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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 Marc K. Stengel

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 Post & Riposte.

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 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 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
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.

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 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 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."

_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."

_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.

_________________________________________________________________

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.
_________________________________________________________________