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Lands Before Time analyses four kinds of knowledge claims: those explicitly fictional or fabled (e.g. Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis); those hypothesized within a scientific method (e.g. Ernst Haeckel’s Lemuria); those that have been falsified or verified in scientific traditions (e.g. current plate tectonics that substantiates “Gondwanaland” as real, but not “Lemuria”); and finally cosmological belief systems (e.g. Christian theologies of the age of the Earth; twentieth-century Theosophy and Anthroposophy of Lemuria and Atlantis). In the tradition of New Earth Histories (Bashford, Kern, Bobbette, 2023), this project understands historically analysable earth knowledge to exceed as well as include earth science and its natural history antecedents.
How did the linked Antiquities of Atlantis, Lemuria, and Gondwanaland become the landscapes through which human time and deep time were worked out, and by historical actors ranging from geoscientists to Gond indigenous people to Theosophists? How did this political geology translate into actual geopolitics (India’s claim to parts of Antarctica, for example, argued through an ancient Gondwanaland territorial connection)? What can Atlantis, Lemuria, and Gondwanaland yield for the present?
Recommended Reading
Bashford, Alison, Pratik Chakrabarti, and Jarrod Hore. “Towards a Modern History of Gondwanaland.” In “Environmental History”, edited by Simon Goldhill and Georgie Fitzgibbon, supplementary issue, Journal of the British Academy 9, no. s6 (2021): 5–26. https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/009s6.005.
Bashford, Alison. The Huxleys: An Intimate History of Evolution. University of Chicago Press, 2022.
Bashford, Alison, Emily M. Kern, and Adam Bobbette, eds. New Earth Histories: Geo-Cosmologies and the Making of the Modern World. University of Chicago Press, 2023.
© privat
2026/2027
Alison Caroline Bashford, PhD
Scientia Professor of History, Co-Director of the New Earth Histories Research Program
University of New South Wales, Sydney
Born in 1963 in Sydney, Australia
BA (Hons and Medal) in History, University of Sydney, MA in History, University of Cambridge, PhD in History, University of Sydney
Arbeitsvorhaben
Lands Before Time: Atlantis, Lemuria, Gondwanaland
This is a history of three lost worlds: Atlantis, Lemuria, and Gondwanaland. Mythic and real, over centuries they have been created and recreated by the philosophically learned, the geologically and bio-geographically trained, and the religiously inspired. Across registers from the strictest earth sciences to eco-poetry, from the landscape pedagogies of botanical gardens to the design of Gondwanaland theme parks, these lands before time have been persistently linked in modern worldmaking. Why? How? And with what effect on our understanding of the Earth’s past and future?Lands Before Time analyses four kinds of knowledge claims: those explicitly fictional or fabled (e.g. Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis); those hypothesized within a scientific method (e.g. Ernst Haeckel’s Lemuria); those that have been falsified or verified in scientific traditions (e.g. current plate tectonics that substantiates “Gondwanaland” as real, but not “Lemuria”); and finally cosmological belief systems (e.g. Christian theologies of the age of the Earth; twentieth-century Theosophy and Anthroposophy of Lemuria and Atlantis). In the tradition of New Earth Histories (Bashford, Kern, Bobbette, 2023), this project understands historically analysable earth knowledge to exceed as well as include earth science and its natural history antecedents.
How did the linked Antiquities of Atlantis, Lemuria, and Gondwanaland become the landscapes through which human time and deep time were worked out, and by historical actors ranging from geoscientists to Gond indigenous people to Theosophists? How did this political geology translate into actual geopolitics (India’s claim to parts of Antarctica, for example, argued through an ancient Gondwanaland territorial connection)? What can Atlantis, Lemuria, and Gondwanaland yield for the present?
Recommended Reading
Bashford, Alison, Pratik Chakrabarti, and Jarrod Hore. “Towards a Modern History of Gondwanaland.” In “Environmental History”, edited by Simon Goldhill and Georgie Fitzgibbon, supplementary issue, Journal of the British Academy 9, no. s6 (2021): 5–26. https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/009s6.005.
Bashford, Alison. The Huxleys: An Intimate History of Evolution. University of Chicago Press, 2022.
Bashford, Alison, Emily M. Kern, and Adam Bobbette, eds. New Earth Histories: Geo-Cosmologies and the Making of the Modern World. University of Chicago Press, 2023.