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

_Whose Race Is It Anyway?_

H IDDEN denominational agendas are the least of the diffusionists'
problems in their ongoing struggle for academic legitimacy. Attempting
to understand an archaeological outlook that he simply cannot accept,
the celebrated Maya scholar Arthur Demarest, of Vanderbilt University,
proposes a rather utilitarian inspiration for mid-nineteenth-century
diffusionism. "That," he says, "was the period of the frontier wars
with the Native Americans -- a period, especially after Custer, when
there was a lot of enmity and hatred toward Native Americans. So that
fed into the idea that these earlier societies, not only the Maya,
Aztecs, and Inca but even the ones up here -- the Moundbuilders, for
example -- were somehow the product of some other white race that came
in, was less savage, and was able to achieve these monuments and other
things. I don't think contemporary diffusionists have any racist
feelings, but that kind of sentiment did give diffusionism a boost
back in the 1870s."

Demarest may not ascribe racist intentions to his diffusionist
contemporaries, but there are some, particularly in official circles,
who may. The 1996 discovery in Washington state of an ancient
skeleton, designated [8]Kennewick Man, soon sparked controversy among
archaeologists, Native Americans, and the U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers, because the skeleton does not appear to be of Native
American origin. As the writer Mark Lasswell observed in _The Wall
Street Journal,_ "Scientific evidence that American Indian ancestors
may not have been the first inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere is a
ticklish subject, not only for Indians but also, apparently, for the
Clinton administration, exquisitely attuned, as always, to the nuances
of multiculturalism."

Early studies of the remains led scientists to suspect that Kennewick
Man arrived here some 9,300 years ago -- long after the Bering land
bridge disappeared -- and bore certain "Caucasoid" features that were
said to distinguish him from Native American peoples of Siberian
heritage. Last fall federally appointed scientists released a report
concluding that the skeleton's physiognomy is most closely linked to
groups in southern and eastern Asia: the features originally described
as Caucasoid are actually associated with a Japanese people known as
the Ainu, they believe. If Kennewick Man is a member of the Ainu, that
group's ancient maritime tradition might explain how he got here.
Scientists say that more tests are needed to reach any definitive
conclusions about Kennewick Man's origins; however, the government has
not allowed any DNA testing of the skeleton to date, because Native
Americans consider it intrusive and sacrilegious. If Kennewick Man was
found on their land, area tribes insist, then he must be an ancestor,
and his remains should not be disturbed. Moreover, because the
religion and oral histories of these tribes hold that their people
have lived in the Northwest "since the beginning of time,"they are
resentful of any implication that they may have ancestors who migrated
from another land -- whether from Siberia, Japan, or elsewhere.
Archaeologists, eager to pursue the questions raised by Kennewick
Man's discovery, have sued to perform DNA and other tests, and a U.S.
magistrate has set a March deadline for federal officials to decide on
the matter.

Meanwhile, in implicit acknowledgment that the race card had been
played successfully, in April, 1998, the Army Corps of Engineers
abruptly dumped 500 tons of rock fill over the site where Kennewick
Man was discovered, beside the Columbia River. Although archaeologists
often restore digging sites to their original condition after
extensive studies have been completed, this action, by the corps's own
admission, was meant to ensure "the protection of any additional
skeletal material or cultural artifacts from further revelation."

The diffusionist cause enjoys no better political tolerance north of
the border. In 1990, reacting to the prospect that some Manitoba
schools might introduce discussions of pre-Columbian contact with
North America into their curricula, Jack Steinbring, an anthropologist
then at the University of Winnipeg, wrote to the Minister of Education
at the time, Len Derkach, with a plea that he intervene. "The view
that Europeans created North American Native rock art ... is
dangerous," Steinbring stated.

Imagine Native youngsters being taught that the countless
_thousands_ of aboriginal rock paintings across North America were
the result of the Norse, or Canaanites, or Phoenicians. The cause
of this situation, and [the] implications for the strengthening of
Native identity in a stressful period of acculturation are
appropriately compared with apartheid or any other form of racial
supremacy.

In a follow-up letter Steinbring declared, "Please understand that
there is no debate on this epigraphy issue in Anthropology.
Anthropology _as a profession_ rejects it."

In any controversy about carvings on North American stones the name of
Barry Fell inevitably surfaces. "In some rather twisted logic,"
Stephen Williams wrote in _Fantastic Archaeology,_

Fell sees a failure by anthropologists to recognize that many
American Indian languages are heavily larded with wholesale
borrowing from Mediterranean peoples, and says that this "does a
grave injustice to the cultural tradition of the Amerindian
peoples." .... I can only suppose Fell means therefore that the
only true happiness for the Amerindians is to realize that they too
are a part of the great heritage of Western civilization like
ourselves. The Native Americans must want to ask, "Why have the
anthropologists wanted to keep us apart?"

Why, indeed? asks Vine Deloria Jr., an outspoken Native American
activist. Deloria is a member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe of
North Dakota, a former executive director of the National Congress of
American Indians, and a professor of history at the University of
Colorado at Boulder. His numerous books, which include _Custer Died
for Your Sins_ (1969), _God Is Red_ (1973), and _Red Earth, White Lies_
(1995), voice a thorough dissatisfaction with the standard histories
of European and Native American relations since Columbus. In a 1992
paper in the academic journal _American Antiquity,_ Deloria chastised
the archaeological and anthropological establishment for embracing the
monocultural implications of the Bering Strait hypothesis. "This
migration from Siberia," he wrote, "is regarded as doctrine, but
basically it is a fictional doctrine that places American Indians
outside the realm of planetary human experiences."

A natural storyteller, Deloria takes obvious pleasure in drawing a
listener into his tales with dramatic turns of phrase and deft
modulations of his gravelly voice. He delights in irony, savors the
unpredictable, and rewards surprise that is expressed at his many
unexpected opinions with a mischievous "Aha!" You might think an
Indian wouldn't feel such a way, he seems to be saying, but you never
bothered to ask, did you?

Deloria bridles at what he sees as the reverse racism implicit in the
establishment's dismissal of all things diffusionist. To him, the
mainstream academic position that defends the Clovis-only hypothesis
smacks of paternalism. He marvels at "the isolation of archaeologists
today," and has written, "I have in the neighborhood of 80 books
dealing in one way or another with Precolumbian expeditions to the
Western Hemisphere." These books, he says, range from utter nonsense
to some quite sophisticated reinterpretations of archaeological
anomalies in light of new findings. But the archaeological
establishment will have none of it, to Deloria's frustration. He
laments, "There's no effort to ask the tribes what they remember of
things that happened." In contrast to tribes in the area where
Kennewick Man was found, he argues, "numerous tribes do say that
strange people doing this or that came through our land, visited us,
and so on. Or they remember that we came across the Atlantic as
refugees from some struggle, then came down the St. Lawrence River,
and so forth. There's a great reluctance among archaeologists and
anthropologists to break centuries-old doctrine and to take a look at
something new."

He continues, "As for the history of this hemisphere from, say, five
thousand B.C. forward to our time, the mainstream scholars just don't
want to deal with that at all. Let me give you an example. Years ago I
spoke at an academic archaeological conference, and at the end of my
speech I asked, 'Why don't you guys just drop the blinders and get
into this diffusionist stuff?' My host, David Hurst Thomas, just about
lost it and said, 'Do you know how long and hard we've fought to get
members of this profession to admit that Indians could have done some
of these things? And now you're saying it was Europeans!'"

_Beyond Dirt Archaeology_

I N the end, the issues dividing the diffusionists and the independent
inventionists come down to an argument about what constitutes
significant historical evidence. Arthur Demarest, of Vanderbilt,
touches, perhaps unconsciously, on the crux of the matter when he
proffers a twig of the olive branch. "Within orthodox academics," he
says, "there are a lot of people who simply dismiss the argument out
of hand on the ground that the mechanics of overseas diffusion
themselves are too difficult. But there are others -- and I put myself
in that group -- who don't doubt there's been contact. I don't think
that the transport problems are such that they prevented people from
moving between continents. What we doubt is the transformative impact
of ephemeral contact. These visitors, whoever and wherever they were,
simply didn't transform the societies they found here."

For the so-called dirt archaeologists, transformative influence is
above all material, technological, and measurable. It is manifest, for
example, in the distinctively fluted spearpoints left like so many
business cards by the Clovis-culture immigrants who crossed the Bering
land bridge. If successive waves of other visitors did reach the
shores of North or South America, where is their material bequest?
Where, for instance, are the wheels and keystone arches that
flourished in the Old World for many centuries before Columbus but
don't appear in the material record of the New World until after 1492?

The diffusionists' rebuttal is, well, diffuse; but it is
thought-provoking just the same. On the one hand, the feisty George
Carter, an emeritus professor of geography at Texas A&M University,
points to the case of [9]Hernando de Soto, who traipsed through the
New World from 1539 to 1542. De Soto and his army came in contact with
hundreds if not thousands of Native Americans, traded goods, and
introduced non-native livestock -- and yet, as Carter points out in
the book _Across Before Columbus? Evidence for Transoceanic Contact
With the Americas Prior to 1492_ (1998), "of that passage virtually no
trace can be found."

On the other hand, Stephen Jett, a geographer at the University of
California at Davis, says that such Old World inventions as the arch
and the wheel are not the sine qua non of cultural exchange, as the
establishment would have us believe. In an essay in _Man Across the
Sea: Problems of Pre-Columbian Contacts_ (1971), Jett repeated the
caution of Douglas Fraser, an art historian at Columbia University:

If we judge West African culture by the absence of wheeled
vehicles, the plow, the true arch, draft animals and milking, then
the well-documented Islamic penetration of the western Sudan [which
in earlier times reached from present-day Senegal to Chad] cannot
have taken place. For these traits are all well known in Moslem
North Africa .... the ancient Greeks also rejected [the true arch]
though it was known earlier in Sumer, Babylon, and Egypt.

For David Kelley, the wheel-and-arch conundrum is doubly perplexing.
In his own contribution to _Man Across the Sea_ he wondered "why
neither the true arch nor the wheel [was] to be found in Egypt for
more than a thousand years after Mesopotamian influences transformed
Egypt from a Neolithic farming stage to a semiurban, literate society,
although [those inventions] already had a long history in
Mesopotamia." Moreover, the ancient riddle has significant modern
ramifications. "In the light of such evidence," Kelley continued, "it
is surprising to find scholars ... arguing that the absence of the
true arch and the wheel in the New World proved that there had been no
contacts between New World and Old World."

In short, the diffusionists and their sympathizers contend, it is the
_nature_ of acceptable evidence that perpetuates the debate. "The
problem," Kelley says, "is in the fact that there are influences, but
they don't show up in 'dirt archaeology.' Basically, they show up in
ideological materials: mythology, astronomy, calendrics. These are
precisely the areas which are hardest to deal with archaeologically.
And so they don't get much attention from traditional archaeologists."

Deloria echoes Kelley's concern. "There's the Stephen Jay Gould
attitude out there," he says, "that believes science can do whatever
it wants unless it comforts religion -- because religion is considered
a mere superstition. But if you look at it, most things that they're
calling religious are not really religious. They're oral traditions;
they're ancient memory." If mainstream archaeologists and
anthropologists are unwilling or unable to consider evidence of this
type, Deloria suggests, perhaps they're not the right ones for the
job.

That is also the opinion of Jon Polansky, an editor of the _Epigraphic
Society Occasional Papers,_ a journal co-founded by Barry Fell and
devoted to the study of transoceanic contact. Polansky concedes that
orthodox archaeologists are certainly competent to perform excavations
and to document the physical details of any artifacts they may find.
He believes, however, that they are neither suitably trained nor
philosophically inclined to test new hypotheses when it comes to
nontraditional forms of evidence. "They're just not concerned with
methods they don't use," he argues. As a result, he says, mainstream
archaeology is missing -- perhaps even obscuring -- many opportunities
for discovering transoceanic contact by limiting the academic
specialties deemed fit to evaluate the evidence.

Polansky is an associate professor of medicine at the University of
California at San Francisco Medical Center and the director of the
laboratory that first isolated and cloned the gene responsible for
glaucoma; he was a student of Barry Fell's at Harvard in the 1960s.
His is an energetic, insistent, and even impatient personality; just
the same, he frequently bites his lip, as if to avoid disclosing some
secret or other that one has yet to earn. His quandary is this: he has
an editorial responsibility to propagate the latest research about
transoceanic contacts, and yet he harbors, understandably enough, a
basic mistrust about how new findings will be received. Traditional
academics are, he believes, less interested in new ideas than in
safeguarding positions of influence and authority. In a 1998 essay in
the _Journal of the West,_ Polansky and his co-authors, Donal Buchanan
and Norman Totten, wrote,

Part of the scientific approach ... is the pioneering will to
follow internally consistent data to [their] logical conclusions
without concern for whether or not the conclusions overturn
existing idea structures. We do not favor the bias often imposed on
new information, requiring "extraordinary proof" for "extraordinary
ideas." Instead, we propose a level playing field in which data ...
are explored in an honest ... application of scientific method ...
without bias as to whether [hypotheses] agree with prevailing
academic thought.

The extraordinary ideas Polansky proposes include the possibility not
only of ancient contact between the hemispheres across both great
oceans but also of reciprocal transfers of information and lore. It's
one thing to discover evidence of travelers to the Western Hemisphere,
he says. But what influences and traditions might the Native Americans
have diffused among these visitors in return?

Diffusionists like Polansky and Deloria are convinced that this kind
of information will be revealed only when qualified experts outside
archaeology and anthropology undertake to examine the available
evidence. Linguists, classicists, Asianists, specialists in
comparative religion, epigraphers, archaeo-astronomers, navigation
historians, ethno-botanists, and ethno-geneticists -- these are the
sorts of scholars who, Polansky believes, must take responsibility for
evaluating the evidence that traditional academics find either
meaningless or troubling.

There is no denying, of course, that the official history of the
Western Hemisphere did not begin until Europeans wrote their first
documents about the New World, at the close of the fifteenth century.
Before then was an undoubtedly rich but largely unremembered period of
habitation by the descendants of unlettered Ice Age mammoth-stalkers
-- people who themselves had no written language. The Western
Hemisphere is unique in this respect. What we know of the hundreds of
generations who lived here before Columbus staked his claim is frozen
in the archaeological record. It is for the most part a mute record,
consisting overwhelmingly of pottery shards, pointed flints, traces of
dwellings, monuments, rock drawings -- in short, of virtually every
product of human imagination except alphabetic writing. How fitting,
then, that the diffusionists' curious lettered stones and tablets
would break the silence, inciting noisy protest from the curators of
America's past even as they suggest that ancient Americans may have
enjoyed the occasional conversation with visitors from afar.

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

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 Three); Volume 285, No. 1; page 35-48.
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