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The Western Hemisphere. General term for the Americas following their discovery by Europeans, thus setting them in contradistinction to the Old World of Africa, Europe, and Asia.
You may be interested in God, the Bible, the construction of an Israeli national through abysmal archaeology, etc., but I am not.
I will add that the prospect of an Israeli-Palestinian conflict with WMD brings a certain gloom to this holiday season.
luxe magazine wrote: Hancock: I’m working now on a big book on ancient America. Two main reasons for that; firstly, a lot of new science on the peopling of the Americas has taken a long time . It’s taken about 25 years to break the old paradigm. But the old understanding of the peopling of the Americas, which used to say there were no humans in the Americas before about 13,000 years ago, has now been completely overturned by new discoveries. Initially, those discoveries were resisted by the establishment very strongly, and many archeological careers were ruined – those archaeologists who were willing to acknowledge and older human presence. But lo and behold, they were right.
The information has now reached such a level that it has overwhelmed the old paradigm; the old paradigm cannot stand in the face of new evidence of humans in America 25,000 years ago, 50,000 years ago, and most recently, a big paper published in Nature in April 2017: Human Presence in the Americas 130,000 Year Ago. That’s 10 times as old as human beings were supposed to have been, in the Americas! That’s in a site near San Diego in California. So, not only that, but DNA work is also giving us a new story about the peopling of the Americas. We’re now beginning to understand how complicated it is. There are certain fragments of DNA that are associated with a group of humans; not anatomically modern humans, but humans that have been a bit like the Neanderthals. They have bred with modern humans and left their traces in the human DNA, just like the Neanderthals did. That DNA is present very strongly amongst Australian Aboriginal Indians and amongst certain tribes in South America.
It hardly appears at all in North America. So the notion that the whole Americas were peopled across the Bering land bridge once the sea level was lower, now the Bering Strait, and that the migration came all the way through to South America, is just wrecked by that finding. It means that people, human beings, had to have got to South America by sea directly, not coming through North America at all, and that raises huge issues about ancient navigation and ancient skills and ancient abilities.
The second reason I’m very interested in focusing in on the Americas is that they have not played a big part in my work until now, and I’m just intrigued and excited by what’s happening. I got activated on this subject when I participated at Standing Rock in 2016 and got to know the Lakota, did some interviews there, and really for the first time I think, I understood the terrible genocide that was inflicted upon the Native American peoples and how their culture, their history, their true past was deliberately obliterated by the invaders, and how so many lies were told about them. I’d like it if my new book can help correct those lies.
It’s been a big week for Graham Hancock. A South African professor endorsed his lost civilization, and a luxury magazine conducted a fawning interview. Now, Bear & Company is getting ready to publish Spirits in Stone: The Secrets of Megalithic America: Decoding the Ancient Cultural Stone Landscapes of the Northeast by Glenn Kreisberg, and Hancock has his name on the cover as the author of the book’s credulous forward. Of the book itself there is little to say. It is more than 400 pages long and seeks to explore alleged stellar alignments among various rocks and earthworks in the northeastern United States to conclude that an advanced super-civilization once occupied the future United States. Weirder, it is partly the work of Kresiberg and partly an anthology of partially related essays by other writers. It is an odd book.
​Kreisberg developed his ideas while living near Woodstock, New York, which he identified as a center of megalithic star culture. He has been promoting version of the idea since at least 2011, including on Graham Hancock’s own website. I remember reading the linked article last year and finding it so unimpressive that I didn’t think to say anything about it. Kreisberg is also the editor of Mysteries of the Ancient Past: A Graham Hancock Reader, so you can see where from where he takes his inspiration.
I feel like I should be reviewing Spirits in Stone, but I must confess that the thought of giving more than a cursory reading to 400 pages of minute arguments about stellar alignments makes my eyes glaze over. The problem is reducible to a simple point: Even if we accept that such stones and earthworks were indeed purposefully aligned to stars and constellations (and that they are all artificial constructions and not, as is the case with some, natural), it implies nothing about the existence of an “advanced” Atlantis-like civilization, for observation of the stars and the ability to point rocks at them is, in the final analysis, not an inherent development of state-level societies. Anyone with sufficient motivation and a rudimentary ability to carve records of stellar positions could do it.
Anyway, Kreisberg invited Hancock to tour some of what he views as megalithic sites in the northeastern United States, and Hancock came away convinced that Native Americans once had a scientifically advanced civilization that expressed sophisticated mathematical truths through the medium of stones aligned to stars. However, Hancock feels that Euro-Americans have destroyed these stony wonders:
"What my rambles with Glenn have shown me, however, and what this book will reveal to you, are that those fragments are indeed present, even in the intensively settled, heavily farmed, and economically developed Northeast where the barbaric forces of “modernization” have been at work the longest, erasing and confusing the record of stone."
​Here Hancock presents an infuriating mixture of fact and fantasy that marries a correct criticism—that agricultural and industrial development has disturbed or destroyed archaeological sites—to a romantic fantasy that the destroyed parts of the archaeological record would reveal a “Hermetic” civilization of staggering wisdom and complexity, one possessed of “energizing, healing, and soul-enriching effects.”
Hancock is at a loss, though, to explain why North America, if part of the same global system of megalithic construction inherited from Atlantis, lacks the kinds of massive stone sites that the Old World has in spades. With the haughty condescension of a wealthy, liberal European, he attributes the missing stone structures to deliberate destruction by us heathen colonials who lack a certain European refinement and British comfort with deep history.
"What is different in America is only the scale of destruction of this ancient worldwide system, deliberate destruction, pursued for short-term economic gains, by rude and barbarous incomers whose cultures had been cut off from the wellsprings of planetary wisdom for so long that they were literally unable to see the pearls of great price that they so carelessly and callously swept away.'
​He doesn’t quite identify who these incomers are, but when he said that “we” are their “descendants,” he makes plain that he is speaking, somewhat imprecisely, of European colonists. Perhaps stung by the repeated criticism that his hypothesis about a lost white race civilizing the brown peoples of the world is racist, or at least racist-adjacent, Hancock has here and in his newer work from the past twelve months or so overcorrected and all but falls into the trap of demonizing Europeans while fetishizing Native Americans as possessors of a purer and more harmonious ancient earth wisdom that makes them all but avatars of occult earth magic.
Regarding the Bering Straight overland route vs. arrival by sea. There was not a lot of fanfare, but the so-called "Pacific Coast kelp highway route" has absolutely supplanted the overland route from Beringia into the Americas. So arrival by boat is now accepted by nearly all archaeologists working on the larger issue of the peopling of the Americas. This may be a revelation to Hancock, but it's almost old news by now....
Regarding the Cerutti Mastodon Site, dated at 130,000 years, I had the opportunity to meet the lead author of the Narure letter, as well as his wife, one of the co-authors, and these were my impressions. From the Fall meeting of the New England Antiquties Research Association(Neara), which was held in Rhode Island:
Dr. Kathleen Holen's talk was entitled "Evidence for human activity at large animal death sites". She and her husband have been involved in over 50 excavations of mammoth and mastodon remains, in the Great Plains and elsewhere. Of course, not all those have involved evidence of human activity, but some have, and have returned dates far older then Clovis. Her emphasis in her talk was on what fresh bone looks like when it is humans doing the work of breaking those bones open. Including experimentation using heavy hammerstones with fresh elephant bones in Africa. I cannot recapitulate her knowledge, and won't attempt it, but will say she convinced me that there are reliable clues that can be demonstrated when fresh bone has been fractured by hominids wielding large hammerstones for percussion operations.
Well, it was superb. I shook his hand afterward and told him I could not speak for Neara, but that I considered it an honor that he came to speak to us about what is grounbreaking(to say the very least!) research, to be able to hear the frontier research by the lead author of the Cerutti study. He replied that he felt honored to have been invited, and that it was wonderful to speak to an audience that was actually receptive to their study.
Indeed! The blowback against them has been nothing short of relentless and fierce. They told us of one grad student, who had no experience excavating a mastodon site at all, publishing a reply stating that heavy equipment driving above the Cerutti bones while they were still buried, was responsible for the fracturing seen. Both Holen and his wife were incredulous at this suggestion, having, as stated, not only so much more experience studying megafauna sites, but being able to easily demonstrate the difference between bones broken by percussion while fresh, and bones broken when dessicated(which the Cerutti bones would have to have been if broken by heavy vehicles driving over their burial sites. Even at 130,000 +/-9000 years old, the Cerutti bones are dessicated, not fossilized. In other words, they are still bones).
Regarding what I felt was one key observation I took away. European colleagues working on sites far older then sites in the Americas, as well as African colleagues working at the famous Olduvai Gorge Early Man sites, are near universal in being of the opinion that the Cerutti Mastodon Site is an archaeological site. Everyone, both old world and new world archaeologists, are of the opinion that the dates for the site are valid. 130,000 +/-9000 years old. The old world archaeologists and paleontologist recognize the fracturing as clearly originating in percussion blows by humans. American archaeologists, in sharp contrast, have been near universal in rejecting the findings. American archaeologists are of the opinion that the Cerutti site is not an archaeological site at all. But I felt the Holen's have effectively overcome these opinions. And that is why I thanked them for the honor of hearing from the lead authors regarding what I believe will lead to a major breakthrough in understanding the peopling of the Americas.
BTW, already two additional sites have been located in California, which may show evidence of hominin activity, and both have returned dates of 80,000-100,000 years old. They told us of occasions where other sites have been destroyed because archaeologists had simply assumed a priori that the sites were simply "too old" and therefore simply not worth saving.
In short, the Holen's won me over. I wish a tape of their talks were available, and that I could offer here more then my impressions based on memory.
Regarding whether there are sites in the Northeast where Native Americans built in stone, well, archaeologist Dr. Curtiss Hoffman of the Massachusetts Archaeological Society favors an interpretation that does assign much of the stonework to prehistoric native peoples.. and has completed an inventory of such sites for the east coast of the United States. On the opposite side of the debate, archaeologists such as Rhode Island State Archaeologist Timothy Ives favors an interpretation that sees the numerous stone cairn sites that are common in New England backcountry hillsides as the product of field clearing by sheep farmers. In Vol. 43, 2015 edition of "Archaeology of Eastern North America", he outlined that viewpoint in an article entitled "Cairnfields in New England's Forgotten Pastures". Interestingly, Narragansett Doug Harris, of the Narragansett Historic Preservation Office, whom I also discussed offshore underwater sites with at the Neara meeting(the Narragansett have oral traditions locating village sites in Block Island and Rhode Island Sounds when those areas were above water), as well as many other New England tribal members do identify many of these stone structure sites in the Northeast with their ancestors, and not colonial and Post colonial sheep farmers.
Recently, the town of Hopkington, RI, together with the Narragansett Nation, preserved and dedicated an interesting site contained some 1000+ cairns, as a Narragansett Sacred Landscape Site. At the least interesting, that in the absence of firm archaeological data one way or another, that such sites are being preserved. It's sort of a "better safe then sorry" approach.
Preserving such sites has been ongoing for quite a few years now. Prior to the preservation of the Hopkington, RI, site, the most successful effort was getting the Turner Falls(Ma.) Sacred Hill Ceremonial Site protected and added to the National Register of Historic Places:
I know nothing about Glenn Kreisberg and his book about "megaliths" in the Northeast, nor what Hancock has planned. I hope it is not just a rehash of the older view that there was a connection between megalithic cultures on opposite sides of the Atlantic....
There is no shortage of Old World archaeologists and paleontologists who are in agreement with their New World colleagues about the problems with the site .
There are always connections between megalith builders , but in the case between old and new worlds diffusion isn't one .
With the exception of some medecine wheel type sites , it would be good to see some examples of the supposed megalthic sites and their putative alignments .
Apart from money I can't understand why anyone would wanted to be associated with the Kreisberg book .
A lot of what I wrote in "Man and Impact in the Americas" is gaining common acceptance now, or being proved correct,
As far as New England megaliths go, it is interesting that Rafinesque used similarities in structures to try to date
structures in the Americas, and to gain a sequence. He had no 14C dates, no pottery sequences, and very limited data.
Andaste (X mt DNA) material culture is what it is. I have no idea about X mt DNA distribution in European coastal Atlantic, no knowledge of the
Giant lore from Ireland or Britain, no idea of any tall skeletal remains found in those areas. Hancock most likely does, or can easily run into
I myself am deeply opposed to the idea of any single master race, or master races, one of the key tenets of theosophy.
I am nor a spiritual guide, but in this case, I can point out the history of the conmen who developed theosophy:
Hancock was not part of this chain, but rather a journalist who stumbled into it while working in Africa,
There is a spiritual vacuum that has developed here in the states, and apparently in Europe as well.
besides that there are very few people around who can see in their minds' eye the paleo environment.
Tiompan wrote: Field clearance cairns look much the same as marker or burial cairns , excavation helps .
Tiompan wrote: There are always connections between megalith builders , but in the case between old and new worlds diffusion isn't one .
Tiompan wrote: With the exception of some medicine wheel type sites , it would be good to see some examples of the supposed megalthic sites and their putative alignments.
as very few of the NE sites have been excavated, no one knows with certainty if any of them are sites.
Tiompan wrote: Apart from money I can't understand why anyone would wanted to be associated with the Kreisberg book.
Tiompan wrote: There is no shortage of Old World archaeologists and paleontologists who are in agreement with their New World colleagues about the problems with the site .
Although I am not, at present, allowed to reveal the location of the site, excavation at a typical conical cairn site in Connecticut revealed ceremonial grade artifacts buried beneath several of the cairns. And it was not a case of the artifacts being there prior to construction of the cairns. No burials were encountered, either. I can't publish that location in a public format, for what I hope are obvious reasons. Not sure it's been written up as yet, either.
I would also not be able to agree, at least where carefully constructed conical, or beehive shape cairns, are concerned, that they are not much different then field clearing cairns. The latter tend to be loosely tossed piles of rocks. This is what we determined at the lower cairn field at Parker Woodland, in Coventry, RI:
1. The cairns were constructed of split slabs of granite and squared-off granite blocks fitted in place, and not uncut cobbles as one might expect in field clearing.
2. The cairns often display a feather-laying technique of construction. That is, the split slabs have been tapered in thickness, with the thinnest section laid toward the center of the cairn.
3. More often then not, convex surfaces on individual slabs are face up. This, in conjunction with the slanting downward of the stones toward the center of the cairn, enables the structure to be tapered conically, as well as ensuring good drainage, thus preventing damage from frost heaving during the winter months.
4. While the average base diameter of the cairns is small, 4-5 feet, and the interior space limited, this space is filled with smaller fractured rock before the cairn is closed off at the top. Water reaching the center of the cairn will thus drain through fractured rock to the ground.
In the case of the lower field of conical cairns in Parker Woodland, and at other sites here in Rhode Island, such effort displayed seems unusual for typical field clearing. In the upper cairn field, consisting of much larger cairns known as platform cairns, they are blended into the existing topography and make use of existing erratics in a way that ensures they too are very unlikely to fall apart over time.
I will say, if I were a farmer, in the case of upland New England, a sheep farmer, I would not want the rocks tumbling back into the field over time. That said, there are plenty of sites where there does not seem to be any such concern, the rocks are simply tossed atop an ever growing loose pile. In the case of two of the largest platform cairns at the Parker Woodland site, trianguloid stones have been stood against the cairn, in one case pointing North, and in the other case pointing East.
In any event, what limited archaeology that has been conducted at these sites, and I am thinking of the undisclosed eastern Ct. site, did reveal a likely native construct for that site.
In general, study of these sites, and the debate itself, is still in a fairly early stage. I have not made up my own mind, one way or the other, and would expect a mixed bag of results. Also, that many cairns are built, and built into the topography, and taking advantage of existing features like large erratics, in a way to help ensure they last through the seasons, that aim alone certainly would not eliminate farmers, who would also not want to have to keep picking up the same rocks season after season. But, nonetheless, there is a big difference in the care displayed in construction between these and the more common loose piles of tossed rocks usually associated with field clearing activity....
Speaking of the use of stone by Notheastern tribes in general, we know there is a Winter solstice alignment at the so-called Queen's Fort in Exeter, RI. Once thought to have been built by a Narragansett known as Stonewall John in the period of King Philip's War, the Narragansett themselves have oral traditions indicating an earlier construction and purpose. There is also an Archaic Era rockshelter in Ma., I'll get the site report and post it when I have the chance, which included a stone wall built at the entrance. The point being that American archaeologists have long assumed Northeastern natives did not build in stone. Not sure there was ever any real justification for that assumption.
Edit: OK, here is the report on the Flagg Swamp rock shelter, where Northeastern natives built a stone wall. In retrospect, seems silly to consider this a surprise, but whatever:
The taller conical cairn here is 5' tall. These cairns really cannot be said to be that much indistinguishable for stone piles usually interpreted as field clearing, IMHO:
Again, may not be typical of field clearing. Retaining, or taller wall, is on the downslope of the cairn, to help prevent it falling apart through time...
Another view of the tallest conical cairn in a field of some 120+ cairns comprising the lower cairn field in Parker Woodland, Coventry, R.I.:
As mentioned a few days there are examples of , specifically X2a mt DNA in Indian populations but to be so general in the use of X shows an ignorance highlighted even further by the specificity of of Andaste .
Much depends on the age of the cairn . In Europe clearance cairns can be thousands of years old and much degraded ,often little different from equally degraded cairns that have deposits below them .
Field clearance is often found on top of erratics or large rocks as they are dead ground and it makes more sense to pile 'em high rather than take up good ground .
I had a look for pics of the putative alignment at Queen's Fort in Exeter, RI, and came across a plan (Maver &Dix ) but no pics as yet .
Just saw the pics of the cairns . They are clearly fairly recent i.e. not much older than few centuries and maybe even restored .
Field clearance in the UK and Ireland can date from the 4th millenium BC and can often covered in turf/peat with nothing of the actual stones to be seen .
Tiompan wrote: Much depends on the age of the cairn . In Europe clearance cairns can be thousands of years old and much degraded ,often little different from equally degraded cairns that have deposits below them .
Which pics are you looking for? Maybe I can help. The tree cover atop Queen"s Fort at present would not make it possible to get a clear view, and hence photos, from the northeast "bastion" to the southwest "bastion". Also, the SW bastion was built sometme between 1979, the date of my earliest photos of the SW "bastion", and 1982, at which time it had been built up higher, and the short arm creating a spiral outline for that feature had been added. Before Mavor/Dix's book was published, I cautioned Dix that neither 19th century plans nor my 1979 photos indicated a spiral shape to the SW "bastion". in 1979, as in the 19th century plan drawings, the SW "bastion" was an open semi-circle in shape. I have photos from both 1979 and from after the rebuild, but there would be no good photos available in which you could stand at the NE "bastion" and actually see the SW "bastion" and the sun, at the Winter solstice. At least to the best of my knowledge. I'm also obviously not in a position to question any oral memories of the Narragansett regarding Queen's Fort. It was not located until after King Philip's War. It was assumed a brief engagement between Narragansett and English forces took place there a day or two prior to the Great Swamp Massacre of December, 1675. Although associated at that time with a known Narragansett mason, Stonewall John, that too seems to be an assumption that cannot be proven.
This page describes some archaeological work done at Queen's Fort years ago. I do have numerous photos of features there, but, to be honest, it's a pain in the ass having to forward the photos to my computer(I use an iPad), in order to then have to use Paint to resize them for archaeologica. Not sure they would really add anything to the discussion, either. But here is lots of info, including that archaeological work:
Jim Egan, who runs a small museum across the street from the Newport Tower, delivered a talk,which I missed, entitled "Newport Tower Through the Ages: New Light on an Old Tower". As you may be aware, Egan favors an Elizabethan, 16th century, origin for the tower. He believes John Dee designed the tower. I'm really not enough up to speed on his research at all. Been too many years since I examined his writings and thoughts. I know Jim, have known him for years. Great guy and great speaker, but I missed his talk altogether. He also opened his museum on the Sunday of the meeting, when field trips around the state take place.
Two things that come to mind that could be helpful are tightening up of the dates for the build and a palynological study to see what the tree cover was like during the approximate/more accurate period of construction .
I was interested to see what the two points , the putative backsight and foresight looked like and whether there was anything to suggest that
Why would the locals build an alignment to the solstice into what appears to be a defensive structure ?