantis existed in the altiplano has deep meaning for Bolivia itself. For a country that is among the poorest in the Americas, that was stripped of its riches by the Spanish, has had its sea and its farthest corners snatched away by its neighbors, and that, for the rest of the world, conjures up images mainly of women in bowler hats and drug dealers, the possibility of ancient greatness may have seismic affects of its own. Says Carlos Aliaga, a Bolivian engineer who is coordinating Allen´s current expeditions to the area, "Bolivia would have been the capitol of South America. What if so much of what the western world respects originated here in the Andes?" In a season filled with geologic catastrophes around the world Aliaga also sees another meaning, a warning about the power of the earth itself. "If it could have happened to them, who’s next? You have a city that is among the most advanced of its time and then it is gone in a day. A few generations later people don’t even believe it existed."
Allen and Aliaga hope that their latest round of discoveries at the site will begin to draw serious scientific and global attention to their investigations, including a detailed geologic analysis to see if a cataclysm of that size did occur there roughly 3,000 years ago. For the speed talking Allen, rooting out that history will continue to be his full-time obsession. Says Aliaga, "Jim Allen is an example of someone suffering to do the science and find the truth. The answers have been there for thousands of years, waiting only for the precise questions." Here in this sparsely populated, two mile-high desert in a part of the world few people ever think of, a single-minded explorer equipped with a Greek legend, a battery of satellite maps and an obsession to find the connection may end up making one of the great discoveries of the ages.
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