Any SF novels/stories dealing with an advanced civilization on earth that ceased to exist before

[raccoon]

recorded history? It might have been destroyed by some apocalyptic event and nobody knew about it for
centuries...maybe then someone found some artifacts....

[arcane1]

1. Graham Hancock's "Fingerprints of the Gods" sort of does that. Too speculative to be a science book

though technically it is "non-fiction".

I just now realized I'm in the Fiction group, but I'm posting anyway. With the proper dose of salt-grains, it does make for a fun tickling of the imagination

[Moe Shinola]

4. I thought answering this one would be easy..

..color me surprised. World of Ptaavs and Protector, by Larry Niven. I thought this specific genre would be better-represented on my bookshelf. Books like A Canticle for Leibowitz, which are set after the end of OUR civilization, are more numerous. Also in this vein I have World Made By Hand, and The Witch of Hebron, by James Howard Kunstler, The Road, by Cormac McCarthy and The Parable of the Sower, by Octavia Butler.

[Pholus]

2. A stretch, and by far not my favorite SF but there is

Julian May's "Saga of the Exiles" which starts with "The Many Colored Land"

For some insane reason, the "Galactic Milieu" decides to send convicts back millions of years on a one-way time travel exile with no technology and sterilized so that no procreation is possible. The arrivals find that there are a couple groups of aliens camped out on Earth already.

I never finished it, though that could have just been teenaged Pholus' impatience with antiheroes. Maybe I will try again.

[Pholus]

3. There is also Pohl's "Heechee saga"

which people either love or hate. It's a variant of the "cold numbers" theme -- an ancient alien civilization leaves an asteroid full of small spacecraft that are obviously millions of years old. The ships still work but the navigation system is incomprehensible. It falls on a group of the desperate, the "prospectors," to hop in the ships, dial in a destination and hope that it is within the range of human life support on the ship (it sometimes isn't). They are promised a "share" of whatever discoveries they can make. Lots of 70's sex drugs and psychotherapy as the book is narrated as the (again an antihero) protagonist is having a session with his computerized shrink as he sorts through the issues that made him a very rich person on his last voyage.

Lots of mysteries, Pohl answers ALL of them -- most importantly why an alien civilization would even abandon the ships in the first place. It's just that sometimes you may not like the answers -- it's kind of borderline classic sci-fi. I loved them personally....he wasn't through until the adventure ended up being cosmological in what it dealt with.

[SheilaT]

5. Not that I happen to know of.

The closest I can think of is a novel "43000 Years Later" by Horace Coon. This one has aliens coming to this planet 40 plus thousand years from now, and discovering the destroyed civilization of the 20th Century.

Personally, I've long wanted to read or perhaps write a novel that involves the discovery of a very ancient civilization from 65 or more millions of years ago. I would need to research to figure out what sorts of evidence would survive that vast period of time.

Put it this way: what if during dinosaur times, some specific species of dinosaurs had evolved the kind of intelligence to create civilization. Sort of the way one specific species of mammals did somewhat more recently. Anyway, say they were wiped out, along with so much else, when the comet struck some 65 million years ago. What exactly might have been wiped out? Cities? A technological civilization? After all these years, and all the changes in the land, could we possibly recognize the evidence of civilization?

Put it this way: If all humans were to suddenly disappear, what evidence of our existence would remain 65 million years from now?

[raccoon]

6. Nucular (sic) waste, maybe, would remain 65 million years from now? Good question.

I'll look for that book.

[SheilaT]

7. I knew the title, and got the author by going to Amazon,

so it's available.

I'm sure you will find it quite dated, since it was written (hopping over to Amazon to check) in the 1950's. Copyright is 1958. Still, I recall some stuff from it, so maybe I should try to reread it myself.