American geologist, associate professor of natural sciences in the College of General Studies at Boston University, with a doctorate in geology and geophysics from Yale. From 1990 he examined the Great Sphinx enclosure at Giza at the invitation of the writer John Anthony West and concluded that its weathering profile had been cut by rain, which would place the original carving at 7000 to 5000 BC. He presented the finding to the Geological Society of America in 1991 and defended it against the Egyptologist Mark Lehner at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1992. Schoch’s own claim is narrower than the use later made of it: he argues for an earlier date and a culture capable of stone-cutting, not for a lost high technology, and has said so in print. His later work proposes a solar outburst at the end of the last Ice Age as the catastrophe behind sites such as Gobekli Tepe.
The seismic work and the revision
With the geophysicist Thomas Dobecki he ran the 1991 Sphinx Seismic Survey, the only instrumented measurement in the dispute, published in Geoarchaeology in 1992. His own dating has moved since: the 2016 brackets inside the reprinted KMT paper in Origins of the Sphinx, the book he wrote with Robert Bauval, say he “severely underestimated the age of the original structure” and push the estimate to circa 10,000 BCE. He is candid about the machinery: he calls the weathering rate crude, volunteers that attributing the temples’ granite ashlars to Khafre is itself circumstantial, and writes that “I am not adamant about these dates whatsoever. For me, the important issue is whether or not the Sphinx is pre-Old Kingdom.”
The comet he turned down
Appendix nine of the same book dismantles the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, which would have handed his argument a ready-made catastrophe, and concludes that the trigger is unresolved.
Connections
Sphinx Water Erosion Hypothesis · Graham Hancock · Robert Bauval · 1991 Sphinx Seismic Survey · Origins of the Sphinx · Great Sphinx · Colin Reader · Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis · Mark Lehner · Khafre · Solar Outburst Hypothesis · John Anthony West · Thomas Dobecki