Tartaria: Are the cool old buildings in your town the repurposed remains of a lost civilization?

[BluesRunTheGame]

Is our accepted historical narrative a lie?

I’ve stumbled down a stupefyingly kooky rabbit hole of architecture conspiracy theories. It’d be really fun and funny but there are people who actually believe this stuff.

[2naSalit]

1. I watched the first one...

I don't get what he's supposedly implying.

[BluesRunTheGame]

2. He says he believes that it would have been impossible to build those buildings...

…with the technology and manpower available at the time. That they were left over from a previous civilization. Also that there’s some sort of coverup going on because the powers that be don’t want us to know about it.

I’m not sure whether he himself believes what he’s suggesting or he’s just trying to rope in as many suckers as he can.

[Warpy]

4. The latter, I suspect

Experimental archaeology has shown the people of the time with the technology of the time could and did build this stuff.

There are still some mysteries, like the megalithic foundation stones the Incas built on. We know how the stones were fitted, but not how they got there.

We also have no idea how the Neanderthals managed to extract birch bark pitch on an industrial scale to make their adhesive. We know what's in the final product, we know what temperature the bark needs to be held in an oxygen poor environment, we just don't know how they managed to do it.

[BluesRunTheGame]

5. Thing is, though...

…the time frame we’re talking about here, is all within the industrial revolution. The buildings he’s questioning were all built in the late 1800s or the early 1900s. The construction technology in use up to and through the Great Depression would apply to every single structure he discusses. Any of us born during the baby boom could have easily had conversations with people who saw this happen in real time or knew and conversed with others who saw the local physical environment as it was being constructed.

Actual photographs exist of the construction process. I’ve seen written descriptions of how many train loads of material it took for specific buildings. We know where the quarries were for the stone. We know where the steel for the frames came from. We know when and how the railroads were built.

We know that this was before labor unions and labor laws. The workers would have worked sunup to sundown 6 or 7 days a week.

Fancy details would have been produced in shops and factories 100s or 1000s of miles away and shipped in by rail.

The towns were laid out on a grid and the rails, without a doubt, ran right down the middle of the streets as the towns were being built. The material came to within a few feet of the construction site and the buildings went up like an erector set.

None of this should be controversial.

My questions are: Why are these people creating this bullshit? Are they really this stupid? What benefit do they get from this?

[Warpy]

6. Exactly so. And while they didn't have diesel powered equipment

they certainly had steam powered equipment that was easily up to the job of lifting stone into place.

Before the Industrial Revolution, the stone had been lifted into place by men walking circular treadmills, a technology documented by the Roman Empire and likely far older.

It's just amazing to me that these idiots who think the world came into being at their birth don't know any of this stuff.

(FWIW, 3 of my grandparents were born close to the end of the Civil War and gave me their perspective on history)

[BluesRunTheGame]

3. He has over 100 of these videos.

The first one I happened upon was kind of vague. I thought it was about historic preservation or something. But there was also a bit of talk about him “doubting the narrative”. There were things he was obviously confused about. After seeing a few more I realized he was promoting a nutty conspiracy theory.

[muriel_volestrangler]

7. Skeptoid on "Tartaria" and "the Mud Flood"

In recent years, a new alternative world history claim has arisen from the Internet — and it's a doozy. It revolves around an alleged worldwide cataclysm believed by adherents to have taken place sometime in the 1800s, a disaster that wiped out a worldwide advanced civilization and allowed the nations as we know them today to rise up. The event was a "mud flood" in which several meters of mud washed in and buried the ground levels of houses and buildings everywhere. Those cities and towns that were partially buried constituted the worldwide advanced civilization called Tartaria, which had free wireless energy and was populated — at least in part — by giants. It was a civilization "reset": out with the old, in with the new; and that "new" civilization is us. If this sounds too silly to be worth anyone's time to even listen to, then consider the fact that of all the hundreds of topic suggestions in the Skeptoid queue, this is the one that I chose for this week. And I chose it for good reason, so attend.
...
Tartaria and the Mud Flood is truly a 21st century conspiracy theory, in that it exists almost entirely on the Internet — if not entirely. While some parts of the narrative go back centuries — and we'll talk about those — the whole thing as a single consolidated claim only goes back to around 2017. August of 2016 is when the first videos began to appear on YouTube about the Mud Flood idea, and we know this because of tools such as Google Trends. This is a tool that allows you to see the popularity of specific Google search terms over time. When we search for "mud flood" or "mud flood theory" or "tartaria" we learn that the Internet was essentially devoid of any interest in these things until about December of 2018. Ever since then, there has been mounting interest in those subjects among Internet users.

YouTube is what drives a lot of these pop-culture trends on the Internet, so we should expect that when we go to YouTube and do a search for videos on those subjects that were posted in that date range, we're probably going to find at least one early influential video. Long time Skeptoid listeners might remember that this is exactly how we found the original YouTube upload that constituted the "case zero" for the "Finland does not exist" conspiracy theory. Applying that same methodology here, I did find a YouTube user, Philipp Druzhinin, who had been posting videos about a mud flood since August of 2016. At first there wasn't much interest in his videos; they had very low viewership. That is, until December 2018/January 2019 — the same time that Google Trends reported the Internet became aware of the subject. Druzhinin had an enormous spike in his downloads right at that time. Which one triggered which? I don't know, and it doesn't really matter. Lots of conspiracy theorists have made Mud Flood videos, and it makes no difference who was the lucky one to get the early traction; what matters is that this is when the subject first became a thing.

But taking Druzhinin's YouTube channel just as one representative example, the descriptions on his videos and his Facebook postings indicate run-of-the-mill broad-spectrum conspiracy mongering. We find the familiar anti-Semitic themes such as the Rothschilds and George Soros; central banking; the Illuminati; microchip implantation and 5G; Q-Anon; climate change denial; the familiar tripe of who's "really" running our lives; pretty much the entire catalog of modern conspiracy mongering. Make no mistake: Tartaria and the Mud Flood does not come from historians or archaeologists or geologists, it comes from the darkest underbelly of Internet conspiracy theory culture.

https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4765

The Wikipedia and RationalWiki entries on it draw a line (rightly or not, I don't know) to the nutty "New Chronology" of Anatoly Fomenko - and we had a few rounds with a proponent of that on DU - almost 2 decades ago! (or that's what the archives seems to say - how can we really know????)
https://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=209x710
https://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=228x1399

These things often devolve into nationalism - "my heritage is brilliant, it's your heritage that is made up of lies designed to hide the genius of my heritage!!!".