No One Here But Us Subduction Zones.

Chapter 10 in, The Lost History of Ancient America, opens with the mysterious Professor Julia Patterson seeming to answer a comment from a reader of Ancient America named Tamara Szalewski. Szalewski mentions an anomaly they’ve discovered while looking at Google Earth and other maps. Szalewski mentions how she wonders if the anomaly is already recorded due to Frank Joesph’s reporting on Lemuria and Atlantis. The area in question is a portion of the Juan De Fuca Plate in Cascades Subduction Zone, 12 miles off the coast of Oregon, between the Coos and Winchester Bays. Since the article is missing any actual pictures of the area in question, I went to Google Earth myself and got some images. Don’t get me wrong, Google earth is a great product, and it can be useful in a number of situations, but it can also be miss understood easily and won’t give a full picture of an area.

This is true even of high resolution satellite or LiDAR images. Because of this, archaeologists who use these images also implement Ground Truthing, which for us means going to the area in question and looking at it. Either we survey it, or excavate it, even underwater. We don’t just take an image at face value.

Unfortunately, the Google Earth images above are only a guess of what Szalewski might be talking about. There is no image provided of the area in question, only a very computer generated one of something looking like a pyramid and has absolutely no context as to what it is or where it is supposed to be.

Patterson does give us some idea of the location, and that’s what I used in Google Earth. To be honest, I don’t see anything that looks like a underwater city. This isn’t to say that there aren’t archaeological sites that have been found underwater, or drowned cities for that matter. But this area, and the Cobb Seamount mentioned in Patterson’s article, don’t appear to be either of those.

Patterson makes the claim that there is physical evidence of a sunken civilization off the coast of Washington State, but fails to cite this or provide any actual evidence in the article itself. This is odd considering Patterson is a professional archaeologist. One would think this would be second nature.

Patterson brings up the Cobb Seamount discovered in the 1950’s. Its mentioned in tandem with David Hatcher Childress and his book, Lost Cities of North and Central America. Patterson makes a reference to a citation that is supposed to be in this book. An article written in 1987 in the Seattle Times. I have tried to find this articles and can’t find anything on it, even in Childress’ book. If anyone can send me copy, that’d be great.

The article is attributed with the claim that there were man-made artifacts found in the sunken mountains. Artifacts dating to 18000 years before present. Plus the mummified corpses of porpoises and whales. I don’t know what one is supposed to do with the other, but there it is. What’s more, no explanation on how the date of 18000 years is reached. Finlay, and this is a repeating error in the book, BP and BCE are not the same thing, and later in the article Paterson swaps the two. Patterson isn’t the only author in the book to make this mistake, but as a professional archaeologist, she would know the difference.

After all this vagueness and lack of connections, or evidence, Patterson makes a astonishing series of statements:

“Perhaps, Washington State’s Cobb Seamount treasure trove of ancient materials is related to Oregon’s underwater feature, which suggests the layout of a huge population center. If so, both sides belong to a high culture that flourished on formerly dry territories, until melting glaciers at the end of the last ice age unleashed catastrophic flooding that elevated sea levels worldwide by 390 feet. (Patterson 2017:78-79)”

“As such, geology is in accord with archaeology when dating the Cobb Seamount artifacts to 18,000 years ago. (Patterson 2017:79)”

The problem is none of what Patterson is trying to conclude is supported by anything in the article. Most of the above statement is unsupported speculation. At no point has anything been provided to even build up the possibility of these claims. Her final claim that geology is in accordance with archaeology is simply out of the blue. Nothing has been provided to back it.

This article is almost exactly like chapter 9, where nothing is provided but speculation. Responsibility for this speculation is passed off onto others via the vague repeating of either a past article or the short retelling of a comment. It’s not an attempt to explain or answer, but to speculate. I’m not overly impressed with this at all, and it’s not at all helpful for building the book’s overall argument for transoceanic travelers in America.

Childress, David

1992    Lost Cities of North and Central America. Adventures Unlimited Press. Il.

Patterson, Julia

2017    Sunken Civilization Found off Oregon? The Lost History of Ancient America, ed Frank Joseph. The Career Press, Inc. Wayne, NJ.