Seeing as this is Cecil’s message board, it only seems sporting to include a link to his 1997 column, reprinted in Triumph of the Straight Dope: Is the lost city of Atlantis at the bottom of a lake in North Dakota?
Cecil Adams
This fact and my history of archaeology class keep me going. Nobody believes anything - nor should they - until you dig it out of the ground. But just because it has not yet been dug does not mean it does not exist.
Cecil Adams
OTOH, I am not holding my breath.
**Does anyone know about the alleged Atlantean evidence in the southeastern US? **
Was it just a really scary coincidence that at the moment I read this, the number of your posts was at 666?
Cecil’s somewhat off base with the notion that Atlantis has been reputed to be just about anywhere in the world.
I happened to be tangentially involved with one of the people giving Jacques Cousteau advice about where to film his special about looking for Atlantis. The serious money is on somewhere around the Med. The Canary Islands are about as far out as anyone guesses reasonably, for the fairly obvious reason that Plato didn’t know about very much, very accurately outside that little European/African sea.
Yep, and it is not alleged, either, the evidence is concrete, provable and irrefutable. Atlantis exists, and it’s in Florida.
The problem is, what is our working definition of Atlantis to be?
It needs to be something more than any old city we dig up, whose apparent origins don’t fit the framework of our model of history. This certainly would be an important discovery, but you can’t just say “This was Atlantis.”
We’ve revised the legend in our own time. Now I think there’s a stress on Atlantis being a long-lost connection between Europe (or Africa) and the Americas. It’s a strong desire for a more satisfying history… and an extraordinary claim that would require extraordinary evidence. And the idea that Plato actually knew about Zelitsky’s city? Impossibly extraordinary. Show me.
We have a model of (pre-)history that’s been taking a lot of challenges lately. I would urge that we stick to the evidence we have, and confine our alternative theories to what we can test easily. If we can demonstrate a surprising antiquity and level of sophistication in Zelitsky’s city, that should be shocking enough for anyone.