Subject: Ancient Artifacts. July 11, 2008.
Here is some information that might make you think
that Columbus or the Vikings were not the first people
to find America.
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- IN THE DREAMTIME DEPARTMENT
Nations Before Our Own
In the mid-1950s, Mrs. Alleyne K. Ecker pulled a
peculiar object from red clay fifteen feet down in a
well workmen were digging on her farm in Guthrie,
Oklahoma.
After she had washed off the mud and clay, she found
that she had retrieved a figurine that depicted a
bearded, robed figure holding a lamb.
A man who claimed to be an expert on woodcarving told
her that the artifact had been shaped from a tree
harder than ebony, a tree that had been extinct for
centuries; but no one could identify the figure of the
ancient shepherd.
After the object had been in her possession for some
time, two Chinese students at a nearby college told
Mrs. Ecker that they recognized the figurine as a
representation of Shou Hsing, the Chinese g-d of
longevity. The idol was considered by the students to
be the earliest representation of the go-, who was
esteemed as a deity many centuries before C-rist.
About 1910 a small boy playing in the tiny settlement
of Flora Vista, New Mexico, dug up two slabs of carved
rock and released a controversy that has raged unabated
ever since. Among the symbols of an ancient language no
one has yet deciphered are the figures of a number of
indigenous animals--and two elephants. Clearly,
unmistakably, with trunks and floppy ears and tusks,
the figures represent elephants. The boy found the
slabs in 800-year-old tribal ruins on the Animas River,
opposite the village of Flora Vista.
Can someone draw a picture of an elephant without
ever having seen one?
It has been postulated that if you put enough monkeys
in a room with enough typewriters and provide them with
enough paper, one of them will eventually reproduce
Hamlet. If countless ancient Native American tribal
artists had carved enough representations of animals on
enough rock slabs, is it possible that one of them had
eventually carved an elephant?
To examine the alternatives, we might say that one of
the following explains the elephant slabs:
1. Mammoths coexisted in the Southwestern U-ited
States until eight centuries ago with men sophisticated
enough to capture their image in art.
2. An invasion fleet launched by an Asian potentate
reached the New World, complete with w-r elephants, and
a Native tribal artist captured the event for
posterity.
3. The slabs are the work of a hoaxster, who hid his
fakes in the old tribal ruins so that sooner or later
either an archaeologist or a small boy would uncover
them.
4. The slabs found their way to New Mexico via the
trade****ps of Phoenicians or Africans between 900-200
B.C.E.
On September 13, 1924, near Tucson, Arizona, Charles
E. Manier found the first of what would prove to be a
series of unusual artifacts inscribed with what very
nearly appears to be Latin. Among the twenty-seven
artifacts are six crosses, nine swords or sword
fragments, a spearheaded serpent cross, and a crescent
cross. According to authorities, the language appears
to be Latin of a style popular up to A.D. 900, and
dates on some of the pieces bear out this supposition.
But the Latin inscriptions strive to record a kind of
history of settlement and provide a journal of
exploration that makes no sense--and a few Hebrew words
thrown in here and there add confusion rather than
clarification.
Again, we are left attempting to explain bizarre
hybrid artifacts:
1. The crosses and swords and their peculiar Latin
inscriptions could be some incredible hoax.
2. A band of explorers, perhaps from the
Mediterranean area with a knowledge of Ch-istianity,
Latin, and Hebrew, could somehow, circa 800 A.D., have
gotten themselves to the American Southwest,
established a colony, recorded their history, and then
proceeded to pass into obscurity.
Some of the Hebrew words found jumbled in with the
Latin are "J-hovah," "Peace," and "Mighty Empire." Did
the explorers consider themselves part of a mighty
empire, or did they find themselves confronted with a
mighty empire in the American Southwest?
The Scientific American for July 22, 1882, tells of a
curious find of "Pre-Indian Relics from Virginia": The
objects [found between the ranges of the Blue and
Allegheny mountains, near Mount Pisgah, North Carolina]
are said to be of a type absolutely unique, consisting
partly of human, partly of animal figures, either in
the round or in various degrees of relief. Some are
household utensils.
They appear to have been sculptured by metal
instruments, so perfect is their workman****p.
The correspondent for Scientific American comments
further that the human figures were not fa****oned in
the likenesses of American Indians, and that the images
were fully clothed in tight-fitting garments. Some of
the figurines were represented as seated in armchairs;
others were astraddle a most remarkable variety of
animals--bears, prairie dogs, birds.
An imaginative artisan at work, one may comment
comfortably. But then comes the zinger: Some of the
riders are seated upon two-humped camels, rhinoceroses,
and hippopotamuses. Either our artisan observed such
African animals for himself, saw representations of
such animals, or he was more than imaginative, he was
clairvoyant.
The Scientific American hazards a theory that "the
articles were made by an earlier and more civilized
race, subjugated and partially destroyed by the Indians
found in Virginia on the arrival of the white men."
However, the specimens of the Old World animals were
"obviously" made by a white man, the re****t concludes
without further explanation.
Roman coins have been unearthed in tribal burial
mounds as far west as Illinois.
An iron fork was found in a prehistoric tribal site
near Eddyville, Kentucky.
Japanese p+ottery from the Jomon period (3000 B.C.)
was found in Ecuador in 1966.
Viking rune stones continue to be unearthed
throughout the United States and Canada.
The colossal stone heads scattered in the jungles of
Veracruz display obvious Negroid features.
A clay tablet found along the Susquehanna River Dear
Winfield, Pennsylvania, bears a cuneiform inscription
that describes a short-term loan of an Assyrian
merchant in Cappadocia around 1900 B.C.E.
I quite agree with my friend Patrick Huyghe, who, in
his book Columbus Was Last: From 200,000 BC to 1492, A
Heretical History of Who Was First (Anomalist, 2005)
presents enormous amounts of evidence to prove that
numerous seafarers landed on the shores of North and
South America before the earliest recorded sighting of
either continent by a European. However, as I point out
in Worlds Before Our Own (Anomalist, 2007), there are a
great number of artifacts that have been discovered
throughout this hemisphere that simply do not make any
kind of sense on anyone's timetable. The evidence,
plain and simple, appears to reveal that there were
other great nations on these lands before our own.
An estimated two million pounds of copper were mined
on Isle Royale in Michigan by some unnamed prehistoric
mining empire that had the means of trans****ting the
metal out of the immediate area.
Several bog-iron smelting furnaces have been found
scattered over the southern half of Ohio. Farmers in
that state occasionally turn up iron artifacts in their
fields.
Speculation as to the identity of the ancient workers
in iron has included the Vikings, the mysterious Mound
Builders, or a long-forgotten civilization that once
existed in America.
All that can be said with certainty at this time is
that when the early settlers arrived in Ohio in the
years 1790 to 1810, they found no less than 100
abandoned hills crowned with stone fortifications. Some
of these remained for years at Fort Hill, Spruce Hill
and Glenford Fort in Perry County. Similar fortified
hills may be seen at Hill Fort, Georgia, and
Manchester, Tennessee. At the Manchester fort the first
settlers found bricks and a short iron sword.
In 1820 Caleb Atwater issued a re****t of a furnace
surrounded by bricks in the central mound around which
Circleville was built. With the furnace were what
appeared to be a dagger and a plate, both of
disintegrated iron.
In 1953 miners of the Lion coal mine of Wattis, Utah, broke into a
network
of
tunnels between five and six feet in height and width,
which contained coal of such vast antiquity that it had
become weathered to a state of uselessness for any kind
of burning or heat. A search outside the mountain in
direct line with the tunnels revealed no sign of any
entrance. Since the tunnels were discovered when the
miners were working an eight-foot coal seam at 8,500
feet, the evidence is irrefutable that an undetermined
someone conducted an ambitious mining project so far
back in time that all exterior traces have been eroded
away.
Professor John E. Willson of the Department of
Engineering, University of Utah, was quoted in the
February, 1954, issue of Coal Age: "Without a doubt,
both drifts were man-made. Though no evidence was found
at the outcrop, the tunnels apparently were driven some
450 feet from the outside to the point where the
present workings broke into them. . . . There is no
visible basis for dating the tunnels ...."
Part 1.
John Winston. johnfw@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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