Charles Hapgood’s 1966 book, written with his students at Keene State College, arguing that a set of late medieval and Renaissance charts, the Piri Reis Map of 1513, the Oronteus Finaeus Map of 1531, Buache’s chart of 1737 and a group of portolans, preserve source maps made by a maritime civilisation that had surveyed the whole earth before the end of the last ice age.
The method, and its flaw
Hapgood reprojected the maps onto modern grids and matched features. The methodological objection, made most fully by Gregory McIntosh, is specific: Hapgood assumed the hypothetical source maps were accurate and attributed every mismatch to copyist error, which licensed reshaping a coastline until it fit, while setting aside the place names inscribed on the maps themselves, which identify the regions conventionally.
Where it left the argument
The book supplies the cartographic first chapter of Fingerprints of the Gods and the Antarctic homeland of its last, by way of Earth-Crust Displacement. The underlying question it raises is real and is still worked on: Renaissance cartographers did compile from older sources, and what those sources were is a live subject in the history of cartography. That question survives the book’s answer.
Connections
Charles Hapgood · Piri Reis Map · Oronteus Finaeus Map · Earth-Crust Displacement · Fingerprints of the Gods · Graham Hancock · Lost Civilization Hypothesis