Culture & Community: Americas Pre-Columbian Past Revealed

Author Frank Joseph discusses some of the unorthodox history of the New World that's included in his new book "Unearthing Ancient America."

At most, all Americans know of their country's prehistory is that Asiatic nomads wandered out of Siberia across an Alaskan land-bridge sometime during the last Ice Age into our continent, where they eventually became tribal Indians. Cut to Columbus planting the Spanish flag on the beach at San Salvador 12,000 years later, and that is just about everything they have learned from teachers and television.

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Aiding and abetting such public ignorance are mainstream scholars. Their vested professional and financial interests uphold the fiction of early America isolated from the rest of the outside world in a kind of impervious cultural vacuum. This academic dogma has absolutely dominated consensus reality where our real origins are concerned. Maverick researchers or independent investigators who question official versions of the past are shunned, their careers threatened and sometimes ruined, their reputations held up for ridicule.

The gulf separating certified from vocational archaeologists in the U.S. is immense and unbridgeable. Any finds made by the latter, or their opinions, no matter how credible, are never officially recognized. In sharp contrast, a real, working relationship exists between university-trained astronomers and amateurs, who often make important discoveries for the advancement of their science. No such rapport exists between professional and amateur archaeologists, resulting in the stagnation of American archaeology.

American archaeologists are necessarily subjective in their approach to our country's pre-Columbian past, which they have done and are doing so much to unearth and preserve. But their training and interpretation traditionally lack the greater scope required to place their finds within the context of the times in which the objects were made and used. Tightly focused views become narrow-minded, and miss the greater picture that at least sometimes provides answers not otherwise forthcoming.

Unfortunately, a rigid unwillingness to look outside the academic box of strictly localized human activities during prehistory amounts to scientific dogma forbidding tenured professionals from so much as stealing a glance at any possibilities for outside influences. Most readers probably assume archaeologists, like geologists or physicists, are scientists, but they are not. Instead, archaeology is taught as one of the humanities at our universities and colleges. Most unscientific is the often-poor rapport between armchair academics publishing textbooks for their students and excavators engaged in the reality of hands-on archaeology.

Himself an accredited archaeologist, Craig Childs admits in his book about the Anasazi, House of Rain, that what one hears "from fieldworkers often differs from what archaeological scholars say." They have little or nothing to say about the mountains of evidence for pre- Columbian visitors to America from the ancient Old World. What, for example, became of the half-billion pounds of high-grade copper excavated around the Upper Great Lakes Region more than three thousand years ago is a question never asked in polite company for fear of embarrassing parallels with the Near East's contemporaneous Bronze Age.

Louisiana's Poverty Point, the oldest city in North America, is a dead-ringer for Plato's description of Atlantis, something altogether avoided in any academic discussion of the site. Mainstream archaeologists teach that the Great Serpent Mound was built by tribal Indians no more than six or seven centuries ago, even though archaeo-astronomers have known since the late 20th Century that Ohio's foremost effigy was deliberately oriented to the Constellation Draco, which it was meant to symbolize, some 4,000 years ago.

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An aerial view reveals the circular pattern of ancient Indian earthworks at Poverty Point, La.

At the same time Neolithic Britons gathered at Stonehenge to observe the positions of the sun and moon, similarly structured and aligned "Medicine Wheels" were operative in the Rocky Mountains, although conventional scholars dismiss any apparent relationships as entirely coincidental. They cannot explain Florida's own "Stonehenge," a pillared monument inadvertently excavated during construction of a Miami apartment building during the late 1990s, nor who built the nearby network of stone canals in the Everglades.

Dozens of Roman era coins found across the Midwest since pioneer days are given short shrift, save only to describe them out of hand as either obvious fakes or lost change accidentally dropped by careless collectors in the recent past. Geologists and epigraphers have repeatedly established the medieval authenticity of a Norse inscription in Minnesota, but tenured archaeologists still brand the Kensington Rune Stone a ludicrous hoax. Only very rarely do they descend to personally handle an object or visit a site that may indicate overseas' influences during pre-Columbian times. Even during such infrequent occasions, they customarily deign to grant the item or location in question no more than a cursory glance, followed invariably by a deprecating wave of the hand.

These cultural isolationists arrive with indoctrinated preconceptions of the world's oceans as impassable barriers that forbade any contact whatsoever between the Old and New Worlds before 1492. Having thus accepted this certainty as an irremovable plank in their belief-system, they are simply not interested in any contrary evidence, no matter how valid, because it must, ipso facto, be either bogus or misinterpreted. Since the basis of ignorance is an unwillingness to consider alternatives, the archaeological powers-that-be have left generations of Americans in the dark about the background of their own country.

Despite official refusal to so much as entertain opposing possibilities, proof for impact made on our continent prior to Columbus by Viking explorers, Chinese merchants, Buddhist missionaries, Jewish refugees, Roman sailors, Egyptian traders, Phoenician castaways, Irish priests, to mention only some, is abundant and conclusive. They do not figure into this examination of America's lost civilization, however, because for all their high significance none of them took root here.

Sites such as Poverty Point or Florida's Stonehenge were more the outposts of foreign powers who established themselves on the North American continent for the exploitation of its natural wealth, such as the mining of Michigan copper for the ancient Old World Bronze Age. However, with inexorable advances in technology, from DNA to ground-penetration radar, the high-handed neglect or deliberate suppression of contrary evidence is no longer possible.

Accordingly, we live in an "Age of Breakthroughs" that is demolishing ivory tower isolation, while broadening the panorama of prehistory. A Roman figurine found off the New Jersey coast, North African gold in Illinois from a long-vanished kingdom, Ohio's two thousand-year-old "super highway" more than sixty miles long, a fifth century Christian church in Connecticut, a prehistoric harbor underwater in the Bahamas are just a few of the proofs battering down the doors of mainstream archaeology.

The maverick researchers contributing to Unearthing Ancient America tackle a broad variety of archaeological enigmas shunned as too heretical for consideration by conventional scholars. Unearthing Ancient America runs the gamut of always fresh, occasionally suppressed evidence documenting the tremendous impact made on our continent by overseas visitors, hundreds and even thousands of years before Columbus. The disclosures presented here re-write the prehistory of our country, and provide readers with a dramatic panorama of the past they never before imagined.