Ancient World Blog: Andis Kaulins and the Ancient World Blog

The Ancient World Blog is written by Andis Kaulins, a joint EU and USA citizen, born in Germany in 1946. He is a J.D. (Doctor of Jurisprudence), Stanford University Law School (1971).

Kaulins (pronounced Collins) is an alumnus associate of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, an international law firm headquartered in New York City and known as "Paul, Weiss" viz. "Paul|Weiss" in the trade.

As of 2016, all three of the ladies on the U.S. Supreme Court were former (summer) associates at Paul, Weiss.

Kaulins is the former FFA Law Lecturer in Anglo-American Law, University of Trier, Germany. He is the author of books on the history of civilization, ancient scripts and languages, as well as megalithic cultures (see the list below).

Kaulins is also co-author of the world's leading Langenscheidt Routledge German-English, English-German Dictionary of Business, Commerce and Finance, now in its 4th print edition, including modern media editions for handhelds, where Kaulins covers law, patents and intellectual property (IP), information technology (IT), Internet, telecommunications, and new media.

As a college student, Kaulins did summer work for the Nebraska State Surveyor's Office, doing land survey in the field.

Anyone who thinks we do not get "out in the field", like a good "digger", had better look at our Glacier Climbing in Svellnosbreen in Norway in 1977.

The Ancient World Blog, as its name, implies, covers the ancient world.

Why do the above-mentioned specialties serve as a strong basis for analyzing history? There are actually simple answers for that.

LAW is a discipline based on LAW, FACTS and their INTERPRETATION and people who study law learn to analyze and use EVIDENCE. No other academic discipline has courses on Evidence. The law does.

Thinking like a lawyer is called "critical thinking", a type of thinking absent in much published historical work by other mainstream disciplines.

"Critical thinking" does not mean considering one or two alternative solutions to a problem. "Critical thinking" means considering ALL the possible solutions imaginable and the reasons for them. Top "critical thinkers" do that, and they are the best lawyers, best CEOs, best political leaders, best scientists, etc.

TRANSLATION and MULTI-LANGUAGE DICTIONARY WRITING is the professional skill of CONVERTING INFORMATION, i.e. converting one form of communication into another.

People in the archaeological and archaeologically-related professions are trained in none of these, and their work shows glaring deficits in those areas.

LAND SURVEY is the basis for the organization of all modern civilizations. The communities of man asserted territories, and those territories had to be land(marked) in some manner. Many people in the archaeological and archaeologically-related professions have no idea about land survey or territory in the sense of Robert Ardrey's Territorial Imperative.

One can not understand the ancient world without the understanding that LAND was more important than POTS. How many people in archaeologically-related professions recognize that?

We cover modern patents in our work. In ancient days, HUMAN INVENTIVENESS and CREATIVITY were equally important for survival as also for social rank and organization.

INVENTIONS go back a long time and form an integral part of the development of the human civilization, both now and in the past.

It must be noted in this connection that there is a greatly mistaken prevailing assumption in many quarters of academia and elsewhere that "Archaeology and related fields" are the disciplines rightly responsible for reconstructing the history of mankind, whereas, in fact, something quite different is actually true, as e.g. modern genetic research of genomics is showing us.

In an Edge conversation, The Genomic Ancient DNA Revolution: A New Way to Investigate the Past, David Reich of the Harvard Medical School is quoted as follows: "This is what ancient DNA does for us. When you look at the data, it doesn’t always just play into one person’s theory or the other; it doesn’t just play into the Indo-European steppe hypothesis or the Anatolian hypothesis. Sometimes it raises something completely new, like the Denisovan finger bone and the interbreeding of a gene flow from Denisovans into Australians and New Guineans." There are many conflicts between prevailing mainstream archaeological "theories" and genetic evidence.

Archaeologists are trained to dig things out of the ground, fine, that is their role. But over the years they have extended their alleged role far beyond their training and expertise.

For example, little in their training has prepared them to properly analyze prehistoric standing stones above the ground. Mainstream academic attempts to analyze megaliths and megalithic sites have thus far been quite ineffective.

We are in part remedying that problem through our publications of megalithic decipherments, which are all mostly astronomical in nature, and show the "art" of prehistoric man.

We refer here also to our forum topic titled Archaeological Research Basics from Pauketat, which we recommend to all who wish to get a more balanced look at current Archaeology in general.

People who think that Archaeology and related disciplines are "exact" sciences are just kidding themselves.

Post-processual archaeology in fact challenges pretty much everything that previous archaeology generations have produced as "human history", quoting the Wikipedia: "Post-processualism was heavily critical of a key tenet of processualism, namely its assertion that archaeological interpretations could, if the scientific method was applied, come to completely objective conclusions. Post-processualists also criticized previous archaeological work for overemphasizing materialist interpretations of the past and being ethically and politically irresponsible."

It is not without reason that Ian Hodder, Dunlevie Family Professor and Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University, asks on his home page "Do ‘pots’ equate with ‘people’?".
We quoted Hodder some years ago in a posting at LexiLine Journal 539. We wrote:

"Göbekli Tepe is featured at Newsweek online in an article from the March 1, 2010 issue of Newsweek magazine. At History in the Remaking: A temple complex in Turkey that predates even the pyramids is rewriting the story of human evolution, Patrick Symmes writes: "

"The new discoveries are finally beginning to reshape the slow-moving consensus of archeology. Göbekli Tepe is 'unbelievably big and amazing, at a ridiculously early date,' according to Ian Hodder, director of Stanford's archeology program. Enthusing over the 'huge great stones and fantastic, highly refined art' at Göbekli, Hodder -- "who has spent decades on rival Neolithic sites" -- says: 'Many people think that it changes everything…It overturns the whole apple cart. All our theories were wrong." [emphasis added]

"All our theories were wrong." Consider that virtually absolute and timely statement coming from one of the leading personages in modern Archaeology.

Hodder is not just "anybody" out there in archaeology spouting off his opinion. Rather, he is a LEADING archaeologist. Take a look at his Stanford University profile.

We are far more critical than Hodder about many things in the archaeological and related professions. We say:

There is no training in archaeology and related disciplines in the use of "probative evidence" and its proper assessment, which is properly the role of people trained in law, but not archaeology. Our cardinal case is the case of Moses and Exodus, for which read the front page of LexiLine.com.
There is little appreciation in archaeology and related disciplines of the importance of astronomy in prehistoric cultures, and even less astronomical knowledge is taught or available in the field.
The role of ancient sculpting arts in prehistory as a major means of communication is often totally ignored, as can be seen in archaeological interpretations of prehistoric cave paintings, which fail to see that the rock faces or stones BEHIND the paintings are often ALSO carved into shapes, and were so carved before ancient man started to apply "rock art paintings" on top of the carvings instead. Carving and sculpting preceded "cave" and "rock" painting, folks. How can something that simplistically obvious not be universally recognized in Archaeology. It is astounding!
There is little archaeological training in "art appreciation" and how to examine and interpret the art of prehistoric and ancient cultures and civilizations. Much of the ancient world is art, so that training in art is essential.

Why, for example, did the minimalistic "relief sculpture" dominate early stone carvings?

Because it was a darn sight easier than carving the whole stone!

Contemporary researchers who have grown up viewing the obvious plasticity of Auguste Rodin sculptures or an Andy Warhol iconic pop art are not likely to easily recognize dimly scratched relief-type art on megalithic standing stones from 5000 years ago.

The ancients could still track the faint spur of a hunted animal's track in the savanna or forest, and knew their stars, for terrestrial and water navigation.

Today, we hunt down our game in the local supermarket and navigate in a labyrinth of glass, steel & concrete.

The ancient world was a different world.

We thus have good reason to claim that much in mainstream thinking is wrong
and to assert that the Ancient World Blog, now being incorporated into the LexiLine forum at ProBoards, has some very good suggested "corrections" to mainstream thinking.

Short list of books published by Andis Kaulins: