According to Bad Archaeologists, there is a series of early modern maps showing continents (usually Antarctica) that their makers ought not to have known about if conventional histories of European exploration are correct. Apparently, these map makers inherited ancient maps from a lost global seafaring civilisation, or maybe they were from cartographically obsessed extraterrestrials, or maybe they date from before the Pleistocene Ice Age, or maybe the earth’s crust slipped out of place, or maybe…

Old maps

Bad Archaeologists are almost as enthusiastic about old maps as they are about biblical and pseudepigraphic texts. They often write about them as if they are mysteries of unknown age, produced by obscure collectors of arcane and ancient wisdom and ignored by modern scholars. Nothing could be further from the truth. We can examine the histories of three of the most frequently cited to see just how wide of the mark Bad Archaeological speculations about them are.

This page was last updated on 28 July 2007
Written by: Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews