I've always been intrigued by this book

I enjoy reading, but am not a believer in, fringe archaeology.  What's fun is learning all the little tidbits that are stitched together by believers into various permutations of alternate history.  

This 1998 book focuses on the great megalithic sites of the world - all of which can reasonably be shown to be oriented to the cardinal directions of our planet and perhaps to the patterns of the stars.  That doesn't surprise me.  Consider that for perhaps 100,000 years intelligent humans lived in a pre-industrial world which had absolutely dark skies.  And consider that the success of civilizations (at least the ones that prospered) depended on being able to predict seasonal changes.  I should think every major civilization would have respected the importance of the equinoxes and the solstices.

What I can't accept is the unifying hypothesis that these cultures, scattered from Easter Island to Egypt to Cambodia to Peru are somehow all descendants of an advanced pre-prehistoric people who were able to discover astronomical evidence of the precession of the stars caused by the wobble of our planet in cycles lasting 25,000 years.   I see no survival advantage in being aware of that phenomenon.

But... look at all the interesting stuff in the book:

1) Who was this Quetzalcoatl guy?  Aztec tradition included the story of "a white man who came from across the sea in a boat that moved by itself without paddles, and who would one day return..."  This tradition predated the arrival of the Spaniards and in part contributed the success of the conquistadors in conquering their empire.  Note that current dogma is that there was no link between Mexican Aztecs and the Andean traditions in Peru, but the latter culture also has a god Viracocha who, like Quetzacoatl, was a white man, blue-eyed and bearded, who brought culture to them.

2) The Egyptian symbol of Akeru showed two lions back-to-back associated with the rising and setting sun at the solstices.  The Maya had back-to-back pumas at Uxmal aligned to the summer solstice sunset.

3)  "Hindus believe that those of us who inhabit the earth today are living through the unfortunate and tumultuous Kali Yuga, supposedly the last and most decadent of the 'ages of man' in the present Kalpa, or cycle of creation.  According to Indian astronomical and calendrical calculations, the Kali Yuga 'began' in 3100 BC, a date that coincides almost to the year with the ancient Mayan computation of the beginning of the Fifth Sun [our present epoch]."

4) So many similar flood myths.  "Before the flood came [Vishnu] warned Maju to build a great survival ship and ordered him 'to load it with two of every living species and the seeds of every plant, and then to go on board himself.  When the waters rose the god towed Mau's ark for many days and nights until it finally came to rest on the slopes of a high mountain."  Compare that not only to the Bible but to the epic of Gilgamesh.

5) "What we accept without question as 'reality' the Rishis [the sages of ancient India] described as 'the world of form.'  They claimed to have discovered that this world is not in fact real at all but rather a sinister sort of virtual reality game in which we are all players, a complex and cunning illusion... in Mexico, too, life was understood not to be real but only a dream from which the soul awakes on death.  Likewise, in the supposedly unrelated Hermetic Texts, compiled in Alexandria in Egypt at around the second century AD, we read that "all things on earth are unreal... Illlusion is a thing wrought by the working of Reality.'"

6) The Rongorongo glyphs of Easter Island appear to be an undecipherable language - a rare accomplishment for a population thought to number only several thousand individuals.  And these same people erected 80-ton statues that presumably were "walked" across the island from their quarry sites, and then somehow placed 11-ton "hats" made of a different stone on top of these statues.  The eyes of these Moai, BTW, are oriented to gaze upward at the stars.  

7) "Ra" is the name of the Egyptian sun god.  The word "raa" in the Easter Island language means "sun."  Just a coincidence, obviously...  But the authors also note "We see no real difference between the reed floats on which Ra crossed the sky in ancient Egypt and the reed floats of the sun-god Raa, used by the hopu manu of Easter Island to cross the waters..." and the reed boats of the two cultures are similar.  

8)  The "twelve-angled-stone" of Cuzco [right] is amazing.  I can see how it could be done by rubbing stones against one another until the interfaces are ground down to a uniformity, but it's still awesome.

9) And the metal "clamps" that were used in megalithic construction around the world share some similarities.

So much interesting stuff to read about.  So little time.  This was my final re-read of this book, which now goes to our Friends of the Library booksale.