• ATLANTEANS IN AMERICA
• Paleolithic Cro-Magnons in America
• by R. Cedric Leonard
• Barely thirty years ago experts in the field of American Archeology would not admit to the presence of man anywhere on the continents of North and South America earlier than 12,000 years ago.
• During a class in European Prehistoric Archeology at the University of Oklahoma under Dr. Robert Bell, we were informed of his participation in an important dig at Sandia Cave near Albuquerque, N.M.
• American Upper Paleolithic archeology was not a part of the cirriculum in the universities of America.
• Although the lower level of occupation was clearly dated at 27,000 B.C. (Hibben, 1941), the experts refused to recognize it (Haynes & Agonino, 1986; Preston, 1995).
• Thirty years later things have changed somewhat. Site after site has been discovered in the Americas accumulating reliable dates back to at least 40,000 years ago.
• The Solutreans of Spain, and possibly the Magdalenians, are now believed to have crossed the Atlantic using the southern Equatorial current and entered the Caribbean arena 18,000-12,000 years ago. From there they continued onto the American continents, eventually spreading both north and south.

  • Solutrean and Magdalenian Cro Magnon peoples crossed the Atlantic, some theorize, to colonize the Caribbean areas and then North and South America. NOTE: It is equally possible the continents were one land mass at the time and no ocean journey was even necessary in the pre-flood world.
  Add Sticky Note
• Archeologists are slowly beginning to realize that to understand European prehistory, American prehistory must also be considered.
• Dr. Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington, states: "We now know that human beings learned to sail 50,000 years before the present.
• Mankind settled in Australia then and it was not linked by any land bridge to Asia. It could only have been reached by boat.

  • Again: this taking place so very long ago and the continents being one unified land mass, man simply walked to Australia.
  Add Sticky Note
• Clearly, we had mastered sailing tens of thousands of years before America was colonized, so we should not be surprised by the idea that people took boat trips across the Atlantic 18,000 years ago" (Stanford & Bradley, 2004)
• Dr. Tom D. Dillehay (1999) of the University of Kentucky, writing from the perspective of accepting human occupation in South America before 12,000 B.P., states: "The most plausible scenario to explain the current archaeological evidence, regardless of an early or late entry date, is a founding migration of people moving rapidly from North America to South America along the Pacific coastline . . . It is likely that people arrived in the Southern Hemisphere no later than 15,000 to 14,000 years ago" (italics mine).
• One such controversial site has been excavated, by Dillehay and others, at Monte Verde, Chile.
• Evidence was gathered and carefully analyzed (almost to the point of overkill) over the last two decades by a team of American and Chilean archeologists led by Dillehay. Early in 2006 a group of archeologists, including several of Monte Verde's most rigorous critics, visited the site and inspected the artifacts, coming away thoroughly convinced.
• In his report of the site visit, Dr. Alex W. Barker, chief curator of the Dallas Museum of Natural History, said: "While there were very strongly voiced disagreements about different points, it rapidly became clear that everyone was in fundamental agreement about the most important question of all. Monte Verde is real. It's old. And it's a whole new ball game."
• The once prevalent idea that Clovis spread throughout North America from a point of origin in the Arctic North, moving southward along an "ice-free corridor" between the continental glaciers, is no longer supported by the known distribution of sites.

  • The northern migration through the Arctic North and then down into the Americas during the Ice Age is proving harder to support as more evidence of man's earliest settlements in North and South America are uncovered and verified.
  Add Sticky Note
• Clovis most probably entered the western hemisphere from the direction of the Caribbean, before dispersing into North and South America

  • Clovis came to the Americas via the Caribbean route?
  Add Sticky Note
• Since much of the land area exposed during the Ice Age is now submerged, much archeological material is underwater making the exact time of entry into the Americas difficult to ascertain. (Stanford & Bradley, 2004)
• The above admission opens up several other problems. Archeology is beginning to demonstrate clearly that Ice Age mankind was getting to the shores of the Americas. But to cross a 3,000 mile-wide ocean requires some technology and logistics that are not being faced. It take several weeks to cross a body of water as large as the Atlantic, which necessitates food, water and other supplies, which in turn require a sufficient amount of storage space.
• Therefore, we are not talking about small flimsy boats made of animal skins, and a crew of two. A crew of at least a dozen is far more likely.
• The skull of the 15 year-old girl known as Minnesota Woman. Her remains were found beneath the layers laid down much later in the area by glacial Lake Pelican in Minnesota which had formed near the end of the Ice Age. (Blegen, 1975) Notice the "European-like" features of this specimen.

  • Remains found under layers of sediment in Minnesota
  Add Sticky Note
• We are, therefore, postulating a ship at least as large as the average Viking vessel, or possibly as large as ancient Phoenician warships. Such would need to be propelled by sails or other means, which would necessitate a sizeable crew.
• Navigational knowledge and techniques (with the necessary instrumentation) must be assumed.
• The alternative to this is to admit the presence of a reasonably large land mass (and maybe some islands) in the mid-Atlantic during the Ice Age to shorten the trip.

  • While I do not subscribe to the wide spread abject ignorance of ancient/prehistoric man or his ability to navigate seas; I personally believe that prior to the great Flood of Genesis, the continents were one with perhaps connected land bridges to islands but for the most part, land was one whole.
  Add Sticky Note
• And we shouldn't forget the archeological and anthropological evidence that several Ice Age "invasions" of Western Europe and Northwest Africa were originating from some unknown location to the west of those land masses during this same time-frame.
• It seems more reasonable to postulate the presence of a mid-Atlantic land mass with shorter ocean voyages to the east and the west than to theorize about long ocean voyages from starting points on the opposite side of the globe, when the home of the originating culture itself remains a total mystery.
• Archeological sites have been discovered in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and South Carolina, dating back 15,000-18,000 years which demonstrate that ocean-going Solutreans may have first entered America from the direction of the Atlantic.
• Discussion of these and other Solutrean-Clovis connections took place during a recent convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
• Sometime earlier Dennis Stanford and Bruce Bradley had realized it was necessary to find artifacts in the Americas to bridge the gap in chronology between the Solutrean and Clovis cultures. So they scoured Clovis sites across the continent, places where other archeologists had been digging for years.
• Their first success came from a site called Cactus Hill, in Virginia, a point that resembled the Solutrean style--and it dated far earlier than the Clovis points. (Stanford & Bradley, 2004)
• During the PBS interview, Dr. Stanford stated: "Here we have a projectile point from a feature that dates right at 15,900 years or 16,000 years ago, which is clearly right in the middle between Clovis and Solutrean. And what's really exciting about it is that the technology here is very similar to Solutrean. In fact it's closer to Solutrean than Clovis where you can see that it's in a progression between Solutrean and Clovis, so you have Solutrean, Cactus Hill and Clovis."

  • American connection between the Clovis and Solutrean
  Add Sticky Note
• According to an interview by A. J. Hostetler, Newpaper Journalist (published in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, May 11, 2006), Stanford stated that his "testable model" rests at least in part on recent findings of early human settlements along the East Coast, including one possibly 17,000 years old along Virginia's Nottoway River called Cactus Hill.

  • Early human settlements along USA's eastern coast
  Add Sticky Note
• Sandia Cave (Hibben, 1941), The Lewisville site (Krieger, 1957), Meadowcroft Rockshelter (Adovasio, et al., 1990), Cactus Hill (Dillehay, 1989), Monte Verde (Adovasio & Pedler, 1997), and numerous other more recent archeological discoveries, are beginning to fill in the chronological "void" between the time of the Solutreans in Europe and Clovis in America, leaving little doubt that human populations have been living in the Americas for at least 40,000 years. (Dillehay, 1999, et al.)
• During the PBS interview, Stanford also noted that during the Ice Age a northern route to the Americas was also possible. He said that Ice Age fishermen and hunters "sailed the Atlantic in tiny boats made of animal skins 18,000 years ago and colonized the eastern United States." (Stanford & Bradley, 2004)

  • Routes from the northern Atlantic during the Ice Age
  Add Sticky Note
• "The gap between Europe and America was greatly reduced," Stanford said. "It could have been quite feasible for fishermen and whale and seal hunters to sail around the southern rim of the packs of sea-ice that covered the North Atlantic and reach land around the Banks of Newfoundland."
• Since at present the possible existence of a relatively large Mid-Atlantic land mass is denied, such a possibility (however bleak) seems to be born more of necessity than of reason.
• Such a theory (allowing only "tiny boats") at least allows numerous stop-offs for shooting game and collecting ice to provide fresh drinking water.
• At that time the planet was in the grip of the Ice Age, and much of its high northern and southern latitudes were desolate.
• According to Stanford, "Such a journey would represent one of the most astonishing migrations ever undertaken--the Earth wastelands blasted by storms and blizzards." On the other hand, much of the planet's water was locked away in icecaps and glaciers, causing sea levels to be much lower than today's.
• This exposure of continental shelf would trim the open-ocean gaps to a minimum.
• Stanford's theory--outlined at a recent archeology conference in Santa Fe, N.M.--is based on discoveries indicating ancient American people were culturally far more like the Stone Age tribes of France, Spain and Ireland than the Asian people whom scientists had previously thought to be the sole prehistoric settlers of North America.

  • Scientists are postulating now that early ancient Americans were culturally closer to Stone Age tribes in France, Spain and Ireland than the Asians of previous theory.
  Add Sticky Note
• But what about their physical characteristics?
• Dr. James C. Chatters, a University of Washington specialist in human osteology, while investigating what originally was taken to be a modern homicide, found himself analyzing the bones of a 9,000 year old skeleton. Upon examination, the 5 feet 9 inches tall specimen had "characteristics that are similar to those of Europeans"; also the skull had "fairly prominent brow ridges." (Chatters, 2000) Now known as Kennewick Man, this skeleton possesses many of the characteristics of our Atlantean Cro-Magnons.
• Skulls found in North America dating back into the Ice Age are few in number.
• Dr. Douglas W. Owsley, Division Head for Physical Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution, has recently described the Kennewick skull, as well as certain other Ice Age American skulls, as being "long-headed and having a short face." (Owsley, Online)
• This odd combination is known among physical anthropologists as "disharmonism" and is a diagnostic trait of Cro-Magnon Man.

  • Cro Magnon traits
  Add Sticky Note
• In this regard, it should be noticed that several skulls found in the Americas dating older than 12,000 B.P. are long-headed (dolichocephalic) and short-faced.

  • Cro Magnon traits
  Add Sticky Note
• Broad-faced, round-headed (brachycephalic) skulls most likely are remains of those who entered the Americas from Asia via the Bering land bridge.

  • Asian physical characteristics
  Add Sticky Note
• The Americas were being populated as far back as 30,000-40,000 years ago by diverse people from all over the world.
• It's rapidly becoming obvious that there was no "First American".
• Today's anthropologists are finally admitting to "a surprising degree of diversity" among ancient skeletons scattered over the two continents.
• "In addition, signs of violence seen in the bones would seem to indicate the presence of different and competing peoples." (Morell, 1998; Owsley & Jantz, 1997, et al.)

  • "...And the world was filled with violence..." Genesis
  Add Sticky Note
• The proximity of the western shores of Atlantis (not to mention possible islands) to the American continent does not appear to enter the equation among most academics. But anthropological remains (bones, skulls, or nearly complete skeletons) tell us much about the kinds of people who were coming here during the Ice Age.
• And throughout this web site I have presented clear evidence that the particular type of man known as Cro-Magnon originated in Atlantis.
• On my Anthropology page I mentioned that Cro-Magnoid skulls had been found deep in South America--even as far south as Chile.
• On 9 September 2004 during the international "Early Man in America Seminar" in Mexico City, an archeological team from Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History reported one of the most significant finds in recent American archeological history. Three well-preserved skeletons were discovered in underwater caves off the coast of the Yucatan peninsula.

  • The skeletal remains found in underwater caves off Mexico's Yucutan.
  Add Sticky Note
• Archeologist Arturo Gonzalez led the dive team. The skeletons were found in 65-foot-deep water.
• Charcoal samples were recovered and sent to the University of California in Riverside, where they were carbon-dated at over 13,000 B.P. Such a find as this is strongly indicative of an "Atlantic" connection.
• Drs. Stanford and Bradley point out important discoveries in genetics which have been made by researchers at Emory University and the Universities of Rome and Hamburg. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), which is inherited exclusively from the mother, normally contains four markers called haplogroups, labeled A, B, C, and D. These four are shared by 95 percent of Native Americans.
• Recently, however, the genetics team identified a fifth haplogroup, called X, which is present in about 20,000 modern Native Americans, and has also been found in several pre-Columbian populations.
• The geneticists' research suggests the marker appears to have arrived in the Americas 12,000 to 34,000 years ago, not from Asia, but from Europe. (Greenberg, 1986)
• A most interesting fact is that haplogroup X is also present in European populations but absent from Asians.
• In addition to the European Marker X in North America, the Araucanians natives of Chile also have significant Paleolithic Caucasian genes in them, most likely arriving from Spain 18,000-12,000 years ago. It is common for Araucanians to have curly reddish brown hair and green eyes. (Bonnichsen, Lepper, Stanford & Waters)

  • The Auraucanian natives of Chile have the unusual haplogroup marker indicating very ancient European descent.
  Add Sticky Note
• I have long suspected that the Araucanians of Chile might be of Cro-Magnon descent, since several Cro-Magnoid skulls have been found in that area; and I have also wondered if the language of the Araucanians is in any way related to the Berber-Ibero-Basque Language Complex.
• It is my hope that some linguist familiar with the native languages of South America will do a study on those languages from that point of view. We could have descendants of Ice Age Atlanteans scattered throughout the massive continent of South America.

65 more annotations...

• North Americans May be a Collage of Ancient Peoples
• During the Cretaceous period  it appears that Europe, Greenland, and North America were still connected moving northwestward.
• At the beginning of the Cretaceous in North America, the Mexican Sea of the late Jurassic period spread over Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and parts of Arizona, Kansas, and Colorado.
• During later Cretaceous period the Colorado Sea became the greatest of the North American Mesozoic seas and extended all the way from Mexico up into the Arctic, covering most of central North America.
• Near the end of the Cretaceous the conditions in the west were similar to those of the Carboniferous period with swamps and bogs forming which would later become valuable deposits of coal.
• During the close of the Cretaceous period, the Rockies and the East Andes mountains became elevated and there were extensive flows of lava.
• The Appalachians, which had been reduced almost to a base level by erosion, were rejuvenated, and the seas retreated from all parts of the continent.
• The map is connected to the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and shows three migration points depicting a southerly migration route beginning in Utah and including an “Antigua Residencia de los Aztecas” – Ancient residence of the Aztecs.
• The existence of the Disturnell Map and others now clearly show us that places that had names like Montezuma and Aztec were already established priority to archaelogical theories that credit the naming of these places on the romaticism of 19th century U.S. archaeologists.
• The mountains in North Carolina continued to experience erosion.
• During the last half of the period, eastern areas sank slowly below sea level and the ocean invaded the Coastal Plain.
• More evidence can be found to support the Aztec claim to North America through linguistics. The Uto-Azteca language family spreads from as far north as Canada down through South America.
• Researchers of the maps, Rodriguez and Gonzales also believe that Corn and their corn-based diets link the families together as one.
• The Cretaceous period was marked in North America and Europe, by extensive submergence of the continents. Changes both in the Earth’s surface and its flora and fauna brought the Mesozoic to a close at the end of the period.

  • Irregardless of times and man-made labels, this period sounds a lot like the Flood of Noah's time.
  Add Sticky Note
• THE OLD RED LAND
• The Cherokee speak  about coming from the 'OLD RED LAND '
• Most thought that this had to have been Venus.
  My belief is that the Old Red Land is not Venus but Old Earth.
• Click the following link
  scotese.com/pzanim
  Watch North America (Laurentia) collide with Northern Europe (Baltica)
  to form the "OLD RED SANDSTONE CONTINENT"
• In the spring of 2005, The Wisconsin Historical Society and Memorial Library at the University of Wisconsin at Madison exhibited the 19th-16th century maps that indicate or allude to an ancient Mesoamerican presence and migrations from what is today the United States.
• The exhibit  included chronicles, codices, annals and interviews regarding oral traditions that speak to ancient connections between peoples of the north and south.
• Part of the objective of the map exhibit examines how cartographers addressed this subject from the 1500s through the 1800s.
• This exhibit is the result of part of the work of several Hopi elders, including the late David Monongye and Thomas Banyacya, who passed on their knowledge of these maps.
• The documents firmly establish that the Hopi never surrendered their sovereignty and point to an ancient Mexican presence in their midst.

  • Ancient Mexican presence in the midst of the Hopi
  Add Sticky Note
• (A special thanks to Frank Gutierrez, counselor and instructor at East L.A. College, who passed them on to the researchers, and the many other elders who passed on other knowledge, guidance and words to them.)
• The overall theme of this exhibit is an examination of maps and chronicles from the 1800s-1500s that show Mesoamerican roots in what is today the United States.
• It is part of a larger collaborative and ongoing research effort that examines ancient connections between peoples of the north and south.
• Many of the maps point to several sites, purportedly associated with Aztec/Mexica peoples and their migrations, but also with older ancient Mexican, Chichimeca and Toltec migrations and that of Central and South American peoples as well.
• It CHALLENGES  the mainstream narrative of U.S. archaeology that tells us that it was the romanticism of 19th century U.S. archaeologists that caused them to place such place names (Montezuma, Aztec, Anahuac, Tula, etc) throughout what is today the U.S. However, these maps (representative of hundreds more and found at most major libraries and research institutions around the world) clearly demonstrate that such sites were well-established long before 1776.
• The research also examines oral traditions, many which speak of connections (beyond migration stories of Uto-Azteca peoples) between the north and the south.
• Turtle Island
  The Hopi  tradition, the turtle island is North America, with four arms a head and a tail. One arm is Baja, another the Bay Area peninsula, another is Florida, the other long island is Nova Scotia.  The tail leads town to Central America, the head the Bering Strait.
• NORTH AMERICA - LAND OF ATLANTIS AND MU
• According to the Chusmash Indians of California, Mu was the west coast of
  the Americas. 
• According to the legends, the west coast of Mu sunk into
  the Pacific ocean (off of Malibu, etc).  That leaves the rest of the Americas,
  and Aztecan/Atlantis as possibly one and the same continental mass that went
  "missing" as most of its coastal lands on either side have sunk into the sea, as
  well as some parts having suddenly risen several thousand feet
• The melting
  of the ice age glaciers also helped to drown the coastal areas that were left.
• Since these coastal, frequented places no longer existed, having sunk, no doubt
  this may have given place to the rumor of the entire "place" being gone??
  
  Kath Gibbs - Kat
• 1804 Humboldt Map
  This map depicts the same three migration points, plus a fourth, more northern one, pointing to Teguayo or the Salt Lake region as the point of departure of ancient Mexican Indians. Humboldt purportedly made his observations based on ancient pre-Columbian codices.
• Interesting Map and article. 
  If one notices, the "Aztlanders" always had encampments and "towns" along major waterways (rivers). 
• The Mississippi River also had hidden away Mayan townships and encampments  which had been covered and silted over due to ancient flooding.  These were first
  discovered with infra-red photography, and some have since been uncovered.
  Kath Gibbs
• 1728 Barreiro Map
  This is the oldest post-Columbian map which depicts the four migration points of ancient Mexican Indians found in later maps. Some sources also point to this region as a former home for people from Central and South America also.
• 1569 Camocio Map
  TOLTEC EVIDENCE
  Several maps associate TOLM. with Teguayo. TOLM. is generally found in the present-day U.S. Southwest on 1500s-1600s era maps. Several maps, including the 1569 Camocio map, show its full spelling as Tolman, which is purportedly associated with the Toltecs
• The Old Red Land
  North America (Laurentia) collides with Northern Europe (Baltica) to form the "Old Red Sandstone" continent.
• MASS EXTINCTION
• By the end of the Cretaceous, about 75% of all species, including marine, freshwater, and terrestrial organisms, became extinct.

  • Extinctions at end of Cretaceous Period
  Add Sticky Note
• The rather abrupt disappearance of Cretaceous life remains a mystery.

  • Not to Bible scholars
  Add Sticky Note
• A popular theory was introduced in 1980 by Luis Alvarez and his colleagues at the University of California. Alvarez suggested that the Earth was struck by an asteroid or comet about 6 miles (10 kilometers) in diameter around 65 million years ago.
• Evidence of an impact includes a layer of iridium in the rock record, plus some probable impact craters dated back to the late Cretaceous.

44 more annotations...

• In the Americas, why did all the civilizations exist (Maya, Aztec etc.) in South America & non in N. America?
• In the time before the colonization of the Americas, most civilizations existed in South America. The Maya, Aztec, Inca civilizations existed in central and South America while non existed in North America.
• North America was inhabited by roaming Indian tribes who did not create any "major" civilization.
• Best Answer - Chosen by Voters
• It is my understanding that MOST North American Indian tribes felt that they did not own the land that they only "Borrowed" it.
• Also most Northern Indian tribes were Nomadic.
• The exception to this would be the Hopi Indians
   
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Cliff...
• The Iroquois created a "major" civilization. Their buildings were made of wood but that most likely was due to available building matterial.
• The Iroquois Confederacy (also known as the "League of Peace and Power", the "Five Nations"; the "Six Nations"; or the "People of the Long house") is a group of First Nations/Native Americans that originally consisted of five nations: the Mohawk, the Oneida, the Onondaga, the Cayuga, and the Seneca.
• A sixth tribe, the Tuscarora, joined after the original five nations were formed.
• Although frequently referred to as the Iroquois, the Nations refer to themselves collectively as Haudenosaunee.

  • The "Haudenosaunee"
  Add Sticky Note
• At the time Europeans first arrived in North America, the Confederacy was based in what is now the northeastern United States and southern Canada, including New England, upstate New York, Pennsylvania, Ontario, and Quebec.
• The Union of Nations was established prior to major European contact, complete with a constitution known as the Gayanashagowa (or "Great Law of Peace"), with the help of a memory device in the form of special beads called wampum that have inherent spiritual value (wampum has been inaccurately compared to money in other cultures).
• Most anthropologists have traditionally speculated that this constitution was created between the middle 1400s and early 1600s.
• However, recent archaeological studies have suggested the accuracy of the account found in oral tradition, which argues that the federation was formed around August 31, 1142, based on a coinciding solar eclipse
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iroquois#Pr...
• Other Answers (9)
• Mississippian
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi...
   Chaco Canyon
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Pue...
• You're just ignoring the cultures in North America, understandable as contact came late enough that many cultures were destablized by disease and/or gunpowder & horse.
• You mention three civilizations. The only one of those in South America was the Inca civilization.
• The Maya were in Mexico and Central America. The Aztecs were in Mexico. Mexico is North America.
• The Aztecs were nomads until the 14th century. They had only been in the Mexico Valley for about 200 years when the Spanish arrived.

  • The Aztecs
  Add Sticky Note
• The Aztecs did not discover or create anything new. They followed the patternof civilization that the Maya, Teotihuacans, Toltecs, and other peoples had already established in Meso America centuries before.
• In what is now the United States and parts of Southern Canada there existed mound builders. The mound builders are generally referred to as Mississippian civilization, because even though they spread throughout the eastern part of what is USA they first appeared in the Mississippi basin.
• The mound at Cahokia, near St. Louis , MO. was much larger than the pyramid of the sun in Teotihuacan , Mexico.

  • Cahokia Mound
  Add Sticky Note
• There are mounds and "pyramids" in many places in the USA.
• Most of the nations east of the Mississippi had towns, ceremonial centers, trade and agriculture.
• The people caled Anaszi in the southwest of the USA left notable ruins and were on a comparable level with their contemporaries in central Mexico.
• Much of the artifacts of what civilization did exist in Arid America and the American Southwest were destryed by the Spanish when they arrived.
• The mounds built by the people in what is now USA did not leave such noticeable ruins as those in Meso America because while they were both made of earth, in Meso America there was a lot of fresh volcanic rock to cover the mounds over and protect them
• In the valleys of the eastern USA that sort of easily workable( with stonage implements), realtively soft stone was not available.
• I also have to wonder what anyone could consider civilized about human sacrifice and cannibalism. In the 16th century my Cherokee ancestors were not doing that.
• North American Indians had just as major civilizations as central and southern American natives.
• The difference is in North America most structures were made of wood instead of stone, so by now they are gone, and most importantly, the people who drove the Indians of their lands is the same people who wrote the history books about them.

32 more annotations...

• Ancient Peru pyramid spotted by satellite
• New remote-sensing technology reveals huge structure beneath surface
• 

  National Research Council, Italy

  In this satellite image, the white arrows show the buried pyramid and the black arrows other structures which have yet to be investigated.
• By Rossella Lorenzi

  

  updated 1:33 a.m. ET, Mon., Oct. 6, 2008
• A new remote sensing technology has peeled away layers of mud and rock near Peru's Cahuachi desert to reveal an ancient adobe pyramid, Italian researchers announced on Friday at a satellite imagery conference in Rome.
• Nicola Masini and Rosa Lasaponara of Italy's National Research Council (CNR) discovered the pyramid by analyzing images from the satellite Quickbird, which they used to penetrate the Peruvian soil.
• The researchers investigated a test area along the river Nazca.

  • Nazca River
  Add Sticky Note
• Covered by plants and grass, it was about a mile away from Cahuachi's archaeological site, which contains the remains of what is believed to be the world's biggest mud city.
• Via Quickbird, Masini and colleagues collected high-resolution infrared and multispectral images.
• After the researchers optimized the data with special algorithms, the result was a detailed visualization of a pyramid extending over a 97,000-square-foot (9,000-square-meter) area.
• The discovery doesn't come as a surprise to archaeologists, since some 40 mounds at Cahuachi are believed to contain the remains of important structures.
• "We know that many buildings are still buried under Cahuachi's sands, but until now, it was almost impossible to exactly locate them and detect their shape from an aerial view," Masini told Discovery News.
• "The biggest problem was the very low contrast between adobe, which is sun-dried earth, and the background subsoil."
• Cahuachi is the best-known site of the Nazca civilization, which flourished in Peru between the first century B.C. and the fifth century A.D. and slid into oblivion by the time the Inca Empire rose to dominate the Andes.

  • The Nazca civilization
  Add Sticky Note
• Famous for carving in the Peruvian desert hundreds of geometric lines and images of animals and birds that are best viewed from the air, the Nazca people built Cahuachi as a ceremonial center, molding pyramids, temples and plazas from the desert itself.
• There, priests led ceremonies including human sacrifices, drawing people from across the region.

  • Human sacrifice
  Add Sticky Note
• Between the year 300 and 350, two natural disasters — a powerful flood and a devastating earthquake — hit Cahuachi.

  • Flood and earthquakes?
  Add Sticky Note
• The site lost its sacred power to the Nazca, who then abandoned the area.
• But before leaving, they sealed all monuments and buried them under the desert sand.
• "Up to now, we have completely unearthed and restored a huge asymmetrical pyramid, known as the Grand Pyramid.
• A terraced temple and a smaller pyramid are in an advanced state of excavation," Giuseppe Orefici, an archaeologist who has spent decades excavating Cahuachi and has also worked with the CNR researchers, wrote in the conference paper.
• Featuring a 300-by-328-foot base, the newly discovered pyramid consists of at least "four degrading terraces which suggest a truncated pyramid similar to the Grand Pyramid."
• With seven levels, this imposing monument was sculpted from the landscape and enhanced by large adobe walls.
• "This is an interesting finding. As with the Grand Pyramid, it is likely that also this pyramid contains the remains of human sacrifices," Andrea Drusini, an anthropologist at Padova University, told Discovery News.
• In previous excavations at Cahuachi, Drusini found some 20 severed "offering heads" at various locations inside the Grand Pyramid.
• "They have circular holes cut into the forehead and were perfectly prepared from an anatomical point of view," Drusini said.
• The researchers are now investigating other buried structures next to the newly discovered pyramid.
• "This innovative technology opens up new perspectives for the detection of buried adobe monuments in Cahuachi and elsewhere," said Masini.
• "Once we have more information about the size and shape of the structures, we might turn to virtual archaeology to bring the pyramid and its nearby structures back to life."
• An earlier version of this report included incorrect measurements of the newly discovered pyramid.

28 more annotations...

• The Flood and Subsequent Civilization
• by Dr. David Livingston
• Terra Is Truly Firma
• An article in US News & World Report told a marvelous story about   "Terra," the super-computer program at Los Alamos, New Mexico, which was   designed "to prove that the story of Noah and the flood of Genesis 7:18   . . . happened exactly as the Bible tells it."
• It seems that John Baumgardner, who designed it, is the world's pre-eminent   expert in the design of computer models for geophysical convection, the   process by which the earth develops volcanoes, earthquakes, and the movement   of the continental plates.
• He is also a fundamentalist Christian "who   believes, in accordance with the Bible, that the earth was created by   God less than 10,000 years ago."
• Terra is an attempt to reconcile   the most literal reading of Scripture with the most advanced science in   existence.
• Some time went by after his conversion, before evolutionist Baumgardner gave much   thought to the creation of the universe by God. But as his walk with the Lord   deepened, he became convinced that "indeed there had been a major catastrophe in the Earth's   past that accounts for a large fraction of the geological features we observe at the earth's   surface today."  And this catastrophe was the Flood of Noah's day.
• The enormous significance of this is seen, for instance,   in that the 100 mile-an-hour runoff of the water covering the earth back into the oceans   could easily create the Grand Canyon  "in about a week!"
• On the other hand, run the program assuming the earth is less than 10,000 years old, and   that there was a catastrophic universal Flood, and all the geology works out OK that way   also!
• Most physicists "believe" the earth   is 4.5 billion years old. And the results of Terra, run with that assumption, works out OK.
• But, as Baumgardner points out, scientists wrongly take for granted that geology   happens consistently, without catastrophes.
• "If you look at the geological record," he   insists, "there are fingerprints of catastrophe everywhere one looks."
• Details of the Terra program and how it works, as well as more of Baumgardner's evidences   for a young earth, make the article well-worth looking up. (US News & World Report, 6/16/97:55-58.)
• Where Did the 40 Days and Nights of Rain Come From?
• The answer, or part of it, may be found in a recent theory proved correct.
• Louis Frank of Iowa University published an article in 1986 postulating that small   icy comets continually pelt the earth.
• Other scientists scoffed at the idea. A leading atmospheric expert argued   that no atmospheric expert supported such a thing. Another commented,   "If he's correct we'd have to burn half the contents of the libraries   in the physical sciences."
• A report in US News and World Report noted   stunning evidence from three cameras on NASA's Polar satellite actually   have captured images of comets as big as a house(!) plunging into the   atmosphere. Between five and 30 comets hit the upper atmosphere every   minute!
• Well, he IS correct!
• "The ice becomes water vapor that later comes down as rain." That   could be a lot of rain! (US News & World Report, 6/23/97.)
• Tale of Two Cultures: Ancient Chinese Dynasty Linked to New World's Earliest Civilization
• Abroad for the first time in his life, Han Ping Chen, a scholar of ancient   Chinese, landed at Dulles International Airport near Washington, D.C.,   the night of September 18, 1996.
• The next morning, he paced in front of   the National Gallery of Art, waiting for the museum to open so he could   visit an Olmec exhibit -- works from Mesoamerica's spectacular "mother   culture" that emerged suddenly with no apparent antecedents, 3,200 years   ago.

  • The Olmec culture: mother culture of Mesoamerica?
  Add Sticky Note
• After a glance at a 10 ton basalt sculpture of a head, Chen faced   the object that prompted his trip: an Olmec sculpture found in La Venta,   10 miles south of the southernmost cove of the Gulf of Mexico.
• What the Chinese scholar saw was 15 male figures made of serpentine or   jade, each about 6 inches tall.
• Facing them were a taller sandstone figure   and six upright, polished, jade blades called celts. The celts bore incised   markings, some of them faded.
• Proceeding from right to left, Chen scrutinized   the markings silently, grimacing when he was unable to make out more than   a few squiggles on the second and third celts.
• But the lower half of the   fourth blade made him jump. "I can read this easily," he shouted. "Clearly,   these are Chinese characters."
• For years, scholars have waged a passionate debate over whether Asian   refugees or adventurers might somehow have made their way to the New World   long before Columbus, stimulating brilliant achievements in cosmogony,   art, astronomy and architecture in a succession of cultures from the Olmec   to the Mayan and Aztec.
• On one side are the "diffusionists," who have   compiled a long list of links between Asian and Mesoamerican cultures,   including similar rules for the Aztec board game of patolli and the Asian   pachisi (also known as Parcheesi),
• a theological focus in ancient China   and Mesoamerica on tiger-jaguar and dragonlike creatures, and a custom,   common both to China's Shang dynasty and the Olmecs, of putting a jade   bead in the mouth of a deceased person.
• "Nativists," on the other hand,   dismiss such theories as ridiculous and argue for the autonomous development   of pre-Columbian civilizations. They bristle at the suggestion that indigenous   people did not evolve on their own.
• Striking Resemblances
• Carbon-dating places the Olmec era between 1000 and 1200 BC, coinciding   with the Shang dynasty's fall in China.
• For diffusionists, Olmec art offers a tempting arena for speculation.
• American archaeologists unearthed   the group sculpture in 1955. Looking at the sculpture displayed in the   National Gallery, as well as other Olmec pieces, some Mexican and American   scholars have been struck by the resemblances to Chinese artifacts.
• In   fact, archaeologists initially labeled the first Olmec figures found at   the turn of the century as Chinese.
• Migrations from Asia over the land   bridge 10,000 - 15,000 years ago could account for the Chinese features,   such as slanted eyes, but not for the stylized mouths and postures peculiar   to sophisticated Chinese art that emerged in recent millennia.
• The scholar emerged from the exhibit with a   theory. After the Shang army was routed and the emperor killed, he suggested,   some loyalists might have sailed down the Yellow River and taken to the   ocean. There, perhaps, they drifted with a current which skirts Japan's   coast, heads for California and peters out near Ecuador.
• Yet, until Chen made his pilgrimage to the museum, no Shang specialist   had ever studied the Olmec
• Betty Meggers,   a senior Smithsonian archaeologist who has linked Ecuadorian pottery to   5,000 year old ship wrecked Japanese pottery, says such an idea is "plausible"   because ancient Asian mariners were far more proficient than given credit   for.
• But Chen's identification of the celt markings sharpens the controversy   over origins even further.
• For example, Mesoamericanist Michael Coe at   Yale University labels Chen's search for Chinese characters as insulting   to the indigenous people of Mexico.
• There are only about a dozen experts   worldwide in the Shang script, which is largely unrecognizable to readers   of modern Chinese.
• When Prof. Mike Xu, a professor of Chinese history   at the University of Central Oklahoma, traveled to Beijing to ask Chen   to examine his index of 146 markings from pre-Columbian objects, Chen   refused, saying he had no interest in anything outside China.
• He relented   only after a colleague familiar with Xu's work insisted that Chen, as   China's leading authority, take a look. He did and found that all but   three of Xu's markings could have come from China.
• Xu was at Chen's side in the National Gallery when the Shang scholar   read the text on the Olmec celt in Chinese and translated: "The ruler   and his chieftains establish the foundation for a kingdom."
• Two adjacent characters are usually read as "master and   subjects," but Chen decided that in this context they might mean "ruler   and his chieftains."
• Chen located   each of the characters on the celt in three well-worn Chinese dictionaries   he had with him.
• The character on the line below he recognized as   the symbol for "kingdom" or "country" -- two peaks for hills, a curving   line underneath for river.
• The next character, Chen said, suggests a bird   but means "waterfall" completing the description.
• The bottom character   he read as "foundation" or "establish," implying the act of founding something   important.
• If Chen is right, the celts not only offer the earliest writing   in the New World, but mark the birth of a Chinese settlement more than   3,000 years ago.
• At lunch the next day, Chen said he was   awake all night thinking about the sculpture. He talked about how he had studied   Chinese script at age 5, tutored by his father, the director of the national   archives. But Chen's father did not live to enjoy the honors the son reaped,   such as a recent assignment to compile a new dictionary of characters used by   the earliest dynasties -- the first update since one commissioned by a Han   emperor 2,000 years ago.
• Color Nuances
• The group sculpture,   he said, might memorialize "a historic event," either a blessing sought from   ancestors or the act of founding a new kingdom or both.
• Chen was so taken with the Olmec   sculpture that he ventured beyond scholarly caution.
• He was mesmerized by   the tallest figure in the sculpture -- made from red sandstone as porous as a   sponge, in contrast to the others, which are highly polished and green-blue   in hue.
• Red suggests higher status, Chen said. Perhaps the figure was the   master of the group, a venerated ancestral spirit. The two dark blue figures   to the right might represent the top noblemen, more important than the two   others, carved out of pale green serpentine.
• But his reading of the text is the clincher. "Writing   systems are too arbitrary and complex. They cannot be independently   reinvented." More than 5,000 Shang characters have survived, Chen says   even though the soldiers who defeated the Shang forces murdered the   scholars and burned or buried any object with writing on it.
• The Smithsonian's Meggers says that Chen's analysis of the colors   makes sense.
• In a recent   excavation in the Shang capital of Anyang, archaeologists have found a   buried library of turtle shells covered with characters. And at the entrance   lay the skeleton of the librarian, stabbed in the back and clutching some   writings to his breast.
• The Olmec sculpture was buried under white sand topped with alternate   layers of brown and reddish-brown sand. Perhaps it was hidden to save   it from the kind of rage that sought to wipe out the Shang and their memory.   (U.S. News & World Report, 11/4/96.)
• Why This is Important
• It demonstrates that shortly after Noah's Flood, there was wide migration   of the families who were descendants of Noah. They were intelligent -- not   evolving brute beasts -- and by 1200 BC (actually even much earlier) were   able to navigate on the world's oceans.
• This diminishes the need for a   Siberia-to-Alaska ice/land bridge crossing. In fact, the scanty evidence we find for   ancient settlements in Alaska could even be the remains of migrants coming from south of Alaska   instead of from Siberia.
• The Native Americans, then, were probably of oriental   descent and did not "evolve" locally from some lower form of life in the Americas.

66 more annotations...

• Finding the lost city
• Page 5 of 5 --
• The settlement is so ancient that it undercuts the long-held theory that the Americas were first populated by the Clovis people, who crossed the Bering Strait from Asia at the end of the Ice Age, settled in North America around 11,000 years ago, and then gradually migrated down to Central and South America.
• In the cave and at a nearby riverbank settlement, Roosevelt made another astonishing discovery: pottery that dates to 7,500 years ago, predating by more than 2,000 years the earliest pottery found in the Andes or Mesoamerica.
• This means that the Amazon may have been the earliest ceramic-producing region in all the Americas, and that, as Fawcett radically argued, the region was possibly even a wellspring of South American civilization - that an advanced culture had spread outward, rather than vice versa.
• Using aerial photography and satellite imaging, scientists have also begun to find enormous man-made earth mounds and causeways across the Amazon -
• in particular in the Bolivian flood plains where Fawcett first found his shards of pottery.
• Clark Erickson, an anthropologist from the University of Pennsylvania who has studied these earthworks in Bolivia, says that the mounds allowed the Indians to continue farming during seasonal floods.
• To create them, he said, required extraordinary labor and engineering: tons of soil had to be transported, the course of rivers altered, canals excavated, and interconnecting roadways and settlements built. In many ways, he said, the mounds "rival the Egyptian pyramids."
• Some scientists now believe the rain forest may have sustained millions of people.
• And for the first time scholars are reevaluating the El Dorado chronicles that Fawcett used to piece together his theory of Z.
• Though no one has found evidence of the fantastical gold that the conquistadores had dreamed of, the anthropologist Neil Whitehead said, "With some caveats, El Dorado really did exist."
• These scholars say they are just beginning the process of understanding this ancient world - and, like the theory of who first populated the Americas, all the traditional paradigms must be reevaluated.
• "Anthropologists," Heckenberger said, "made the mistake of coming into the Amazon in the 20th century and seeing only small tribes and saying, 'Well, that's all there is.' The problem is that, by then, many Indian populations had already been wiped out by what was essentially a holocaust from European contact.
• That's why the first Europeans in the Amazon described such massive settlements that, later, no one could ever find."
• Fawcett often complained about his many detractors, about the "men of science" who had "in their day pooh-poohed the existence of the Americas - and, later, the idea of Herculaneum, Pompeii, and Troy."
• He spoke of his vision of a majestic culture rising in the Amazon and radiating outward, before being finally overwhelmed and swallowed by the lianas and creepers and palms.
• And in his final letter, which was carried out of the jungle by an Indian runner before he vanished, Fawcett assured his wife: "You need have no fear of any failure."
• David Grann, a staff writer at The New Yorker, is the author of "The Lost City of Z," from which this article is adapted. He will give a free lecture at the Museum of Science at 7 p.m. Wednesday.
• © Copyright 2009 Globe Newspaper Company.

18 more annotations...

• Finding the lost city
• Fawcett was deeply influenced by such racist ideas; his writings are rife with images of Indians as "jolly children" and "ape-like" savages. And he constantly struggled to reconcile what he saw with everything he had been taught.
• Page 4 of 5 --
• The only thing he was certain of was that the Amazon and its people were not what everyone assumed them to be. Too much evidence indicated that the jungle had once been the center of a great civilization.
• After Fawcett disappeared, many scientists no longer doubted his theory on biological grounds.
• The Aztecs in Mexico and the Incas in Peru had obviously produced extraordinary cities, disproving any notion that Native Americans were somehow "half men" physically incapable of such feats.
• Instead, many scholars assumed that the Amazon jungle was simply too inhospitable to sustain a sophisticated society.
• Biological determinism had increasingly given way to environmental determinism.
• And the Amazon - the great "counterfeit paradise," as the archeologist Betty Meggers famously coined it - was the most vivid proof of the Malthusian limits that the environment placed on civilizations.
• And then slowly it began to happen. After many archeologists had ignored the Amazon, assuming nothing of import would be found, a small group of revisionist scholars started to visit the region.
• Unlike their predecessors, they were often aided by an array of sophisticated tools, including ground-penetrating radar, satellite imagery to map sites, and remote sensors that can pinpoint buried artifacts.
• And what they found, in the words of one archeologist, was "earth shattering."
• In the last few years, a team of researchers led by the archeologist Michael Heckenberger uncovered 20 pre-Columbian settlements in the Xingu region of the southern basin of the Amazon - the very region where Fawcett believed he would find the City of Z and where he disappeared.
• These settlements, which were occupied roughly between 800 and 1600 AD, included houses and moats and palisade walls.
• There were causeways and roads, which connected the settlements together. There were plazas laid out along cardinal points, from east to west, and roads positioned at the same geometric angles.
• (Fawcett had reported that Indians told him legends that described "many streets set at right angles to one another." )
• According to the scientists, each cluster of settlements contained anywhere from 2,000 to 5,000 people, which means that the larger communities were the size of many medieval European cities.
• "These people had a cultural aesthetic of monumentality," Heckenberger said. "They liked to have beautiful roads and plazas and bridges."
• Other scientists are fueling this revolution in archeology, which is upending the view of the Amazon as a place that could never sustain what Fawcett had envisioned: a prosperous, glorious civilization.
• Anna Roosevelt, a great-granddaughter of Theodore Roosevelt, who is an archeologist at the University of Illinois, has uncovered in a cave near Santarém, in the Brazilian Amazon, the remains of a settlement at least 10,000 years old - about twice as old as scientists had estimated the human presence in the Amazon.

18 more annotations...

• Finding the lost city
• Fawcett also studied the 16th- and 17th-century chronicles of the El Dorado hunters.
• Page 3 of 5 --
• Even though the conquistadores had not found a golden kingdom, they had reported seeing "cities that glistened in white," with temples, public squares, palisade walls, causeways, and exquisite artifacts.
• Because later explorers never came across similar settlements - or indeed any large populations - it was assumed these descriptions, like El Dorado itself, were simply products of the conquistadores' fervid imaginations.
• But once while Fawcett was climbing a desolate mound of earth above the flood plains of the Bolivian Amazon, he noticed something sticking out of the ground.
• He scooped it into his hand: it was a shard of pottery.
• He started to scour the soil. Virtually everywhere he scratched, he later wrote, he turned up bits of ancient, brittle pottery.
• He thought the craftsmanship was as refined as anything from ancient Greece or Rome or China. "Wherever there are 'alturas,' that is high ground above the plains" in the Amazon basin, Fawcett said, "there are artifacts."
• And that wasn't all: extending between these alturas, there appeared to be some sort of geometrically aligned paths. They looked, he could swear, like "roads" and "causeways."
• Still, Fawcett struggled to make sense of his own findings. The notion of a complex civilization in the Amazon contradicted the two ethnological paradigms that had prevailed since the first encounter between Europeans and Native Americans, more than 400 years earlier.
• Though some of the first conquistadores were in awe of the civilizations that Native Americans had developed, many theologians debated whether these dark-skinned, scantily clad peoples were, in fact, human; for how could the descendants of Adam and Eve have wandered so far, and how could the biblical prophets have been ignorant of them?
• In the mid-16th century, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, one of the Holy Roman Emperor's chaplains, argued that the Indians were "half men" who should be treated as natural slaves.
• At the time, the most forceful critic of this genocidal paradigm was Bartolomé de Las Casas, a Dominican friar who had traveled throughout the Americas.
• In a famous debate with Sepúlveda and in a series of treatises, Las Casas tried to prove, once and for all, that Indians were equal humans ("Are these not men? Do they not have rational souls?"), and to condemn those "pretending to be Christians" who "wiped them from the face of the earth."
• In the process, however, he contributed to a conception of the Indians that became an equal staple of European ethnology: the "noble" savage.
• According to Las Casas, the Indians were "the simplest people in the world," "without malice or guile," who are "totally uninterested in worldly power."
• Although in Fawcett's era both conceptions remained popular in scholarly and popular literature, they were now filtered through a radical new scientific theory on the origins of humankind: evolution.
• Victorians now attempted to make sense of human diversity not in theological terms but in biological ones.
• A popular anthropology manual, which Fawcett studied, included chapters on "Anatomy and Physiology," "Hair," "Colour," Odour," "Physical Powers," "Senses," and "Heredity." The Victorians wanted to know, in effect, why some apes had evolved into English gentlemen and why some hadn't.

18 more annotations...

• Finding the lost city
• Page 2 of 5 --
• History has been as unsparing of Fawcett as was the jungle. Although his legend helped inspire Arthur Conan Doyle's novel "The Lost World" and once spawned radio plays, poems, documentaries, movies, stamps, children's stories, comic books, ballads, stage plays, and graphic novels, Fawcett has increasingly been forgotten.
• Most scholars have dismissed him as a crank who sacrificed his life, and that of his son, in pursuit of a mad fantasy.
• Yet in recent years archeologists have begun to find evidence of what Fawcett had always claimed: ancient ruins buried deep in the Amazon, in places ranging from the Bolivian flood plains to the Brazilian forests.
• These ruins include enormous man-made earth mounds, plazas, geometrically aligned causeways, bridges, elaborately engineered canal systems, and even an apparent astronomical observatory tower made of huge granite rocks that has been dubbed "the Stonehenge of the Amazon."
• The discoveries are not only transforming our understanding of one of the most daring and eccentric explorers ever to set foot in the New World. They are challenging long-held assumptions about the Amazon as a Hobbesian place where only small primitive tribes could ever have existed, and about the limits the environment placed on the rise of early civilizations.
• And these revelations are exploding our perceptions of what the Americas really looked liked before the arrival of Christopher Columbus.
• The idea did not strike Fawcett like a bolt of lightning. Rather, the theory of Z developed over time, with one clue leading to the next.
• Fawcett, who was born during the Victorian age of exploration, had trained as a surveyor at the Royal Geographical Society in London, the same place that had helped launch such explorers as Richard Burton and David Livingstone.
• In 1906, after serving as a British secret agent in Africa, Fawcett had been recruited by Bolivia, Brazil, and Peru to map the interior of the Amazon.
• The region was still so unexplored that these countries could not even agree on their borders: They were simply speculative lines sketched through forests and mountains.
• It was during these epic journeys - journeys in which many of his men perished from disease and starvation - that Fawcett began to gather evidence of Z.
• Over a span of nearly two decades, he made contact with various unknown tribes, documenting how they had brilliantly adapted to the conditions in the jungle. They often used the Amazonian flood plains, which were more fertile than terra firma, to grow crops, and relied on elaborate ways of hunting and fishing.
• As a result, they were able to generate enough food to sustain larger populations - a precursor to any sort of complex society with divisions of labor and political hierarchies such as chiefdoms and kingdoms. "Food problems never bothered them," Fawcett said.

13 more annotations...

• Finding the lost city
• Does the Amazon jungle conceal a vanished empire?
• By   David Grann       

            February 22, 2009 
• In 1925, the legendary British explorer Percy Harrison Fawcett ventured into the Amazon, vowing to make one of the most important archeological discoveries in history.
• He was searching for an ancient civilization, which he had named, simply, the City of Z.
• Ever since the Spanish conquistadores descended the Amazon River, in 1542, perhaps no region on the planet had so ignited the imagination - or lured so many men to their death.
• For centuries, the conquistadores had searched the jungle for the glittering kingdom of El Dorado.
• The kingdom, which the conquistadores had heard about from Indians, was said to be so plentiful in gold that its inhabitants ground the metal into powder and blew it through "hollow canes upon their naked bodies."
• (El Dorado literally means the Gilded Man.) Thousands had died looking for this golden realm.
• Yet after a toll of suffering and death worthy of Joseph Conrad, most archeologists had concluded that El Dorado was no more than an illusion.
• Many modern scientists have assumed that no complex civilization could have emerged in so hostile an environment, where the soil is agriculturally poor, mosquitoes transport lethal diseases, and predators lurk amid the forest canopy.
• The Amazon's brutal conditions have fueled one of the most enduring theories of human development: environmental determinism. According to this theory, even if some early humans eked out an existence in the harshest conditions on the planet, they rarely advanced beyond a few primitive tribes. Society, in other words, is a captive of geography.

• Fawcett, however, was convinced that the Amazon wilderness - an area virtually the size of the continental United States - concealed the remnants of at least one, and

  probably more, highly advanced civilizations.
• He was the last of a breed of explorers to venture into blank spots on the map with little more than a machete, a compass, and an almost divine sense of purpose, and he spent nearly two decades gathering evidence to prove his case and pinpointing a location.
• With his 21-year-old son, Jack, and Jack's best friend, Raleigh Rimell, Fawcett finally set off into the Brazilian jungle to find the City of Z. Then he and his party vanished, giving rise to what has been described as "the greatest exploration mystery of the 20th century."
• Fawcett had warned that no one should follow in his wake due to the danger, but scores of scientists, explorers, and adventurers plunged into the wilderness, determined to recover the Fawcett party, alive or dead, and to return with proof of Z.
• In February 1955, the New York Times claimed that Fawcett's disappearance had set off more searches "than those launched through the centuries to find the fabulous El Dorado."
• Some were wiped out by starvation and disease, or retreated in despair; others were murdered by tribesmen firing arrows dipped in poison.
• Then there were those adventurers who had gone to find Fawcett and, like him, simply disappeared in the forests that travelers had long ago christened the "green hell."

17 more annotations...

• Monster Quest: The Legend of Hairy Man ...
• This episode from the Monster Quest TV series examines the   connection between the modern and ancient North American Indians and the   Bigfoot phenomenon ...
• Part 1 ...
• Part 2 ...
• Part 3 ...
• Part 4 ...
• Part 5 ...

10 more annotations...

• Ancient America
• By Blair A. Moffett
• Part One
• In a just published book, Before Columbus (Crown Publishers, Inc., N.Y. 1971; 224 pages, $6.50; see review article, "A Question of Maps," Sunrise August 19, 1967), Dr. Cyrus H. Gordon, head of the Department of Mediterranean Studies at Brandeis University, New York, has performed an important service to a growing number of scholars, both professional and amateur.
• These are scholars whose own reflections and investigations tell them that there is much more to the testimony of the mute megalithic and related archaeological records of the "pre-Columbian" New World than has yet been revealed -- or for that matter been accepted even as a possibility by their more conservative and methodologically rigid colleagues.
• Professor Gordon's main conclusion is that there must have flourished, at least as early as the Bronze Age, a great civilization of Sea People whose knowledge of astronomy and the arts of shipbuilding and navigation enabled them to ply all the oceans.
• They should not be considered, he feels, as tied to a particular land, because apparently they embraced several ethnic and linguistic elements from various areas.
• Not only did they devise our alphabet, but they were unquestionably associated with the Minoans and Phoenicians, as well as with the highly developed inhabitants of pre-Columbian America, thus playing a key role in the history of world civilization.
• In support of this thesis, Dr. Gordon has assembled a mass of testimony from several sources: countless Mesoamerican ceramic figurines that portray Far Eastern, African Negro, and Caucasian types, references by Greek authors of the classical period as well as in early American texts, examples of cultural transmissions between Old and New Worlds, archaic writing such as that on the Metcalf Stone, evidence from comparative linguistics, and recently examined maps and records of ancient mariners and sea captains.
• Some specific findings among the many that he offers are
• (1) the appearance in Ecuador about five thousand years ago of Japanese pottery of the Jomon period;
• (2) a Roman sculptured head of about 200 A.D. excavated professionally in stratified remains in Mexico;
• (3) a hoard of Mediterranean coins discovered off the coast of Venezuela, some of which are of eighth century A.D. Arabia but most are Roman of early dating;
• and (4) the unearthing of a cache of Roman coins from 132-135 A.D. in Kentucky, an account of which is in preparation for publication.
• Some of Dr. Gordon's discoveries of language links between ancient Mesopotamia and Mesoamerica will be discussed in a subsequent article.
• Dr. Gordon acknowledges his debt to Charles H. Hapgood, whose Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings (See review article, "A Question of Maps," Sunrise, August 1967) concluded that at least 6,000 years B.C. there had existed a world-wide civilization some of whose most important members were expert navigators and sea kings.

  • 6000 BC there existed a worldwide civilization...
  Add Sticky Note
• Hapgood offered startling evidence that some of these people must have lived before the most recent ice age had ended in the Northern Hemisphere and when Alaska was still connected with Siberia by the Pleistocene ice age "land bridge."
• Moreover, he shows that they were able to determine longitude, an art that was later forgotten until the mid-eighteenth century A.D.
• Although he focuses mainly on Mediterranean-Mesoamerican prehistoric links, as his professional competence lies in those areas, Professor Gordon uses his discoveries to range much farther, believing that to restrict investigation to any one area is dangerous unless we have in view the total nature of the research problem we face, which is that of the existence of an ancient world-wide ecumene.
• He emphasizes that these transoceanic mariners came to the Americas from many places and during many periods, not only from Japan to the shores of Ecuador around 3000 B.C., but very possibly from China, Southeast Asia, and India via the Pacific.
• While much of his data is new and he has brought together both new and old evidence in a fresh way, Dr. Gordon is only one of a long and honorable line of well-known as well as obscure protagonists of the startling ancientness of the New World.
• In 1940, the American polar researcher and explorer, Vilhjalmur Stefansson, said the idea that "man of the Old World discovered the Americas from Brazil to Greenland" five thousand or more years ago is still only a theory, although "we can prove it likely" (Greenland, p. 26).
• Lecturing at Oslo in 1936, for example, the Norwegian scholar A.W.Brogger spoke of a period roughly 4,000 or 5,000 years ago as a golden age of deep sea navigation when all the world was known.
• Elsewhere in his books Stefansson described this early era as one during which Stone Age and Bronze Age inhabitants "swarmed the Atlantic."

• He wrote:

    

  There are rock carvings in Norway to indicate that Norwegians were sailing the seas, and doubtless visiting Britain, contemporaneously with the New Stone Age sailors of Crete, who have been considered here as of from 4,000 to 10,000 B.C. The same navigators were, in that case, visiting the Arctic in the same period those of them, that is, who were not living within the Arctic Circle and visiting the Temperate Zone instead. (Great Adventures and Explorations, pp. 22-23.)
• We may also mention Peter H. Buck's treatment of early Pacific voyages in his Vikings of the Pacific. (First published as Vikings of the Sunrise, 1938.)
• One of the earliest and most controversial investigators of prehistoric America was Ignatius Donnelly, a lawyer who served as a Minnesota Congressman from 1863 until 1870, and was described as "perhaps the most learned man ever to sit in the House."
• After researching the matter for years, Donnelly published his Atlantis, The Ante-Diluvian World in 1882. His thesis was that both ancient America and the Mediterranean, as well as the west coast of Europe, had received their early populations from a former continent which he named Atlantis.
• He devoted his book to a remarkable collation of archaeological, geological, linguistic, mythological, and other related findings. These, he believed, offered solid evidence for a mid-Atlantic continental land mass having existed as the seat of mighty and advanced peoples who gradually deserted it over the centuries, fleeing to east and west as portions of it sank beneath the waters. Finally, its remaining population perished in the submergence of the island of Poseidonis, in a day and a night 11,536 years ago as recounted by Plato in the Critias and the Timaeus.
• Donnelly was perhaps the first trained, intelligent mind of our time exhaustively to research and bring together the major data available in his day which pointed to a myriad of features common to prehistoric and ancient inhabitants of both the Old and New Worlds.
• Despite the novelty of his theme, and the later irresponsible claims for "lost continents" such as the Mu of James Churchward that have tended to discredit the historicity of Plato's references as well as the existence of formerly peopled lands in general, Donnelly's research has ever since formed a background for scientific argumentation and inquiry on the part of both opponents and supporters.

• As Louis A. Brennan said in 1959, we cannot dispose of the problem "by sweeping Donnelly's Atlantis exposition under the carpet."

   

  Atlantis is not exactly a fiction; it is a reference in Plato. Just so was Troy a myth, and the whole Homeric narrative with it, until Heinrich Schhemann, with the simplicity of a believer in fairytales, dug it up, right where Homer said it was. (No Stone Unturned, p. 228.)
• It is to be regretted that many later scholars have ignored or overlooked much of the solid scholarship in comparative linguistics and religion that is contained in Donnelly's book. He deserves far more credit than he has received for his pioneering work, now being given more up-to-date treatment by Hapgood, Gordon, and others in substantiation of the existence in very ancient times of a powerful and highly advanced global civilization.
• Speaking in 1969 at the meeting of the American Historical Association at Washington, D.C., Dr. Vincent H. Cassidy of the University of Ohio rightly reminded his professional colleagues that while Plato's Atlantis is, understandably, receiving much current attention, his "other continent" receives "studied neglect."
• With this, Professor Gordon is in agreement -- "It is futile to dwell on the lost island of Atlantis and then to forget [Plato's] plain reference to the continent that seals off the Atlantic Ocean on the West" --
• citing this land as being clearly America, and Plato's rather casual mention of it as simply indicative that its existence was well-known to the learned Greeks of his time.
• Louis Brennan cites the discovery during the International Geophysical Year of a range of submerged mountain ridges extending 600 miles southwest from Peru to Easter Island, and observes that Easter Island is the easternmost of a series of islands extending in stepping-stone fashion fully to the Asian mainland.
• But the Americas have a Pacific as well as an Atlantic coastline.
• He views as even more important the corollary finding of the Easter Island Rise, which sweeps northward from there through the Galapagos Islands to join the South and Central American continental coast and form a broad, far-reaching shelf from Ecuador to Mexico.
• His conclusion is that, in the early epochs we are considering, the Pacific had sufficient islands and perhaps even larger land masses above its waters to have made navigation across it not only safe but attractive. Steady trade and contact between Pacific Asia and the west coast of the Americas apparently continued until the island chain was broken by the submergences of many of its links nearer to the western seaboard of the Americas.
• Dr. Gordon includes references also of Chinese expeditions to North and Central America that took place in the twenty-third century B.C., if not before, and again in the fifth century A.D.
• We have already noted the early Japanese contact with Ecuador's coastal peoples.
• The earlier account is contained in The Classic of Mountains and Seas, a record of world features said to have been compiled at the request of the Emperor Shun about 2250 B.C.
• Both of these Chinese voyages to America have been expertly reconstructed by Henriette Mertz, (Pale Ink.) who shows the areas in North and Central America through which the Oriental visitors traveled, such as the Sand Dunes of Colorado (now a National Park) and that state's Black Gorge (Black Canyon of the Gunnison).
• They saw the great desert, and wrote of the Grand Canyon of Arizona in glowing, poetic terms. They admired the aspen forests and the redwoods, the unusual rivers and numerous animals, and described the bird resembling a large domestic fowl "with ratlike legs and claws like a tiger," having dark feathers but a white head -- obviously the bald eagle.
• The widespread use of corn and the prevalence in certain areas of the mulberry tree impressed them, but so did the La Brea Tar Pits in what is now the Los Angeles area, which they called the 'Sea of Varnish,' and the giant horse effigy at Sacaton in Arizona.
• All these and other features of this strange land were set down in some detail.
• In the Mahabharata, one of the two Sanskrit epics of ancient India, mention is made of the visit of Arjuna, a prince of the Bharatas, to Patala, the "antipodes," and of his marriage there to the princess Ulupi, a daughter of one Kauravya, the king of the Nagas.
• Commenting on this, H. P. Blavatsky wrote that Pundit Dayanand Saraswati, then the greatest Sanskrit and Puranic authority in India, had personally confirmed her view that Patala was America, and that the visit of Arjuna to that land from what was then India took place 5,000 years ago. (The( Secret Doctrine, II, 214.)
• The Sanskrit word for serpent is naga and she explained that from time immemorial the serpent, as the dragon, has in every part of the world signified a "wise man, endowed with extraordinary magic powers." She further alluded to the clear relationship between the reference to nagas or wise initiates residing in Patala (America), and the nagals, a Mexican Indian name for "the (now) sorcerers and medicine men."
• This brings us to Professor Gordon's research in the Aztecan and Mayan (and also South American Indian) tradition that it was a white, bearded personage who brought the arts of civilization to America, arriving from the east by boat.
• Both the Aztecan and Mayan titles for this personage, Quetzalcoatl and Kukulcan respectively, mean "Plumed Serpent."
• Additional testimony to the ubiquity and central religious importance among early American peoples of the snake or serpent need hardly be given, but we can briefly refer to the Snake Tribes among the North American Indians, the gigantic Serpent Mound over 700 feet in length that was constructed by the mound-building peoples of ancient Ohio, and the use of the feathered serpent (often dragonlike in appearance) in the magnificent pre-Columbian stone structures throughout Central America.

• What Dr. Gordon has done is to provide evidence that:

    

  The classical Old World has something to say about bearded white men who are at the same time plumed serpents. A pediment from the Athenian acropolis portrays on one side three plumed serpents, each with the head of a bearded man. This embodies the essential traits -- at two levels -- of the American iconography. There are too many details involved to be attributed to accident. (Before Columbus, pp. 51-53.)
• Dr. Gordon has included in his book a photograph of this pediment of an archaic temple on the Acropolis.
• Another very interesting corroboration of Old World links with the Plumed Serpent tradition, not mentioned by Professor Gordon, is offered by the Scots antiquary, Dorothea Chaplin, who, writing in 1938, (Mythological Bonds Between East and West, pp. 35-36.) discusses linguistic evidences for prehistoric links between the Celtic hero Cuchulinn (or Kukil Can) and the Mayan Kukulcan, noting that both of these figures were characterized as the Feathered Serpent.
• For his courage in allowing his evidence to stand or fall on its inherent cogency and appeal to our sense of logic and probability, Professor Gordon deserves a loud vote of thanks, for, as he correctly observes, his conclusions do "help us more fully to understand ourselves, our place in the order of things and our responsibilities."
•  Part Two
• When we review the field of prehistory, there is no doubt that we are really only at the beginning of gauging with any accuracy the place and meaning of our present civilization in man's long trek from his racial origins, and that research in all branches of knowledge is needed to bring us to a fuller understanding.
• For instance, Professor Gordon, an acknowledged expert in ancient Mesopotamian and Mediterranean tongues, used his skills to striking advantage in his book, Before Columbus, in showing what rich stores of information are to be garnered by an enlightened use of linguistics in tandem with other lines of investigation of prehistory.
• Aside from citing an amazing number of comparative word derivations, he devotes a full chapter to the array of evidence found in language which, among others, points to links connecting the ancient Mesopotamian peoples with those of Mesoamerica.
• Noting distribution of the crocodile over both Old and New Worlds, Dr. Gordon says that in Egypt this animal was called sbk (usually pronounced sobek). The Aztecan name for the reptile is cipactli, whose stem is cipac- (pronounced sipac-) plus the nominal -t1i.

  • Similarity in names for the crocodile in ancient Egyptian & Aztec languages.
  Add Sticky Note

• He writes:

   

  As far as the consonants go, there is no discrepancy between Egyptian sbk and Nahuatl spk because in the latter b and p are not distinguished. -- p. 135
• He then cites the Central American Nahuatl word teo-tl, god, drawing attention to the parallel Greek theo-s and the Latin deu-s, and regards the comparison well founded that was made more than 150 years ago by Alexander von Humboldt between the Nahuatl teo-calli (god's house) and the Greek theoukalia (god's house, shrine).
• Further, he draws attention to the Nahuatl papalotl and the Latin papilio, both words meaning butterfly.
• Another example should be quoted here because of the role it plays in authenticating a possible sixth century B.C. voyage from the Red Sea to Brazil by Canaanite traders.
• The author tells us that the word for "iron" in most Semitic languages other than Arabic is barzel (brzl in Ugaritic, parzillu in Akkadian), and that the word found its way into the Atlantic community where, in the Midland counties of England, brazil means "iron pyrites."
• He notes that Hy Brasil stands for the Northwest Semitic 'I BRZL, or "The Island of Iron":
• Old Irish lore refers to Hy Brasil, "The Island of Brazil," out in the Atlantic Ocean beyond Ireland.
• Whether "the Island of Brazil" designated a part of the country now known as Brazil has not yet been proved. We can however say that no country in the world merits the name BRZL "Iron" more than Brazil, whose chief resource is still iron. -- Before Columbus, p. 119
• This was initially branded as a forgery, but after translating the eight-line inscription again in 1968, he is convinced the text is genuine. He bases his conclusion on the fact that it contains readings, unknown in 1872, that have since then been authenticated by inscriptions discovered during the century that has elapsed.
• Dr. Gordon links this etymology with an inscribed stone found in Brazil in 1872 which he believes records a crossing from Canaan to Brazil in 534-531 B.C.
• The stone tells of the separation of a Sidonian Canaanite ship from a fleet of ten voyaging for two years westward around Africa, and then being cast onto the shores of the "Island of Iron" (or Brazil).
• By means of this kind of convincing analysis, only briefly exemplified above, Professor Gordon and his many sung and unsung predecessors have made it now much clearer that the first task facing us is the unraveling and clarifying of the history and events of that still mysterious period which dates roughly from 13,000 up to 3,000 or 2,000 years B.C.
• For somewhere within those approximate dates will almost certainly be found the keys to the existence of an Atlantis, of that early advanced ecumene of Sea People and of the nature of the prehistoric Meso-american civilizations. Moreover, and perhaps of greater import, such key data should afford us a truer vision of the real age of man.
• The period from about 13,000 to 8,000 B.C. is characterized as a primitive "middle stone age"; the next 4,000 years as a similarly aboriginal "recent stone age"; and the period from about 4,000 to 2,000 B.C. is seen as a not much more sophisticated "bronze age."
• This prospect takes on a much sharper significance when we realize that our major schools of anthropology and archaeology are still working in a strangely artificial frame of reference as to time.
• Specialists restrict themselves almost exclusively to stratigraphy and the classification of artifacts and fossils as evidence about the nature and degree of civilization enjoyed by the mankind of those eras.
• The defect of such an approach is highlighted by Dr. Gordon's criticism of "the hyperskeptical denial fostered by over-specialization" and his emphasis on the deadening effect this has had upon the type of basic research he believes is needed to unravel our immediate prehistory.
• He is in favor of bringing to bear the contributions made by as many fields of human knowledge as possible upon the unsolved problems in a consciously coordinated and mutually supportive effort. His book affords a good example of such a wide-open approach to new correlations of knowledge.
• The significance of the period from about 13,000 to 2,000 B.C. for a more extended human history may be seen from what modern geological knowledge tells us, because that period takes us back to the close of the most recent Ice Age.
• Named in Europe the Wurm and in North America the Wisconsin, this age of glaciation is calculated to have blanketed much of the northern hemisphere in those two areas with a massive ice shield from about 50,000 to much less than 20,000 years ago.
• In North America east of the Rocky Mountains the icefields are said to have extended as far as southern Indiana and Illinois until about 13,000 years ago, and are estimated to have disappeared from central Quebec not more than 10,000 years ago.
• In the western ranges the Ice Age was represented mainly by scattered mountain glaciers which did not have the same general grinding effect over great sweeps of the land as in the eastern areas.

  • Might this be for the reason the Rocky Mountains rose at a much later date?
  Add Sticky Note
• As the enormous weight of the ice was released, great portions of the land rose hundreds of feet from under their former burden, while the water, cycled into the oceans, raised the sea level also by as much as 350 feet.
• The withdrawal of the icesheet, calculated to have been more than a mile in thickness at its center, had many important effects.
• With the melting process came radical changes in the climate, which became drier and much warmer and milder.
• Flora and fauna moved northward, with major shifts of various land masses, accompanied by unusual volcanic, tectonic, and landslip activity also taking place.
• The notable rise in the level of the oceans not only would have favored, but also would have required more extensive maritime activity by the civilized man of that epoch.
• Of obvious interest in this connection is the dating of the sinking of Poseidonis as 11,536 years ago.
• The widespread ameliorating of climatic conditions throughout the Temperate Zone would certainly have conduced to much more extensive human movement and exploration than had been possible during the long millennia of the great icesheets, and may even have permitted significant increases in total world population.
• Recent geological discoveries show that for several thousand years prior to a date of about 3,000 B.C. -- i.e., 5,000 years ago and earlier there occurred a "Climatic Optimum" within the general warming trend on the earth, during which world temperatures were much higher than at present so that even the arctic seas were free of ice, and mountain glaciers had dwindled to a few remnants on the highest peaks.
• This "Climatic Optimum" would have existed, we may observe, precisely during the period of some thousands of years when, according to Professors Brogger, Stefansson, Hapgood, and Gordon -- who argue from other kinds of evidence than that of geology -- a highly civilized global ecumene flourished based upon advanced knowledge of astronomy and navigation.
• On the Pacific side it would have existed just at the time when the ancient records of India tell us that Arjuna crossed from Asia to visit America, and, somewhat later perhaps, Chinese records of world geography and exploration show their emissaries in the New World, to say nothing of the Japanese who apparently visited Ecuador during the same era.
• If to this picture we add further geological information showing that some 4,000 years ago there occurred a "Little Ice Age" within the broader warming trend -- during which arctic seas were refrozen and mountain glaciers again reborn once more descended into fertile valleys in Temperate Zone regions -- it is possible to get some understanding of how people isolated by the cold could soon have lost knowledge of their neighbors and why we do not have more general physical evidence of possibly several preglacial civilizations.
• Since then, according to some scientists, this "Little Ice Age" has advanced and retreated in minor cycles.
• But authorities are not yet fully agreed whether our own time is in fact a fourth interglacial period (three former such periods are said to have occurred in the last 900,000 years, between four Ice Ages of which the Wurm-Wisconsin was the most recent) or part of a new Ice Age.
• There are of course many other reasons than Ice Ages, seismic events, and submergences, why formerly widespread knowledge became inaccessible to our generation.
• We can cite the deliberate destruction a various times of such records by man himself. Hapgood remarks that there is evidence the maps of the early sea peoples were collected and studied in the great library at Alexandria until most of them were lost in the catastrophe of its final destruction in the seventh century A.D.
• Edward H. Thompson has recorded the wholesale burning at Chichen Itza in Yucatan by the early Spanish Bishop de Landa of priceless stores of rolled deerskin and maguey paper manuscripts collected there by the Mayan wise men, the "Itzaes," and the demolition of thousands of stone figures, altar stones, vases, and other artifacts reflecting the high craftsmanship of the Mayans.
• And we read of an early ruler of China who ordered the destruction of all existing books so that human history could begin with his reign.
• A corollary to this sort of activity is the growth at various times of a scientific, religious, or academic 'establishment' that becomes so obsessed with its own dogmas that for long periods the truth receives little attention.
• As an example, we may ask how it can be that, in our most enlightened of eras, Western medical science has remained until only yesterday so oblivious to and disinterested in the Chinese technique of acupuncture, which reflects a knowledge of anesthetics and the nervous system that we might long since have been utilizing for our general benefit?
• Such seminal works as Before Columbus illustrate as almost nothing else can how poorly we have used the records of antiquity that by fortune escaped destruction and have come down to us in whole or in part, particularly the obvious key materials such as those of language and the traditional legends and epics of early peoples.

  • And equally so..is how poorly learned men of a more open mind than their hide bound academia colleagues, have also ignored or rejected outright the Bible, specifically the Old Testament's, recording of mankind's earliest epochs.
  Add Sticky Note
• We are made painfully aware that it is not the ancients who are at fault, for their efforts to pass on a full account of their own and even former times were far better than we had imagined.
• It is rather our own canons of scholarship which must bear the major blame for this neglect, characterized as they are by an excessive parochialism and skepticism toward the earliest literatures as recordings of authentic history.
• We have set up arbitrary standards of evidence and then have refused to consider any findings judged not to conform to those standards. The result is apparent: a distorted and culture-bound perspective of our past.
• What is clearly needed is a larger theoretical horizon that takes the whole globe as its ecumene, and a corresponding time-frame for man as civilized homo sapiens that comprehends much vaster periods and epochs of years for his development than the paltry few thousands presently allowed him by academic specialists.
• By their insistence upon a broad, impartial and elevated scrutiny of the far vistas of prehistory as the only adequate standard of scholarship, the Donnellys, Stefanssons, Hapgoods and Gordons offer much hope to the intelligent layman and the open-minded professional that the past can be read usefully and with benefit for all.
• It becomes ever more apparent that such an unfettered perspective is needed not only to confirm our intuitions of an ancient human greatness, but also to show that the early accounts make perfect sense as recordings of an archaic racial history, whose decipherment, by the same token, will confer new dignity upon us and our strivings to cope more effectively with the perplexities of our own time and condition.
•  (From Sunrise magazine, June-July, August-September 1972; copyright © 1972 Theosophical University Press)

109 more annotations...

• “Gigantic” Newcomers to the Prehistoric St. Lawrence River Valley
• by G. Iudhael Jewell
• Right: Adena skull from the Ohio State Archaeological Museum, Columbus, Ohio. Click and drag photo to resize. Script from The Java Script Source 
• A strange people intruded into the St. Lawrence Valley around 2,000 BC, huge, rugged, very tall, with massive skulls, very roundbroad heads.
• They were physically different than the long-narrow headed native "Archaic" peoples.
• The big, roundheaded newcomers brought D-shaped 11-inch celts.
• There appears to have been a link between their society and the isolated Meadowood Culture of 800 to 500 BC on the border of the lower St. Lawrence river at Quebec- New York-Ontario.
• Prufer and Dragoo always insisted that Adena came from eastern Lake Ontario, via upper New York to West Virginia and the Ohio River.
• They also formed a nexus with the Adena culture of huge round-heads.
• Now the Canadian Museum of Civilization (a citadel of conservative isolationism and liberal political-correctness) admits that in the Terminal phase (2,000 to 1,000 BC) of the "Middle Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Culture" (previously called "Laurentian Late Archaic") a tall people (women 170 cm and men 180.7 cm) with "hyperdontia, or extra teeth... a genetic trait... biological...", dwelt in the St. Lawrence-Ottawa Valley (J.V. Wright, History Native Peoples of Canada: 10,000 to 1000 BC).
• Plenty of cremations, though, in glaring contrast to the Red Paint People, wether Maritime or Laurentian Archaic, who had elaborate burials for kids.
• Strangely, the skeletal remains of children were very rare.

  • Childrens' skeletons very rare...???
  Add Sticky Note
• The Brook Street Burial Below: On December 6, 1960, the skeletal remains of a man who lived in the area about 700 BC were discovered by Douglas Yaxley of Peterborough, Canada.
• Buried with the man were twenty-nine artifacts attributed to the Point Peninsula Culture, which occupied the Trent River system before the Christian era. Click and drag photo to resize.
• Irish tradition recounts that the brutal, warlike Fomorians were "giants" who invaded in ships from Africa, and demanded children at Halloween time. Pict tradition held the same.

  • Offshoots of or akin to the Isrealites' record of the "Sons of Anak?" There were other "giant" species of the Middle East at about this time frame: Rephaim, Zamzumim, etc..
  Add Sticky Note
• They were finally driven north to the Hebrides Isles off northwest Scotland and to Tory Island off northwest Ireland in the deep Atlantic.
• The Formorian giants were supposedly endowed with double-rows of teeth.
• From there, they preyed on the people of Ulster.
• Interestingly, Anglo-American settlers in the upper Ohio were told Native traditions of "giants," and early settlers claimed they were digging up (from Lake Erie-to the Ohio River) the skeletons of "giants' with massive skulls and double rows of teeth.
• The skeletal remains of pygmies (often of Australoid type), especially in the Tennessee Valley have been excavated, confirming Native traditions.
• The Mandarins of the Canadian Museum of Civilization (Hull/Ottawa) also at long last admit: "Historically documented native beliefs in Canada appear to have been quite similar to those of the pre- Christian Celtic, Germanic and old Scandinavian peoples of northwestern Europe" ... (Old Scandinavian means Lapps and Finns).

19 more annotations...

• Archaeologist Claims Human Sacrifice Performed At Cahokia Mounds

      <!--google_ad_section_end-->

  <!-- google_ad_section_start --> 

  
• bnd.com - Human sacrifice! Victims buried alive! Read all about it in "Cahokia -- Ancient America's Great City on the Mississippi."
• According to this new book by University of Illinois archaeologist and professor of anthropology Tim Pauketat, the mound builders were not always the idyllic, corn-growing, pottery-making, fishing-hunting gentle villagers depicted in various dioramas at the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site in Collinsville.
• Pauketat said these long-vanished people practiced human sacrifice of women and men on a mass scale and weren't always careful to bury only the dead.

  • Wondering in that dem American past if the Mound Builders of North America and the pyramid builders of South and Central America did not have some relationship one to another in their respective constructions as well as human sacrifices
  Add Sticky Note
• Based on years of study of artifacts including many from the extensive excavation of the site's Mound 72 during 1967-71, Pauketat's book is getting national attention. The Washington Post described it as "undeniably hot." A national online review service used the headline, "Sacrificial virgins of the Mississippi."
• But the "virgins" angle may be a bit of an overstatement, said Pauketat, but not by much.
• "In the book I do not use the word virgin. I used female sacrifices," he said, noting that close study of the pelvic area of some of 53 female skeletons found in a huge pit below the mound showed clear signs of childbirth.
• "They were selecting women of a certain age, but it's not like they're selecting virgins," he said. Most of the sacrificial victims were in their early 20s, he said.
  
• The existence of 260 skeletal remains including of women all retrieved from within and under Mound 72 was not previously unknown in the metro-east. But because of the book, it's sensational news in other parts of the country, especially in big Eastern cities where residents are unfamiliar with the Midwest's often savage early history.
• Pauketat said that the vast collection of data from the mound excavation included reports from the original archaeologist who found finger bones extended deep into the sand below some of the skeletons, evidence that victims were alive when buried.
• "That's the interpretation of the original excavator. He's quite sure of that. I talked to him in person," Pauketat said.
• "Basically, the book came together after we reached a critical threshold, all of the little pieces started falling into place. A lot of pieces from the Mound 72 dig are important because they help make sense of all the other pieces that have been found."
• Ancient Cahokia, which reached its peak about 1150 A.D. with a population of 20,000, was a religious center of farmers and hunters that probably influenced much of what archaeologists call the Southeast Ceremonial Complex, a string of similar but smaller sites found from Illinois to northern Florida.
• It was abandoned about 100 to 200 years later and its descendants are believed to be the various tribes from historic times.
• At the time of its zenith, Cahokia rivaled London in population and was America's most-populous city until Philadelphia eclipsed it in the 18th century.
• About 80 of the original 120 mounds survive, including Monks Mound, the largest prehistoric earthen structure north of Mexico.
• In this society, often referred to as the Mississippian Culture, women played much more of a role than convenient sacrificial victims, Pauketat said. And even in this death ritual, women were respected, unlike some of the men whose remains were found with heads lopped off.

  • So much for the glorified and lately proferred "goddess worship societies of peace and harmony"
  Add Sticky Note
• "The women never show injury. There is no trauma. So that means either they drank poison or they were strangled. But, that's speculation. They were very carefully placed into these pits," he said.
• And in the practice of various religious rites, evidence has been found that women were the rivals of this society's male religious leaders.
• Ancient Cahokia's big draw, according to the book, was religion
• Pauketat said the evidence is in the form of curious female figurines carved from a type of clay found just south of St. Louis known as flint clay. The reddish substance dries rock hard.
• Just last month, a small, 4-inch high female figure was found at a state-run archaeological dig in East St. Louis. Pauketat said only 23 other such figurines are known, including the largest, about 16 inches high.
• The elevated status of women in religion in Cahokian society is illustrated, Pauketat said, by the decorations on the figurines that include a highly prized serpent figure, and of depictions of staple foods like corn and squash.

  • Females and serpent figures...interesting..Native American memories of the Genesis Garden of Eden record?
  Add Sticky Note
• On some figurines, baskets that have been interpreted as holding the bones of ancestors also have been carved into the statues.
• "Clearly, a lot of the artwork of female gods and female figureheads show that women were probably highly elevated at Cahokia."
• Pauketat said that at Cahokia, religion drew people from small farming villages all over the metro-east and from where present day St. Louis stands.
• "People recognized in that place (Cahokia) a supernatural power on a scale and of a kind that was probably unknown in North America north of Mexico," he said
• As for the female sacrifices, Pauketat said important women may have been chosen because of their status.
• "These female sacrifices might not have been of unimportant people. This may have been a very honored role to fill. It may have been people who were impersonating some kind of corn goddess," he said, "And their duty was to die."

27 more annotations...

• from A Ghosthunter's Journal by Mason Winfield
• BIGFOOT AT BLACK CREEK
• By now the word “paranormal” is used simply to mean “outside the accepted theory,” and, as might be imagined, the modern business of it is a big one, concerning itself partly with subjects that people would type as “supernatural,” like apparitions of dead humans and extra-sensory talents in living ones.
• Paranormal inquiry also addresses things that might be totally natural, even commonplace, but simply out of setting.
• “Ancient mysteries” -- like the possible Phoenician exploration of the Americas -- are generally of this variety. Some paranormal subjects may just be undiscovered -- like UFOs, earth energies, and mystery monsters -- and, if the general presumptions of their advocates come true, might someday be the study of mainstream disciplines like physics, geology, and zoology.
• The apish giant often called “Bigfoot” would be in the last category, and Shadows of the Western Door addressed the subject of its possible presence in Western New York
• I compiled as many good “crazy critter” reports as I could about my home region, hoping for credible and electrifying “close encounters.”
• What surfaced easily was a folkloric mass from a long section of the Alleganies running well into Pennsylvania. Until recently this was the best modern cycle, but it was murky: often third-hand reports lacking reliable witnesses or physical evidence. At that point it didn’t surprise me; I expected the critters to be... scarce.
• From 1973 to 1976 there was a better cycle of reports from a largely forested and rural region around the northern part of Allegany County.
• I had interviewed most of the key human players from this episode in the early 90s and they seemed very credible, but I'd left the matter out of Shadows because I didn’t have even enough idea what was up to know which chapter to put it in. (Ghosts? Beasties? UFOs?)
• From what I could gather, the focus - if not also the stimulus - of the quirky activity seemed to be a small cabin built by some high school kids near a marshy region that had attracted generations of paranormal rumors reminiscent of UFO stories, like strange lights and mechanical noises. The lads used to sleep in this jerryrigged shack on weekends and holidays, but one of them stepped outside one night and found himself and a large critter checking each other out. He described it as anthropoidal, but light-colored.
• In other respects the cycle followed paranormal patterns: ripped farm animals, rattled cabins, spooked livestock, alarmed countryfolk, and reports of strange, smelly critters. Yes - Bigfoot is supposedly so redolent that they call him “the Skunk Ape” in some parts.
• Shortly after Shadows was published I started hearing stories that made me believe I’d given too short shrift to a couple of its topics, including Ol' Stinky.
• In the fall of 1998 after a luncheon talk in Niagara County I was approached by one of the attendees. That very week her brother's family had cast a set of seventeen-inch footprints outside their Allegany County home. They were wary of publicity, but I managed to arrange an interview for a few weeks later. I used the interval for a little more digging, and reflected on Bigfoot in my area back through time.
• One of the most elaborate came from Livingston County, where a strange beast was sighted several times in 1870 and 1871.
• There were historic accounts of Bigfoot, or the reasonable facsimile.
• Big, bipedal, and hairy, it maimed a number of harassing dogs. The accounts make no mention of details we’d consider critical: its skull size and shape, its body configuration. It’s hard to know what was going on.
• As part of the work on “Buried Secrets” - Shadows' chapter on the ancient mysteries of the region -- I had discovered a tradition of something like Bigfoot in the histories and old records.
• When the Whites arrived for good near the end of the eighteenth century this area was fairly dotted with earthworks much like the Old World type, and a number of curiosities came out of them, including two bestial, humanoid skulls from a pre-Iroquoian burial mound on Tonawanda island near Buffalo.
• Giant human-like skeletons turned up throughout the region, chiefly in the Southern Tier near the Alleganies, and along river valleys like the Conewango.
• Nineteenth-century finds, seemingly quite well-documented, of numerous giant skeletons just outside Western New York -- in northwestern Pennsylvania and the Susquehanna Valley -- could point to a tribe, even a race of them in the region, except for the sheer oddity of the idea.
• More reports of big hominid bones came from homebuilders and other diggers near East Aurora and Rochester.
• Iroquois legend held figures that might be interpreted as Bigfoot-like, both generic - the Stone Giants - and individual, like High Hat, a bogie local to the northern Alleganies.
• While some Native American nations of the west seem to have the tradition of the Bigfoot, among those of the Northeast Woodlands the matter is anything but clear.
• I’d even heard of something called “the Wendigo Complex,” only found among Native American men, in which the sufferer believes he is becoming something bestial, cannibalistic, and dangerous to his community, even his own loved ones.
• Yet I had no confidence whatever that a Bigfoot was what we were talking about.
• I don’t believe you should start out looking for something and ransack tradition for things that remind you of it. You don’t understand the significance of the images that way. You start by getting into the context of a culture, and I really didn’t think I was with the native people of the northeast.

25 more annotations...

• from A Ghosthunter's Journal by Mason Winfield
   
   V
• I arrived at Sandy’s house, still chuckling at myself over that comical little standdown. I had probably outfaced a dyspeptic groundhog.
• Young Parker let me in and showed me the downstairs shower, looking like he had something on his mind. When I came out, Sandy and other members of the brood were back, rushing around like they were battening hatches against a storm. “Don’t go anyplace,” she said, ushering her youngest up the stairs.
• “Parkie shot a ‘woody’!” chirped the little one.
• “You shoulda been there!” crowed Parker, but he looked like he was covering his feelings.
• An hour before the young fellow (babysitting his little sister) had fired a shotgun at some suspicious bushes. The resultant bellow and heavy bipedal running had them believing that he had winged the Bigfoot.
• I wondered if that was the stalker I had envisioned on my run. Its scrub-haunting style was certainly the same, and we had our explanation if it had turned nasty - unusual, but not unreported, Bigfoot behavior.
• Parker even believed he had some blood samples and hair from the scene, which he seemed about to retrieve.
• I raised my hand before he could spring up the stairs. “Can it wait? I have a signing to get to.”
• Sandy, however, was distressed at the idea of Bigfeet on the warpath and the house with only one adult.
• I held my peace and considered options. There was no telling how long I’d have to wait until Bill Pascarella returned, but I was determined not to stand up that little bookstore. They’re the ones you want to show respect. A signing can be the high point of their year.
• I called Jim Lynn, a retired civil deputy who lived nearby. He had attended a couple of my talks and even helped me track down a ghost story in these parts a few years back.
• The cops wouldn’t stay here all night on suspicion of Bigfeet, but another idea came to me.
• He arrive in or forty-five minutes with his brother-in-law Bob Gorski, a State Trooper, and Ed Gunther, a friend, hunter, and curiosity-seeker. They were brawny, middle-aged men armed for game, and I had no more fears for the family. Parker seemed to have some new heroes, and when I left he was on the porch with them chattering about law enforcement.
• I inquired about the local paranormal as well as the “mystery critter” population. I didn’t mention the word Bigfoot for fear of getting whoppers delivered to order;
• Signings - like lectures - are usually great opportunities to make research contacts, and this small one in the shop of a Black Creek woman was no different.
• but a few stories from the last century did offer themselves, and word that recent digging in the cellar of an old home on Sandy’s road had turned up giant bones.
• Sandy had kept that from me, or else she hadn’t known.
• It was also pointed out that this was “the Valley of the Lost Nation,” the region from which a small Native American group just vanished from history with barely a trace, as if something had snatched them into the sky. What the Hell was going on around here?
• The three guardians had been all over the ridge with the family dogs and noticed nothing out of the ordinary. Everyone s spirits had lightened.
• I got back to Sandy’s by nine-thirty to find Jim Lynn and his pals jawing with husband Bill at the kitchen table, praising Sandy’s coffee and whole-wheat cookies.
• I felt as if I had gotten swept up in Sandy’s mood earlier that evening, and that my haste to get to the signing had tag-teamed my normal reasoning processes. I was even questioning my experience in the woods.
• I’d seen nothing, really. It was generally believed that Parker had sunk buckshot into his own bogeymen, and that our suspicions were the stuff dreams are made of.
• I delivered something like a vernacular Puck’s address (at the end of ‘Midsummer Night’) to the lawmen, filled with genial remorse for wasting time in their busy lives. Veterans of many a fruitless material stake-out, they were good sports about this failed paranormal one.
• It had even become the fashion of the evening to scoff at Bigfoot rumors.
• She was taking her sweet old time about getting back, though. The others were hot into some topic, and I decided to see what she was up to.
• The evening now seemed so innocent that no one noticed when Suzie walked with a couple of the dogs out to the barn for an errand.
• The minute I stepped from the house I knew something was wrong. The dogs were in full throat behind the barn. How could we not have heard them? I had two choices: turn back into the house and sound a warning or rush over immediately. For some reason I chose the latter.
• Generations of owners had more or less connected the old farmhouse to the barn by an assortment of structures - a stable, pens, a tool-shed - that seemed afterthoughts: walls without roofs, workspaces without walls, interlocking to produce jagged passageways and open-air spaces.
• I cut around the buildings from the outside and the front of the house, following the hubbub to the left of it. Expecting to see Suzie as I rounded the corner, I was readying a phrase, “What’s all the racket?” I never used it.
• It felt like I ran into a tree branch. I flew and fell in an awkward position, on my back across a stack of old doors beneath a low overhang. My hips were higher than my head, which may have been what kept me conscious. In the odd, crowded confines of the barn entrance there were wooden fixtures and heavy items at all angles, and only moonlight pouring in.
• The shadow that loomed over me looked as wide as a refrigerator. It reached for me with an astonishing peace.
• I had the impression of fingers thick and blunt as twinkies groping or me in my awkward perch. Several of them brushed past my eyes, inches away, as if expecting to fingerpaint into a palette of human features, as if reaching for an image a foot closer. Whatever it was was easily within reach of my legs or my waist and could have hauled me from my space like a wheelbarrow;
• Everything was slowed, as if the air had thickened into molten glass, and time into an invisible, permeating medium that even bogged thought.
• but it seemed to prefer my throat, and to have trouble finding it in the half-lit jumble of flat planes, of table-edges and reclining doors. Its spatial awareness was not that of a human being.
• From where I lay, I put my feet high against the figure above me. Its torso felt hard as wood. It leaned into me as if amused, sensing something it readied to grab. I’m not a big man at all, but I’m fit, and my legs are strong. Even as my knees flexed, bringing the figure closer, I had the absurd memory of a similar move in college, when I got my back against a guard rail outside Denison University’s Bandersnatch and pushed a ‘67 Chevy out of a snowbank. The things that flash through you in the most desperate, speeded-up, slowed-down moments... The few life-and-death situations I remember have all been like that.
• With the same motion, but viciously and faster, I gave a perfectly-timed shove with all I had when the figure was most unbalanced and my leverage was the best. The huge form shot back and up, hitting its head on the edge of an overhanging open attic-floor beneath which it had been leaning to reach at me. The impact had to be awful.
• I was on my feet so fast it surprised me. As if it had been left there for me to grab, the haft of a tool on the edge of a bench came into my hand. It was an axe. I swung it sideways like a bat at a pitch and felt the hammer-end land with a sick thwack on a neck and jaw and carry right through.
• It made me remember a discovery from an ancient battle, some guy's jaw found a hundred feet from his body, doubtless slung off him by a single handy blow.
• The tool fell from my hands, and I stood back stunned against the wall, the impact of the brushing blow I had taken either starting to tell for the first time, or really settling in. I came to at the incredible sound of a shotgun from five feet away, and the insane din of several dogs too afraid to do more than stand and yap.
• Jim Lynn had fired at something toward the treeline and stood next to me staring in its direction.
• Whatever instincts the old lawman had had been good ones; he had left the house within seconds of me, out a different door, and come around from the other side. He may have saved my life.
• Suzie Pascarella stood frozen beside us, having witnessed everything from behind a waist-high partition. I looked down and saw nothing but scuffed dirt. Amazing. That blow was the most vicious thing I have ever done. I think it would have dropped a bear.
• We stood, staring out into the night suddenly weirder than we had ever accepted, staring as if the field and trees beyond it was a screen upon which we had seen a film so moving that we could not rise from our seats until we had read all the credits. It had to be minutes before any of us spoke.
• Others arrived, Bob Gorski with his pistol and Bill Pascarella with a baseball bat. Sandy and the older children followed.

43 more annotations...

• Thursday, August 27, 2009

   

    

   In the Spirit of Rugaru: Bigfoot As Prophetic Representative of the Earth
• As I was visited recently by Craig Woolheater of the TEXAS BIGFOOT RESEARCH CONSERVANCY, and at the upcoming TEXAS BIGFOOT CONFERENCE, Peter Matthiessen is finally coming out in full public view with the Bigfoot beliefs I always suspected he held,
• I got to thinking about a book I read over a decade ago, and a certain mysterious creature in it: RUGARU!
• [NOTE: The 2009 Texas Bigfoot Conference will be held in Tyler, Texas, September 26, 2009, 8:30 A.M. to 6:30 P.M."]
• Back in the mid-to-late 90s I was on a jag of reading "bad history" (the horror, the horror!), absorbing all I could of the nightmare of humanity's past (trying to awaken).
• During this time I read Peter Matthiessen's IN THE SPIRIT OF CRAZY HORSE, right after "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" and "American Holocaust."
• As I read along I began to sense something strange about this book. Mostly it is a legalistic recounting of the horrid injustices done to the Lakota, the American Indian Movement, and in particular, Leonard Peltier.
• But it is also an attempt to tell the history of the People through the aspects of the culture still living and viable in the modern world.
• A recurrent theme, popping up over and over again, to the point I had to stop, go to the index, and re-read the segments where RUGARU, or THE BIG HAIRY MAN, was discussed.
• What was Bigfoot-- as the author and his interviewees clearly meant to say this spirit/creature was--doing in this book?
• Rugaru, just as the Bigfoot we know more familiarly, creeps on the margins, or at the heart of things in this book, as a sub-text that emerges as the main message: Humanity is out of touch, out of balance, crimes against nature and people must be righted, and our ways of life changed to their proper states.
• See, Bigfoot (or Sasquatch, or Rugaru, or...) isn't some phenomenon originating in 1950s or 1960s popular culture;
• it has been here for thousands of years, most likely brought over by (or preceding) the Native Americans as they crossed from Asia during the prior Ice Ages.
• Personally, I learned about Bigfoot in the usual way of my generation, through Leonard Nimoy on "In Search Of," and then through John Green's books in the paranormal section of the public library.
• I was obsessed, at around the age of nine or ten, with such things, be they ghosts, ESP, cryptid creatures or monsters, UFOs or demons--I was down with it.
• But in the years interceding my mental use of Bigfoot became increasingly of a humorous nature. It was just simply funny, seen on the cover of The Weekly World News.
• Bigfoot had the air of something rebellious in it, too: it lived outside of human parameters and society, stank to high heaven, and loved to mess with logging equipment.
• Bigfoot was the first Earth First-er! Sasquatch was a Rebel. Bigfoot began to appeal to my associates in the ARMCHAIR ANARCHISTS SOCIETY, to the degree that we formed a splinter group, THE CHURCH OF BIGFOOT SCIENTIST.
• Even as we laughed, joked and chanted "Rugaru, Rugaru!!!" around the campfires, something was slowly changing in me, I was beginning to suspect there WERE perhaps eyes looking back at me from the dark forests, wondering about our absurd behavior and myriad empty beer bottles.
• And then we encountered something brown and tall, moving through heavy forest brush several miles in to old logging company land way back in the hills above Blue Lake, CA.
• We only really saw it's head moving quickly through the branches, its body obscured. It could, perhaps, have been an elk; but I've never seen the dogs we had with us respond this way to anything, and they were used to bear, deer, cougars and foxes. They positively freaked out.
• The thing quickly disappeared down into the deep thickets, but we could hear its treads retreating. There was something strange about it, an unexplainable feeling in the experience.
• I referred back to Matthiessen's book again, haunted by his evocation of the BIG MAN, the spirit of the woods, of earth's justice, of something beyond current culture and the hegemonic dominance of cheezoid and crass corporate consumerism.
• As I began reading the books about Sasquatch, eventually consuming about 50 of them, the myth and legend began to become a plausible reality.
• No, it wasn't just a joke: this thing has been leaving tracks, making appearances, and maybe abducting human females and children, for centuries.
• The reported characteristics are so consistent that eventually one has to take out Occam's Razor and admit it: the simplest explanation, simpler by far than "myth" and "hoaxing," is that THERE IS SUCH A CREATURE, and it is alive and well out there in the world beyond our imaginations as well as within them.
• Here are quotes from the book, mysteriously hidden within the massive 686 page narrative of historical oppression and heroic survival:
• "My travels with Indians began some years ago with the discovery that most traditional communities in North America know of a messenger who appears in evil times as a warning from the Creator that man's disrespect for His sacred instructions has upset the harmony and balance of existence;
• some say that the messenger comes in sign of a great destroying fire that will purify the world of the disruption and pollution of earth, air, water, and all living things.
• He has strong spirit powers and sometimes takes the form of a huge hairy man; in recent years this primordial being has appeared near Indian communities from the northern Plains states to far northern Alberta and throughout the Pacific Northwest." (pg. xxiii)
• "Along the way I learned a little of the Indians' identity with land and life (very different from our 'environmental' understanding) and shared a little of their long sadness about the theft and ruin of ancestral lands--one reason, they felt, why That-One-You-Are-Speaking-About had reappeared." (pg. xxiii)
• "'There's a lot going on up in that country now,' said Archie Fire, referring not only to the threat to the Great Plains from widespread mining but to recent appearances of the big hairy man at Little Eagle, on the Standing Rock Reservation, who came in sign, some people said, of those days at the world's end 'when the moon will turn red and the sun will turn blue' and the Lakota people will resume their place at the center of existence." (pg. xxvi)
• "Turtle Mountain was among the many Indian communities that had been visited in recent years by the "rugaru," as the Ojibwa call the hairy man who appears in symptom of danger or psychic disruption in the community.
• Mary's son Richard talked a little about the appearance of these beings in recent years to Lakota people at Little Eagle, South Dakota.
• 'There were just too many sightings down there to ignore. I mean, a lot of people saw it. Around here, we didn't have very many reports; most of them were right here where we live now.' He waved his hand to indicate the woods outside, where I camped that night along the lake edge." (pg. xxvii)
• "A few weeks before, the big, hairy man had appeared in Little Eagle for the third straight year, and more than forty people had seen him.
• 'I think that the Big Man is kind of the husband of Unk-ksa, the Earth, who is wise in the way of anything with its own natural wisdom.
• Sometimes we say that this One is kind of a big reptile from the ancient times, who can take a big, hairy form;
• I also think he can change into a coyote.
• He is very powerful. Some of the people who saw him did not respect what they were seeing, they did not honor him, and they are already gone." (xxix-xxx)
• "Her family paid no attention. 'They're all Christians up there now,' Lame Deer had told me. And Joe Flying By, asked how the old people of Little Eagle accounted for the Big Man, had said shortly, 'There are no more old people.'" (pg. xxxi)
• "Sidney Keith said that the Big Man seen at Little Eagle might be Unk-cegi, which means literally 'Earth Brown' or "Brown Shit'--the filth of Creation.
• Unk-cegi lived long, long ago, in the time of the great animals, but he had been covered up in the Great Flood, with all the other giants.

  • Native American version or ancestral memory of a Nephilim/Giant and the Genesis Flood
  Add Sticky Note
• 'He was down there too deep to be saved by Noah,' Sidney Keith observed dryly.
• But all the mining, all these underground explosions of the white man's bombs, had made fissures in the earth and released not Unk-cegi but his spirit.
• 'His bones are still down there. That's why Indians get so upset when burial grounds are disturbed, when the whole burying ceremony is interfered with; it isn't just a matter of disrespect.
• Disturbing the burial grounds the way the white man does releases those spirits.
• Unk-cegi was here when Indian man first came here.
• He seeks out Indian communities because he knew Indians in the Old Days, and he sought out Little Eagle because that is the worst place for drinking in Standing Rock, and maybe Cheyenne River, too.
• We drink too much in Eagle Butte, but not like that; even their old people are all drunk over there. Unk-cegi appeared to kids who smoke grass, and drunks and hotheads... nice people, some of 'em, but they do bad things.
• He won't appear to the good people; that's why Joe Flying By didn't see him. And he won't appear at the sun dance--that's a good circle.'" (pg. xxxiii)
• "'Maybe it's a good thing that Nature would come along and change everything, clear all that away, and start again.' Of the Big Man, Joe Eagle Elk said, 'It seems maybe he has got a good heart. He has never hurt nobody. A lot of people over there at Little Eagle, they been shooting at him instead of trying to exchange words and ask why he is coming around. Maybe he is trying to tell us what he wants and where he comes from; maybe he is bringing news for us, a warning.'"
• "'This nation--I can't say my nation, because they stole it away from me. ...They cheated and lied, and broke every treaty, even the sacred treaty that protected the Black Hills.'
• The medicine man subsided suddenly and became silent, composing himself. 'We've come to an age when we should know better than we are doing,' Pete Catches resumed softly, in a silence that followed some meditations on the Big Man, who was trying to save mankind, he said, from the great cataclysm the Indian people knew was coming.
• 'We must now try to understand what is wrong with us, why we have to tamper with and change the forests and the land. We have done this too long--not us, but the white man. Let's not walk on the moon, then fail to understand what this Creation is all about. This is life, this is beautiful, everything is the way it should be. (pg. xxxviii)
• "'Maybe around three or four o'clock, ...not long before the sun, we heard something very big walking in the creek. It wasn't any animal, either, and it wasn't somebody tossing in big rocks; it was plunk-plunk-plunk, like that, big steady steps.
• Zimmerman was so scared he just ran off, he wanted to wake up Joe, because him and Joe was living in one tent.
• Norman Brown said it was the Big Man, and that his people over in Arizona knew all about it, but we were all too scared to go down there and look.'
• In the evening of that day, huge dark thunderheads gathered over the Black Hills, followed by wild angry winds and lashing rain that caused property damage all over the western part of South Dakota." (pg. 149)
• "I told Sam about the footsteps in the creek heard on the night before the shoot-out by Jean Bordeaux and Jimmy Zimmerman and Norman Brown, and he nodded, saying, 'That was a sign, a warning.'
• 'There is your Big Man standing there, ever waiting, ever present, like the coming of a new day,' Pete Catches had told me two years earlier, here on Pine Ridge. "He is both spirit AND real being'--he had slapped the iron of his cot for emphasis--'but he can also glide through the forest, like a moose with big antlers, as if the trees weren't there.
• At Little Eagle, all those people came, and they went out with rifles and long scopes, and they couldn't see him, but all those other people at the bonfire, he came up close to them, they smelled him, heard him breathing; and when they tried to get too close, he went away.
• He didn't harm no one; I know him as my brother. I wanted to live over there at Little Eagle, go out by myself where he was last seen, and come in contact with him. I want him to touch me, just a touch, a blessing, something I could bring home to my sons and grandchildren, that I was there, that I approached him, and he touched me.
• It doesn't matter what you call him; he has many names. I call him Brother, Ci-e, and that's what the Old People would call him, too. We know that he was here with us for a long time; and we are fortunate to see him in our generation.
• We may not see him again for many, many generations. But he will come back, just when the next Ice Age comes into being.'" (pg. 559)
• Rugaru seems to be here, if not perhaps to warn us in our stupidity, then at least to remind us in our ignorance of the real, wild and largely unknown world that we are a part of, despite many centuries of deluded actions and insane culture.
• If you want to study this subject further, here is a great article we found in researching this blog entry: "Attitudes Toward Bigfoot in Many Native American Cultures," by Gayle Highpine.
• "Our people don't call themselves Sioux or Dakota. That's white man talk. We call ourselves Ikce Wicasa--THE NATURAL HUMANS, THE FREE, THE WILD, COMMON PEOPLE. I am pleased to be called that." --John Fire Lame Deer
• "Rugaru," as a neologism or pidgin term is certainly derived from Native interactions with French frontiersmen and traders.
• The root terms would be "loup" and "garou," meaning basically "wolf-man," "werewolf," or a lycanthropic shapeshifter.
• It would seem that this was the French folks' interpretation of the Native's "big hairy man."
• Recently a comic book/graphic novel was produced by Zenoscope Entertainment, called (of all things) WILLOW CREEK, and set here in our area. It involves Bigfoot and a werewolf beast being mixed up between Native and modern culture.
• Sadly, production on this cool horror project was suspended indefinitely when the artist contracted spinal cancer.
• Let's hope he recovers and the series continues. The two back issues are still available at Bigfoot Books, however, while supplies last.
• Leonard Peltier was recently denied parole, AGAIN. It would seem he is the scapegoat the FBI and government require.
• Matthiessen's book proves pretty damn conclusively that he is NOT guilty of shooting those federal agents. To take action start with the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee.
• PS--the more I work and live out here the more I hear, from locals and people from the various Native American tribes, about Bigfoot as a shape-shifter, a spiritual, interdimensional being. Before, I'd thought this stuff was kind of nutso. But now I am starting to wonder.... Watch the right side of the blog for a new POLL TOPIC on this matter.

75 more annotations...

• Gary A. David, Author of the Month for October 2009
• The Mothman of Pottery Mound:
   the Use of Sacred Datura in Ancient New Mexico
• By Gary A. David
• Gary David has been intrigued by the Four Corners region of the United States since his initial trip there in 1987.
• The following year he spent six months examining rock art and indigenous ruins in northern New Mexico.
• This prompted a move to Arizona In 1994, where he began an intensive study of the ancestral Pueblo People (sometimes misnamed the Anasazi) and their descendants the Hopi.
• In late 2006 after more than a decade of independent fieldwork and research, his nonfiction book The Orion Zone: Ancient Star Cities of the American Southwest was published by www.adventuresunlimitedpress.com.
• This describes a pattern of Hopi villages and ruin sites that precisely mirrors Orion, with an ancient site corresponding to each major star in the constellation.
• The sequel, also published by Adventures Unlimited Press (2008), is titled Eye of the Phoenix: Mysterious Visions and Secrets of the American Southwest.
• The book deals with diverse topics: the Ant People, Snake People, Dog Star People, Sedona Sanskrit, Arizona Knights Templar Crosses, Reptilian Round Towers, Frontier Freemasonry, Meteor Crater, Hopi Kachinas, Stone Tablets and the End Times.
• His articles have appeared in Fate (see beginning of article at: www.fatemag.com/issues/2000s/2007-01article2.html), World Explorer, Atlantis Rising, Ancient American, and Four Corners magazines. He has been interviewed on national radio programs and has given presentations extensively.
• Mr. David earned a master's degree in English literature from the University of Colorado and is a former adjunct professor. He is also a poet, with numerous volumes published. In addition, he is a professional musician, publisher of Island Hills Books (an online showcase for the literature inspired by the spirit-of-place, http://islandhills.tripod.com), and executive director/webmaster for www.theorionzone.com.
• Gary, his wife, and two cats live in rural northern Arizona, where the skies are still relatively pristine.
• From late 1966 though late 1967 the small town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia along the Ohio River was terrorized by a series of sightings of an uncanny creature that became known as Mothman.
• He was typically described as a broad-shouldered black or gray humanoid at least seven feet in height with moth-like wings that extended about ten feet.

• His glowing red eyes seemed to have a hypnotic effect. Sometimes the creature appeared headless, with his round, reflective eyes set down in his shoulders.

    

  
  Artist's sketch of one variation of Mothman.

• Sometimes it would suddenly shoot straight up in the air and completely disappear. The same period saw increased sightings of luminous balls or other UFOs and unexpected appearances of Men In Black.

    

  
  This 12-foot-high, stainless steel statue of the Mothman located in Point Pleasant, West Virginia was created by artist Robert Roach.
• The eerie entity would reportedly swoop down on people or cars and chase them at very high speeds.
• Were all these sightings of Mothman and other anomalous incidents just a weird precursor to the brief psychedelic era in popular culture when hallucinations became the norm? Or are there precedents for this phenomenon in the distant past?
• On the western bank of a turbulent, muddy river we see a flat-topped pyramid where a bizarre ritual is taking place. It involves a ring of elders wearing feathered headdresses, geometric medallions, white sashes, and brightly painted capes. Some are holding round shields and eagle-talon staffs.
• Cut to the high plain of central New Mexico in about the middle of the 14^th century.
• One of the elders raises a woven plaque heaped with tiny yellow and black seeds and brown spiny pods. The participants begin to eat the seeds, while low chants punctuated by a lone cottonwood drum rise into the endless desert night.
• At the center stands a tall being with the gray wings and coiled proboscis of the night flying hawk moth.
• An uncertain period passes as dizzy heads spin in swirling silver smoke.

• The creature then extends his massive wings and rockets high above the lone pyramid. He soars over whispering cornfields and circles the bulwark of the pueblo. Suddenly in a burst of purple light the Mothman disappears into gauzy clouds while moths flutter gently over jimsonweed blossoms glowing ghostlike in silent moonlight.

    

  
  The eroded cutbanks of the Rio Puerco in central New Mexico.
• Archaeologists know it as Pottery Mound, named for the profusion of polychrome potsherds. In fact, a greater variety of pottery styles were found there than at any other spot in New Mexico, with culturally distinctive ceramics coming from the Zuni and Acoma regions to the northwest and the Hopi region even farther northwest.
• Located about 12 miles southwest of the modern town of Los Lunas is the ancient village where this ritual took place.
• About 90 percent of the pottery retrieved from the site is non-utilitarian or decorative, so in its heyday the place was probably a major ceremonial center.
• Frank C. Hibben, the head archaeologist who initially excavated the site, writes: "The Rio Puerco Valley at the site of Pottery Mound is wide and almost level. In the whole region there is no place where a flat-topped structure of even modest dimensions would appear more imposing than at this spot. It is easy to see why the original builders constructed a pyramid there. " [1]

• Endnotes

   
    
  1. Frank C. Hibben: Kiva Art of the Anasazi at Pottery Mound (KC Publications, Las Vegas, Nevada, 1975), pp. 10-11. [back to text]

28 more annotations...

• Gary A. David, Author of the Month for October 2009
• The Mothman of Pottery Mound:
   the Use of Sacred Datura in Ancient New Mexico (cont.)
• By Gary A. David
• 
  The excavation crew at Pottery Mound during the 1961 season.

    

  The pyramid itself, technically called a 'platform mound', was constructed of puddled adobe and trash fill.
• As Hibben suggests, it must have dominated the expansive landscape, although it once rose only about 13 feet above the plain.
• Its sloping sides were originally coated with a smooth caliche surface. The mound was built on two levels with the upper one covering about 215 square feet.
• Surprisingly, three pueblos, each three or four stories high, had been constructed at different times -one above the other- on top of the pyramid, with additional buildings extending down the sides and around the base.

• Also unearthed were four plazas and 16 rectangular kivas (subterranean ceremonial prayer-chambers) that were roughly 30 by 30-some feet in size plus one round kiva 22 feet in diameter.

    

  
  Typical kiva at Pottery Mound. The access was via a ladder through an overhead hatchway. Colorful murals (described below) covered all four walls. The sipapu (hole in the floor) is conceptualized as a portal to the underworld.
• Perhaps these were added at a later stage.
• It may even have had an affinity to the larger stone pyramids farther south, for which the Toltec, Maya, and Zapotec are renowned.
• The flat-topped structure was similar to those found in Mexico, especially at the major settlement of Paquimé (also called Casas Grandes) in Chihuahua.
• A sunken edifice that looks like a ball court located just south of the mound also points to Mesoamerican influences.
• The most spectacular feature of Pottery Mound, however, is not either the pyramid or the pottery. Instead we find the walls of every kiva covered with lavishly painted murals depicting a variety of social and spiritual motifs.

• Rock art expert Polly Schaafsma defers in this case to the subtler visual medium by stating that these murals were essentially the "apex of Pueblo art":

    

  "The mural art consists of bold, dynamic design layouts adapted to the entire wall surface. Border and framing lines are often used to break up the wall surface, or the whole wall may be treated as a single, unbounded, integrated composition. Subject matter consists of ceremonial and ritual themes into which elaborately attired humans, animals, birds, and abstract designs are incorporated. Shields, feathers, baskets, pots, jewelry, textiles, miscellaneous ceremonial items, food, and plants are also pictured. While this is a highly meaningful art, full of graphic portrayals and symbolic content, it is, at the same time, very decorative. Colors are highly varied and sensitively juxtaposed. Areas of flat solid color contrast with those broken into intricate patterns or bold designs." [2]
• One of the most striking aspects of murals is the variety of brilliant colors: eight shades of red, three of yellow, two of green, two of blue, as well as purple, lavender, maroon, orange, pink, salmon, white, gray, and outlines of black.
• From three to 38 layers of plaster, each one providing a visual space for the paintings, were found on the kiva walls. Thus, the total prehistoric murals numbered about 800!
• This practice is similar to the destruction of Navajo sand paintings or Tibetan mandalas, which form a crucial part of a given sacred ceremony but are no longer needed when it is concluded.
• Some murals seem to have been plastered, painted, and then re-plastered after just a couple days when their ritual purpose had been fulfilled.
• Among the plethora of images are non-indigenous green parrots and scarlet macaws, which also suggest a wide trade network with Mexico.
• One fresco even depicts a jaguar and an eagle, which may refer to the ancient Mexican jaguar-eagle cult.
• Another shows a rattlesnake superimposed on an "eagle-man." Just add a cactus and you'd have the traditional symbol for Mexico.
• One disturbing image shows an unfortunate man painted purple with a red equilateral, outlined cross on his chest being eaten by a horned serpent with sharp teeth and a feathered ruff.
• This creature is, of course, the archetypal plumed serpent Quetzalcoatl, also called Awanyu by the ancestral Puebloans of New Mexico.
• Another mural shows a horned serpent with a zigzag body cradling a four-pointed star with a circular face at the center. This star-face (which, by the way, is frowning) supposedly signifies a "soul-face," possibly the soul of a warrior killed in battle. (See painting below.)

• One shows the creature with a red body, white sash, black kilt with geometric designs, and a red headdress. His translucent wings are crosshatched and painted with a few lavender spots. One wing's lower edge has three red spots on a white jagged background.

    

  
  Mothman mural

    

  
  Pink-spotted hawk moth on a jimsonweed bloom
• Some of the most unusual murals, however, are those that depict what we call today the Mothman.

24 more annotations...

• Gary A. David, Author of the Month for October 2009
• The Mothman of Pottery Mound:
   the Use of Sacred Datura in Ancient New Mexico (cont.)
• By Gary A. David
• This one has star symbols on his wings and a couple of dragonfly symbols beneath him.
• The other figure in basically the same pose has a yellow body and a brown and yellow headdress.
• With his left hand he is grasping a lightning bolt emanating from a bowl balanced on a maiden's head. (She is not seen in this picture, but she is, by the way, holding a macaw in each hand.)

• Both of the Mothman figures have a coiled or curved proboscis.

    

  
  Another Mothman mural

    

  
  Sphinx moth
• What prompted the depiction of this strange insect-human hybrid?
• One of the archaeological interns who originally excavated Pottery Mound and helped to copy its murals has put forth an intriguing theory.
• In a poster presentation at the Society for American Archaeology conference, March 2005 in Salt Lake City, Utah, independent researcher and anthropologist Paul T. Kay provided some interesting links between the night flying hawk moth (Manduca sexta, also called sphinx moth) and the Datura plant.
• "There exists a mutualistic relationship in nature between the hawk moth and the Datura plant. ALL of this is related to the widespread ritualistic use of Datura during SHAMANISTIC practices…" [3]
• The pink-spotted hawk moth (Agrius cingulata) may also have been intended.
• Datura wrightii is known as devil's weed, thorn apple, or jimsonweed.
• The latter term is a corruption of Jamestown weed, after the Virginia colony where Europeans first unwittingly ingested a similar species.
• Its nocturnally blooming, white trumpet-shaped flowers are pollinated by the hummingbird-sized hawk moth, which inserts its long proboscis into the fragrant flower tube to reach the profuse nectar.
• This perennial grows throughout the American Southwest in open land with well-drained soil.

• Kay furthermore believes that the classic plumed serpent traditionally depicted on ceramics, murals, and rock art is actually the instar, or larva, of this moth. The only problem with this part of Kay's theory, however, is that the 'horn' is at the posterior, not the head. Ancient Pottery Mound inhabitants would surely have known this.

    

  
  Mural of star-face and horned serpent with feather ruff

    

  
  Hawk moth larva
• Ground-up portions of the plant were sometimes employed as an anesthetic or as a salve for wounds or bruises.
• Datura is a powerful and dangerous hallucinogen. [4]
• It has been used both medicinally and ritually for at least 4,000 years in the American Southwest.
• The Aztecs called it toloatzin, which means "nodding head." This refers to the seedpods but may as well mimic the unconscious head of one who has ingested the psychotropic plant.
• The Navajo have a folk adage regarding this poisonous tropane alkaloid of the nightshade family: "Eat a little, and go to sleep. Eat some more, and have a dream. Eat some more, and don't wake up."

• Symptoms of Datura intoxication include dizziness, flushing, fever, dilated pupils, temporary blindness, dry skin and mouth, difficulty swallowing, tachycardia, heightened sexuality, restlessness, inability to concentrate, idiosyncratic or violent behavior, delirium, visual and auditory hallucinations, sometimes terrifying phantasmagoria, inability to distinguish fantasy from "reality," and amnesia.

    

  
  Blossom of Datura wrightii

    

  
  Egyptian hieroglyph for 'star'. Various species of Datura grow in Egypt. Is the morphology of the night-blooming "moonflower" the source for this hieroglyph? Duat, the Egyptian word meaning 'underworld', was also spelled Dat, the root of the word Datura. [5]
• Andrew Weil highlights the negative aspects of the plant: "Datura is not a nice drug. Although sometimes classified as a hallucinogen, it should not be confused with the psychedelics. It is much more toxic than the psychedelics and tends to produce delirium and disorientation. Moreover, Datura keeps bad company. All over the world it is a drug of poisoners, criminals, and black magicians." [6]
• For the indigenous people of the Andes in Peru, Datura is known as yerba de huaca, or 'herb of the graves'. This is because its use allowed communication with the spirits of ancestors. [7]

23 more annotations...