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J A N U A R Y  2 0 0 0

___(The online version of this article appears in three parts. Click
here to go to [6]part one or [7]part three.)_

_The Case of Barry Fell_

T HE chief diffusionist culprit is the late H. Barraclough ("Barry")
Fell. A Harvard biologist turned epigrapher, Fell acquired a following
in 1976 with the publication of _America B.C.,_ which discussed the
archaeological implications of epigraphy -- the study of ancient
man-made markings incised in stone, clay, wood, or bone. Part
adventure tale, part introductory textbook on linguistics and
anthropology, _America B.C._ energized a generation with its talk of
"Druids in Vermont?" and "Phoenicians in Iowa before the time of
Julius Caesar?"

Despite a penchant for berets and a breezy, teasing manner, Fell was
no mere dream-spinner, in the style of nineteenth-century seekers
after the Lost Tribes of Israel or after survivors from Atlantis. A
scholar of high standing at one of the world's most imposing academic
institutions, Fell endeavored to bring a scientist's objective
discipline to the process of identifying mysterious alphabetic scripts
and pictographs, translating them from their ancient languages, and
interpreting their meaning in the context of their surroundings.

When Fell came across an archaeological anomaly, he gnawed at it
relentlessly until an explanation issued forth. For instance, his
curiosity aroused by oddities at the Comalcalco temple site, on the
coast of Tabasco, in southeastern Mexico, Fell prepared reams of
comparative analysis in support of a Mediterranean role in the
temple's origins. The key, he insisted, was the use of fired bricks in
the construction of the temple walls -- an anomaly in the region.
Comparing supposed masons' marks at the site with analogues from Rome,
Crete, and Libya, Fell disputed mainstream assertions that this was a
Classic Mayan site. With characteristic bravado he wrote that it was
designed and probably built by "visitors from Europe and North Africa,
trained in the manufacture of fired bricks in Roman brickyards."
Moreover, these visitors came "during the first three centuries of the
Christian era." Fell's absolute certainty, in this and myriad other
epigraphic "explanations," inflamed mainstream scholars. But although
another researcher has identified a few other instances of fired-brick
construction in Mesoamerica, mysteries remain about Comalcalco and the
profusion of its scripts. Fell's ghost is not easy to exorcise from
this place.

For many general readers _America B.C.,_ together with Fell's
subsequent _Saga America _(1980) and _Bronze Age America_ (1982),
rewrote the cultural history of the Western Hemisphere. Fell's clear
message was that Europeans, Africans, and Asians had made routine yet
historically unremembered visits to North and South America for at
least 3,000 years prior to Columbus's celebrated landfall.

To the academic establishment, however, Fell was a self-promoting
pseudo-scientist who threatened to undo more than a century of careful
progress in archaeological and anthropological research. His critics
charge that instead of observing protocols and rules of evidence
required by traditional archaeology, Fell promoted esoteric claims to
a nonspecialist -- and therefore credulous -- audience. A minor
industry developed for the express purpose of debunking Fell.

Both before and after Fell's death, in 1994, his critics were
merciless, citing a variety of errors of chronology and interpretation
and also Fell's perceived distaste for peer review by specialists.
Unable to trust some of his discoveries, mainstream academics have
generally elected not to trust any of them. In _Fantastic Archaeology,_
Stephen Williams argued that the case of Barry Fell amounted to a
single question: "How many of Fell's inscriptions in North America,
which now must number in the thousands, are real messages from scribes
writing in non-Native American languages (Eurasian scripts)?" Williams
was scathing in his answer: "The real count, I fear, is few or none."

The influential archaeologist David Kelley, of the University of
Calgary, has his own concerns about Barry Fell's methods -- and yet,
unlike Williams and Brian Fagan, in the end he is unable simply to
dismiss Fell's work. Kelley is a Harvard-trained scholar of catholic
interests, which range from ancient calendrics and archaeo-astronomy
to the prehistory of the Celts to the decipherment of Mayan glyphs. In
conversation he seems to guide by indirection, answering questions
with questions or with references to the writings of his peers. His
wispy eyebrows sit above eyes undimmed by more than forty years of
serious scholarship; a tight-lipped smile suggests that there are many
things he will not say about himself or his accomplishments. Indeed,
he is almost painfully reticent about what most scholars now consider
to be a monumental achievement in the field: his having broken a
century-old logjam in Mayan epigraphy. Prevailing amid a hail of
academic and personal attacks, Kelley made a persuasive argument for a
phonetic, as opposed to an ideographic, method of interpretation.
Drawing on the work of the Russian linguist Yuri Knorosov, Kelley's
work offered a way to unlock the sounds and meanings of glyphs that
had stood mute for centuries -- inaugurating a new age of decipherment
that is transforming Mayan studies.

Kelley, who is a contributing editor to _The Review of Archaeology,_
complained in a 1990 essay that "Fell's work [contains] major academic
sins, the three worst being distortion of data, inadequate
acknowledgment of predecessors, and lack of presentation of
alternative views." Among the embarrassments that Kelley and other
critics often use against Fell are a series of Celtic ogham
inscriptions that were sent to Fell from McKee, Kentucky, in 1988. He
dutifully translated the scripts, which later proved to be forgeries.
Although Fell was the one to spot that they were fake, the damage was
done.

Nevertheless, Kelley and others do credit Fell with raising the
possibility of Celtic, Iberian, and North African connections to
certain unexplained American inscriptions. The [8]Grave Creek Stone,
from West Virginia, is a typical example. Mainstream archaeologists,
puzzled by the carvings on it, have long dismissed it as a forgery;
but Fell suggested that its symbols derive from an ancient Punic, or
Phoenician, alphabet used on the Iberian Peninsula during the first
millennium B.C. -- a script unknown, and thus presumably unforgeable,
at the time of the stone's discovery, in 1838. Kelley disagrees with
Fell's theory that the Grave Creek symbols represent some sort of
astronomical text. But the similarity of those symbols to obscure but
undisputed Phoenician letters, he believes, is much more than
coincidence -- and, at the least, Fell deserves credit for emphasizing
the comparison.

It is unusual to detect even this much tolerance for Barry Fell in a
member of the academic mainstream. But Kelley can be more enthusiastic
yet. With regard to a celebrated (or notorious) hypothesis of Fell's
that the stick-figure letters carved into stones at sites ranging from
Vermont to Oklahoma are Celtic in origin, Kelley wrote in his _Review
of Archaeology_ essay, "I have no personal doubts that some of the
inscriptions which have been reported are genuine Celtic ogham." These
are the very markings that most orthodox scholars dismiss as plough
marks or forgeries or the figments of febrile New Age imaginations. In
addition, Kelley resists joining the many of his peers who take
potshots at Fell's Druids of New England. He continued,

Despite my occasional harsh criticism of Fell's treatment of
individual inscriptions, it should be recognized that without
Fell's work there would be no [North American] ogham problem to
perplex us. We need to ask not only what Fell has done wrong in his
epigraphy, but also where we have gone wrong as archaeologists in
not recognizing such an extensive European presence in the New
World.

The way Kelley is described by his friend Michael Coe in _Breaking the
Maya Code_ (1992) suggests that he might secretly revel in his
controversial, if guarded, support for Fell. Coe wrote,

[Dave is] a lively mixture of Irish puckishness and New England
Yankee sobriety [whose] large frame, bald head, and leprechaun
smile are familiar features at [academic] meetings, where he can
always be expected to present a paper that may be unusual and even
outrageous, according to one's lights, but is usually grounded in
the most impeccable scholarship.

In one such paper, titled "Writing in the Americas," published in
October of 1998 in a special edition of the _Journal of the West,_
Kelley focused on a "decipherment" that detractors consider to be one
of Fell's most outrageous: the Peterborough Stone, in Ontario. This is
a flat table rock measuring hundreds of square feet, upon which a riot
of curious incised graffiti are interlaced, seemingly at random. To
Fell, who made the stone the focus of his _Bronze Age America,_ the
layout consisted of meaningful groups of symbols and letters, carved
primarily to document the visit and the commercial enterprise of a
Bronze Age Nordic king whom Fell identified as Woden-lithi.
"Woden-lithi, of Ringerike the great king, instructed that runes be
engraved," reads one section of Fell's ambitious translation of this
curious saga in stone. "A ship he took. In-honor-of-Gungnir was its
name .... For ingot-copper of excellent quality came the king by way
of trial."

Fell believed that Scandinavian visitors circa 1700 B.C. incised the
Peterborough Stone with words and symbols that have distinctly
Scandinavian pronunciations and meanings. However, the letters
themselves are not depicted with recognized medieval Norse runes. In
Fell's, and now Kelley's, view, a _pre_-runic alphabet was used -- a
little-known script called Tifinagh, preserved by a Saharan Berber
people known as the Tuareg. It is as if Woden-lithi's scribe used
symbols from the Classical Greek alphabet to put together
English-sounding words.

In _The Review of Archaeology,_ Kelley supported Fell's identification
(if not his exact translation) of proto-Tifinagh at Peterborough, and
he amplified this position in his _Journal of the West_ article. After
comparing figures at Peterborough with inscriptions found in the
Bohuslän region that once encompassed parts of Norway and Sweden; in
the Tassili area of Saharan Africa, near Algeria's border with Niger;
and at a southern terminus of the ancient Amber Route, in the Camonica
Valley of northern Italy, Kelley wrote,

I have found that the late Bronze Age of Scandinavia, corresponding
to the early Iron Age of Italy and North Africa, shows a lengthy
series of innovations in all areas of iconography, including
apparent Proto-Tifinagh inscriptions in both Scandinavia and Italy
.... The date is about 800 b.c. (900 years later than asserted by
Fell).

Kelley did not shy away from the diffusionist implications of his
analysis: "It looks to me as if a single trade route united an area
from the gold-mining zone along the Niger [River] to Scandinavia, and
I think that oceanic voyagers from Scandinavia, linked into that
route, reached Ontario."

Kelley's role in the Mayan-decipherment controversy of the 1970s has
steeled him against the predictable rebukes of mainstream colleagues
for his Peterborough hypothesis. "When it is clear that a 'fantastic'
interpretation has many reasonable components _if the data are
valid,_" he has observed, "most professional archaeologists regard
that as .... adequate reason to _assume _that the data are invalid."
Kelley believes that in the prevailing academic climate the challenge
for diffusionists is not only to build a solid scientific case but
also to win a fair hearing. "The problem I see with Barry Fell," he
says, "is that the people who can evaluate him accurately are the
people who are least likely to be reading him. It needs somebody with
a professional understanding of linguistic evidence and a willingness
to look at some quite unlikely-seeming material."

_A Diffusionist Rebuttal_

T HE material to which Kelley refers is not only confounding but also
compelling. It ranges from small stones inscribed with ancient Semitic
scripts, such as the Tennessee Bat Creek Stone and the West Virginia
Grave Creek Stone, to the Phoenician-inscribed Paraiba Stone, found
(and then lost)in the nineteenth century in Brazil, to Japanese-style
pottery shards in Ecuador, to the "melanotic" chicken, a genetically
unique strain indigenous to Southeast Asia but found in Mesoamerica as
well. If Stephen Williams's _Fantastic Archaeology_ gives the
impression that such things are no more than a random series of
strange delusions, that impression is robustly countered by the
laborious research of John Sorenson and Martin Raish. Sorenson, an
emeritus professor of anthropology at Brigham Young University, who
also holds degrees in archaeology and meteorology, has published
extensively on the topic of transoceanic contact with the Americas
"before the Recognized Discoveries." Concerning Barry Fell's research,
he says he is "appreciative of the enterprise but critical of the
methods, logic, and resulting interpretations." Raish holds a Ph.D. in
art history; he also has a master's in library and information
sciences, and is an instructional librarian at Brigham Young
University. It is perhaps the latter expertise on which he and
Sorenson drew most heavily for the herculean task of collating,
summarizing, and indexing diffusion-related texts.

Their 1,200-page, two-volume _Pre-Columbian Contact With the Americas
Across the Oceans_ is an annotated bibliography of more than 5,100
books, articles, dissertations, and presentations regarding the
(mostly) serious scholarship devoted to matters diffusionist, pro and
con. Originally published in 1990, by Research Press, of Provo, Utah,
it was substantially revised and amplified in 1996. It is either a
treasure trove or a refuse heap of pre-Columbian conundrums, depending
on one's perspective.

There are, for example, citations of the studies of Carl Johannessen,
a professor emeritus of geography at the University of Oregon, which
analyze the delicately rendered carvings that look like maize -- a
crop known to be indigenous to the Western Hemisphere -- in the
Karnataka temple sculptures. There are citations of painstaking
linguistic evaluations by Richard Nielsen, a Houston-based engineer,
of the inscriptions on the Kensington Rune Stone, in Minnesota. On
what looks like a rough-hewn headstone are about sixty words (and some
numerals) in the distinctive runic alphabet of medieval Scandinavia.
They purportedly chronicle a bloody attack on a group of Swedish and
Norwegian adventurers that is unmistakably dated in runes: "Year
1362." Williams has dismissed the Kensington Stone as an obvious
forgery because of amateurish "mistakes" in runic orthography.
However, as Sorenson and Raish point out, Nielsen "brings forward
extensive evidence that what critics have called 'aberrant' features
in this text are not so. They were in fact found in the old south
Norwegian province and dialect of Bohuslän at least by A.D. 1200."

The bibliography also includes citations of the work of J. Huston
McCulloch, a professor of economics at Ohio State University, who has
written extensively on the Bat Creek Stone and collateral artifacts. A
hand-sized dark-gray shard, the stone resides out of public view, in a
back room at the Smithsonian Institution, to which facility it was
delivered shortly after its discovery, in 1889. It bears an
eight-letter script that has been identified -- not without virulent
controversy, of course -- as a form of paleo-Hebrew from the first or
second century. According to a 1970 interpretation by the prominent
Semiticist Cyrus Gordon, the text fragment reads "for Judea" or "for
the Judeans." Although charges of forgery or of confusion of the
script with the Cherokee syllabary have been plausibly refuted by the
diffusionists over the years, authorities contended that simple
bracelets that were found alongside the stone amount to proof of the
artifacts' Native American origin: it was presumed -- without testing,
as it turns out -- that the bracelets were made of pure copper from
the Lake Superior region. McCulloch, however, brings to light chemical
analysis by the Smithsonian revealing that the "copper" bracelets are
actually made of brass. Furthermore, he found, as Sorenson and Raish
note, that the bracelets "have parallels in the Mediterranean world
only during the first and second centuries of the Christian era,
supporting the reading of the inscription as Hebrew of that period."
McCulloch and other diffusionists argue that because no Native
American populations are known to have smelted metals, the presence of
brass -- an alloy -- suggests a foreign provenance, or at least a
foreign influence.

To establishment charges that diffusionists are but a rabble of
undisciplined intellectual guerrillas intent on archaeological
anarchy, Sorenson and Raish's bibliography represents an impressive
rebuttal -- a dispassionate and comprehensive summary of the most
serious diffusionist research and commentary to date. However, the
bibliography is the product of a publishing house with Mormon ties --
a fact that establishment scholars cite with disdain. After all, the
Book of Mormon identifies three main peoples as having emigrated from
the Middle East to the Americas: the Jaredites, of the Book of Ether
(circa 3000 B.C. ); the family of Lehi, of the Book of First Nephi
(circa 600 B.C. ); and the people of Zarahemla, descended from King
Zedekiah of the Old Testament, who escaped the destruction of
Jerusalem in 586 B.C . Anything that connects ancient Mesoamerica with
biblical-era Palestine lends that much more credence to the Book of
Mormon -- support that in itself casts doubt on the bibliography's
objectivity, at least as far as most of its critics are concerned.

Explaining the criteria they used to select entries, Sorenson and
Raish state that they "exclude only two categories as absolutely
without redeeming scholarly value: Atlantis/Mu per se and
'extraterrestrial contacts.'" Just the same, they have drawn fire on
this very point. Anthony Aveni, of Colgate, says derisively, "This
diffusionist topic is, at root, Atlantean. And I think this mono-myth
-- what you might call the Simple Solution -- goes back to the Tower
of Babel, to the Old Testament. It's biblical: the Lost Tribes of
Israel, for example. The Mormons are still preaching that idea."

_[9]Continued..._

_(The online version of this article appears in three parts. Click
here to go to [10]part one or [11]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.
_________________________________________________________________

Copyright © 1999 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly; January 2000; The Diffusionists Have Landed -
00.01 (Part Two); Volume 285, No. 1; page 35-48.
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