From the Introduction: “Recovering From Cultural Amnesia”

“Much of how we reconstruct the past is based on how we perceive it.”—President of the World Explorers Club, David Hatcher Childress

This book is intended to acquaint readers with the monumental dramas of human achievement and tragedy that played out across our land many hundreds, even thousands of years ago. These grand events are generally unknown, because humanity’s last 25 generations have been schooled to believe that Christopher Columbus was the first and only discoverer of the New World. For them, American history began in 1492, and nothing of equivalent significance supposedly took place here before then.

Such ignorance is understandable, when we learn that the ancient Old World colonizers who repeatedly landed on our shores arrived with their own, very specific agendas. They sought to monopolize American resources of high-grade copper, precious gems, powerful narcotics, agricultural products, or many other native riches, just as modern corporations guard against one another’s industrial espionage. Navigational directions were state secrets, and rumors of boiling seas filled with monsters or sailing off the edge of the earth were deliberately spread to discourage competition. Transatlantic voyages were covert operations undertaken only the most capable maritime kingdoms, each jealous of the other’s success.

But their trade secrets were lost with the catastrophic close of the Bronze Age, around 1200 BC, when its thorough and widespread collapse ushered in a dark age that virtually wiped clean all memory of contact with the Americas. Two millennia of transoceanic accomplishments were reduced to legends, until first the Phoenicians, followed by Latin and the Keltic, sailors found some old sea-lanes back to the Opposite Continent. With the late 5th Century fall of the Roman World, another, deeper dark age ensued to yet again cast its shadow over all previous knowledge of the New World. Scandinavian Vikings made an exception, of course, but like their Bronze Age forerunners, their voyages were mostly described in sagas, the stuff of which myth was made.

It was against this backdrop of cultural amnesia that Christopher Columbus challenged the Atlantic Ocean.

Frank Joseph is the editor in chief of Ancient American magazine and the author of Atlantis and 2012, The Destruction of Atlantis, The Lost Civilization of Lemuria, Survivors of Atlantis, and The Lost Treasure of King Juba. He lives in Minnesota.