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J A N U A R Y  2 0 0 0

The Diffusionists Have Landed

_You've probably heard of those crackpot theories about ancient
Phoenicians or Chinese in the New World. Maybe it's time to start
paying attention _

by [6]Marc K. Stengel

_(The online version of this article appears in three parts. Click
here to go to [7]part two or [8]part three.)_

I T is arguably the biggest discovery never to have elicited any
reaction whatsoever. In November of 1994 a small monthly newspaper
called _Y Drych_ (_The Mirror_), which serves as an expatriate journal
for North America's Welsh diaspora, published the following curious
item among a batch of breezy tidbits:

According to [Alan] Wilson and [Baram] Blackett ... the court of
Camelot is more likely to be found in Kentucky! They claim that
[King] Arthur was killed in North America by Indians after
emigrating there ca. 579 A.D.

With telegraphic brevity the _Y Drych _contributor, Don John, ran
through the few salient points: There were _two _Arthurs, who lived
centuries apart. "It was King Arthur II who died in America. He was
embalmed and taken back to Wales to be buried at Mynydd-y-Gaer, near
Bridgend." Oddly, John failed to mention the discovery a few years
earlier, by a man antiquing in Pennsylvania, of a two-edged sword of
the Norse _spatha _type. That finding had recently been discussed in
the pages of another obscure journal, _The Ancient American,_ which
quoted the same Alan Wilson. The sword was inscribed with seven
letters of a script that Wilson identified as Coelbren y Beirdd,
presumed to have been used by ancient Welsh divines in casting lots
(_coelbren_ = "lots, sortilege"; _y beirdd_ = "of the bards"). Wilson
proposed a rough translation ("The Lord ruler well beloved, the duty
of the army mutually together to you") and posited a connection
between this sword and Arthurian immigrants in North America circa
A.D. 570.
Discuss this article in [9]Post & Riposte.

More on [10]politics & society in _The Atlantic Monthly_ and _Atlantic
Unbound._

_Related links:_

_[11]Archaeology & Ethnography_
A division of the National Park Service that "provides national
coordination for the protection, preservation, and interpretation of
America's archeological and ethnographic resources."

_[12]ArchNet_
A guide to archaeological resources on the Internet, categorized by
geographical region and by subject.

_[13]The Epigraphic Society_
"Since its formation in 1974 by Professor Barry Fell of Harvard
College and Norman Totten of Bentley College, the Epigraphic Society
has supported international reports of the discovery and decipherment
of ancient inscriptions, including those of the Americas."

_[14]Epigraphy Forum_
"A list-server for the discussion of epigraphy, decipherment of
ancient languages and scripts, evidence for pre-Columbian transoceanic
contact, and cultural diffusionism."

_[15]The New England Antiquities Research Association_
"A non-profit organization dedicated to a better understanding of our
historic and prehistoric past through the study and preservation of
New England's stone sites in their cultural context."

_[16]The Upper Midwest Rock Art Research Association_
An organization "dedicated to publicizing the petroglyph and
pictograph research being conducted in the Upper Midwest of the United
States."

_[17]Pre-Columbian Archaeology Related Links_
A comprehensive index of sites pertaining to pre-Columbian
archaeology.

_[18]Ancient American_
The online edition of a magazine that "stands firmly on behalf of
evidence for the arrival of overseas visitors to the Americas...
before Columbus -- not only from Europe, but the Near East, Africa,
Asia, and the Western Pacific."

_[19]The WWWorld of Archaeology: North America_
Information about archaeological sites, projects, and organizations in
North America.

_[20]Archaeology of North America_
A comprehensive collection of links pertaining to North American
Archaeology.

_[21]Viking Millennium International Symposium_
Information about a symposium to be held in September, 2000, which
will focus on the L'Anse aux Meadows Viking settlement.

_[22]In Plain Sight_
A biography of Gloria Farley, excerpts from her book, and related
links.
John's scoop has apparently remained an exclusive for _Y Drych_: the
big dailies and newsweeklies have run no follow-ups; no national
television crews have combed Kentucky for relics of the Once and
Future King. The silence, in the United States, at least, has extended
even to a book on the subject, _The Holy Kingdom,_ in which the
popular paranormalist Adrian Gilbert elaborates on the Wilson-Blackett
proposition in exhaustive textual, photographic, and genealogical
detail. The book, brought out in England in 1998, has yet to find an
American publisher.

It was ever thus, judging by the sentiments of those attending a
recent annual conference of the Institute for the Study of American
Cultures, held in Columbus, Georgia. ISAC members are accustomed to
the professional and popular disregard that greets their unorthodox
inquiries into the pre-Columbian history of the Western Hemisphere --
inquiries, generally known as diffusionist studies, that suppose
intentional contact with the Americas by civilizations across both the
Pacific and the Atlantic, beginning sometime in the late Stone Age
(7000 -- 3000 B.C. ).

Arrayed against the diffusionists stand the so-called independent
inventionists -- mainstream scholars who regard Western Hemisphere
aboriginals as having been essentially free of cross-cultural
contamination until 1492. What the inventionists and the diffusionists
are fighting over is the right to propose -- or, better yet, to define
-- the prehistory of the Americas. The two camps, it seems, agree on
little before Columbus's landing. The Norwegian archaeologists Helge
and Anne Stine Ingstad's famous identification, in 1961, of a Viking
settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, from just after A.D.
1000 is, of course, a notable exception, no longer in dispute. But
that discovery has so far gone nowhere. The Norse settlers, who may
have numbered as many as 160 and stayed for three years or longer,
seem to have made no lasting impression on the aboriginal skraellings
that, according to Norse sagas, they encountered, and to have avoided
being influenced in turn. The traditions of the Micmac people,
modern-day inhabitants of the area, have not been seriously
investigated; another people historically associated with this area,
the reputedly fair-skinned Beothuks, have been extinct since 1829. The
Vikings came, kept to themselves, and left -- that appears to be as
much revision of the long-standing history of New World settlement as
the hard-core academic establishment will entertain.

To many, the inventionists have clearly gained the upper hand, having
marshaled shards, spearpoints, and other relics that indicate the
independent cultural development of a native people whose Ice Age
ancestors came overland from Northeast Asia. Still, the diffusionists
have a habit of raising awkward questions -- questions that even some
mainstream scholars find hard to ignore, much less to explain away.
Who carved Phoenician-era Iberian script into a stone found at Grave
Creek, West Virginia? How did a large stone block incised with
medieval Norse runes make its way to Kensington, Minnesota? Why would
a rough version of the Ten Commandments appear in Old Hebrew script on
a boulder-sized tablet near Los Lunas, New Mexico? Conversely, how
could the sweet potato, known to be indigenous to the Americas, have
become a food staple throughout Polynesia and the Pacific basin as
early as A.D. 400? And why would dozens of eleventh- to
thirteenth-century temple sculptures in Karnataka, India, include
depictions of what appears to be American maize?

At the ISAC gathering Mike Xu, a professor of modern languages and
literatures at Texas Christian University, raised the possibility of
direct Chinese influence on Mesoamerica's Olmec culture. Xu is young,
quiet, and almost diffident about the bold proposition he came to
reveal. Drawing on linguistic scholarship in his native China, he
suggested that carved stone blades found in Guatemala, dating from
approximately 1100 B.C., are distinctly Chinese in pattern. Moreover,
they bear ideographic writing that has uncanny resemblances to glyphs
from the contemporaneous Shang Dynasty, which ruled North China from
its center in the lower Yellow River valley.

Xu was candid about the skepticism, even disdain, that his proposal
engenders among orthodox archaeologists. With an engaging smile, he
pointed out that no less an authority than Michael Coe, a Mayan-glyph
decipherer and an emeritus professor of anthropology at Yale
University, considers the Shang hypothesis totally spurious. Xu
remains unbowed. "The problem," he told his ISAC audience, "isn't
_whether _Asians reached Mesoamerica before Columbus. The problem is
_when _they arrived and _what _they did here." Any proposal that
smacks of diffusionism in today's academic climate, Xu continued, is
immediately dismissed as irresponsible at best, malevolent at worst.
"Here are all these American scholars," he pointed out slyly,
"speaking European languages, and they dare to say 'No, there was
never any diffusion; and yes, all Western Hemisphere cultures are
indigenous.'"

The two-day ISAC conference passed quietly enough for a symposium that
juggled such unorthodox topics as the [23]Bat Creek Stone -- whose
inscription, in what seems to be a second-century Semitic alphabet,
complicates the stone's official provenance in nineteenth-century East
Tennessee -- and certain Native American Earth Mother symbols that
resemble icons from prehistoric Europe and Asia. Gloria Farley, whose
book _In Plain Sight_ (1994) has become a standard reference work
among diffusionists, summarized the latest inquiries into the origin
and the decipherment of rock carvings at an Oklahoma site known as the
[24]Anubis Caves. A self-taught epigrapher, still dauntless in her
early eighties, Farley reviewed a career in which she was among the
first to posit, fifty years ago, that the caves' myriad jumbled
symbols represent pictographs and epigraphy with proto-Celtic,
Iberian, and Phoenician affinities to a time pre-dating Jesus by
centuries. The dramatic hypotheses being proposed by Farley, Xu, and
other speakers stood in stark contrast to the humble setting of a
small rented conference room in western Georgia.

_Crank Science_

T HERE is a reason, according to the academics who uphold
anthropological orthodoxy at universities and research institutes, why
the diffusionists have elicited nothing but enmity or disregard for
their views: they are crackpots and lunatics. "Crank" is the term
employed for these scientists by Stephen Williams, a retired curator
of North American archaeology at the [25]Peabody Museum of Harvard
University. Williams's _Fantastic Archaeology: The Wild Side of North
American Prehistory_ (1991) is virtually a catalogue of outlandish
theories about pre-Columbian transoceanic visits to the Americas.
Williams set out to debunk them all. Wielding sarcasm like a shiv, he
was relentless in attack. He scuttled the "lost continents" of
Atlantis and Mu; deconstructed the latent racism that he perceives
beneath the nineteenth-century fascination with Moundbuilder cultures,
whose barrows freckle the great river valleys of the Ohio, the
Tennessee, and the Mississippi; and squashed speculation about Norse,
Semitic, and Celtic letters carved in stones from New Hampshire to New
Mexico.

Hundreds of symbols have been
found in Oklahoma's Anubis
Caves by self-taught epigrapher
Gloria Farley. Mainstream scholars
have been largely dismissive
of the notion that the carvings
have myriad Old World
affinities, from Egyptian to Iberian
to Celtic -- but are hard-pressed
to say what the carvings
_do_ represent

Similarly, for Brian Fagan, an influential professor of anthropology
at the University of California at Santa Barbara, diffusionism is
exasperating. "Why do such lunatic ravings persist?" he asked in his
book _The Great Journey: The Peopling of Ancient America_ (1987). "To
read the crank literature on the first Americans is to enter a fantasy
world of strange, often obsessed, writers with a complex jargon of
catchwords and 'scientific' data to support their ideas." The Colgate
University astronomer and anthropologist Anthony Aveni tends to be
more sympathetic, perhaps because the field of archaeo-astronomy,
which he has helped to ennoble, was itself an academic pariah until
recent years. Nevertheless, Aveni's sympathies go only so far. "I
think there is, beneath all this dialogue about diffusionism, a will
to believe in bizarre ideas," he says. "This is a romantic idea that
we're talking about here, after all. These are bizarre tales of an
imagined era in an imagined past. And like the occult beliefs they
resemble, they're really just wishful thinking. It's a belief that we
can wish into existence the universe we desire and deserve."

The universe that we appear to be stuck with, however, at least as far
as the peopling of the Western Hemisphere is concerned, is unromantic
and fairly unambiguous. Fagan's book provides a succinct summary of
establishment thinking:

The most conservative viewpoint argues that no humans lived in the
Americas before the end of the Ice Age. Tiny numbers of big-game
hunters moved south of the great North American ice sheets as the
glaciers retreated after 14,000 years ago. The newcomers followed
large Ice Age animals into more temperate latitudes. They expanded
rapidly over vast tracts of virgin hunting territory, their
immediate descendants [being] the famous Clovis people, whose
distinctive stone spearpoints have been found over much of North
and Central America.

For decades these Clovis immigrants have been assigned a settlement
date around 10,000 B.C., in what Stephen Williams, an adherent, calls
"the Clovis hard-line position." Williams and other mainstream
scholars contend that the wide distribution of the [26]distinctive
stone spearpoints first discovered in Clovis, New Mexico, in 1932
supports their theory that all pre-Columbian experience throughout the
Western Hemisphere ultimately derives from an Ice Age monoculture with
exclusively Siberian origins.

Lately, however, archaeological finds at various digs in North and
South America have begun to call the Clovis-only scenario into
question. For instance, the archaeologist Tom Dillehay, of the
University of Kentucky at Lexington, has uncovered intriguing
[27]evidence that human beings reached Monte Verde, in southern Chile,
12,500 years ago -- in other words, that the extreme southern limits
of the Western Hemisphere were settled at about the time that the
supposed first Americans were crossing the Bering land bridge, more
than 9,000 miles to the northwest. It is generally accepted that
settlement across this distance would have required progressive
immigrant waves over some 7,000 years. Moreover, Dillehay and his team
have come across a campsite near Monte Verde that they believe may be
30,000 years old.

Less ancient but potentially more problematic for the Clovis
hard-liners is the revelation in Brazil of what appear to be the
oldest human remains ever found in the Western Hemisphere. Last
October, Brazilian scientists announced evidence suggesting that the
skull of a young woman found at Lapa Vermelha, in the state of Minas
Gerais, is some 11,500 years old. Moreover, sophisticated
reconstructive techniques performed on the skull in England indicate
that Luzia, as the woman has been named, might have Negroid origins --
or at least is not Mongoloid, as any descendant of Bering Strait
pilgrims must necessarily be. Luzia's remains were discovered in 1975,
but it was not until twenty years later that anthropologists examined
the skull closely and thought to question the Clovis-only hypothesis
on the basis of the unusual cranial features.

How might the pre-Clovis settlers have arrived? One explanation is
that early immigrants floated down the western coast of North and
South America in small boats. This theory, considered heretical when,
nearly three decades ago, it was proposed by the archaeologist Knut
Fladmark, of Simon Fraser University, has been gaining adherents of
late. Researchers such as Dennis Stanford, the chairman of the
anthropology department at the Smithsonian Institution; Carole
Mandryk, an associate professor of anthropology at Harvard University;
and Daryl Fedje, an archaeologist with Parks Canada, are urging their
colleagues to consider that canoelike or skin-covered boats --
prototypes of Inuit kayaks, perhaps -- might have aided migration
toward the end of the last Ice Age, around 14,000 years ago. Jon
Erlandson, an anthropologist at the University of Oregon, has pointed
out that boats were used in Japan 20,000 years ago. By Fladmark's
estimate, travelers paddling six hours a day could have made the trip
from the eastern Aleutians to Chile in just four and a half years.
This route might also help to explain Luzia's presence in Brazil: the
anthropologist who first noted her unusual features believes that her
forebears originated in Southeast Asia and migrated "northward along
the coast and across the Bering Straits until they reached the
Americas."

Xu, for one, is amused by this archaeological approximation of a drag
race backward in time. Although he welcomes any willingness among
traditional academics to question the established settlement dates, he
is puzzled by their apparently exclusive fascination with older
contact. "It amazes me," he told his ISAC colleagues in Columbus,
"that while there are authorities who propose visits to North America
by boat some twenty-five thousand years ago," most orthodox academics
insist that contact across the sea in the past 3,000 years is "simply
unthinkable."

_[28]Continued..._

_(The online version of this article appears in three parts. Click
here to go to [29]part two or [30]part three.)_
_________________________________________________________________

Marc K. Stengel is a writer and a television producer in Nashville,
Tennessee. Stengel is at work on a historical novel and a documentary
film, both touching on aspects of pre-Columbian transoceanic
migration.
_________________________________________________________________

Photography by Gloria Farley.

Copyright © 2000 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly; January 2000; The Diffusionists Have Landed -
00.01; Volume 285, No. 1; page 35-48.
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