kbs2244 wrote: My feeling as to why it is hard for people to accept the concept of impacts is that it is a hangover from the feeling of superiority and a “we are in control of our destiny” that is a result of the “Age of Science.” The idea that a mindless hunk of rock can come out of nowhere and destroy all our wonderful things is hard to accept.
Yes, recent massive fatal comet and asteroid impacts are hard facts to accept. In sum, while archaeology has been used to track diseases, earthquakes, volcanoes, and climate disasters, we now need the information it can provide to help us deal with a new hazard, the impact hazard.
On the bright side of this we now have the science and space technology to prevent these catastrophes from happening, if we can just get NASA focused in that direction. See the professional engineering reports at :
http://www.nss.org/resources/library/pl ... /index.htm
or my first seat of the pants guess in 1998 about the required detection systems at:
http://www.geocities.com/epgrondine
This was not simply a delusion of grandeur on my part, as you can see from the engineering reports linked to above. I was a space journalist, and could at least form some rough seat of the pants first order estimates.
All of this impact research has consequences far beyond archaeology, as it involves the direction of the expenditures of billions of dollars in space; it will effect billions of dollars spent by the space programs by every space faring nation living on planet Earth. Even small rocket launches cost tens of millions of dollars, and their payloads hundreds of millions of dollars, and we'll need them to deal with these things.
kbs2244 wrote:E P, we have had our differences of opinion in the past, but I do want to say I have finished your book and found it convincing.
Thank you. Please be sure to recommend my book to your friends - I desperately need the sales right now, and since my stroke it would be wonderful if I could get a major publisher to see the book through to a much improved second edition - others will have to carry on the work now.
kbs2244 wrote:I don’t think you wrote half of the words in the book.
Thank you, I didn't.
I always say that I did not write my book so much as assembled it, from the first peoples' traditions and the archaeological record.
When I started my own research, impact traditions globally were pretty much lumped altogether and tied to extremely rotten archaeology and physics. My task was to tie the separate traditions to the separate archaeological discontinuities and also to the geological remains of the separate impact events.
kbs2244 wrote:You obviously wrote it to prove a point and I think you did a pretty good job.
My goal was not simply to prove one point, it was to arrive at an accurate estimate of the impact hazard, in order to get space money spent to save lives. There were going to be three books, "Man and Impact in the Americas", followed by "Man and Impact in the Ancient Near East" (using the Oriental Institute's collection of texts) and "Man and Impact in Europe" - but I got hit with a stroke after finishing the manuscript for "Man and Impact in the Americas".
They say that every good book takes on a life of its own, and in the case of "Man and Impact in the Americas" that was certainly true. As I assembled "Man and Impact in the Americas" the realization came to me that the first peoples' traditions which I was repeating were generally not available. Using the impacts, I could locate the peoples and their traditions accurately in time and space.
Thus in addition to being a catalogue of impact events in the Americas to be used for estimating the hazard, "Man and Impact in the Americas" became the only reliable proto-history for the peoples who lived east of the Mississippi River.
In as much as my grandmother was Thewighili Shawnee, by right the tradition keeping division of the Shawnee, this now has particular meaning for me, and importance in terms of Shawnee access to ceremonial sites in Ohio and elsewhere, what you may know as "Hopewell Hopewell".
kbs2244 wrote:You just have done a very good job of tying together a tremendous collection of references. Congratulations.
Thank you.
You may want to read the updated collection of Holocene Start impact traditions which I passed on here:
http://forum.palanth.com/index.php/topic,1093.0.html
When I started work on this Firestone was going on about supernova with no impact, while I was working trying to clear up some of the archaeological confusion in Clube and Napier's cometary impact work. While Firestone had a stack of money from Lawrence Livermore to work with, Firestone was blessed to gain Kennett's help. I had no help, and worked entirely alone, financing it all out of my own pocket, and got hit with a stroke before I could get it in final form.
My book is better than Firestone's team's in some ways, as all of the impacts in the Americas were documented, not just the Holocene Start impacts. On the other hand, because it covers so much time and so many impact events, it is far far weaker. Now if some major publisher would just pick it up...
If any of you here want personally signed first edition copies of "Man and Impact in the Americas" at the special archaeologica price, pm or email me.
E.P. Grondine
Man and Impact in the Americas
