{"id":39681,"date":"2018-06-09T07:39:27","date_gmt":"2018-06-09T06:39:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/atlantipedia.ie\/samples\/?p=39681"},"modified":"2018-06-09T07:39:27","modified_gmt":"2018-06-09T06:39:27","slug":"archive-2694","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/atlantipedia.ie\/samples\/archive-2694\/","title":{"rendered":"Archive 2694"},"content":{"rendered":"

Archaeology: Book about America\u2019s discovery gets it all wrong <\/strong><\/p>\n

By <\/strong>Bradley T. Lepper The Columbus Dispatch<\/em> \u00a0\u2022\u00a0 Sunday September 20, 2015 8:17 AM<\/p>\n

Numerous popular books and television programs claim that America was discovered by a variety of Old World civilizations centuries before Columbus.<\/p>\n

In the current issue of the journal American Antiquity<\/em>, Larry Zimmerman, an archaeologist from Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, reviews one of those books, The Lost Colonies of Ancient America: A comprehensive Guide to the Pre-Columbian Visitors Who Really Discovered America,<\/em> written by Frank Joseph.<\/p>\n

Joseph writes that there were pre-Columbian visits by Sumerians, Egyptians, Hebrews, Celts and others. An apparently non-facetious blurb on the book\u2019s cover asks, \u201cWho didn\u2019t discover America?”<\/p>\n

He wrote that it was this cosmopolitan parade of visitors from the Old World and not the indigenous cultures of America who created virtually all the wonders of this New World, from Ohio\u2019s Newark Earthworks, which encode in their earthen walls a sophisticated knowledge of geometry and astronomy, to the monumental masonry of Machu Picchu.<\/p>\n

Why don\u2019t archaeologists take these claims seriously?<\/p>\n

Joseph says they \u201ccannot deviate from an academic party line without jeopardizing their professional careers,\u201d and so accept \u201conly those facts that support mainstream opinion.\u201d<\/p>\n

The idea that archaeologists might ignore or even hide evidence that deviates from some \u201c academic party line\u201d would be laughable if it weren\u2019t so insulting.<\/p>\n

Scientists have a long tradition of challenging the academic party line. Take the motto of London\u2019s Royal Society, which was founded in 1660 \u2014 nullius in verba<\/em>, which means \u201ctake nobody\u2019s word for it.\u201d<\/p>\n

As a graduate student, I submitted a paper to a major journal arguing that two of Ohio\u2019s most famous and influential archaeologists were wrong in how they interpreted the statewide distribution of 13,000-year-old flint spear points. After the paper was peer-reviewed, the journal published it.<\/p>\n

Opinions, mainstream or otherwise, don\u2019t count for much in science. Evidence is what\u2019s important.<\/p>\n

Most archaeologists don\u2019t dismiss the possibility of pre-Columbian contacts. In the June issue of the journal Antiquity<\/em>, University of Calgary archaeologist Richard Callaghan presented the results of computer simulations of 1,200 voyages of small boats drifting with the currents from northern Africa to the Americas.<\/p>\n

About 82 percent of Callaghan\u2019s simulated boats made landfall in the Americas, many in 70 to 120 days. Since watercrafts have been around for at least 8,000 years, Callaghan says there could have been a \u201csignificant number\u201d of successful pre-Columbian voyages to America.<\/p>\n

Do Callaghan’s simulations lend credence to Joseph\u2019s extraordinary claims about who discovered America? No. Regardless of how likely such voyages might have been, archaeologists require evidence before accepting that they actually happened.<\/p>\n

So far, there is no credible evidence for pre-Columbian contacts beyond the short-lived Norse settlement at L\u2019Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland.<\/p>\n

In the early 19th century, some archaeologists believed that American Indians were too savage and ignorant to have built Ohio\u2019s ancient earthworks.<\/p>\n

They speculated that the great mounds and enclosures were the work of a lost race of presumably white-skinned mound-builders. By 1890, however, systematic archaeological investigations conclusively showed that the true mound-builders were the ancestors of America\u2019s Indians.<\/p>\n

Zimmerman argues that the racism underlying this mound-builder myth also is behind Joseph\u2019s claims, and it\u2019s still being used to \u201crationalize injustice to American Indians.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bradley Lepper is curator of archaeology at the Ohio History Connection.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Archaeology: Book about America\u2019s discovery gets it all wrong By Bradley T. Lepper The Columbus Dispatch \u00a0\u2022\u00a0 Sunday September 20, 2015 8:17 AM Numerous popular books and television programs claim that America was discovered by a variety of Old World civilizations centuries before Columbus. In the current issue of the journal American Antiquity, Larry Zimmerman, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5322],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39681","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archive"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlantipedia.ie\/samples\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39681","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlantipedia.ie\/samples\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlantipedia.ie\/samples\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlantipedia.ie\/samples\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlantipedia.ie\/samples\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39681"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/atlantipedia.ie\/samples\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39681\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlantipedia.ie\/samples\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlantipedia.ie\/samples\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlantipedia.ie\/samples\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}