2006 has been an exciting year for me and I can’t wait to see what the new year brings. Will 2007 be the year that establishes, once and for all, that an ancient race of maritime travelers inhabited the Caribbean long before the Spaniards arrived? It will, if the work of Bill Donato, Greg & Lora Little and others continue at the current pace. With the Bimini Road myth debunked (we should really start calling it “Bimini Wall” or “Bimini Harbor”), the search is now on for other man-made structures below the surface of the Caribbean and interesting possibilities exist at Paradise Point, Proctor’s Road, the Andros Platform and other areas in the Bahamas.
When this year began, I only had a passing interest in archaeology and no idea that history-changing discoveries were being made less than 60 miles off the eastern coast of Florida. Initially my only interest was in the reported discovery of megalithic ruins off the northwest tip of Cubabecause I wanted to use the site as a location in a fiction novel I was (and still am) writing. My research led me to books and articles by Ivar Zapp & George Erikson, Greg Little and Bill Donato and suddenly I was hooked. Spurred on by Web sites like Satellite Discoveries (http://www.SateliteDiscoveries.com) and Google Earth and armed with hydrographic data from NOAA, (http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov) all my free time has been occupied with “catching up” and there still hasn’t been enough time to assimilate it all. As my publisher will attest, my fiction writing has taken a back seat to my non-fiction learning!
So what about 2007? Well, I hope to meet in person some of the interesting folks I met through email during this past year. I’ve had the pleasure of corresponding with Graham Hancock, Paulina Zelitsky, Paul Weinzweig, Manuel Iturralde, Angie Micol, David Hatcher Childress, George Erikson and Bill Donato, among others, and I’d love to meet every one of them! I also hope to participate, in some minor way, in one of the 2007 expeditions to Bimini.
As the curtain drops on 2006, I can’t help thinking about another end that’s fast approaching – the end of the 13th B’ak’tun of the current Maya calendar – the end of one 5,125 year period and, hopefully, the beginning of another. Sure, it’s still almost six years away, but if it’s anything like the Maya predicted, it’s not too soon to start preparing!
Have a very happy and safe New Year’s Eve and please visit The Mega Blog frequently during 2007.