Graham Hancock - Fingerprints of the Gods

Fingerprints of the Gods could not have been written without the generous, warm-hearted and sustaining love of my partner Santha Faiiawho always gives more than she takes and who enriches the lives of everyone around her with creativity, kindness and imagination. All the photographs in the book are her work.

I am also grateful for the support and encouragement of our six childrenGabrielle, Leila, Luke, Ravi, Sean and Shantieach one of whom I feel privileged to know.

My parents, Donald and Muriel Hancock, have been incredibly helpful, active and involved through this and many other difficult times and projects. Together with my uncle James Macaulay they have also patiently read the drafts of the evolving manuscript, offering a wealth of positive suggestions. Thanks, too, to my oldest and closest friend, Peter Marshall, with whom I have weathered many storms, and to Rob Gardner, Joseph and Sherry Jahoda, Roel Oostra, Joseph and Laura Schor, Niven Sinclair, Colin Skinner and Clem Vallance, all of whom gave me good advice.

In 1992 I suddenly found that I had a friend in Lansing, Michigan. His name is Ed Ponist and he got in touch with me soon after the publication of my previous book, The Sign and the Seal. Like a guardian angel he volunteered to devote a hefty chunk of his spare time to helping me out in the US with research, contacts and the collection of documentary resources of relevance to Fingerprints of the Gods. He did a brilliant job, always sending me the right books just when I needed them and finding references that I didnt even know existed. He was also an accurate weather-vane on the quality of my work, whose judgement I quickly learned to trust and respect. Last but not least, when Santha and I went to Arizona, to the Hopi Nation, it was Ed who came with us and who opened the way.

Eds initial letter was part of an overwhelming deluge of mail that I received from around the world after writing The Sign and the Seal. For a while I tried to answer all the letters individually. Eventually, however, I got swamped with the new work on Fingerprints and had to stop replying. I feel bad about this, and would like to take this opportunity to thank everybody who wrote to me and to whom I did not write back. Im intending to be more systematic in the future because I enormously value this correspondence and appreciate the high-quality information that it frequently turns out to contain ...

Other researchers who have helped me on Fingerprints of the Gods have been Martin Slavin, David Mestecky and Jonathan Derrick. In addition I would like to thank my Anglophone editors on both sides of the Atlantic, 10

Tom Weldon at Heinemann, Jim Wade at Crown and John Pearce at Doubleday Canada, as well as my literary agents Bill Hamilton and Sara Fisher, for their continuing commitment, solidarity and wise counsel.

My warmest appreciation also to those co-researchers and colleagues who have become my friends during the course of this investigation: Robert Bauval in Britain (with whom I shall be co-authoring two future books on related subjects), Colin Wilson, John Anthony West and Lew Jenkins in the United States, Rand and Rose Flem-Ath and Paul William Roberts in Canada.

Finally I want to pay tribute to Ignatius Donnelly, Arthur Posnansky, R.A.

Schwaller de Lubicz, Charles Hapgood and Giorgio de Santillanainvestigators who saw that something was badly wrong with the history of mankind, who had the courage to speak out against intellectual adversity, and who pioneered the momentous paradigm shift that is now irrevocably under way.