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Did Old World
peoples create the antiquities of North America?
Although the answer to the
above question might seem self-evident, this has not always been the
case. While a reasonable person might describe the romantics
--who believed the antiquities of this hemisphere were largely created
by Old World visitors-- as simply silly (if not racist in that they
denied the Native inhabitants of North America the ability and
motivation to create monumental architecture), the truth is that huge
amounts of ink have been wasted attempting to prove the absurd.
By 1789, for example,
speculation over the origin of the inscriptions on Dighton Rock
(shown below) on the Massachusetts coast had already been underway for
over a century. George Washington, as the anecdote below
relates, was one of the few still fluent in some of the Native ways:
Volume 10, Massachusetts Historical Society
Proceedings; 1868; p.114-116; a letter dated August 10, 1809 from John
Lathrop to Judge John Davis:
“Dear Sir,
--Agreeably to your request, I hasten to communicate the substance of a
conversation with the late President Washington, relating to the
inscription on a rock in Taunton river, which has been the subject of
interesting research, from the first settlement of Europeans in this
part of America.  The
learned have been divided in opinion respecting the origin of that
inscription: some suppose the origin to be Oriental, and some
Occidental.
Many Gentlemen acquainted with the Oriental languages
have thought several of the characters in the inscription bear a great
resemblance to some characters in the Oriental languages, particularly
the Punic. From the valuable communication which was made by you,
at the last meeting of the Academy, I perceive you favour the opinion
that the inscription was made by the native Indians of our country.
Having produced several important authorities, you mention the opinion
of the late President Washington.
As I am the only surviving member of the Corporation
present at the time when the late President gave the opinion you
mention, I now state to you the conversation on that subject. When that
illustrious Man was on a visit to this part of the United States, in the
autumn of 1789, the then President and Fellows of Harvard College waited
on him with an address, and invited him to visit the University in
Cambridge. While in the Musaeum I observed he fixed his eye on the full
length copy of the inscription on a rock in Taunton river, taken by
James Withrop, Esqr, and is exhibited in the Musaeum for the inspection
of the curious. As I had the honour to be near the President at that
moment, I took the liberty to ask him whether he had met with any thing
of the kind; and I ventured to give the opinion which several learned
men had entertained with respect to the origin of the inscription. I
observed that several of the characters were thought very much to
resemble Oriental characters; and that as the Phenicians, ‘as early as
the days of Moses are said to have extended their navigation beyond the
Pillars of Hercules,’ it was thought that some of those early navigators
may have either been driven off the coast of Africa, and were not able
to return, or that they willingly adventured, until they reached this
continent; and thus it was found, ‘Thule was no longer the last of
lands,’ and thus ‘America was early known to the ancients.’
 Some
Phenician vessels, I added, it was conjectured had passed the island now
called Rhode-Island, and proceeded up the river, now called Taunton
river, nearly to the head of navigation. While detained by winds, or
other causes, now unknown, the people, it has been conjectured, made the
inscription, now to be seen on the face of the rock, and which we may
suppose to be a record of their fortunes, or of their fate.
After I had given the above account the President
smiled, and said he believed the learned Gentlemen whom I had mentioned
were mistaken: and added, that in the younger part of his life, his
business called him to be very much in the wilderness of Virginia, which
gave him an opportunity to become acquainted with many customs and
practices of the Indians. The Indians he said had a way of writing and
recording their transactions, either in war or hunting. When they wished
to make any such record, or leave an account of their exploits to any
who might come after them, they scraped off the outer back of a tree,
and with a vegetable ink, or a little paint which they carried with
them, on the smooth surface, they wrote, in a way that was generally
understood by the people of their respective tribes. As he had so often
examined the rude way of writing practised by the Indians of Virginia,
and observed many of the characters on the inscription then before him,
so nearly resembled the characters used by the Indians, he had no doubt
the inscription was made, long ago, by some natives of America.”
A few generations
later, Daniel Brinton, fully conversant with Native ways, was
typical of the serious researchers of his day who still
knew Dighton Rock's inscription was Native, a fact which has
since become more obscure with each passing decade:
The myths of the New world; a treatise on
the symbolism and mythology of the red race of America; Daniel Brinton;
1876
"This kind of writing, if it deserves
the name, was common throughout the continent, and many specimens of it,
scratched on the plane surfaces of stones, have been preserved to the
present day. Such is the once celebrated inscription on Dighton Rock,
Massachusetts . . ."
Dighton Rock is an example of
the sort of controversy which raged for decades over the question of who
built the 200,000 earthen mounds in the middle of the continent.
Not until the end of the 19th
Century, when the Smithsonian waded into the debate, did the
pendulum swing toward a Native explanation. The Smithsonian
research and publications made a strong case for Native construction of
the massive collection of earthworks in the Midwest, finally ending most
debate. Yet over a century later, there are still a few who cling
to the belief that a mysterious race of Moundbuilders once
inhabited this country.
While the question of who built
the antiquities is long settled in the Midwest, it is only beginning to
be addressed in the Northeast. The Northeast is today where the
Midwest was 150 years ago. People are only beginning to
recognize and catalogue the remaining Northeastern antiquities.
And in regions such as California, almost no one is focused on features
such as the Native stone walls, cairns or propped boulders which survive
there. The debate will only be settled when all these
constructions are examined together (not as individual specimens)
and in the wider context of Native American stonework found across the
entire continent.
Reawakened awareness of New
England stone antiquites
While it is clear from early accounts of such
things as stone
cairns,
walls
and
chambers, that there
had once been widespread recognition in New England of the existence of
Native American stonework, by the 20th Century few were still
familiar with this literature. William Goodwin's 1946 The Ruins
of Great Ireland in New England marked the beginning of the modern
effort to document and understand these constructions. Goodwin and
his cohorts began to locate stone chambers and complexes such as
Mystery Hill.
Goodwin eventually purchased Mystery Hill and began the investigation
and restoration of this important site. Organizations such as the
Early Sites Research Society (disbanded c. 2000), the
New
England Antiquities Research Association (founded 1964) and
the
Gungywamp Society
in Connecticut (founded 1979) were established in response to the
growing realization of the widespread distribution of such antiquities.
Goodwin concocted a grand theory of Irish
Culdee monks who visited New England in the 10th Century
and left behind the many stone chambers he and his associates were
stumbling across. The absence of comparable stone constructions in
Ireland should serve as a warning against investing any credibility in
the many other wild speculations incorporated into his book.
Goodwin's opinion on the Algonquian Natives of this region are best
stated in his own words: ". . . we utterly fail to see any
improvement or even change in their manners, minds, customs or actions,
subsequent to the attempt to Christianize them." Given this
mindset, there was little chance Goodwin would ascribe these works to
Native authors. Rather, his absurd conclusion that they were the
work of people who did not build such structures in their homeland
struck a chord in the public's imagination. Unfortunately, this
nonsense still echoes down to the current era. It is almost
impossible to read Goodwin. There is little internal organization
of his 424-page book and what he attempts to pass off as logic, isn't.
For example, on the second page of his first chapter, Goodwin spells out
the twisted method of arriving at his primary conclusion:
"One of
the first steps taken by this author was to obtain books from London and
Dublin covering the question as to whether any type of stone work was
Norse. In the final analysis we became convinced that these
curious buildings were of a type found in Ireland, the British Isles and
on Continental Europe where they are considered to have been the work of
an early people, and had no Norse background whatsoever. In the
end, we reduced this to Cornwall, Spain, Ireland and Scotland and became
of the opinion that all the sites whenever located in Maine, New
Hampshire and Massachusetts were the work of Irish Culdee monks and
their families with the aid of Indian converts."
Uh huh. It is extraordinarily difficult to read
Goodwin. Neither his logic nor his writing is easy to follow.
It is hard to believe he wrote in the middle of the 20th
Century. His writing would have made for bad speculation in the 18th
Century, except for the fact that this would have been impossible
because knowledge that these sorts of stone constructions were Native
was still too widespread at that date. Precisely at the same time
he wrote, intelligent researchers were busy studying the Native
stonework in New England. During the first part of the 20th
Century, Frank Speck from the University of Pennsylvania was the
preeminent researcher of Native American anthropology in the Northeast.
He had noted the enduring practice of Lenapes (in the mid-Atlantic
region) of building stone and brush memorial heaps into the early
20th Century. In 1946, the same year Goodwin published,
Eva Butler of Connecticut followed up on Speck's work and published an
important review article in that state's archaeological society's
bulletin of the same practices in Southern New England. Butler
followed Speck in being one of the leading New England researchers of
Native American subjects in the middle of the last century. A
decade later, Frank Glynn, president of Connecticut's archaeological
society, excavated a pair of stone cairns on that state's coast,
revealing them to be clearly Native in origin. His work was done
in close collaboration with Prof. Irving Rouse of Yale, founder of that
society. The report of Glynn's excavations was finally published
posthumously by the Connecticut Archaeological Society in 1973.
Glynn stated: "This excavation had its inception in a conversation
with Dr. Irving Rouse and Mr. Lyent Russell in the winter of 1952.
Under discussion was a prevalent archaeological belief that there are no
prehistoric mounds or structures in New England. Rouse and Russell
suggested that the well-documented ([Eva] Butler, 1946)
Connecticut stone heaps offered an opportunity for testing the
generalization."
Goodwin's title encapsulates the early thinking (over
the course of several decades in the mid-20th Century) about
the origin of the builders of these stone constructions. Without a
thorough grasp of three areas, it was easy to fall into this logical
trap. The six decades since Goodwin have brought a much greater
understanding of these three subjects: 1) the
stonework of Ireland and
the rest of western Europe, 2) the stonework of the Northeast and 3) the
stonework context of the rest of North America. The past couple of
decades have also witnessed a growing understanding of Native American
cosmology and the sacred architecture which memorializes these concepts.
Both in North and South America, using anthropological and
archaeological methods, a remarkable amount of the past has been brought
back to life. While regional differences abound in the New World,
the extant sacred architecture clearly reveals an underlying cosmology
focused on the Mother Earth/Father Sky duality and an effort to unite
these two entities, as well as a focus on the sprit world which suffuses
both. In the intervening decades, Goodwin's Mystery Hill has been
subject to intense scrutiny and mapping. This has revealed a
massive solar calendrical device incorporated into the architecture of
the site. The features found at Mystery Hill are all found in less
dense contexts elsewhere throughout the Northeast. But they are
not found in the context of Culdee monks in the Old World. Nor are
the European structures Goodwin latched onto the product of Culdee
monks.
From our current vantage point, it is clear that,
just as the Mississippian and Anasazi sacred architecture are the
remains of two vanished, distinct civilizations, the Northeastern
stonework is the unique product of an indigenous, Native civilization.
While related (in both design and cosmological configuration) to stone
(and earthen) constructions found elsewhere in the New World, the
Northeastern architecture is a distinct style found nowhere else in
the world. While similar individual examples of things
such as
cairns,
walls,
petroforms or
propped boulders are
located elsewhere in North America, nowhere else do these sorts of
constructions appear in the same complex configurations and density as
they do in the Northeast. Too long a subject to explore here, the
Native stonework of the Northeast reveals a thorough understanding of
three facets of a comprehensive cosmology: 1) the landscape features of
the the Earth, 2) the cycles of the Sky and 3) the geology underlying
the landscape, at the entrance to the Underworld were so much of the
spirit world takes place. The sacred architecture served to unite
these concepts.
Was Fell
even partly right?
Getting back to Fell,
there were two primary components in his work: an expansion upon
Goodwin's Irish Culdee monk speculations and a focus on the ancient
inscriptions of America. He would have been better off to have
simply skipped the former and focused on the latter. What set Fell
apart was that he was the first to fully recognize the widespread
existence in the New World of stone inscriptions in scripts which are
also found in the
Old World. Fell erred in immediately presuming an Old World
origin for the drafters of these New World inscriptions.
Take ogam
(a.k.a. ogham) script, for example. At the time when
Fell wrote of discovering many ogam inscriptions in the U.S., it was
generally assumed that ogam was a European script, as it was last used
in Ireland in the medieval era. Since then, it has been learned
that ancient ogam inscriptions are found on every continent, with North
America hosting the largest collection. Today, no one has any idea
where ogam may have originated. All we know for sure is that it
was in widespread use across the globe.
Fell's error was to confuse
a script with a race. The absurdity of this reasoning is
revealed when one considers English, originally an obscure
northern European dialect only a millennium ago. The page
you are reading is written in a Latin script, using Arabic
(originally
Hindu) numerals, and is in a language widely spoken and written
in every corner of the planet by individuals of every race.
English text today serves as the modern version of ogam: a script in
worldwide use allowing disparte peoples to communicate.
One of Fell's primary
contributions was to focus attention on the Northeastern stone
antiquities, a subject only beginning to attract investigation in 1976.
He recognized the likely antiquity of these constructions, but erred in
determining their builders. Fell was also correct in recognizing
the likelihood of a massive amount of communication between the Old and
New Worlds in antiquity. This is the central contention of the
paradigm of
diffusionism to explain why similar things are found in distant
regions of the world, as opposed to the concept of independent
invention. Diffusionism, for example, attempts to understand
why pyramids are found in the
Middle East, Canary Islands and Mexico.
This is a vast subject in much dispute, falling outside the bounds of
this discussion. Just two examples suffice to underscore the solid
foundation of this concept:
1) Roger Williams,
founder of Rhode Island, noted in the early 17th Century that
the Native inhabitants of that region referred to the Big Dipper
and Little Dipper
constellations as the Great Bear and Little Bear,
alternate names used in Europe as well (familiar to us as the
Latin Ursa Major and Ursa Minor):
Key into the
Language of the Indians of New England,
1643: "By occasion of their frequent lying in the fields or
woods, they much observe the stars; and their very children can give
names to many of them, and observe their motions; . . . Mosk or
Paukunnawaw [is the name of]; the Great Bear, or Charles' Wain [Big
Dipper], which words Mosk, or Paukunnawaw signify a bear; which is so
much the more observable, because in most languages, that sign or
constellation is called the Bear."
2) William Sullivan, in 1997 in
The Secret of the Incas, threw down the gauntlet to the
isolationists who would have us believe Columbus was the first to make
the voyage between hemispheres:
"If contact between Old World and New is
unacceptable as an explanation for why, in the Andes, the planet Saturn
was conceived of as the ancient mill bearer, Jupiter as the king who
hurls, Venus as a beautiful woman with curly hair, and Mars as the ruler
over warfare, then the time has come for those who reject this
explanation to step up and provide a plausible alternative. . . .
we are leaving nothing less than a history of the human race,
unsuspected and unimagined, to gather dust on dark shelves."
Planets and constellations were
known by the same terms on both sides of the Atlantic. The odds of
this being explainable by mere coincidence converge toward zero.
The ever-cogent Thomas
Jefferson will have the final word on this subject [from
Notes on the State of Virginia; 1781]:
"Great question has arisen from whence came those aboriginal
inhabitants of America? Discoveries, long ago made, were sufficient
to shew that a passage from Europe to America was always
practicable, even to the imperfect navigation of ancient times. In
going from Norway to Iceland, from Iceland to Groenland, from
Groenland to Labrador, the first traject is the widest: and this
having been practised from the earliest times of which we have any
account of that part of the earth, it is not difficult to suppose
that the subsequent trajects may have been sometimes passed. Again,
the late discoveries of Captain Cook, coasting from Kamschatka to
California, have proved that, if the two continents of Asia and
America be separated at all, it is only by a narrow streight. So
that from this side also, inhabitants may have passed into America:
and the resemblance between the Indians of America and the Eastern
inhabitants of Asia, would induce us to conjecture, that the former
are the descendants of the latter, or the latter of the former:
excepting indeed the Eskimaux, who, from the same circumstance of
resemblance, and from identity of language, must be derived from the
Groenlanders, and these probably from some of the northern parts of
the old continent. A knowledge of their several languages would be
the most certain evidence of their derivation which could be
produced.
In fact, it is the best proof of the affinity of nations which ever
can be referred to. How many ages have elapsed since the English,
the Dutch, the
 Germans,
the Swiss, the Norwegians, Danes and Swedes have separated from
their common stock? Yet how many more must elapse before the proofs
of their common origin, which exist in their several languages, will
disappear? It is to be lamented then, very much to be lamented, that
we have suffered so many of the Indian tribes already to extinguish,
without our having previously collected and deposited in the records
of literature, the general rudiments at least of the languages they
spoke. Were vocabularies formed of all the languages spoken in North
and South America, preserving their appellations of the most common
objects in nature, of those which must be present to every nation
barbarous or civilised, with the inflections of their nouns and
verbs, their principles of regimen and concord, and these deposited
in all the public libraries, it would furnish opportunities to those
skilled in the languages of the old world to compare them with
these, now, or at any future time, and hence to construct the best
evidence of the derivation of this part of the human race.
But imperfect as is our knowledge of the tongues spoken in America,
it suffices to discover the following remarkable fact. Arranging
them under the radical ones to which they may be palpably traced,
and doing the same by those of the red men of Asia, there will be
found probably twenty in America, for one in Asia, of those radical
languages, so called because, if they were ever the same, they have
lost all resemblance to one another. A separation into dialects may
be the work of a few ages only, but for two dialects to recede from
one another till they have lost all vestiges of their common origin,
must require an immense course of time; perhaps not less than many
people give to the age of the earth. A greater number of those
radical changes of language having taken place among the red men of
America, proves them of greater antiquity than those of Asia."
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