A week ago, I received an email from somebody known as Nazani who had written a review on Amazon.com. It’s of a work by Andis Kaulins, a lawyer and prolific blogger, called Stars, Stones and Scholars. Interestingly, the author reviews the book himself and gives it a five-star rating. It’s also the only review available on the Amazon.co.uk website; Nazani’s is found only on Amazon.com. I don’t understand the workings of Amazon’s review system, so I don’t know if this is usual or not for an English-language work.
The email said that “About 2 weeks ago I posted a negative review of Andis Kaulins’ book “Stars, Stones, and Scholars.” on Amazon.com. Kaulins has responded by threatening me with a libel suit, even though the bulk of my review was quotes from his own journal. I’m not wooried about any suit, but I feel this bully needs to be poked with a stick.’. This is a worrying development. Of course, people can post negative reviews.
What I suspect upset the author was the start of the review (taken from the Google cache of the page): “Andis Kaulins is a nutter. From his Lexline journal…”, with the next four paragraphs of the review consisting of Kaulins’s own words. The final paragraph reads “So there you have it- you name the pre-4000 BC site, and he’s come up with some contorted explanation about why it must be incorrectly dated. Needless to say, he doesn’t accept carbon dating. There’s also a strong streak of “the Europeans/Hebrews did it first” in his theories.”.
Kaulins posted a lengthy and threatening comment to the review, complaining “… Have you nothing better to do with your time? You sometimes allegedly review 2 or 3 books per day, obviously never reading any of them. Besides, calling someone names like this on the Internet is libel per se – a serious criminal offense – made even more blameworthy by your hiding behind an anonymous facade and not posting a single word about the book under review, but simply picking other topics out of context from other sites on the web – thereby posting original copyrighted material not belonging to you at all – a violation of the author’s copyright in addition to you4 libel offense. The question is – for what amount of money should you be sued for these offensive materials and what can you afford? A good jury might take you for every penny you have. Here is the reputation being libelled – it looks to us like a legal action against you will be a VERY expensive proposition for you. …”. There is a lot more to the comment, but I have quoted only the threatening parts.
Presumably under this threat of legal action, Nazani edited her review so that the start now reads: ““Andis Kaulins is a nutter.” I am revising this to say that Kaulins is not nuts, he is a very clever man who spends so much time blogging that it seems unlikely that he has time to conduct actual archeological research. Be sure to read his threatening reply to my review. True enough, I only skimmed through this book, but why would I want to read the work of a guy who spends so much time bad-mouthing credentialed scientists? A scientist would not threaten people who merely quoted a few of his controversial ideas. His scholarship has been criticized by Eric C. Cline (From Eden to Exile,) and researchers at the University of Chicago: […] Kaulins may have a few valid ideas about depictions of astronomy by ancient man and the importance of the Baltic languages, but they’re getting lost in his shrill denunciations of mainstream academia. Read his bio, his own academic background is in law, not linguistics or archaeology.”.
Who is Andis Kaulins, apart from a lawyer who is ready to threaten somebody with legal action over a review of a book, something that strikes me as a bit of an over-reaction? According to LexiLine (“A Renaissance in Learning” – modesty is not a feature of this site!) and a number of other sources, he obtained a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Nebraska (in 1968), a Juris Doctor from Stanford University Law School (1971), was a lecturer at the University of Trier from 1998 to 2002 and is currently (March 2010) a freelance Dictionary Author at Langenscheidt Fachverlag. He is clearly a very intelligent and well educated man. But as Nazani points out, his intellectual milieu is the law, not archaeology. Again, according to LexiLine, he “examines the alleged knowledge of mainstream historical science from the standpoint of evidence”, asking “What does the probative evidence actually tell us about man’s past? Does this evidence support the historical judgments that have been made by the mainstream?”.
Now, these are approaches we see in the works of several Bad Archaeologists. Erich von Däniken and Graham Hancock, for instance, are very fond of holding up evidence as if they are barristers in a court of law, presenting only those bits that they believe bolster their case. This is the reverse of the way real archaeologists work: we try to deal with possible objections to our hypotheses, using evidence that at first sight appears to contradict our ideas and showing why it does not. In other ways, he is like David Rohl or Immanuel Velikovsky, in that if archaeology disagrees with the Bible, then it must be archaeology that’s at fault.
Kaulins has a tendency to prejudge matters. Where there is no historical or archaeological evidence for the existence of a biblical character, he simply identifies them with somebody else. No trace of Moses in the archaeological record? Why, he’s actually known to Egyptologists as Pharaoh Sobekemsaf II of the Seventeenth Dynasty. “Very few equivalences in ancient times are so certain as the equivalence of Ramses II with King Solomon. Indeed, no mainstream scholar has been able to present even the most minimal requisite evidence necessary to rebut my challenge to current chronology”, although the url to that challenge does not work. Where the chronology worked out by ancient historians and archaeologists appears to contradict the fables of the Bible, then a new chronology must be constructed around the biblical system. Unfortunately, many of the pages dealing with chronology are missing from the LexiLine website, which makes it very difficult to find out what the “challenge to current chronology” consists of in its entirety, let alone rebut it.
Simple! Everyone else is wrong. Why on earth can’t we all see that?
Turning to the specific book that Nazani criticised, the basic thesis is outlined on Megaliths.net, “The Megaliths as Astronomy and Land Survey System”. According to the Amazon.com summary of Stars, Stones and Scholars, Andis Kaulins “shows that ancient megalithic sites are remnants of ancient local, regional and worldwide Neolithic surveys of the Earth by astronomy”. Kaulins’s own review of the book on Amazon.com says that it is “a pioneer analysis of prehistoric art, megalithic sites, astronomy, archaeology and the history of civilization”. Looking through the book, we can see that he accepts untenable ideas about the past, such as the existence of ley lines, a fantasy dreamed up in the 1920s by Alfred Watkins. He finds cup-and-ring marks on stones that depict constellations in the southern hemisphere (such as Musca) that were not defined until the sixteenth century: remember that constellations have no objective reality in the sky, that they are arbitrary groupings of unrelated stars and that different cultures make different groupings. His mangling of linguistics allows him to state that the name of Merlin – who is identified as a genius behind megalithic carvings that no-one else has yet recognised! – can be derived from a root “MER- meaning “measure, survey” in ancient Indo-European” when it comes from Welsh Myrddin, probably derived from the Brittonic placename Moridunon, now Carmarthen (Caerfyrddin in Welsh), meaning “sea fort”.
There is little point in trying to do a detailed, point-by-point rebuttal. The evidence simply does not stack up. While Andis Kaulins is evidently an accomplished lawyer and translator, I find nothing in his excursions into archaeology, ancient history and biblical exegesis that is really worth spending time on.
Update
As expected, Andis Kaulins has responded on his website, characterising my post as “libelous”. Of course, this post is not in any sense libellous. It is a criticism of Kaulins’s ideas: ideas cannot be libelled, even under the ludicrous English libel legislation.
I’m not going to do a detailed refutation of what Kaulins conisders a rebuttal of my post, simply make a few comments. Firstly, the post is not and never has been by “anonymous posters” or an “unseen foe”: my name is here for all to see beside my posts. A simple click on the About Bad Archaeology tab will tell the reader a little bit more about the writer. Pointing out that his book does not mention ley lines, he states “many of these [megalighic sites] are land survey markers sited by ancient astronomy”. It’s actually worse than that: at the very start of Chapter 1, he makes the ludicrous assertion that “All Neolithic sites in England and Wales, as marked on the Ordnance Survey map of Ancient Britain, form a map projection of the stars of the northern and southern heavens… Sites later than the Neolithic show that the ancients adjusted for precession of the solstices and equinoxes.”. There is no point in trying to refute this: just ask yourself if the Ordnance Survey Map of Ancient Britain shows “all” the sites in England and Wales that can be dated to the Neolithic period. Even if the term “ley lines” does not occur in the text, we are looking at the same concept of geodetic marking that writers such as John Michell extrapolated from ley line theory.
When it comes to the history of the constellation Musca, it simply had not been defined before 1597/8. That medieval European scholars believed that “the southern heavens contained a constellation near the pole similar to our Bear” has no bearing on the prior definition of Musca. Remember, constellations have no real existence and are defined by human convention; they vary from culture to cultura and Musca is a modern European invention. End of story!
The criticism that I am using nothing more than a folk etymology for the origin of the name Merlin is backed up by a statement in Wikipedia for which there is no citation. No alternative is given in Wikipedia, but the statement seems to come from an entry in Celtnet, which seeks to explain how the name of a poet at seems originally to have been Latinised as Lailoken, representing a Welsh Llallawg, was transformed into Myrddin. It’s that process that is described as a “false etymology”, not the derivation of Myrddin from Moridunum (although it should be noted that the writer proposes an untenably etymology for Myrddin in the next paragraph). The consensus among Celtic scholars seems to be that Merlin is a ‘ghost’ name, derived by false etymology from the Welsh placename Caerfyrddin (English Carmarthen), misunderstood as “Fort of Myrddin” instead of the correct “Fort Moridunum”.
I don’t see any reason to do a rebuttal of the “challenge to Egyptology and Astronomy, which depends on such imponderables as the assertion that “The Horus Falcon Names are a Calendar of Kings”, at least of the Archaic Period, that the cosmetic grinding hollow on the Narmer Palette is actually a representation of a solar eclipse or that, after Huni, Egyptian kings did not use the Horus name. I leave it to others better qualified in Egyptology to point out that these ideas are just plain wrong.
badarchaeology.wordpress.com 
“Bullies” in my view are people who libel people online under the cloak of anonymity. The bullies are not, as you have alleged, those who post under their true identities to the Internet and who then try to defend their reputations against unseen foes.
Bad Archaeology writes: “Looking through the book, we can see that he accepts untenable ideas about the past, such as the existence of ley lines, a fantasy dreamed up in the 1920s by Alfred Watkins.”
In reply, the truth is: In fact, the term “ley lines” is not mentioned once in the whole book, not even in the index, and the term “ley line” is mentioned only twice in the entire book as part of the general source material on megaliths covered in 420 pages – I just ran a Word search of the final .doc manuscript to be sure. I have NEVER “accepted” the traditional view of ley lines, dowsing lines, or whatever other people or you may think them to be – and there is no such statement in my book. I do not discuss ley lines at all in my book. My book discusses megalithic sites and alleges that many of these are land survey markers sited by ancient astronomy. That hypothesis is actually quite simple.
Conclusion: your first criticism of my book is simply false on the facts.
Bad Archaeology writes:
“He finds cup-and-ring marks on stones that depict constellations in the southern hemisphere (such as Musca) that were not defined until the sixteenth century: remember that constellations have no objective reality in the sky, that they are arbitrary groupings of unrelated stars and that different cultures make different groupings.”
In reply, the truth is: You are imputing that I do not know the history of Musca, which is unfortunate, given what I have actually written in my book. As I wrote at page 88 of my book, Stars Stones and Scholars:
“Allen [Richard Hinckley Allen’s, Star Names, Dover Publications, N.Y., 1963, p. 104, ISBN 0-486-21079-0] cites Manilius, and Al Biruni (who repeats Sanskrit legend) and the Anglo-Saxon Manual in this regard. Hinckley writes:
‘Before the observations of the navigators of the 15th and 16th centuries the singular belief prevailed that the southern heavens contained a constellation near the pole similar to our Bear or Wain; indeed, it is said to have been represented on an early map or globe….
[A]t one time in the history of the Creation an attempt was made by Visvamitra to form a southern heavenly home for the body of the dead king, the pious Somadatta; and this work was not abandoned till a southern pole and another Bear had been located in positions corresponding to the northern, this pole passing through the island Lunka, or Vadavamukha (Ceylon). The Anglo-Saxon Manual made distinct mention of this duplicate constellation ‘which we can never see.’…’ ”
Given the assumption that there were ancient seagoing vessels in the Southern hemisphere in the pre-Christian era, something which is very likely documented at least for the Pharaonic era — http://www.reshafim.org.il/ad/egypt/timelines/topics/exploration.htm — which speaks of a journey around Africa, and given the evidence of sea-caapable vessels at Abydos dating to ca. 3000 BC, the major constellations of the northern skies thus may well have had their comparable models in the southern skies, already very long ago. We have no reason to conclude that the ancient tales of Southern constellations are necessarily wrong. Hence, the megalith makers as seafarers may very well have known such constellations — or even created them.
Hence, at p. 292-294 of my book in discussing the Temples of Malta as representing various star groups, I wrote:
“Not all of the representations of stars at Malta find comparables in our modern constellations….”
The stars at the position of the Southern Musca — there also used to be a Northern Musca — have a definite shape which lent itself to being seen as a bee or a fly in the modern era of navigation. I even suggested it might be a chicken at Malta, full well realizing that these stars — which also existed prior to the modern era — may have had another identity to stellar observers millennia ago.”
Conclusion: your second criticism of my book is simply false on the facts. I am aware of the history of the stellar constellations — and I know them far better than most, thank you.
Bad Archaeology writes: “His mangling of linguistics allows him to state that the name of Merlin – who is identified as a genius behind megalithic carvings that no-one else has yet recognised! – can be derived from a root “MER- meaning “measure, survey” in ancient Indo-European” when it comes from Welsh Myrddin, probably derived from the Brittonic placename Moridunon, now Carmarthen (Caerfyrddin in Welsh), meaning “sea fort”.”
In reply, the truth is, as currently written at the the Wikipedia, open for all to read: “The Welsh name Myrddin (Welsh pronunciation: [ˈmərðɪn]) is usually explained as deriving from a (mistaken) folk etymology of the toponym Moridunum, the Roman era name of modern Carmarthen….”
Conclusion: your third and last criticism of my book is simply false on the facts. Myrddin has absolutely nothing to do with “sea fort”, as you allege. That is a “folk etymology”. Obviously, the etymological origin of the name for Merlin will always remain speculative since there is no agreement even about his actual identity, or his actual time of existence, much less about the origin of his name. What I actually did in the book was to write a couple of fun paragraphs about Merlin and it is quite clear that I do not mean “the Merlin” that people are always trying to place in the modern era and I specifically refer to “a legendary name”. What I actually wrote was: “A number of megaliths show a singular sculpting style of absolute genius, perhaps from one artist, who we call Merlin, presumably residing anciently at Kents Cavern. We equate Merlin with the legendary physician Aesculapius of the fabled Argo of Jason and the Argonauts (argos=earth) whose Minyans we hold to be the first men to ever conduct a geodetic survey of Earth by astronomy…. Merlin” as a legendary name perhaps goes back to the root MER- meaning “measure, survey” in ancient Indo-European….”
As for my challenge to Egyptology and Astronomy, the U of Chicago has moved its list from the given link — I am not responsible for that — and that challenge is in fact easily found through Google at http://lexiline.blogspot.com/2005_10_01_archive.html.
It may be – as you write – that the U of Chicago now has people who have criticized some of my work, but when I applied to law school there years ago, that university offered me a full scholarship – tuition plus room and board, which is rather rare. I do not think they were wrong….even though I ultimately chose Stanford. Chicago is a great university – not everyone there is going to agree with me, nor should they. That is what academic dialogue is all about.
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Ah, crying libel – the last refuge of the crazy.
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Wonderful post! Man, it’s nuts how this guy followed you home like a puppy…a puppy that’s incompetent at science.
The thing that I find a unifying concept behind a lot of crank theorists is their insistence that everything you know about history is wrong. The theory I always thought had the most chutzpah (which I am astonished to see you haven’t addressed) is the Phantom Time Hypothesis, which argues that 300 years of history never happened.
Though my concentration is in the hard sciences and not archeology, I always thought that there was something screwy about the pseudohistorians trying to create a new chronology, based on grounds of how the process of reason and science work: the burden of proof is on the person trying to prove everything we know is wrong.
Sure, everyone knows that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, but we also know that many of these people have an extremely naive definition of what constitutes proof – dubious linguistic problems are also a product of “Black Athena,” which is an interesting theory but supported by weak evidence.
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“It may be – as you write – that the U of Chicago now has people who have criticized some of my work, but when I applied to law school there years ago, that university offered me a full scholarship – tuition plus room and board, which is rather rare. I do not think they were wrong….even though I ultimately chose Stanford. Chicago is a great university – not everyone there is going to agree with me, nor should they. That is what academic dialogue is all about.” -Kaulinus
Non-sequitur much? So because they offered you money to go there for an education in law they much think you are a good archaeologist and thus you are correct? I don’t even know why I am trynig to follow your “logic”. There is none.
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“In reply, the truth is, as currently written at the the Wikipedia, open for all to read:”
Really? You’re using Wikipedia as the source of your refutation of a point of argument? Really? If you want to be taken seriously as a scholar, you need to be able to evaluate sources. Wikipedia is fine as a general reference, but if you need to prove a point or need specific facts, it is unacceptable as a source. Try publishing a paper to a peer-reviewed journal with Wikipedia as a source and see what happens.
“but when I applied to law school there years ago, that university offered me a full scholarship – tuition plus room and board, which is rather rare”
Uh…yeah, the University of Chicago respected your work in law…not archaeology – the fact that you were offered a full scholarship in law in now way indicates your abilities in archaeology…which are clearly lacking.
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I’m completely jealous. None of the nutters I’ve criticized on the interwebs has ever threatened me with libel.
Oh. Wait. There was Maria, the girlfriend/secretary for a guy that claimed to have found Atlantis in the Gulf of Cadiz in Spain. Ah… good memories.
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You might be interested in looking at the first comment on this story.
http://www.pasthorizons.com/index.php/archives/11/2010/standing-stone-cup-marks-may-represent-star-constellations
A fan of Andis Kaulins or the man himself.
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I think you’re being unfair to Alfred Watkins. His ‘discovery’ of ley lines was mistaken, and shows that he didn’t understand mathematics very well: the sheer number of possible lines through hundreds of sites virtually guaranteed that some would lie near a line. But it wasn’t a fantasy, just a misinterpretation of the evidence by an amateur archeologist. The fantasy part didn’t come until Michell’s 1969 book The View Over Atlantis.
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I use the word ‘fantasy’ because Watkins himself described how the whole idea came to him as a vision (“in a flash”). Perhaps it is unfair.
I don’s think there’s any suggestion that he had any interest in archaeology before this revelation, although I could be wrong.
Michell’s books are wonderful (?) examples of the late 1960s counter-culture’s attempts to reclaim a mystical British ancient history for its own ends. They are such a mix of different counter-cultural, occult and UFO ideas that they are just about impossible to read.
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https://polldaddy.com/js/rating/rating.jsI hope you’re not saying anything bad about David Rohl! He has, courageously, gone up against the quack-a- demics, in a very methodical and ethical way to prove they’re wrong. His re dating of Egypt is ground breaking and he is in NO WAY a fringe scientist! he is the real deal. Its normal when people like him, who are true geniuses , come along every so often and shake things up. The average academic who just sits on their ass and teach classes and collect their paycheck, never doing anything amazing., These guys get green with envy when the Rohls of the world come along and prove that the other guys didn’t & couldn’t see what he saw. So it makes them feel stupid and they have to attack him. They are afraid their books will be obsolete and ignored so they lash out in envy and jealousy.
Rohl deserves your respect. I know all about his work and him he has never done anything to cut corners or be unethical in any way. He doesn’t believe in aliens or religion.
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So many fallacious arguments in a single thread ROFL
I could quote 4 pages of it, from both “camps”, but that would be a waste of time as experience has taught me dealing with intellectually dishonest and dogmatic people is useless
The worst part being that the designated “fake archeologist” here actually arguments more than the professionals (?) who are supposed to debunk him….
I just have a question – not to answer, rather to meditate to yourselves: what’s the point of crusading against quacks, pseudohistorians and anyone you deem unworthy of the scholarly world… By precisely resorting to what you denounce from these people (bad faith, ad hominem attacks, sophistic tricks)? Is it some kind of monomania, or are you genuinely trying to bring the world Truth and Enlightenment from shady archeological theories? In that regard, I hope you do you realize that the relevance of an anonymous “do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do” scheme on a blog for an already-convinced public is close to zero?
Just food for thought… I was just passing by anyway
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