posted
Very interesting article that relates directly to van Sertima and Winters' pre-columbian trans-atlantic contact theories. .................
Consensus and the Fringe in American Archaeology Alice B. Kehoe1
(1) 3014 N. Shepard Ave., Milwaukee, WI 53211-3436, USA
Alice B. Kehoe Email: akehoe@uwm.edu Published online: 22 July 2010
Abstract Is the “consensus of the scientific community” to reject transoceanic diffusion as an explanation for cultural change in the Americas justified by logic, data, or disciplinary politics? Keywords Diffusion - Science - Fringe archaeology - Polynesia - Transoceanic contacts
Résumé Le « consensus de la communauté scientifique » pour rejeter la diffusion transocéanique en tant qu’une explication du changement culturel en Amériques est-il justifié par la logique, les données, ou la politique disciplinaire? Resumen Es «consenso de la comunidad científica» rechazar la difusión transoceánica como explicación del cambio cultural en América justificado por la lógica, los datos o la política disciplinaria? Preface
When, in 1971, Joseph Needham published his discussion of “Navigation” in volume 4, part 3 of Science and Civilisation in China, David Kelley and I were gratified that one of the leading scientific minds of the century had judged the evidence for pre-Columbian transpacific contacts to warrant serious consideration. No one else seemed to notice. In 1975, looking up the library catalog number for Science and Civilisation, Needham’s birth date, 1900, caught my attention. I phoned Kelley, pointed out Needham was 75 years old, and suggested that since archaeologists seemed unaware of his research, Dave and I should try to organize a conference with him to bring that work into our field. We wanted Needham to come to Mexico to see the data firsthand and discuss finds and contexts with archaeologists engaged with those data. Needham was delighted, and said that Lu Gwei-Djen would accompany him. With support from Wenner-Gren, Ford Foundation, and Coca-Cola (then negotiating to win the People’s Republic cola-drink franchise), our group spent 2 weeks in Mexico in 1977, visiting Teotihuacán, Monte Albán, El Tajín, and Palenque as well as Mexico City’s Museo Nacional (Kehoe 1978). The funded participants were from the United States and England, with Mexican colleagues joining us as convenient; such a peripatetic conference meeting at a series of sites and museum collections was a novel innovation for Wenner-Gren. A good time was had by all, but none of participants who had dismissed pre-Columbian contacts changed his mind, and none of those fulfilled the understood obligation to submit a paper for the proposed conference volume. I believe none of them had a reasoned argument.
I continue to see archaeologists rejecting well-derived, well-supported scientific interpretations, espousing instead hoary dogma or simplistic scientism. As David Quinn, discussing disputes over Columbus’ rivals, said of the magisterial Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison, The rejection of any pre-Columbian movement across the Atlantic apart from the Norse voyages leaves the ocean peculiarly empty for many centuries, but it is a justifiable reaction in an outstanding historian whose great merit is that he sees sharply in black-and-white terms and is therefore uniquely qualified to expound what is already known. He is perhaps too impatient to study the nuances of pre-Columbian enterprise (Quinn 1974:22–23).
A Case Without Nuances In 2007, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published a peer-reviewed paper by eleven scientists, “Radiocarbon and DNA evidence for a pre-Columbian introduction of Polynesian chickens to Chile.” Fifty chicken (Gallus gallus) bones were recovered from El Arenal-1, a late pre-Columbian archaeological site on the southern side of Chile’s Araucanian Peninsula. Chickens are a south-Asian domesticate carried by Polynesians to their Pacific colonies. The El Arenal-1 chickens’ DNA matches that of pre-Columbian chickens in Polynesian island sites; not surprisingly, these Polynesian chickens represent a common type spread into Europe as well as Asia and then the Pacific over several millennia (Gongora et al. 2008: Fig. 1).
The Araucanian peninsula lies within the “Roaring Forties” where winds and currents facilitate landfalls from South Pacific voyagers. Indigenous Mapuche still raise chickens that share a single point mutation, T to C transition at site 214 on the genome, with prehistoric chickens from West Polynesia, Hawai’i, and Easter Island (Rapa Nui). Radiocarbon analyses directly on the El Arenal-1 chicken bones date them to Cal. AD 1304–1424 (Storey et al. 2007). (Note that Pizarro landed in Peru AD 1532.) Archaeologist Terry Jones and linguist Kathryn Klar point out that in addition to chickens, the area had Polynesian-style basalt adzes, two-piece bone fishhooks, and sewn-plank canoes. The latter two artifacts occur also in Chumash territory in southern California beginning in the late first millennium AD. Klar notes that the Chumash word for the sewn-plank canoe and the neighboring Gabrielino words for sewn-plank and for hewn dugout canoes derive from Central Eastern Polynesian, and are foreign to the Chumash and Gabrielino languages (Jones and Klar 2005:460). Mapuche called their sewn-plank canoes dalca, but the neighboring Alacaluf used ki_-lu which Klar relates to Hawai’ian kialoa, a type of Polynesian canoe (Klar and Jones 2007:94). Chumash territory and the Araucanian peninsula are the only places in the Americas where sewn-plank canoes were constructed before European contact. Jones and Klar therefore concur with Storey et al., that El Arenal-1 offers strong empirical evidence for Polynesian landing before historic European contact, and suggest that El Arenal-1 strengthens their interpretation of data for Polynesian landing in southern California (Jones and Klar 2009).
The Storey et al. 2007 and Jones and Klar 2005 papers immediately provoked rebuttals. For the former, a group argued that if any chickens were brought to Chile by Polynesians, they should have been a unique type raised in Rapa Nui, and also questioned whether the radiocarbon dating took sufficient account of possible marine effect (did the chickens eat seaweed?) (Gongora et al. 2008). For the latter, the leader of Chumash-territory archaeology insisted on her interpretation of Chumash history in terms of autochthonous evolution (Arnold 2007). Rebutting her critique, Klar and Jones (2007) add to the artifacts and linguistics, references in both Chumash and Hawai’ian oral history traditions to events that are reasonably inferred to refer to Polynesian voyaging to America.
By 2008, one could say that most Oceanic archaeologists considered Polynesian landfalls on the American Pacific coast a probability, if not particularly significant for American societies. The data convinced a California archaeologist, Terry Jones, to change his orthodox opinion toward accepting authochthonous evolution (Jones and Klar 2009:180). I consider it significant that Jones joined a university faculty only after working for many years in CRM archaeology. Empiricism rather than theory is privileged in CRM projects, scrutinized as they are by engineers, business operators, government officials, and developers. There is “forbidden knowledge” that endangers people’s lives or livelihoods, and “forbidden knowledge” that endangers scientists’ careers (Kempner et al. 2008:3–4). The former can be of concern in CRM projects, the latter lies in the gardens of university Edens. This paper looks at the fruits of trees of knowledge forbidden by the popes who manage “normal science,” ripe fruits plucked by a few of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ most brilliant scientists (von Humboldt 1814, Needham 1971) but declared rotten by professors who set the boundaries for valid research.
Perhaps the best perspective for understanding social structure among archaeologists is in terms of normal science and anomalies (Kuhn 1962; see also Nickles 2003). Normal science is “the consensus of the scientific community,” in effect “the local cultural tradition” (Barnes et al. 1996:31). Jane Holden Kelley diagramed these as concentric circles around a Core System (Kelley and Hanen 1988:120).1 The farther from a Core tenet an explanation lies, the more stringently it is critiqued (Kelley and Hanen 1988:337). Graduate students and assistant professors are warned not to pursue outlier topics. Quoting circles, frequently stemming from an author’s graduate-school cohort and professors, buttress Core Systems because “every citation acknowledges a source of authority” (Barnes et al. 1996:155). Core Systems’ vitality is maintained by the activities of its practitioners, and simultaneously by the low visibility of outliers not cited, not invited to lecture, and published in less-generally-read journals or presses.
Mainstream American archaeology’s normal science focuses on constructing sequences of artifacts from stratigraphic sections, on the model of paleontology. The work, following a natural-science model, appears objective and scientific. Changes through time can be ascribed to evolutionary processes, affected, as in paleontology, by environmental changes. This orientation toward natural-science data and models has been termed “ecological functionalism” (Philips et al. 1994:3; see also Phillips and Sebastian 2001), and it underlay the “explicitly scientific” method advocated by the postwar cohort that labeled their program “the New Archaeology” (Kehoe 1998:116). Their hope to proclaim universal laws of human behavior derived from material data and statistical manipulations fit the National Science Foundation’s Cold War program (Trigger 1989:314–315; Fuller 2000:151; Steinmetz 2005a:22–23, 2005b:278, 298). Its substantial funding valorized their “explicitly scientific” schema as competing paradigms languished.
Under Lewis Binford’s New Archaeology regime, “science” was narrowly defined according to Wesley Salmon, an American logical empiricist. Their text was Explanation in Archaeology: An Explicitly Scientific Approach (1971) by Binford’s disciples Watson et al. (revised 1984 as Archeological Explanation). “Explicitly scientific” meant proposing a hypothesis and specifying a test to validate it, thus the method is “H–D,” hypothetico-deductive. Carl Hempel, the Vienna-school philosopher who popularized the method in the United States, taught that any truly scientific explanation must have reference to general (universal) laws (Salmon 1989:12; Salmon and Salmon 1979). Therefore, New Archaeologists premised general laws of human evolution and behavior. To find such, they had recourse to nineteenth-century anthropology, specifically, although unacknowledged, the ideas of Herbert Spencer embedded in Leslie White’s evolutionism (Carneiro 1981:200; Adams 1998:173–175). New Archaeologists’ preoccupation with “the evolution of complex societies” came from this training, originating at the University of Michigan with White and Elman Service. Many of the problems in New Archaeology are cogently analyzed by Wylie (2002).
Sociologist George Steinmetz highlights the manner in which his discipline reflected American ideology, especially in the mid-twentieth-century, “oriented toward general laws, replication, prediction, and value-freedom” (i.e., freedom from concern with value judgments) (Steinmetz 2005b:309). Bernard Barber articulated the mid-century position: “The social sciences, like all science, are primarily concerned for analysis, prediction, and control of behavior and values” (Barber 1952:259)—a Fascist notion of science carried by such Cold War warriors as James Conant, Thomas Kuhn’s mentor (Mirowski 2005:150, 164). Odd though it seems today, the National Science Foundation was the single largest source of funding for mid-century sociology (Steinmetz 2005b:296). Steinmetz broadens the Cold War focus that spawned the National Science foundation by embedding it in what he and others term the Fordist capitalist, Keynesian, welfare-state regime (Steinmetz 2005b:295–295). American academic archaeology paralleled sociology and other social sciences in the orientation Steinmetz describes, like them reaping NSF bounty. NSF dominance in funding underlay the simultaneous emergence of self-designated New Archaeology, New Geography, and New Ecology (Kehoe 1998:127). Less obvious is why, at this time, all these plus social sciences and even philosophy and theology adopted the label “process” (Kehoe 1998:107). “Process” derives from Latin pro cedere, “go forward,” and implies, according to the Oxford English Dictionary’s first definition, “progress,” and “natural or involuntary operation, series of changes,” just the sort of thing Fordist managers hoped to see. As the Fordist regime dissipated in the last third of the twentieth century, methodological positivism was questioned and challenged in all the disciplines–in archaeology, “postprocessualism.”
During the mid-twentieth-century heyday of Positivist science devoted to winning the Wars—World II and Cold War—commitment to mathematical languages obscured the horrors attending military goals (Mirowski 2005:164). Lack of concern with natural language—semantics, rhetoric, structure—placed American archaeologists completely out of sync with contemporary developments in semiotics and linguistics (e.g., Eco, Sebeok, or Lakoff and Johnson [Eco 1976, Lakoff and Johnson 1980, Sebeok and Eco 1983, Lakoff 1987]).2 Natural languages are, in Lotman’s term, “primary modeling systems” (Lotman et al. 1975). Archaeologists’ languages are overwhelmingly natural language, thus archaeological knowledge is set within primitive modeling systems seldom brought into consciousness (see Nersessian 2003 for a recent review of cognitive research on “model-based reasoning”). Data and interpretations may seem unambiguous because they lie within a shared primary modeling system. As it inculcates a scientific community’s primary modeling system, whether in a natural or mathematical language, professional training may subvert science’s avowed ideal of addressing real data.
French archaeologists led by J.-C. Gardin and his associates were, in contrast to most Americans at the time, engaged with contemporary linguistics (Gardin and Peebles 1992). The cognitive mind of the archaeologist, not people in the past, is a problem that must be addressed. Where a philosophically naive American archaeologist would take data literally as “givens,” the Gardin group weighed the circumstances within which certain phenomena are re-cognized as significant data. Expanding on semiotics, Stoczkowski (2002) drew out narrative structures persistent in Western culture, showing that these mold both archaeologists’ recognition of data and interpretation. Such a focus on epistemology seemed esoteric to the majority of American archaeologists, ensconced within a nation that, as Leslie White taught (1959), believed it had triumphed through harnessing the most energy.
American naïveté stems, basically, from the Scottish bourgeois culture carried by nineteenth-century immigrants who dominated American business (Herman 2001:253–254) and its social mores (Bozeman 1977). Thomas Reid’s (1710–1796) Common-Sense Realism was taken for granted by most American scientists, along with Comte’s Positivism (including its idea of Progress). Reid believed that the real world compels consensus among rational men. This has an interesting converse: that what is held in consensus by rational men must be real. Politically, this philosophy powerfully legitimizes beliefs and policies of the educated “rational men” comprising the dominant class. Common-sense Realism orients researchers to the consensual community amply described in sociological studies of scientists from Merton’s “invisible college” (Merton 1973), through Latour and Woolgar’s landmark Laboratory Life (1979), to a plethora of contemporary ethnographies such as Knorr Cetina’s Epistemic Cultures (1999) and critical philosophy such as that by Zammito (2004). None of these, so far as I have seen, take particular note of Reid’s articulation of the premise that common experience constitutes a realist picture of the world. The imprint of Scottish bourgeois culture upon American society, beginning in the late eighteenth century, tended to subtly differentiate it from English culture and its exemplification (for our purpose here) in Cambridge and Oxford Universities.
Until the 1970s, American archaeologists were nearly exclusively WASP men, born into American middle and upper classes (Patterson 1995:99). Their education followed the Scottish model (high school/4-year college) and, incorporating Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, fostered a pragmatic realism more engaged with practice than with metaphysics. After World War II, the G.I. Bill social revolution and 1964 Civil Rights Act enabled large numbers of men and women from lower classes and diverse ethnic origins to complete university and enter professions (Patterson 1995:72). Although this greatly broadened social origins of American archaeologists, it did not heighten general concern with epistemology. Instead, among archaeologists, scientific method was emphasized, in accord with twentieth-century America’s mantra, “Science Finds–Industry Applies–Man Conforms” (from the 1933 Chicago Exposition, in Goldman, ed. 1989:294).
Concomitant with the broadening of the profession’s social base, American archaeology bifurcated into academic and heritage-management (CRM) structures (or as Barnes puts it, “hierarchy” and “market” [Barnes 2003:139]). Over a generation, National Science Foundation support lessened and CRM employment came to dominate the profession (Patterson 1995:108–110; McGimsey 2003; Polk 2002). Academics differentiate themselves, and their niche market, from hoi polloi contract practitioners by requiring publication of books ostensibly exemplifying theory; CRM people are expected just to write gray-literature reports. Academics produce data from their field schools or grant-supported projects and slot them into theoretical models, CRM practitioners mass-produce data to be warehoused. Each sector images itself as a scientific community controlling specialized knowledge and methods by protracted initiation, peer-reviewed production, arenas of competition for status, and lobbying for domain protection.
Each segment of the profession developed its role models: for academics, the major professor heading a hierarchy of affiliated scientific specialists and graduate students, employed in multi-year projects costing hundreds of thousands of dollars; for CRM, the senior staff of an established company with its own well-equipped facility, running multiple contracts efficiently carried out by seasoned field directors and dependable shovel-dancers. The crux of academic life is the dissertation that must demonstrate relevance to a theoretical model considered feasible by the candidate’s major professor. Monitoring this gate to the profession, professors in large research universities subsidizing dozens of doctoral candidates can push their preferred method and theory, their paradigm in Kuhn’s term, promulgating it beyond their own department through recommending—or not recommending—graduates seeking employment. The consensus community thus created and maintained is unlikely to last more than a generation, waning as its leader retires and aggressive younger scholars build their own cohorts of students.
Meanwhile, CRM companies are constrained to legal regulations and guidelines that dictate a consensus on acceptable heritage management. They are required to assess “significance” according to whether the subject area exemplifies “historic” properties or appears relevant to recognized research problems. Since CRM must be formulated within bureaucratic codes, projects tend to be seen as series of more-or-less standard cases. Practitioners desiring to be innovative, in method or in questions entertained, feel they are performing “intellectual gymnastics” to comply with “the regs” (Altschul 2005:207). Because CRM overtly follows written codes, the limiting and stultifying effect of mainstream consensus is obvious. CRM practice is the palpable face of establishment hegemony, veiled in academia by rhetoric of free inquiry (Tainter and Bagley 2005).
Consensus communities built by major professors compete for funds and jobs, as of course do CRM companies. The latter necessarily exclude persons incapable of fulfilling legal requirements for a contracted project; the fringe of CRM archaeology consists of inadequately capitalized companies, incompetent practitioners, and a few shady characters. Academic consensus communities are another matter. Kelley’s Core Systems of tenured professors directing well-funded projects, recruiting and maintaining research cohorts, depend upon the larger society, subject to its structures and ideological forces. An analysis of the constitution of Core and fringe positions in American archaeology needs to look beyond the profession’s rhetoric.
Fringe Archaeology The profession of archaeology has a wide foundation of avocational researchers, lay local historians and naturalists, and people who work the land. Some of these find standard archaeological interpretations less than satisfactory, or are interested in phenomena and questions not usually discussed by archaeologists. Such people, and a few reputable professional archaeologists, get lumped as “fringe archaeology” (Feder 1990; Stout 2008; Williams 1991). Thorough histories of archaeology should investigate why certain phenomena and issues are non grata. American archaeology has been strongly influenced by Manifest Destiny ideology with its racist picture of First Nations as bestial savages in a wilderness (Kennedy 1994; Kehoe 1998:65–70). For several reasons—legitimating European colonization and the Monroe Doctrine (proscribing European intervention in American affairs), and testing hypotheses of societal evolution on allegedly independent data—orthodox American archaeology insists there were no contacts between the Americas and the rest of the world before Columbus’ 1492 voyage, with the very minor exception of brief Norse visits to northern Newfoundland, Labrador, and Baffin Island. Recent hard petrographic data validating the 1362 date carved in a Norse rune inscription on a stone found in northwest Minnesota (Kehoe 2005a) is summarily rejected by some archaeologists insisting “We know it’s a hoax.” Even those consummate long-distance voyagers the Polynesians are dismissed as only “once” touching America (Williams 1991:233; for an opposing view by an Oceanic archaeologist, see Green 1998). Substantial evidence exists, and has been presented by respected scientists beginning with Alexander von Humboldt, for pre-Columbian transoceanic contacts (Jett 1983, forthcoming; Fingerhut 1994; Kehoe 2003). This dark side of archaeology, as real as the dark side of the moon, is as much part of histories of archaeology as the mainstream story.
Raising and working with data seen as anomalous, is taken as throwing a gauntlet to established professionals. In cases where a proponent of transoceanic contacts has achieved status as a reputable archaeologist, for example the Mesoamericanists Gordon Ekholm, David H. Kelley, Paul Tolstoy, his reputation is saved by ignoring his work on pre-Columbian contacts. In my conversations with these men, each was bemused by his peers’ assumption that transoceanic contacts research is an aberration to be politely overlooked.
The Rejection of Pre-Columbian Transoceanic Contacts For mainstream archaeologists, pre-Columbian transoceanic contacts have been a dead issue. Primitive people couldn’t cross oceans, that settles it; or, anyone who asserts the American Indians didn’t evolve wholly independent of Old World societies must be a racist. To the first point, in 1971 I published a list of documented deliberate modern ocean crossings in an astounding variety of things that float (Kehoe 1971, updated in Kehoe 2003:32): the record for smallest boat is held by Hugo Vihlen, who crossed the Atlantic from Casablanca to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in 85 days in 1968, on a 5′117/8″ sailboard, then in 1993 crossed from St. John’s NFLD to southern England in 106 days on a 5′4″ board. For the Pacific, in 2000–2001, Jim Shekhdar, a 54-year-old Briton, rowed a boat 8060 miles from Peru to Brisbane, Australia, in 274 days. These feats are ignored. Archaeologists cannot ignore the Paleolithic settlement of Australia, requiring boats or rafts crossing open ocean to the island continent, a fact supporting the increasing popularity of postulating initial colonization of the Americas by coastal voyaging around the North Pacific rim. That hypothesis is kept within the subfield of Paleoindian studies rather than stimulating discussion of ocean voyaging in later Holocene times. As for the charge that only racists would look for pre-Columbian contacts, the real racists are those who exclude First Nations from involvement in the wider world.
Much of the evidence for transoceanic contacts is historic or ethnographic, therefore outside archaeology as it is practiced as a modern science. American geographers trained by Carl Sauer and, more recently, his students, work with these data and include several extensively researching transoceanic contacts, pre- and post-1492. A second-generation “Sauerian,” Daniel Gade, declares that the Sauer tradition represents a particularly strong commitment to empiricism, which he contrasts with the postwar American archaeological paradigm (Gade 2004:24). Where data pointing to transoceanic contacts are archaeological, as in the wheeled figurines Gordon Ekholm excavated in sealed stratigraphic deposits in Mexico, the comparison (to Chinese tomb figurines) is anomalous to American purview. The structure of American archaeological practice has no place for “the nuances of pre-Columbian enterprise,” where Ekholm, for example, added to his Chinese tomb figurines, depictions of dragons with flame eyebrows and Teotihuacán cylindrical tripod vases with conical lids and fresco painting (Ekholm 1953, 1955, especially 1964 for his discussion of scientism and of regional foci impeding broader comparisons). Notwithstanding the respect earned by his many years as Curator of Mesoamerican Archaeology at the American Museum of Natural History, and his impeccable, for its time, fieldwork in Mexico, Gordon Ekholm’s detailed and carefully argued hypotheses of Han Chinese-Classic Mesoamerican contacts have been relegated to fringe archaeology.
Joseph Needham is another example of a scholar whose reputation as a scientist carried no weight among American archaeologists when he argued for pre-Columbian transpacific contacts. Needham was controversial, especially in Cambridge. In the 1930s, along with J. B. S. Haldane in biology, J. D. Bernal in physics, and Lancelot Hogben in mathematics, Needham, then working in biochemistry, formed a Social Relations of Science group looking to Marxist principles to explain the history of science (Aronowitz 1996:208–209; Harding 1996:22). Later, upon his retirement from his laboratory in 1965, Needham began a monumental history of science in China, incorporating Chinese philosophies and political history as well as what the West terms science and technology. A basic theme in the Science and Civilisation in China volumes is the spread of scientific knowledge, what is usually termed “diffusion.” Many instances proved difficult to document, particularly in Needham’s favorite challenge, the spread of gunpowder and firearms. There, military advantage, and in other cases, commercial advantage, dictated secrecy. Other difficulties stem from an opposite circumstance, the unremarked mundane ordinariness of everyday technologies. Needham forged ahead, laying out the story as he perceived it, bolstered by immense footnoting. Critics found many cracks in the grand edifice, as might be expected in work of such pioneering scope (similar in this respect to the provocative projects of Richard S. MacNeish, in American archaeology). Regardless, Cambridge honored Needham by making him Master of Gonville and Caius College.
My own evaluation, from 2 weeks together during our Wenner-Gren conference in Mexico, 1977, and visits to him and Lu subsequently in Cambridge, is that he possessed a strong scientific mind, focusing on material data and building a clear logic. Whether that logic could be refuted would be a matter of working with more data or alternate hypotheses. Our question of transpacific contacts was greatly advanced by his raising the possibility of undocumented commoners transmitting traits during the century of the Manila galleons, whose crews deserted by the hundreds and were forced to flee into the hinterlands because desertion was severely punished. Ethnographic similarities might be attributed to these early post-Columbian contacts. Sifting out these, Needham highlighted archaeological and early contact ethnographic data (Needham and Lu 1985). What I have termed the “Manila galleon problem” of undocumented commoner contacts extends broadly across the Americas, certainly to the United States Southeast where sixteenth-century pirates and privateers preying on the Atlantic treasure galleons running the Gulf Stream must have lain over along the coast. Anglophone archaeologists and ethnohistorians have ignored not only these undocumented boats, but also the first Jamestown chroniclers’ identification of the Chickahominy lord Opechancanough as a refugee from “near Mexico,” and the extraordinary sojourn of another Chickahominy, “Don Luis” (Paquinquineo), between 1560 and 1570 in the Caribbean, Mexico, and Spain before returning to his homeland and resuming his aristocratic leadership (Kehoe 2005b:268–270). Here, boundaries between eventually Anglo and Spanish territories, and between prehistoric and historic, support orthodox American archaeology’s commitment to a premised evolutionary trajectory instead of historical particularism. From the standpoint of Chesapeake Bay First Nations, an academic origins myth is substituted for their forebears’ participation in a wider world.
When archaeologists dismiss scientists of the caliber of Alexander von Humboldt and Joseph Needham, when data are rejected a priori on grounds that oceanic voyaging was impossible or that proponents are racists, we are not dealing with rational science. Mainstream archaeology constructed a normal science conformable to Western ideology, excluding pasts that veer from the story of Man’s Rise to Civilization through Western Technology (Stone and Mackenzie 1989). American mainstream archaeologists, apparently unable to grasp that evolutionary developments are above all historically contingent (Gould 2002), have not yet rejected nineteenth-century stages of cultural evolutionism. Those who travel the high road replicating their preceptors, both in social class and intellectually, usually gain a job.
End Notes 1 Kelley herself was somewhat marginalized, as a woman in an era when Gordon Willey could openly proclaim he would not accept women students, as a West Texan in a country that thinks intellectuals can only be bred on the seacoasts, as a Southwestern archaeologist aware that her region stretches across the political border into Chihuahua, and exacerbating her marginality to the Southwest archaeology Core, employed in a Canadian university. 2 I owe this paragraph to Clyde Kluckhohn, who discussed Gardin at length in his Harvard graduate course on history and theory of anthropology, Spring semester 1958, in which I was enrolled. Kluckhohn foresaw, and recommended, a “linguistic turn” in archaeology; two other students in the course, Chang (1967:77–78) and Deetz (1967:83–96) reflect Kluckhohn’s influences although without citation, since he had not published his argument before his untimely death, 1960. Chang dedicated his book to Kluckhohn. References Cited
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Comments by Peter R. Schmidt Peter R. Schmidt1
(1) Department of Anthropology, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA
Peter R. Schmidt Email: schmidtp@ufl.edu Published online: 6 August 2010
Without Abstract Comments to Author “Consensus and the Fringe in American Archaeology” by Alice Kehoe holds poignant lessons for archaeologists of all world regions. As an Africanist archaeologist, I naturally see Kehoe’s arguments through a lens filtered by archaeological practice and thought in Africa. Yet simultaneously, as an American trained archaeologist I quickly recognize and resonate with the issues that she makes so diaphanous within American archaeology. I am struck by the strong parallels between American archaeology and postcolonial archaeologies in Africa, similarities that suggest that both venues suffer from similar syndromes—colonial legacies that: (1) venerate and legitimate the gatekeepers of knowledge; and (2) the systematic silencing and marginalization of those who conduct empirical research with results that substantively overturn mainstream orthodoxies.
Kehoe’s discussion of normative science and the maintenance of “Core Systems” of knowledge sounds much like what occurs in the practice of archaeology in the postcolonial world, where local and indigenous scientists continue to be marginalized and published in outlier journals that are mostly ignored by mainstream archaeological science (see Schmidt and Patterson 1995). More recently Roderick McIntosh (2009) and others (Ndlovu 2009; Schmidt 2009) have developed this theme for African archaeology by showing how the steadfast defense of core paradigms by “barons” or knowledge gatekeepers mark how archaeology is done in Africa and very likely in much of the remaining postcolonial world, a profound parallel to the bastions of correct knowledge that prevail in the West. The gatekeeping barons in Africa exercise their power by “eating the young”—consigning talented upstarts to dark corners of museums or to menial tasks; they either waste away or quit in frustration. This is no different from the gatekeepers of America who “eat the young” by denial of tenure, by ignoring meritorious job applications, and by denying fellowships.
These parallels should come as no surprise, for the West in its hegemonic definitions of correct scholarship continues to impose its colonial will on all cultures, including that of academe. Kehoe is dead right when she identifies a culture of compliance—really a colonized mind—in the academy, a culture that defines challenges to normative science as “rotten fruit” bound to doom the naive assistant professor to denial of tenure. We have all faced the imposition of such controls in our careers. I distinctly remember when as a young assistant professor I remarked to my former archaeological supervisor (on an interdisciplinary committee and then President of SAA) during a visit for a guest lecture that I had revised a paper on Binford’s early work (Galley Pound Mound; Hatchery West), a critique that demonstrated serious contradictions to most of the principles he was advocating during the 1960s and early 1970s. While my mentor’s response had been guarded but positive to an earlier version in seminar some years before, he vehemently whispered to me while climbing into his rental car, “You do that and you are dead academically”, and slammed the car door behind him as he departed. Sad to say, he was right. Had I had the temerity to submit it and find a willing publisher, the fallout would have been grave in terms of tendentious, vicious rebuttals, possibly ending my career. Yet, the very idea that we bend to such anticipated reactions is precisely the question that Kehoe brings to the surface for examination.
The prominent professors who failed to submit papers after the conference that Kehoe (1978) organized on Asian influences in Mesoamerica illustrate a mentality of fear—a colonized mind-set—that keeps open inquiry at bay and privileges the paradigms favored by the barons who control the discipline. Kehoe does all of us a great favor by diagnosing the disease and openly discussing its symptoms, the first step in treating a cancer that eats away at our integrity and truthfulness. It is informative that Kehoe leads off her essay by referencing the recent documentation of chicken in Argentina during pre-Columbian times. The scientific evidence is overwhelmingly convincing for a variety of reasons: meticulous scholarship and scientific analysis, affirmed by the best possible peer review. One would expect that to be enough, but sacred, normative ideas about pre-Columbian contact are part of a larger hegemonic paradigm controlled by key actors (the “barons”), who see such upstart challenges as threats to conventional research questions that they control through peer review processes in August institutions like the NSF.
Kehoe strikes a chord with Africanists when she debunks the notion that there is not substantial evidence for the probability that transoceanic contact with the Americas occurred over the long durée. She unmasks the argument that those who support such ideas are racist (because they deny American Indians independent development) and shows that they are in fact underwriting a racist position by denying early Americans creative interactions with peoples of other continents.
In a similar vein, one of the most important books on interactions of the Asian world with Africa (Hornell 1934) has remained obscure and mostly unreferenced—much like the work of Joseph Needham that Kehoe discusses—remaining virtually ignored until recently. Though he provided convincing evidence for extensive interaction between Indonesia and Africa, Hornell’s work was not rediscovered until recently when evidence for early bananas in West Africa came to light, showing that Africans from both East and West Africa were in contact with Southeast Asia. As well, the discovery of technological influences from India (Kusimba et al. 1994) in East Africa in the mid-1st millennium AD has stimulated renewed respect for Hornell’s ground-breaking insights about long-distance ocean voyaging and cultural interaction in the Red Sea Region. Given the huge distances covered (to West Africa from Indonesia 2–3 millennia ago), the obvious question is, why should such voyages not have happened regularly in other parts of the world, such as Polynesia? Kehoe cites numerous examples of recent, intrepid crossings of both major oceans to illustrate that nay-sayers are not engaged in rational science, but are protecting orthodoxy.
Kehoe also draws important attention to how marginalization of creative voices occurs through labeling. Amateur archaeologists with novel ideas and even professionals who subscribe to non-mainstream interpretations get labeled as doing “fringe archaeology”, a label that carries negative connotations and, once applied, can lead to permanent identification of individuals as unreliable and tending toward the bizarre, e.g., on the fringe. In African archaeology we have recently seen such techniques applied to discredit the work of Felix Chami of the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania (Chami 2009; Schmidt 2009). Labeled by white European archaeologists as a “sloppy” excavator, Chami faces a battle against a common colonial legacy—labeling the African “worker” as unreliable, as lazy. Those who feel discomfort in being so closely identified with such discrediting practices rooted deep in a racist colonial past alternatively call his work “nationalistic”, a code word meant to identify him as subjective and under the influence of a political ideological agenda. And so, Chami is assigned to the “fringe” much like those identified by Kehoe in the Americas.
Alice Kehoe has made many important contributions to American archaeology and in this case she does all archaeologists a great service by showing that processes of silencing and ‘“correct thinking” are not limited to the Americas, but also apply to most of the postcolonial world.
References
Chami, Felix (2009) The Atomic Model View of Society: Application in Studies of the African Past. In Postcolonial Archaeologies in Africapp. 39–56, edited by P Schmidt, SAR PressSanta Fe, NM.,
Hornell, J. (1934) Indonesian Influence on East African Culture, Royal Anthropological InstituteLondon.,
Kehoe, A. 1978. Early Civilizations in Asia and Mesoamerica. (Report of 1977 Wenner-Gren conference organized by Kehoe and David H. Kelley.) Current Anthropology 19(1):204–205.
Kusimba, C., Killick, D., Cresswell, R. G. (1994) Indigenous and Imported Metals at Swahili Sites on the Coast. In Society, Culture, and Technology in Africapp. 63–77, edited by ST Childs, MASCA, University of PennsylvaniaPhiladelphia.,
McIntosh, R. (2009) Barons, Anglo-Saxons, and Nos Ancêtres—Or, Eating the Young in Francophone West Africa. In Postcolonial Archaeologies in Africapp. 115–128, edited by PR Schmidt, SAR PressSanta Fe, NM.,
Ndlovu, N. (2009) Decolonizing the Mind-Set: South African Archaeology in a Postcolonial, Post-Apartheid Era. In Postcolonial Archaeologies in Africapp. 177–192, edited by PR Schmidt, SAR PressSanta Fe, NM.,
Schmidt, P. R. (2009) What is Postcolonial About Archaeologies in Africa? In Postcolonial Archaeologies in Africapp. 1–20, edited by PR Schmidt, SAR PressSanta Fe, NM.,
Schmidt, P. R., Patterson, T. C. (1995) Introduction: From Constructing to Making Alternative Histories. In Making Alternative Histories: The Practice of Archaeology and History in Non-Western Settingspp. 1–24, edited by PR Schmidtand TC Patterson, SAR PressSanta Fe, NM.,
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quote:For several reasons—legitimating European colonization and the Monroe Doctrine (proscribing European intervention in American affairs), and testing hypotheses of societal evolution on allegedly independent data—orthodox American archaeology insists there were no contacts between the Americas and the rest of the world before Columbus’ 1492 voyage, with the very minor exception of brief Norse visits to northern Newfoundland, Labrador, and Baffin Island...
Mainstream archaeology constructed a normal science conformable to Western ideology, excluding pasts that veer from the story of Man’s Rise to Civilization through Western Technology (Stone and Mackenzie 1989).
I agree with the general premise of the two articles presented here, with regards to the conformist culture in "Western mainstream" academia, which has historically been used to defend "Western" colonial designs, something that remains true even to this day at some level or another; I've made a note to this end myself in my postings elsewhere (blog)--one for example, being a writing on the implications of Timbuktu chronicles, Ancient Ghana Conquest Theory, and western African historiography in general. That said, I must say that I generally find Clyde's theories on African-involved pre-Columbian trans-Atlantic contacts materially wanting, not because they advocate pre-Columbian contacts -- which I myself finds thoroughly plausible, but more so on the grounds of questionable and/or insufficient material data that he bases his theories on. In Van Sertima's case, I've only come across snippets here and there of his take on pre-Columbian trans-Atlantic contacts involving Africans; so, I don't have sufficient information on his work to adjudge his take on the issue.
quote:
In a similar vein, one of the most important books on interactions of the Asian world with Africa (Hornell 1934) has remained obscure and mostly unreferenced—much like the work of Joseph Needham that Kehoe discusses—remaining virtually ignored until recently. Though he provided convincing evidence for extensive interaction between Indonesia and Africa, Hornell’s work was not rediscovered until recently when evidence for early bananas in West Africa came to light, showing that Africans from both East and West Africa were in contact with Southeast Asia. As well, the discovery of technological influences from India (Kusimba et al. 1994) in East Africa in the mid-1st millennium AD has stimulated renewed respect for Hornell’s ground-breaking insights about long-distance ocean voyaging and cultural interaction in the Red Sea Region. Given the huge distances covered (to West Africa from Indonesia 2–3 millennia ago), the obvious question is, why should such voyages not have happened regularly in other parts of the world, such as Polynesia? Kehoe cites numerous examples of recent, intrepid crossings of both major oceans to illustrate that nay-sayers are not engaged in rational science, but are protecting orthodoxy.
I also agree here, with the general premise of the conformist policy of "western" academia to deny or downplay pre-European water navigation creativity and technological break-through of non-European peoples, particularly so when it comes to Africa. I've noted elsewhere, how this drives conformist "mainstream Western" academia to use the "Near East", often under the banner of "Caucasians" or "Caucasoids" taxonomy, as a surrogate of some sort for Europeans in time frames of antiquity wherein Europeans were for the most part, quite marginal in world affairs. Speaking of such contacts, as noted above in relation to evidence suggested by bananas, I've come to notice that even when such African-to-non-African contacts are acknowledged, they need not necessarily recognize tacitly, the African end of creativity and initiative in water navigation to far-flung lands, and likewise -- technological creativity; in many occasions, to the contrary and as I've noted before (see below), Africans are seen as socially-stagnant and immobile recipients of know-how from elsewhere, wherein ideas are brought in unidirectionally, without Africans reciprocating the introduction of their technological know-how to foreign parties. In other words, such contacts are usually perceived as unidirectional, wherein it is the non-African parties who navigate the great waters of earth, while Africans stay put and subsequently exploit the fruits of foreign know-how. So just saying that there were contacts between Africans and non-African in remote/pre-historic antiquity is not sufficient in itself to remedy the traditional inadequacies of the conformist culture of 'western' academia; such contacts have to be placed in their broader and multi-layered context, with each party treated as active and reciprocating players...
Recap:
Between c. 400,000 and 200,000 years BP:
Jerome M. Eisenberg, Ph.D. and Dr Sean Kingsley
Now, from the remote shores of Budrinna on Lake Fezzan in Libya, and Melka Konture on the banks of the River Awash in Ethiopia, a series of stunning discoveries are set to challenge the originality of the Neolithic Revolution. After 39 years of surveys and excavations, Professor Helmut Ziegert of Hamburg University presents his results as a world exclusive in Minerva (pp. 8-9). In both African locations he has discovered huts and sedentary village life dating between an astonishing 400,000 and 200,000 Before Present - if correct, literally a quantum leap in our understanding of man's evolution.
Interesting development; possibly marks the beginning of an era ushering in some breaking away from or loosening of the traditional Eurocentric doctrine in scholarly circles of trying to make every supposed "unprecedented turning point in human biological and social evolutionary histories" into the monopoly of what they consider "non-Africans", as though throughout much of anatomically modern human's (a.m.h) pre-OOA history, which essentially makes up a substantial portion of a.m.h's bio-history, and those of his Homo genus counterparts in continental Africa, nothing of note occurred in such extended period of time for some reason until after they emigrated from the continent. Instead, in such warped traditional Eurocentric thinking, the norm has been to present Africans as recepients of the fruits of such "turning points", as opposed to being agents of laying down the foundations for such, which archaeological finds make more and more apparent. - blog post
Archaeological indicators of African-South Asian contact by ~ 4000 BC: Botanical and Artifactual indicators based on B. Julius Lejju et al.’s work…
Introduction of Bananas into Africa
Given the evidence for early domestication of bananas in New Guinea by the early 5th millennium BC, it would seem to be within the bounds of possibility for bananas to have reached Uganda by the mid to late 4th millennium BC, particularly if these were AA or AAA cultivars brought directly from southeast Asia. This would imply arrival of the plant on the east African coast long before the date of about 1000 BC suggested as a terminus ante quem by De Langhe et al. However, such an early arrival would also seem to be contradicted by the linguistic evidence linking the diepersal of bananas across Africa with Bantu languages, whose antiquity is not usually deemed to extend back as early as the 4th millennum BC…
…From these beginnings a remarkable diversity of banana cultivars arose as a result of human intervention, since banana plants cannot propagate by natural means. This diversity is particularly well represented among the AAB plantains in the rainforest regions of Africa, with at least 115 known cultivars. While **this implies a long history of cultivation and experimentation within Africa**, it is also likely that bananas may have been introduced to Africa several times. AA and AAA cultivars may have been introduced directly from southeast Asia, whereas AAB and ABB hybrids are more likely to have reached Africa from India or Sri Lanka. Thus, it is unfortunate that we cannot yet identify different banana genomes from their Phyloliths.
It has been suggested that the first bananas to arrive in Africa were plantains brought to the east coast of Africa across the Indian Ocean by 1000 BC, prior, in other words, to the settlement of Madagascar by Austronesians…
In this scenario, rapid acceptance and development of plantain cultivation in east Africa may have been facilitated by the indigenous inhabitants’ familiarity with Ensete, which they may have already “semi-cultivated” (but note the caution expressed by Philippson and Bahuchet). Indeed, Rossel has suggested that “the importance of the use of Ensete for technical purposes (fiber production) in eastern Africa, combined with the fact that Musa names in many cases borrowed from Ensete, leads [one] to think that an early success of Musa depended more on its usefulness for non-food pruposes (fibers, etc)”. From these auspicious beginnings, plantain cultivation and experimentation with propagation of new cultivars may have spread rapidly across the tropical belt of Africa. - B. J. Lejju et al. 2005
^Consistent with the point I made earlier, about the largest diversity of plantain bananas found in Western Africa. Bananas may have well been introduced initially from southeast Asia, where it initially grew in the wild, something which perhaps was rare in Africa at the time, and then domesticated. As you can see, these bananas arrived in Africa quite early, possibly not long after early domestication took in place in the vicinity of New Guinea, where transition from the wild to domestication was easily facilitated, very likely because it was already available as a wild plant. However, as noted above, Africans took initiative in experimenting with making these plants develop in ways that make them easier to grow on the environments of the continent, more diverse and more abundant, so as to accommodate regional usages according to respective local tastes.
Aside from bananas, other flora which were introduced into Africa across the Indian Ocean, are namely; coconut (Coco nucifera (L.)), colocasia or taro (Colocasia esculenta (L.) Schott), water yams (Dioscorea alata (L.)), sugarcane [probably originated in New Guinea; see Lejju et al. 2005], and perhaps rice. On the faunal end, chickens (Gallus gallus L.) are perhaps one of the notable ancient southeast Asian imports.
Chickens (Gallus gallus L.) are another southeast Asian domesticate that have become ubiquitous in Africa. Until recently a major problem in dating the arrival of chickens in Africa was the difficulty of separating chickens from indigenous fowl on the basis of osteology. Thus, the archaeological evidence is sparse; the earliest skeletal evidence for this species in Africa, as well as the earliest **literary reference**, dates to the **eighteenth dynasty in Egypt (c. 1567-1320 BC), but the first chicken bones south of the Sahara date only to the mid-1st millennium AD, at Jenne-Jeno - Lejju et al. 2005
Other possible chicken bones were uncovered in Machaga Cave on Zanzibar, dating to approx. first millennium BC [per Lejju et al. 2005].
African domesticated plants in Southeast Asia:
Corn variety, according to B. Julius Lejju et al. 2005:
By ~ 4000 years ago:
Pearl millet
Several crops of African origin occur in south Asia, initially associated directly or indirectly with the Harappan civilization. The first occurrence of pearl (bulrush) millet (Pennisetum glaucoma (L.) R. Br.) falls within the Late Harappan period at about 2000 BC or a little earlier.
Sorghum and Finger millet
Sorghum (Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench) was probably introduced at about the same time (Fuller convincingly refutes the arguments for late domestication of sorghum in Africa). This crop also reached Korea by 1400 BC. However, a recent re-examination of the archaeobotanical evidence for finger millet (Eleusine Coracana (L.) Gaertn.) in south Asia has shown that claims for the presence of this crop in the mid-3rd millennium BC were based on faulty identifications; the earliest secure dates for this crop in south Asia fall only towards the end of the 2nd millennium BC.
Cow peas and Hyacinth beans
In addition to these cereals, cow peas (Vigna Unguiculata (L.) Wa;[/). A domestic of west or perhaps southern African origin, were definitely present in southern Asia by about 1500 BC and probably several centuries earlier, while hyacinth beans (Lablab purpureus (L.) Sweet), an east African domesticate, reached south Asia by at least as early as 1800 BC.
Thus, in summary, several plant species that were first domesticated in Africa had reached south Asia towards the beginning of the 2nd millennium BC and possibly by about the end of the 3rd millennium BC. Fuller notes that “The general distribution of Lablab, Eleusine, and caudatum Sorghums might all argue for dispersal from coastal regions south of the horn of Africa”, while there is a dearth of evidence for these crops on the Arabian peninsula.
Evidence for African crops in south Asia by the beginning of the 2nd millennium BC does not itself constitute direct evidence for African-southeast Asian connections during this period. However, it does show that Indian Ocean voyaging, with one terminus probably on the east African coast, occurred by this date.
Artifactual indicators of African-Southeast Asian contact by ~ 5000 years ago
Again, according to B. Julius Lejju et al. 2005,
One piece of art factual evidence also demonstrates that the east African coast was engaged in Asian trade during the 3rd millennium BC. Analysis of a pendant found at Tell Asmar, ancient Eshnunna, in Mesopotamia shows that is was made of copal from the “Zanzibar, Madagascar, Mozambique region of East Africa”.
Similarly intriguing is the ethnographic evidence for ancient connections between Africa and Indonesia. A careful review of this evidence indicates that not only is it likely that xylophone was an African introduction to Indonesia, but also, even more surprisingly, the canoes of Lake Victoria share some very detailed and otherwise globally unknown features with those of Java and Madura. Of course, it is very difficult to discern the antiquity of these connections, though Blench argues that the accuracy of the descriptions of the Lake Victoria region found in Ptolemy’s geography indicates that “a regular trade route must have existed between the Lake and the coast, sufficiently well organized to allow the transmission of maritime technology.”
In summary, our reading of the archaeological evidence from Indian Ocean prehistory indicates that bananas could well have been brought to the east African coast in the 3rd millennium BC. However, there is no evidence from the Indian Ocean to support the hypothesis of an introduction in the preceding millennium, apart from the evidence that bananas had been domesticated at an appropriately early date in New Guinea.
The above, taken together, show a quid pro quo relationship of antiquity, in African-Southeast Asian contact, wherein all parties are equally active players, with ideas and water-navigation initiatives of getting from point A to destination B going in both directions, instead of a unidirectional one.
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If there was any large scale black presence in the americas it was mostly likely asian blacks of eastern asia,not africans.
The first Americans? quote-
Skulls of peoples with Australoid morphologies have been found in the Americas, leading to speculation that peoples with phenotypical similarities to modern Australoids may have been the earliest occupants of the continent. These have been termed by some Pre-Siberian American Aborigines. If this theory is correct, it would mean that some Proto-Australoids continued migrating beyond Southeast Asia along the continental shelf north in East Asia and across the Bering land bridge, reaching the Americas about 52,000 BCE.
Christy Turner notes that "cranial analyses of some South American crania have suggested that there might have been some early migration of "Australoids." These early Americans left signs of settlement in Brazil which may date back as many as 50,000 years ago. However, Turner argues that cranial morphology suggests "Sinodonty" in all the populations he has studied.
One of earliest skulls recovered by archaeologists is a specimen named Luzia. According to archaeologist Walter Neves of the University of São Paulo, Luzia's Paleo-Indian predecessors lived in South East Asia for tens of thousands of years, after migrating from Africa, and began arriving in the New World, as early as 15,000 years ago. Some anthropologists have hypothesized that Paleo-Indians migrated along the coast of East Asia and Beringia in smallwatercraft, before or during the last Ice Age.
Neves' conclusions have been challenged by research done by anthropologists Rolando Gonzalez-Jose, Frank Williams and William Armelagos who have shown in their studies that the cranio-facial variability could just be due to genetic drift and other factors affecting cranio-facial plasticity in Native Americans.
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This articles has nothing to do with theories relating to an African influence in the Americas.
The influence of African crops in South and Southeast Asia are due to the expansion of the Mande and Dravidians spreading African agriculture after 2500 BC. Below is my response to Fuller:
As you can see the historical, anthropological, archaeological and genetic evidence all points to the recent spread of African cultigents to South and Southeast Asia.
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-------------------- C. A. Winters Posts: 13012 | From: Chicago | Registered: Jan 2006
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Firstly, we should be clear about just who we are talking about. Those who are commonly referred to as "Native Americans" are actually a Mulatto people: the descendants of the Americas original people: Africans (from wherever) and later, Mongols and Whites - this is obvious in ancient American phenotypes.
The fact that native Americans did not evolve independently, is proven by the first advanced culture in the Americas - The Norte Chico civilization, dating from about 9,210 B.C. By 3,200 B.C, human settlement and communal construction are readily apparent. A later city Caral, was inhabited between 2627 B.C. and 2020 B.C. Caral city was comprised of six pyramids (or platform mounds), two plazas, an amphitheatre, and ordinary houses.
The interesting thing about Norte Chico, is that they started building pyramids BEFORE they learned how to make POTTERY - which is unnatural, and just not possible without outside influence.
Clyde and I have disagreed on where these Africans came from, he espouses the theory that there was a now desiccated, Saharan river, which took Saharan people to the Atlantic coast, and from there they crossed the Atlantic to the Americas.
That is certainly possible, as we know from artifact, that Nigerians had advanced Boat designs from about 8,000 B.C.
We also know that the single most notable thing about ancient American civilizations, is their pyramid building.
And it so happens that there is a line of Saharan pyramid cultures stretching from Sudan to the Atlantic coast.
posted
^My own theory is that advanced culture was brought to the Americas by the Blacks of China. I base my theory on, among other things: the Olmec's preference for Jade in their artwork, but most importantly, the similar nature of the pyramids.
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The tumulus mound covering the tomb of Emperor Jing of Han (r. 156-141 BCE), located outside of Xi'an.
A modern model portraying how Emperor Jing's tomb complex would have appeared upon completion
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Great info by Explorer on early SE Asian-African contacts! Unfortunately, I only recently became aware of this research after reading an article by Joanna Casey. She also mentioned African crops being found in India during this era but didn't specify which crops. F.C. Holl in another article mentioned Sorghum and Millet being introduced to SE-Asia, but I don't recall him citing dates (but I'm sure he was referring to the same thing that Casey was referring to). This proves not only early trans-oceanic contact but that "sub-Saharan" Africans were practicing agriculture much earlier than archaeologists would have liked to admit.
quote:Originally posted by Clyde Winters: This articles has nothing to do with theories relating to an African influence in the Americas.
There are parallels. The truth in that other people are starting to realize such research suppression by supposed "gatekeepers" of the field immediately reminded me of the haste criticism directed at van Sertima for expounding such theories. The irony is that Van Sertima presented much more evidence than what is reviewed here with respect to Kehoe's concerns.
quote:Originally posted by Mike111: Sundjata - Your thread, what's your point of view?
That the evidence leans towards an African presence in the new world before Columbus, though I think most of it I'd associate with 14th century voyages of Malian (Mande) explorers, as opposed to Egypto-Nubian or OOA relic populations. I made a thread on ESR a while back weighing the different evidences.
Posts: 4021 | From: Bay Area, CA | Registered: Mar 2007
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quote:Originally posted by Mike111: ^My own theory is that advanced culture was brought to the Americas by the Blacks of China. I base my theory on, among other things: the Olmec's preference for Jade in their artwork, but most importantly, the similar nature of the pyramids.
.
The tumulus mound covering the tomb of Emperor Jing of Han (r. 156-141 BCE), located outside of Xi'an.
A modern model portraying how Emperor Jing's tomb complex would have appeared upon completion
Mississippian culture - North America
Teotihuacán Mexico
Norte Chico Peru.
Great post mike. But I want to remind you that some of the earliest jade artifacts (Amonzonite) come from the Sahara, not China.
quote:Originally posted by Mike111: Sundjata - Your thread, what's your point of view?
That the evidence leans towards an African presence in the new world before Columbus, though I think most of it I'd associate with 14th century voyages of Malian (Mande) explorers, as opposed to Egypto-Nubian or OOA relic populations. I made a thread on ESR a while back weighing the different evidences.
I like the idea of 14th-century voyages to the Americas from Africa much more than Winters et al's "black Olmecs" theory. At least your scenario doesn't imply that Native American civilization was created by outsiders. However, I still have one problem with it: if Africans reached the Americas before Columbus in significant numbers, why didn't Native Americans receive Old World diseases earlier?
Posts: 7071 | From: Fallbrook, CA | Registered: Mar 2004
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posted
^ you'll probably change your mind tomorrow, like you did on what you referred to as the "black AE theory".
Mike your signature erratic picture spams are really out of place in a thread that has so much potential for a rational discussion on "controversial" historical claims.
Posts: 4254 | From: dasein | Registered: Jun 2009
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quote:Originally posted by Mike111: Sundjata - Your thread, what's your point of view?
That the evidence leans towards an African presence in the new world before Columbus, though I think most of it I'd associate with 14th century voyages of Malian (Mande) explorers, as opposed to Egypto-Nubian or OOA relic populations. I made a thread on ESR a while back weighing the different evidences.
I like the idea of 14th-century voyages to the Americas from Africa much more than Winters et al's "black Olmecs" theory. At least your scenario doesn't imply that Native American civilization was created by outsiders. However, I still have one problem with it: if Africans reached the Americas before Columbus in significant numbers, why didn't Native Americans receive Old World diseases earlier?
What kind of Old World diseases? Africans haven't been historically known to be carriers of pandemic diseases.
Posts: 4021 | From: Bay Area, CA | Registered: Mar 2007
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quote:Originally posted by Mike111: Sundjata - Your thread, what's your point of view?
That the evidence leans towards an African presence in the new world before Columbus, though I think most of it I'd associate with 14th century voyages of Malian (Mande) explorers, as opposed to Egypto-Nubian or OOA relic populations. I made a thread on ESR a while back weighing the different evidences.
I like the idea of 14th-century voyages to the Americas from Africa much more than Winters et al's "black Olmecs" theory. At least your scenario doesn't imply that Native American civilization was created by outsiders. However, I still have one problem with it: if Africans reached the Americas before Columbus in significant numbers, why didn't Native Americans receive Old World diseases earlier?
Simple there were no whites/Europeans living among the people of Mali.
The so called Old World diseases were transplanted by Europeans who practiced an unhealthy lifestyle and rarely practiced hygine. Remember many Africans in the New World also died as a result of their diseases.
quote: That the evidence leans towards an African presence in the new world before Columbus, though I think most of it I'd associate with 14th century voyages of Malian (Mande) explorers, as opposed to Egypto-Nubian or OOA relic populations. I made a thread on ESR a while back weighing the different evidences.
I like the idea of 14th-century voyages to the Americas from Africa much more than Winters et al's "black Olmecs" theory. At least your scenario doesn't imply that Native American civilization was created by outsiders. However, I still have one problem with it: if Africans reached the Americas before Columbus in significant numbers, why didn't Native Americans receive Old World diseases earlier?
I really don't understand how that would jibe with the ancient nature (the original settlers) of Blacks in the Americas. Can you explain?
Posts: 22721 | Registered: Oct 2005
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quote:Originally posted by anguishofbeing: Mike your signature erratic picture spams are really out of place in a thread that has so much potential for a rational discussion on "controversial" historical claims.
Some may think that you are trolling, just to be annoying. But I think that you are serious: meaning that you really are so stupid, that you cannot comprehend the function of a picture in a narrative.
Posts: 22721 | Registered: Oct 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Mike111: Those who are commonly referred to as "Native Americans" are actually a Mulatto people
Mike, enough with the fancy anthropological terms
Okay, If you'll explain what a "narrative" is to the idiot who doesn't know what a picture is for either.
Posts: 22721 | Registered: Oct 2005
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posted
Lioness - Assuming that you will keep your end of the bargain, and PM your idiot spawn to cease and desist, and go back to eating it's supply of bugs:
And agreeing that mulatto is really not a very scientific sounding term: I will endeavor to come-up with more scientific sounding terms.
quote:Originally posted by Mike111: Those who are commonly referred to as "Native Americans" are actually a Mulatto people
Mike, enough with the fancy anthropological terms
Okay, If you'll explain what a "narrative" is to the idiot who doesn't know what a picture is for either.
I never majored in literature, but from what I know, narrative is suppose to have some sort of structure, coherence. Your usual bizarre and ignorant ramblings don't count. It couldn't even pass for a postmodern narrative. lol
Posts: 4254 | From: dasein | Registered: Jun 2009
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quote: That the evidence leans towards an African presence in the new world before Columbus, though I think most of it I'd associate with 14th century voyages of Malian (Mande) explorers, as opposed to Egypto-Nubian or OOA relic populations. I made a thread on ESR a while back weighing the different evidences.
I like the idea of 14th-century voyages to the Americas from Africa much more than Winters et al's "black Olmecs" theory. At least your scenario doesn't imply that Native American civilization was created by outsiders. However, I still have one problem with it: if Africans reached the Americas before Columbus in significant numbers, why didn't Native Americans receive Old World diseases earlier?
I really don't understand how that would jibe with the ancient nature (the original settlers) of Blacks in the Americas. Can you explain?
Explain what? Why Native Americans look the way they do today, even though they descend from OOA migrants 60-70,000 years ago? When I say "relic", I mean "unchanging". However, I have considered the two-wave model and don't rule it out, I just wouldn't superficially refer to those people as "Africans" in any historic sense.
Posts: 4021 | From: Bay Area, CA | Registered: Mar 2007
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posted
What about the similarities between Meso-American and AE religion? Is that coincidence or is there something to it?
Posts: 4254 | From: dasein | Registered: Jun 2009
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quote:Originally posted by anguishofbeing: What about the similarities between Meso-American and AE religion? Is that coincidence or is there something to it?
Wouldn't know enough about Meso-American religion to compare. I may need to re-read Van Sertima towards that end.
Posts: 4021 | From: Bay Area, CA | Registered: Mar 2007
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