Citadels of Mystery

De Camp was a man of many talents (or a wearer of many hats, at any rate), but he was neither an archaeologist nor an anthropologist. Citadels of Mystery, therefore, reads like what it is: the scribblings of a hobbyist who had sufficient funds and leisure to travel the world taking snapshots of

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ancient ruins. He references many other authors, but De Camp's terse pronouncements are absurdly funny considering how little he knew about the subject himself. "If they sprang from a common civilized center, the Egyptians and the Mayas ought to have shared such things as maize and smallpox," concludes De Camp, blissfully unaware of what the two civilizations did share: an identical solar calendar with the basic length of 360 days, rounding off the year with a short month of five "bad" or "nameless" days. That's an unusually specific similarity between two cultures whose paths, according to the author, never crossed. "Present informed opinion does not take the Diffusionist claims seriously," he declares elsewhere. How chagrined De Camp would be to read the conclusion of a recent study published in Current Biology (October 2017): that, while researchers have found no evidence of genetic intermingling between South American natives and Easter Islanders, they concede that "some cultural exchange occurred between the Americas and Polynesia before the impact of European colonization." In other words, Sprague, the Diffusionist claims have withstood the rigors of science...while you are deader than the dodo. (Interestingly, De Camp's Wikipedia page notes that his parents sent him to a military-style school "to cure him of intellectual arrogance." I offer no further comment, except to say that perhaps the cure didn't take.)

Two stars for the inclusion of Great Zimbabwe and Nan Madol, fascinating archaeological sites about which relatively little has been written.

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