Chapter 3: Lost Races

Mysterious City in Cuban Waters

The best-selling books of British author Andrew Collins have won him a worldwide following for his bold inquiries into the ancient past. Gods of Eden, From the Ashes of Angels, and Tutankhamun, the Exodus Conspiracy have each achieved best seller status in Europe and the United States.

But it was Gateway to Atlantis that proved remarkably prescient. Its original argument that the lost civilization had been located on the island of Cuba was provided powerful physical evidence four years after its release, when sonar images of a sunken city began to appear off the shores of Havana.

In July, 2001, Collins not only laid out his Cuban Atlantis theory for Ancient American readers, but offered them among the most credible, engaging descriptions of the underwater mystery found anywhere.

Was Atlantis in Cuba? by Andrew Collins

A “lost city” that could turn out to be the fabled capital of Atlantis has been located by a Canadian scientific research team. In a press release dated Havana, 14 May 2001, Reuters of London informed the world that Russian-born ocean engineer Paulina Zelitsky, president of Canadian-based company Advanced Digital Communications, had detected “a sunken city” in deep waters off the west coast of Cuba, the largest island of the Caribbean.

Satellite-integrated ocean bottom positioning systems, echo-sounders, and high-precision side-scan double-frequency sonar have detected the presence of what are being described as shapes that “resemble pyramids, roads, and buildings.” Their regularity seems consistent with the idea that they represent an “urban development” composed of “symmetrical architecture.” Reuters reported that the deep-sea city is located on a huge land plateau lying in around 2,200 feet (700 meters) of water.

Furthermore, in Paulina’s opinion, the complex belongs to “the pre-classic period” of Central American history, and was populated by “an advanced civilization similar to the early Teotihuacan culture of Yucatan. It is stunning,” she said during an interview with the Reuters representative at her office at Tarara, east of Havana. “What we see in our high-resolution sonar images are limitless, rolling, white sand plains and, in the middle of this beautiful white sand, there are clear, man-made, large-size architectural designs. It looks similar to flying over an urban development in a plane, and seeing highways, tunnels, and buildings. We don’t know what it is, and

we don’t have the videotaped evidence of this yet, but we do not believe that nature is capable of producing planned symmetrical architecture, unless it is a miracle,” she added.

Paulina is cautious about what lies beneath the glistening blue waters of the Yucatan Channel, admitting only that she is “excited but reluctant to speculate until a joint investigation with the Cuban Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society takes place early this summer.”

The discoveries were made last summer during deep-sea surveys made by Paulina and a trained scientific research team aboard the Cuban research vessel, Ulises. Sonar images revealed “an extensive series of structures” over a several-mile area in darker and lighter shades. The site is close to the edge of an underwater geological feature known as the Cuban Shelf. It falls off sharply in a series of shelves dropping down to several thousand meters. The anomalous target area sits on one of these shelves. The mass of rectilinear features are said to be located in the proximity of an “extinct volcano, geological faults, and a river bed.” This last fact alone shows that the land shelf, which rises to a height of around 40 meters, was once above water.

“Whenever you find a volcano, there is often a settlement associated with it,” Paul Weinzweig, Paulina’s husband and a director of ADC, observed. “I don’t know the exact relationship, but it is in the same vicinity as the volcano, the fault lines, and the river. They’re quite close to one another.” On the matter of whether the sonar imagery really does show “pyramids, roads, and buildings,” Paul stated, “We had been looking at the images for some months. We keep a picture on the wall showing pyramids in the Yucatan, and let’s just say they kept reminding us of these structures. They really do look like an urban development.” As to whether the light and dark areas of the sonar imagery appear to be three-dimensional features or not, he answered, “There’s a lot of symmetry, apart from actual shapes, and some suggestion of structure. Some American geologists have looked at them and said that the darker shadings are suggestive of metal roofing.”

In order to explore the site more closely, ADC are currently planning to send down remote robot video cameras and a one-man submersible. Ancient American readers may look forward to further news of these discoveries in coming months.

Interestingly, ADC’s intentions had never been to search for sunken cities. Their scientific operation to survey the deep waters off the Cuban coastline forms part of a joint venture set-up between the Canadian company and the Cuban government, in particular its state partner, Geomar. One of the most important goals was to find billions of dollars of bullion and lost treasure disgorged from sunken ships from the time of the Spanish Conquest. As Paul said, “Cuba has the richest galleon cemetery in the world.”

Over the past five centuries, it is estimated that hundreds, if not thousands, of vessels must have been lost in Cuban waters because of poor navigation, piracy on the high seas, and the violent Caribbean storms that plague the region on a frighteningly regular basis. Visa Gold, a Toronto-based low-tech company that operates out of Havana’s Marina Hemingway, already claims to have found some 7,000 objects from sunken vessels including jewelry, diamonds, and pistols. They are believed to be artifacts from the brigantine Palemon, lost off Cuba’s northern coast in 1839. Visa Gold’s next target is the Atocha y San Jose, another old Spanish vessel. It sank in Havana Bay during January 1642, after fleeing storms at sea.

Renewed interest in treasure salving among Cuban coastal waters comes after Fidel Castro’s government recognized its own lack of oceanographic technology to conduct scientific operations of this nature. Its divers, who are considered some of the best in the world, have been diving off Cuba’s coast, treasure hunting for decades. Yet, Cuba lacks expertise and technology for deep-sea science. That is why its government leaders invited ADC to take up the challenge. Their 80 meter oceanographic research vessel is equipped with high-tech instrumentation and a trained scientific team to survey the sea bottom up to a depth of several thousand meters.

It was their skilled sonar software analysts who detected the reported underwater remains in the Yucatan Channel.

“These projects are very important in helping us rescue things from history, which contribute to our national patrimony,” said Eddy Fernandez, vice president of Geomar. “As you know, we have financing problems. This is a very expensive activity. They give us technology and financing. We provide historical and ocean expertise.”

The implications of ADC’s discoveries off Cuba’s western coastline are far-reaching and quite extraordinary. An online pole was conducted by the NBC home news service, MSNBC, of the 1,827 persons who had voted by May 26, 2001, no less than 73 percent believed that the find “could be something big: Next stop, Atlantis.” In fact, NBC executives are considering the possibility that the sunken city could be linked with Plato’s account of the lost city. This is good news for me, as my book Gateway to Atlantis, published in 2000, concluded that the most likely location of Plato’s sunken empire was Cuba, the first time that Castro’s island had ever been proposed in this respect.

I pointed out that evidence contained in Plato’s works, the Timaeus and Kritias, hinted strongly that his view of Atlantis was based on stories and rumors reaching the ancient world via Phoenicians and Carthaginians, who were crossing the Atlantic prior to his age. Moreover, Plato’s description of Atlantis’ great plain, said to have been three 3,000 by 2,000 stadia (552 by 368 kilometers) in size, matches Cuba’s great western plain.

Before the rapid rise in sea level following the end of the last Ice Age, this stretched southward across the Bay of Batabano to the mysterious “Isle of Youth” and was originally 540 by 160 kilometers in size. Although I speculated in the book (since published in the U.S., Italy, Holland, Germany, and Portugal) that the Atlantean city might await discovery beneath the shallow waters of the Bay of Batabano, word that a sunken city may now have been detected in the Yucatan Channel, between Cuba and the Yucatan Peninsula, is exciting news. Incidentally, the ADC has plans to explore the Bay

of Batabano during the next year, so it should be interesting to see what, if anything, they find there.

In September 1972, American oceanic explorer J. Manson Valentine was flying over the Bahamas in a light aircraft with his associate, Jim Richardson. He noticed a mass of rectilinear and curvilinear features in shallow waters on the southwestern edge of the former Bahamian landmass, now the Great Bahamas Bank. Valentine referred to this mass of possible archaeological features as “the mother lode” of all archaeological discoveries. They face out across the Old Bahamas Channel, like some kind of ancient port serving the Cuban mainland.

As early as the 1950s, light-aircraft pilots reported seeing what they described as underwater “stonework” that was “well within Cuban waters.” Similar sightings north of Cuba of an alleged “submerged building complex covering over 10 acres” might even have convinced the Cuban government that a veritable city awaited discovery in its vigorously defended waters. There are, for instance, unconfirmed reports that this “building complex” was explored with the assistance of Soviet submarines based in Cuba during the 1960s. Strange then, that these recent discoveries of a sunken city in Cuban waters are being conducted by a Russian-born Canadian oceanographer.

Among those who felt they had glimpsed the remains of a lost citadel in Cuban waters was Leicester Hemingway, brother of writer Ernest Hemingway. During a flight into the country, Leicester noticed, beyond its northern coast, “an expanse of stone ruins, several acres in area and apparently white, as if they were marble.” The exact location of these underwater features remains unclear. Only time will tell whether the discoveries made by Paulina Zelitsky and ADC do constitute firm evidence of Plato’s Atlantis. For if they do, then it will fix, once and for all, its geographical location in the Bahamas and Caribbean, and not anywhere else in the world. However, the

location of a lost city on a huge land plateau lying at a depth of around 600 to 700 meters poses new problems for the Atlantis debate.

Plato wrote that his Atlantic empire was destroyed by “earthquakes and floods” in “one terrible day and night” post-8570 B.C. in the Timaeus, and around 9421 B.C. in the Kritias. This time frame corresponds with the cessation of the last Ice Age, when we know that sea levels began to rise fairly rapidly, as ice fields which had covered vast areas of North America and Europe for tens of thousands of years began to disappear.

In Gateway to Atlantis, I proposed that the mechanism behind Atlantis’s destruction was a comet impact, which devastated the eastern Atlantic coast of America, causing about half-a-million elliptical craters, known today as the Carolina Bays, sometime around 8500 B.C. (+/-500 years). Fragments of the comet falling in the Western Atlantic basin, north of the Bahamas, would have created tsunami tidal waves perhaps hundreds of meters high. These would have drowned, temporarily at least, large parts of the Bahamas and the Caribbean, as well as many low-lying regions of the eastern United States. Myths and legends told by the indigenous peoples of the Bahamian and Caribbean archipelagos, when the Spanish first reached the New World, spoke of such a cataclysm. They said that the waters suddenly rushed in and drowned the great land-mass, breaking it up into the individual islands seen today.

Although a fragmentation of the former land masses of the Bahamas and Caribbean in the manner indicated could not have been caused by tsunamis alone, the gradual rise in the sea level that followed this cataclysmic event would have drowned, more permanently this time, all low-lying regions, creating the archipelagos we see today. Yet, in the thousands of years which it took for the ice fields to melt in full, the sea level rose only 300 meters; some estimates place it as much as 400 meters. If the “city” does lie in 600 to 700 meters of water, we will need to propose a suitable geological

mechanism in order to justify its submergence to this depth, post 9000 B.C. Either that, or we will have to define a geological time frame in which the land plateau, with its volcano, fault lines, and river, was above sea level.

Paulinas statement that the “city” might belong to “the pre-classic period” of Mesoamerican history, and was populated “by an advanced civilization similar to the early Teotihuacan culture of Yucatan,” is very difficult to equate with the discovery. The Teotihuacan Culture, which thrived in Central Mexico from around 400 B.C. until around 500 A.D., remains an enigma to archaeologists. Its origin is unclear. What we do know is that legends once told by the Totonac peoples of eastern Mexico spoke of the founders of its sacred city of Teotihuacan, with its mighty Pyramids of the Sun and Moon, as having arrived on the Gulf coast from an island homeland that lay beyond the sea. Here was to be found Chicomoztoc, or “Seven Caves,” where it was said that the first humans emerged out of the darkness at the beginning of time.

For many reasons, not least of all the appearance of sea-shells of a purely Caribbean nature carved on the walls of the Temple of Quetzalcoatl at Teotihuacan, the Teotihuacanos saw their ancestral homeland as connected in some way with the Caribbean. Moreover, in Gateway to Atlantis, I identified the original “Seven Caves” complex as the Punta del Esté caves on Cuba’s “Isle of Youth,” one of which, Cueva Number 1, has been described as a veritable “Sistine Chapel” of the prehistoric world. Many thousands of years ago, unknown artists adorned its walls and ceilings with abstract petroglyphs of a blatantly celestial nature.

Even so, any sunken city lying off the northern coast of Cuba, in 600 to 700 meters of water, must antedate the Teotihuacan Culture by many thousands of years. Curiously, Pauline Zelitsky visited Ceuva Number 1 at the Punta del Esté complex during the summer of 2000, shortly before she made her dramatic discovery of the underwater “city.” There is something magical about this place. It assaults the senses and inspires thoughts regarding the origins of Cuba’s indigenous peoples, and their apparent knowledge of the cataclysm which devastated the region so many thousands of years ago.

If Paulina Zelitsky and her oceanographic colleagues are right in their belief that “pyramids, roads, and buildings” do indeed lie off Cuba’s western coastline, then it is clear that the prehistory of the Caribbean, and its influence on the rise of Mesoamerican Civilization, will have to be revised dramatically. Moreover, it could well be that at long last the mystery of Atlantis, mankind’s greatest historical enigma, is about to unfold in a most spectacular fashion.

Ancient Graveyard

Archaeology’s best-kept secret was the mining of some half-billion pounds of copper from North America’s Upper Great Lakes Region more than 3,000 years ago. To find out who achieved this gigantic enterprise and what became of them, Ancient American publisher Wayne May visited their final resting place and filed this report in the October, 2000 issue.

Well-made copper spear-heads from Michigan s Upper Peninsula date from the third millennium B.C. The specimen on the far right is very Bronze Age European in appearance.

America’s Oldest Cemetery: The Copper Miners’ Graveyard by Wayne May

In the summer of 1952, a 13-year-old boy from Oconto, Wisconsin, was exploring an abandoned gravel pit on the western outskirts of the city, when he uncovered a cache of human bones. Donald Baldwin’s accidental discovery would lead to one of the most significant archaeological investigations ever undertaken in the state. It would grow to involve not only the Milwaukee Public Museum, but the University of Chicago, the Natural History Museum of Chicago, and the Wisconsin Historical Society.

Excavations were conducted jointly by the Oconto County Historical Society and the Wisconsin Archaeological Survey. Young Baldwin’s find and subsequent discoveries at Oconto established the area as one of monumental archaeological importance. Carbon-14 dating revealed human habitation there in excess of 7,500 years ago. The remains of at least 45 individuals and a virtual treasure trove of copper, bone, and stone artifacts were the oldest (at least at that time) cultural materials found east of the Mississippi River.

The site contained the oldest known cemetery in North America. Artifacts and burials provided powerful new evidence about the antiquity, complexity, and diffusion of ancient North America’s Copper Culture. Yet, in the end, everything learned and gained from the discovery would be soon after packed away and virtually forgotten. But the Copper Culture tradition grew to represent one of the most controversial interpretations of North American prehistory. Currently at Wisconsin State Park and open to visitors, the archeological precinct is located some 150 yards from the Oconto River, and approximately 3 miles from where it flows into Green Bay.

The site lies in a Pleistocene glacial till plain overlain with a 1.5-foot layer of sand and 0.5-foot layer of humus. Area surrounding the site was once a fairly level one, but gravel mining operations

during the 1920s removed a substantial amount of the soil and substrata, destroying most of the site. Investigators estimate it originally may have contained as many as 200 burials. Both grave and cremation pits were found, but no mounds associated with them exist. Pit outlines were generally round for cremation and elliptical or rectangle for graves. In cross-section, they were basin-shaped. The incineration and burial areas were separated from each other by 1 to 5 feet. In two instances, the burials intruded into prior or adjacent graves.

Eight cremation pits were found altogether. They were generally 2 to 4 feet in diameter, 1 foot deep, and often did not penetrate into the gravel layer. Each cremation pit contained the remains of at least one individual. The presence of charcoal, blackened stones, and other evidence of fire on the sides and bottoms of the pits suggests that cremation took place within the pits. Split bones, skull fragments, and the general chaotic position of the bones indicated the dead may have been dismembered, or given scaffold or tree-burials before cremation. Altogether, 21 grave pits were uncovered during excavations.

A total of 33 men, women, and children were recorded. One of the pits was empty, 11 contained a single individual, seven were occupied by two persons each, and one held three human remains. Five individuals were interred in a single pit. Graves were dug into the gravel stratum (glacial till), while the burials were laid in and covered with sand. These pits were discernible by their gravel outline when seen from above. The entombed individuals had been interred in several positions varying from prone to partially flexed (in the ancient Egyptian manner). A number of graves contained bundle burials, implying they died elsewhere and were reburied at the Oconto site. Artifacts discovered at the site are perhaps the most telling evidence of the Copper Culture. They show that the Oconto site inhabitants used a deep knowledge of metallurgy, and established a strong economy based on extensive trade.

Travel, too, would have played an integral part in their commerce, and is demonstrated by the many copper artifacts found up and down the Mississippi River Valley. In all, 26 copper artifacts were discovered at Oconto, including 10 awls ranging in length from 2 to 4 inches, four crescents, three clasps, two spatulas, a spiralshaped piece of metal, a fishhook, rivet, bracelet, and a number of projectile points. Several items were found in conjunction with fiber and birch remains preserved by contact with the copper. Except for the awls, all the artifacts were found in graves or cremation pits.

In addition to these copper relics, a number of other revealing artifacts were discovered. For example, a whistle made of bone and two lumps of hematite were found near the base of a child’s skull in the grave of an infant. The simple instrument was a polished bone about 6 inches long and three-quarters of an inch in diameter. It had a rectangular hole in the center, two smaller holes on the sides, and several rows of short lines cut into the top and bottom sides, apparently for decoration. At first, investigators thought the work had been carved from a deer tibia. Later, Robert Blake, at the Natural History Museum of Chicago, determined it was made from the humerus of a trumpeter swan.

The bone whistle is similar to instruments of the same type found in Kentucky at Indian Knoll, and in the Carlson Annis Mound (where it was discovered at the base of a human skull, just as the Oconto whistle had been). In addition, the whistle also resembles a similar specimen from the Oklahoma Fourche Maline culture. Artifacts such as the whistle were recovered in all stages of burial including cremations. Most had been interred with children and infants, not adults. These and other items suggest possible trade contacts, or perhaps even the culture’s travel habits. In a single burial, the portions of two unworked shells were recovered.

One shell was a portion of a freshwater clam (Unio ellipsis), whose nearest present source was the Mississippi River. A second shell formed the portion of a large “lightning shell,” a marine snail

(Fulgar perversus) with distribution along the Atlantic coast from North Carolina to Florida. The presence of this second shell implies contact with a region more than a thousand miles from Wisconsin. Dating of the Oconto site materials was conducted by Dr. W. F. Libby, a physicist at the University of Chicago. He subjected 56 grams of charcoal gathered from one of the cremation burials, to Carbon-14 analysis. Results stunned investigators when the dates came back indicating that the site had been occupied in 3646

B.C. (+1-400 years).

In an effort to disprove this officially unacceptable date, conventional scholars removed and tested additional samples of charcoal. To their astonishment and chagrin, this second battery of tests produced a date even more remote in time, to 5556 B.C. (+/-400 years)! Subsequently, the Oconto site had to be officially dated around 7,510 years old; that is some 2,000 years before the earliest known beginnings of civilization in the Nile Valley and Mesopotamia. In 1952, these dates made Oconto the oldest cultural find east of the Mississippi River, the first date for prehistoric man in Wisconsin, and the earliest date for human remains in all of northeastern North America. The discrepancy of 1,910 years between the two tests was later explained as a result of the first sample having been contaminated by materials bearing younger carbon.

The significance of the Oconto discoveries would overshadow and further validate another find of Copper Culture materials made seven years earlier in southeastern Wisconsin. This site, near Osceola in Grant County, was disclosed in 1945, when the waters of the Mississippi exposed a similar cemetery. As with the Oconto site, this burial ground had been disturbed prior to discovery, and only a small portion of the graves could be excavated using careful archaeological methods. But this site was estimated to have contained more than 500 burials. The two locations shared many commonalities, including copper artifacts and chipped or ground stone implements found in the burials. Osceola interments, however, were predominantly

single or multiple bundle burials, with no evidence of the cremation of articulated bodies.

The Osceola discovery also showcased a variety of artifacts including copper beads, awls, clasps, and projectile points. Other items found at the site, but not directly associated with the burials, included clumps of red ocher, clay wads, and cubes of galena. In addition to the Copper Culture artifacts, three categories of chipped stone were represented in an abundance of chert projectile points. This differs significantly from Oconto, where the predominant projectile points were copper. As years passed since the Oconto discovery, artifacts from the 1952 excavation were packed away in the dark recesses of the Milwaukee Public Museum, their significance apparently all but forgotten.

Yet, the Oconto site lives on because of the concerted efforts of a group of concerned citizens who staff the Oconto County Historical Society Museum. Each summer the archaeological area itself is open to the public, and a variety of knowledgeable local historians are on hand to describe the discovery to visitors who otherwise would nothing about it.

Alaska’s Mummy People

Even archaeologists usually do not consider Alaska when thinking of American prehistory. Yet, one of our continents foremost enigmas is found in the Far North. The elusive identity of a technological advanced people and their ultimate fate were questions tackled only in the June, 2001 issue of Ancient American.

The Caucasian Mummy People of Alaska by F.S. Pettyjohn

Alaska’s “Mummy People” belonged to a prehistoric ethnic group inhabiting the Aleutian Islands from 7,000 years ago until historic times. There were still a few members of this mysterious race surviving in the westernmost Alaskan Islands when the Russians arrived in 1741. The Aleuts, who inhabit Alaska at the present time, are a mixture of the Eskimo, who began an island-to-island conquest 1,000 years ago, and this distinctly different “Mummy People.” The Eskimo, who overran the entire Catherine Archipelago from the Alaskan mainland, intermarried with the original inhabitants and inherited much of their physical characteristics, as well as their culture, to become the historic Aleut, very few of whom still exist.

The origin of the long-dead Mummy People is unknown. Few archaeologists have studied their remains. However, some scientists remark on the resemblance of this vanished people to the ancient Ainu, a Caucasoid race that occupied the Japanese Islands from Neolithic times until driven out by the Mongoloid Japanese. As were the Mummy People, the Ainu were long-skulled, used wooden armor, helmets, broad swords, and pikes. They lived in subterranean dwellings. They hunted in the sea for subsistence, practiced mummification of the dead, were medium-sized, muscular men wearing beards and mustaches, and (again, as with the Mummy People of Alaska) there were only a few left alive on the Northern Kurile Islands when the Russians arrived there in the mid-18th century.

The ancient Aleuts were known as the Ta-iagu-muit, meaning “younger brother,” by the Eskimo. Each village had a chief called the Toukoo or To-en, as a common-consent chief. He was mainly an arbitrator whose edicts were enforced by the people. Top in authority was a Council of Elders; second came the Shaman. In time of war, the chief assumed full dictatorship under common consent and held full power until peace was re-established.

against Eskimos of the Bristol Bay area, the Kodiak Island, and people of the Alaska Peninsula. They never attacked Cook Inlet, Kenai, or Chugachmuits. Slaves were taken and belonged to the taker for life. They could be given away as gifts or as payment in a trade. Body armor, wrist guards, helmets, masks, and body-shields protected them in combat. The shields were made from wood and bone slats held together with sinew, and covered with rawhide. These were called kuyake. Armed with daggers, lances, pikes, and broad swords, many of which were made of crude iron, individual warriors were formidable. Their portable breastworks were used principally during an attack and served to cover warriors who were launching spears, stones, arrows, and darts with throwing-sticks, and by hand with deadly two-stone bolos from behind their for-tress-like shields.

The first Russian ships arriving on Kodiak Island were driven away by armed men using these huge shields, which were proof even against cannon fire. The natives openly attacked, driving the Russians off the beaches under a rain of stones thrown from catapults, spears,

Skulls of Alaska's Mummy People often have red hair.

Savage warfare was waged
darts, and lances. The Russians retreated, but suffered extensive losses of ships and men.

The Aleuts used a decimal system that could tabulate up to 100,000 and used a 12-month calendar. They manufactured a white parchment that has endured through the ages. They made fishing nets, harpoon lines, and bidarka ropes from the core of seaweed, and wove baskets and sleeping mats from the roots of tall grass. Geese were domesticated by catching them during the molting season and then clipping their wings; thus, a yearly supply was assured. They had a working knowledge of astronomy and anatomy: human and animal, setting simple fractures and performing some operations, one in particular being the removal of eye abscesses.

They were fearless in their pursuit of whales, walrus, sea-cows, sea-lions, and seals. They had the world’s first weather bureau: After a hunter grew too old to hunt, he was often trained in the art of weather forecasting. Atmospheric pressure, air density, wind velocity, and temperatures were used along with centuries of observation of local weather conditions to enable the observers to render competent daily forecasts.

Spears, arrows, and javelins were used in hunting, as well as in warfare. The poison on their darts was the trade secret of a selected few. It was manufactured from putrid oil and the powdered root of monkshood. Combustible sulphur was used to start fires, with sparks being struck from rocks containing pyrite. They also mined copper and iron sulphides, oxides, synite, slate, sandstone, pumice, greenstone, and many other minerals, which they used as paint for their lamps, dishes, tables, tools, and weapons. The present archeological theory is that the iron weapons that were used among these people came with them across the Bering Sea. However, Dr. Fredericka de LaGuna disputes that point, stating that no comparisons have ever been made to identify placement.

The Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, D.C., is the only official repository for the few remaining Alaskan mummies. Large numbers of them were burned by early Christian missionaries jealous

of all forms of “paganism.” There are many more yet to be unearthed in the frozen northlands. Perhaps enough will be found in future excavations to determine once and for all the identity of this fair-haired people who long ago dominated what has since become the largest state in the Union.

Mysterious Indigenous People

Spanish explorers of Americas Pacific coasts were met by indigenous peoples physically unlike the Indian tribes encountered in the rest of the Continent. The controversial origins of these untypical natives was described in the March/April, 1997 issue of Ancient American by William Donato, head of The Atlantis Organization (Buena Park, California), and the worlds leading authority on an underwater structure in the Bahamas known as the “Bimini Road.” He and his decades-long investigation have been featured in several nationally televised documentaries, such as The Discovery Channel's “Secrets of the Deep: The Hunt for Atlantis” (1994) and “Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious Universe: Secrets of Ancient Worlds”

(1996); and “Truth or Dare: The Bermuda Triangle” (2004).

Who Were the “Western Whites”? by William M. Donato

In 1576, when sailing off course from his route near South America, between Peruvian Callao and Chilean Valparaiso, Juan Fernandez encountered what he thought was the shores of a great southern continent. He claimed to have seen “the mouths of very large rivers... and people so white and so well clad and in everything different from those of Chile and Peru.”

During the 16th century, Cabrillo described the people of Gha-las-Hat (California’s San Nicholas Island) as being more advanced than those on the mainland. He described the women as having “fine forms, beautiful eyes, and a modest demeanor,” and the children as being “white, with light hair and ruddy cheeks.” Their culture seems to have been a variant of Chumash-Gabrieleno. Old ship logs and other contemporary written accounts also refer to “the white-skinned” Native American communities on Santa Catalina Island. Catalina was called “Pimu” by the original inhabitants, and Santa Cruz Island was known as “Limuw.” Incidentally, “Limuw” means “in the sea.” A study of human crania cited by Dr. Jeffrey Goodman showed that the ancient Channel Islanders had the greatest affinity with a group labeled “archaic Caucasoid.”

According to Yurok traditions, before their ancestors arrived at the Klamath River, the land was occupied by a white-skinned people they described as moral and civilized, and shared what they had with the Yurok, who remembered them as the Wah-ghas. Though we would like to give something substantive with respect to who these ancient people were, we cannot. No one knows who they were, where they came from or where they went. That they existed is an undisputed fact, as some of their physical remains still exist in museum collections in California and Nevada.

Though they resembled Caucasoids, they appear far too early to have been either Kelts or Vikings. The only facts we do know point to their culture as non-European. Were they descendants of Mu, also known as Lemuria, the lost “continent” of the Pacific? Their Channel Island names, such as Pimu and Limuw, hint as much.

Giant Bears

Obstacles faced by the early inhabitants of North America were daunting in the extreme. Certainly, the most horrific challenge to their existence stood in the form of monstrous bears that dominated the land for thousands of years. During the conflict between brute strength and inventive intelligence, the survival of one or the other hung in the balance. The Curator of Anthropology emeritus at Waukegan, Illinois’ Lake County Museum told just how close our species came to extinction on this Continent for readers of Ancient Americans February, 2000 issue.

Giant Bears Terrorized Ancient America by Dr. E.J. Neiburger

Man has occupied the Americas for the last 50,000 or 60,000 years. His earliest habitation sites cluster in South America. But why didn’t early humans settle in North America before colonizing distant areas farther south? Perhaps the answer may become self-evident in the following conjectured scenario from the distant past.

Boki finally completed the long walk over the cold and windy land- and ice-bridge later known as the Bering Strait. He and his paleo-Asian band moved south along the great water to a land beyond the glaciers. The land had dense pine forests and much game. A shadow also traveled with them. It was cast by a giant bear.

Boki and his band called the roaring creature “Gor.” He was a terrible spirit, not like the more common brown or black bears. Gor was much, much larger than a big, shaggy Kodiak or ghost-white polar bear. He stood two or three times the height of the tallest man. His arms could spread the distance of two men placed head to toe. His claws were longer than a man’s hand. Gor could not be killed. Many parties of warriors went out to battle him with traps, pit falls, and spears. None returned. He was a spirit with hide so thick it could stop the sharpest obsidian spear. They were unable to trap him, because his giant claws could lift his massive body out of any dead-fall pit or cave.

The paws were powerful enough to snap a tree as thick as a man’s leg. No woven rope could hold him. Gor was always hungry and always near by. He followed the band of hunters wherever they camped. If they hid, he caught their scent and dug them out of their holes. He ran them down in the meadows, where he would swat the puny humans to the ground and crush their heads with a single bite. And he was clever. He often laid quietly until darkness fell, then swiftly lumbered into camp and took a human or two for dinner. Some hunters might stop to throw spears or torches at Gor. Others tried to outrun him, but always failed. Their band was growing smaller. But the monstrous bear was relentless.

Although the foregoing recreation was fictitious, Gor was not. Arctodus simus, the giant, short-faced bear of North America, did indeed exist. He roamed the upper reaches of the North American continent from approximately 36,000 Years Before Present to only about 5,000 years ago, at the end of the Pleistocene Age. Arctodus was a contemporary of Ice Age man, the mammoth and other giant mammals. Some scientists believe his presence was an irresistible pressure for early North American man to quickly move south and populate the warmer areas outside the monster bear’s range in Central and South America. Arctodus was a giant. His fossilized bones belonged to a beast that towered 12 to 14 feet high when standing upright, 5 or 6 feet high at the shoulder when down on all fours.

Other fossils show he was 80 percent to 120 percent larger than the biggest modern Kodiak bear. Average polar or grizzly bears weigh about 500 pounds. The largest modern male polar bear is recorded at about 900 pounds. The largest Kodiak reached 1,150 pounds. Arctodus was much heavier. He was similar to a grizzly, save for his longer front legs and a pushed-in, shortened, broader muzzle. The Indiana fossil of a medium-sized Arctodus revealed a 9 foot front arm span, and an estimated weight of 2,575 pounds (776 kilograms). Fossils of this bear are a third larger than the Indiana fossil.

Extrapolating these findings, some fossil Arctodus individuals could have reached 3,500 pounds during their lifetimes, triple the size of the largest modern Kodiak bear. If we assume that the popu-lation-size range of Arctodus was similar to that of modern bears (some individuals are twice the size of the average bear), then there probably were at least some 5,000 pound bears (twice the size of the Indiana fossil) that stood more than 20 feet tall. Fossils of Arctodus have been found in more than 100 locations, including the Yukon, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Indiana, California, and northern Mexico. These types of slash-marks could have been made with a Clovis paleo-Indian spear point. It may be that the Arctodus-human interchange was not always a one way relationship.

As are modern bears, Arctodus was an omnivore; in other words, he ate everything—plants, as well as animals. Studies of his fossil remains show that he suffered many of the illnesses occurring in mammals today, including man. Because of his size and habitat, painful arthritis and fungal infections were common and, in all probability, kept Arctodus in a continuously irritated, mean mood. The enormous size and frequency of remains are the impressive aspects of this beast. Its wide distribution and physical power probably influenced the rapid human migration to Central and South America. Fossils of large animals are rare, and the recovery of 100 of them indicates a very large population, because only a minute percentage (one in a million) of any group of animals will become fossilized.

There were many Arctodus bears, and as the populations of mammoth, mastodon, giant beaver, musk ox, and sloths disappeared, man became a prime food source. How could such an animal, even if it was big, force large numbers of well-organized (tribal) humans, armed with spears, traps, and knowledge of killing large game such as mammoths, to literally run to safer areas in South America? The answer is quite simple. The bears were tougher than humans. Today, we have little experience in hunting bear with the weapons available to early Asian immigrant hunters.

It is a considerable jump from shooting a 600-pound Kodiak with a high powered, long range, semi-automatic rifle, as compared to running up to the enraged creature and poking a spear or arrow into his tough, thick hide. Even if one were about to penetrate the skin, a 5-inch-thick layer of fat covered the muscle. Five to 8 inches of muscle protected the vulnerable internal organs, so penetration power of a foot or so was necessary to inflict Arctodus with a fatal wound. Such weapon penetration technology was not usually available to the paleo-hunter; even if he chose to commit suicide with a close-contact assault.

The power of bears was well documented by Lewis and Clark in their report to President Jefferson (1807) concerning experiences with relatively small, but newly discovered grizzlies on their expedition to the Pacific coast. Lewis states, “The men, as well as ourselves, were anxious to meet with some of these bears. The Indians give a very formidable account of the strength and ferocity of this animal, which they never dare to attack but in parties of six, eight, or ten persons; and are even then frequently defeated with the loss of one or more of their group members.”

On 5 May 1805, Captain Lewis reported a “monster” bear (later weighed at 600 pounds), which required ten shots—five of them through the lungs—to kill it.” Even though severely wounded with nine shots from the .69 caliber Harpers-Ferry rifles, the grizzly chased the hunters down a 20-foot perpendicular embankment and into the river. The bear was finally killed with a 10th shot to the head. Such ferocity and danger involving relatively “tiny” bears as experienced in Lewis’s report must be multiplied several times over for creatures as big as Arctodus.

Another problem encountered by early man was bear intelligence. The relative brain/body-size ratio of Arctodus was comparable to that of modern bears. This implies that Arctodus probably had the same intelligence of modern bears, who are really quite smart. Some recent news stories coming out of our U.S. national

parks illustrate this point. Park bears are generally pests constantly looking for food. Hanging food from campground poles or trees became ineffective when the bears discovered how to chew the ropes and drop the food bags. Metal lockers were installed but the bears learned how to open the locks. Numerous cars were systematically vandalized by some bears who broke windows, tore off the doors, and got into the trunk area by removing the back seats. The record of this activity was a mother bear and her two cubs who “processed” 44 cars in one weekend.

Our Ancient American ancestors faced Arctodus—numerous, giant, ferocious, unstoppable, and intelligent bears. No wonder they quickly moved to Central and South America. They wanted to be out of range from the largest carnivore since the days of the dinosaurs!

For some unknown reason, about 5,000 years ago, Arctodus became extinct. Perhaps the scaled-down versions of flat-faced Arctodus (grizzly brown bears) or pointed-faced black bears were more efficient food gatherers in a post glacial, changing environment. It is also possible that new diseases finished off the big bears. We really do not know, but in the evolutionary-natural selection scheme, smaller-sized game often results in smaller-sized carnivores. Around 5,000 Years Before Present, North American game such as mammoth, musk, and ox, were relatively small. But before then, giant bears roamed North America, and human beings were their prey.

Michigan’s Mysterious Past

Immense walls, pyramids, gigantic statues, and mega-lithic monuments such as those erected by Europeans during the Stone Age once dotted the landscape of America’s Upper Midwest. Some still exist, hidden by dense vegetation or under water. Indigenous oral tradition assigns their construction to foreigners who raised

these impressive structures in deep antiquity. On a quest for the identity of these long-vanished builders was Daniel Wood of Michigan’s St. Joseph County Historical Society and the author of “Religious Motives for Columbus’ First Voyage,” as it appeared in Discovery of the Archaeology of Spain and Portugal. In his May/June, 2003 article for Ancient American, he reveals some of the hidden history of his native state.

The Vanished Builders of Bronze Age Michigan by Daniel Wood

Somewhere deep within the misty twilight of prehistory, a band of intrepid explorers sailed up the St. Lawrence River. The Great Lakes were far warmer then than they are today, even balmy. The group encountered natives who probably offered various copper objects in trade. The explorers heard of vast freshwater seas at the source of copper. In time, the newcomers reached the south shore of Lake Superior.

These overseas’ visitors, whose identity was so long ago forgotten, excavated hundreds of pit-mines along the coasts of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. They followed regular water routes and erected markers along the way. To avoid being caught in the hard winter, they built numerous stone calendars that would ensure they embarked for home well before the first snowfall. Regular mining continued for two thousand years. Then the mines were suddenly abandoned. While the forests gradually reclaimed the pits, native tribal peoples continued to regard the stone structures as hallowed places.

They offered tokens to the cairns’ spirit-guardians in the hope of obtaining safe passage on the lake waters. French explorers learned of Michigan’s freshwater seas and mountains of copper in much the same manner as their prehistoric forebears. They found stone giants

guarding water routes from Detroit to Green Bay. Native Americans told both the French and the latter American pioneers that these and other rock shrines were built by another, more ancient, race. Many traditions yet exist regarding this lost race. The early 19th-century explorer Bela Flubbard noted an abundance of stone shrines in his memoirs.

During 1837, he visited a stone monument overlooking the Saginaw Bay. “Memorials of the native inhabitants were still frequent upon a swelling knoll overlooking the bay,” he reported. “In the midst of a tract of country from which all the timber had been burned was a spot which seemed to have been dedicated to the evil Manitou. Here an altar was erected, composed of two large stones, several feet in height, with a flat top and a broad base. Around that area there were smaller stones, which were covered with propitiatory offerings; bits of tobacco, pieces of flints, and other articles that were of little value to the Native American, as, with religious philosophy, he dedicates to his Manitou.”

While traveling along the south shore of Lake Superior three years later, Hubbard observed similar stone “altars.” Of these he

wrote, “We passed frequent memorials of the Indian inhabitants_________

Sometimes we met a rude altar of stones, where bits of tobacco and other petty offerings were placed for the Manitou.”

A very similar altar existed during historic times in Michigan’s northern Gratiot County, on the banks of the Pine River. Copper, tobacco, and other gifts offered to the Manitou were placed atop the boulder. Earlier, the Jesuit missionaries observed stone slab altars throughout the Upper Great Lakes. They pulled them down believing their destruction to be a necessary precursor to conversion.

Charlevoix reported that an Indian maiden was tied to one such stone altar as a sacrifice. Fires were lit around her. Just before the flames consumed the poor girl, the chief shot an arrow into her heart. Warriors then dipped the tips of their arrows into the blood gushing from her wound to become empowered.

A veritable host of sacred rocks existed throughout Michigan, most of them natural formations that, because of their appearance or location, acquired an aura of sacredness for Native Americans. These included Red Rocks on either side of Keweenaw Bay; Doric Rock near Marquette; Portal Rock along the Pictured Rocks Lakeshore; the Vanishing Indian of the Huron Islands; and Rabbits Rock.

Though mainstream scholars insist that Michigan’s Indians did not work in monumental stone, it nonetheless seems likely that they were built by Native Americans. More troubling to define, though, are stone idols. All known examples occurred near strategic bodies of water, and the smallest were several hundred pounds. Six miles north of Rogers City, in Presque Isle County, two stone idols stood approximately 100 yards offshore at the mouth of the Swan River where dogs were sacrificed.

The Devil River Idols stood near Ossineke, in southern Alpena County, until the 1940s, when local fishermen appropriated them for use as anchors. These idols, each more than several hundred pounds, resembled human forms. The Indian name for the spot, Shing-gaw-bawaw-sin-ek-ego-bawat, meant “image stones,” implying that they predated the Native Americans. The Native Americans did build large mounds near the mouth of the river, but the famed Jesuit missionary, Claude Jean Allouez, provided an even greater stumbling block for conventional researchers.

In Outassuac Country, an area now containing the Eastern Upper Peninsula and adjoining lands in Canada, he discovered that the natives were in possession of a most curious idol. There they venerated a statuette about 5 feet high that they “found in the country.” They gave it “a beard like a European’s, although the savages themselves are beardless. There are certain fixed days for honoring this statue with feasts, games, dances, and even prayers, which address it in diverse ceremonies.”

Another strange idol looked out from the south shore of Alcona County’s largest lake until it was lost at the end of the 19th century.

The so-called “Indian Worship” of Hubbard Lake likewise stood 5 feet tall and featured a removable head within which offerings were placed. Alcona County also once boasted of the sacred Black Rock, near Springport, as well as the more historic Mikado Earthworks and Black River enclosures. One wonders whether some of the other stone heads discovered throughout the state were once part of larger stone idols such as the Indian Worship.

The Bab-o-quah, a 4-foot-tall idol, once existed between Flint and Grand Blanc along an old Indian trail. A huge smiling boulder was unearthed along the Saginaw and Tuscola county lines. In 1938, yet another stone head was discovered at Merriweather, near Lake Gogebec. During 1669, members of French explorer Sieur de La Salle’s party pulled down and destroyed a humanoid, painted idol that stood along the Detroit River. The natives believed that proper propitiatory offerings could guarantee safe passage on the waters. It seems the missionaries gave some credence to these claims and blamed the idol for some of their own misadventures.

The French missionary, Abbe de Galinee, wrote: “...we discovered a place that is very remarkable, and held in great veneration by all the Indians of these countries, because of a stone idol that nature has formed there. To it they say they owe their good luck in sailing on Lake Erie, when they cross it without accident, and they venerate it by sacrifices, presents of skins, provisions, and so on, when they wish to embark on it. The place was full of camps of those who wished to pay homage to this stone.... The Native Americans painted the idol to accent its crude human features.”

Abbe de Galinee, along with fellow missionary, Father Dollier, blessed an axe and then set about destroying the idol. They joined a pair of canoes together to carry away the fragments up the Detroit River, where they were duly dumped. Father Galinee at once noticed a turn in their fortunes: “God rewarded us immediately for this good action, for we killed a roebuck and a bear that very day.”

The Jesuit Relations record a virtually identical incident near the Oconto River in Green Bay, Wisconsin: “One day’s journey up river from the Bay of Pauns, there are three or four leagues of rapids. At the falls is an idol that the Native Americans sacrifice to, a rock shaped by nature in the form of a human, but in which one can distinguish, from a distance, the head, shoulders, breast, and, more especially, the face which passersby are wont to paint with their finest colors. To remove this curse of idolatry, we had it carried away by main force and thrown to the bottom of the river, never to appear again.”

Fortunately, James Scherz (Professor Emeritus, University of Wisconsin-Madison) and ancient copper expert Fred Rydholm have found a similar stone head on Mummy Mountain, in the Upper Peninsula. Precise measurements by Professor Scherz demonstrate that the stone head is aligned to the Huron Mountain Dolmen, facing the summer solstice. The dolmen, or artificially arranged stone monument, measuring 5.7 cubic feet and weighing 900 pounds, sits 1,600 feet atop Huron Mountain.

Four thousand years ago, it would have stood along the shoreline of a beautifully protected harbor, as a clear sentinel for mariners. Scherz believes that other stone structures in the immediate vicinity of the head were aligned with Mt. Bohemia by way of another, smaller dolmen in concert with a perched rock to calculate Lammas Day, August 1. He argues that most, if not all, of these sites were built by ancient traders as maritime landmarks. They indicated both direction and time.

Dolmens similar to those found on Huron Mountain have been located in Minnesota (Boundary Waters) and in Canada, where Rydholm is currently conducting research. A complex not unlike that at Huron Mountain only much larger, is reported along the Sanguiny River, at its entrance to the St. Lawrence. In Oakland County at least 40 cairns were discovered during 1987, not far from a large stone face.

In ancient times this complex probably overlooked a lake, long since dried up. Mainstream investigators continue to dismiss these sites as “glacial erratics,” freaks from the Ice Age action. Their interpretation might be plausible if only a few such sites existed. But the sheer number of these structures, their clear analogies to counterparts in Northern Europe, and their obvious human design sink the Glacial Erratics Theory. Virtually all North American dolmens are located at strategic points along extinct water routes that existed during the Bronze Age, 3000 B.C. to 1200 B.C.

As previously mentioned, Michigan at that time was balmy by today’s standards, and an Atlantic crossing was not nearly as perilous as one might think. By 7000 B.C., the Ice Age ceased to be the dominant factor in the environment of the Upper Great Lakes. A thousand years later, deglaciation was complete. Freed from the tremendous weight of the glaciers, the Lake Superior basin began a phenomenon known as “upwarping,” which gradually increased the lake levels of Huron and Michigan.

The lakes of the Bronze Age belonged to the Nipissing Stage (3,000 to 1500 B.C.), a period when all three of the giant lakes were combined in one, immense body. Rising lake levels of the Nipissing Stage drowned prehistoric sites of the Lower Peninsula beneath as much as 400 feet of water. In the Upper Peninsula, however, ancient lake shore sites are now as far as 20 miles inland. This explains the dearth of Bronze Age sites in the Lower Peninsula: They are under water. The Bronze Age of the Old World and the Nipissing Phase of the Great Lakes occurred at precisely the same time.

Throughout this period, the entire region could have been navigated without portages. Thus, copper might be mined and transported without resorting to any burdensome overland routes. If we couple this fact with the purity of the copper itself, virtually free of the need for smelting, we may understand how the Michigan trade network was economically viable. The waters of Lakes Superior, Huron, and Michigan formed one enormous lake. Traders could follow the

North Bay outlet through Ontario or take the Chicago outlet to the Mississippi. Evidence exists that both routes were used. Large copper storage pits, for example, line both probable water routes.

The Torch Lake Pit is 50 feet across with a 20-foot burrow around its perimeter. This pit alone contained 20 tons of carbonate of copper and has been dated circa 1800 B.C. Pits have been found as far east as Sault Ste. Marie. Others still exist in southern Wisconsin. As many as 20 have been located in the ancient city of Poverty Point, Louisiana. The average Poverty Point pit measured 15 to 20 feet in diameter, with no regular shape prevailing. Purported to be America’s oldest city, flourishing from 1500 to 500 B.C., the ancient metropolis had no real source of local copper. Ancient American editor Frank Joseph, has developed a provocative theory that a sophisticated copper entrepot grew-up at Rock Lake, Wisconsin. Now submerged below the lake, the city of Tyranena once acted as a collection and distribution center for Lake Superior copper, shipping it south along the Mississippi. Mr. Joseph personally coordinated research at the site, which included high-tech diving and side-scan sonar.

Underwater conical pyramids, effigy mounds, and other structures that would have stood along the ancient shoreline of Rock Lake have been positively identified. Research into the traditions of the Winnebago have revealed details of the “old foreign chiefs” of Rock Lake who dwelled in the city from roughly 3000 B.C. to 1200 B.C. Joseph believes that settlers from the Canary Islands, off the Atlantic coasts of North Africa, founded the town.

Michigan’s numerous stone monuments are something more than glacial freaks. Stone circles have been located on Garden Island and Beaver Island in northern Lake Michigan. On Beaver Island alone, 39 stones form a 397-foot circle. A center stone, 4 feet high and 5 feet across, provides an axis with which the summer solstice may be observed.

Although Establishment professionals continue to dismiss the site as a natural formation, Ojibwa tribal elders maintain that the land was cleared prior to assembling the circle. Subsequent examination

has established that the ground was indeed burned beneath one of the stones. Ojibwa oral tradition states that the “Ancient Ones” built the stone circle on Beaver Island, which has been tentatively date to circa 1000 A.D. Beaver Island also possesses seven medicine wheels, numerous petroglyphs, and several raised garden beds. Writing about Beaver Island, Professor Scherz reported, “While surveying rock barrels and pits near the extensive prehistoric garden beds on Beaver Island, we were told by Native Americans that ancient ‘Thunderbird Lines’ intersected at this old ceremonial site.

“They recounted how one such line went to the ancient mines on Isle Royale, and another south to Rock Lake, Wisconsin. Pamita, a local Native American teacher, said that rock structures now under water in Rock Lake were associated with other rock structures in Madison, Wisconsin, and with those on Beaver Island. He described the network of rock structures as long-range ‘grid-lines’ set up by wise men in prehistoric times. According to legend, other ancient lines arranged by the Ancients are marked by two giant, perched stones near Madison, Chamberlain Rock, and Spirit Rock. They would have been visible about two nautical miles apart. The geometry-based alignment is nearly north-south, and can be traced to other sites, such as the so-called ‘Wisconsin Rapid Site’ on the Wisconsin River, and then to the Ontonagon Site, near the mouth of the Ontonagon River, in Michigan. If this is not all a coincidence, it would seem that ancient wise men did indeed create a giant grid-system marked by rock structures between prominent, recognizable land-forms to aid long-distance travelers.”

Numerous cairns have been reported throughout the state. Basically a pile of dry, unmortared stones, cairns were frequently erected over the dead in many ancient cultures. Others were built as crude observatories. Antiquarians Greg Bambenek and Glen Langhorst of Duluth, Minnesota term this later group as “cosmic cairns.” They examined cairns at Canada’s Thunder Bay that would have stood along the ancient shoreline

4,000    years ago. They concluded that the stones marked the summer solstice, both at sunrise and sunset. They believe that the cairns

helped identify spawning season for the trout and whitefish in nearby shallows. In Michigan, the Black River Cairns of Negwegon State Park probably served similarly as guideposts and calendars for ancient travelers along the copper trade routes. Who actually built these structures is still open to question. Michigan’s monuments closely resemble structures found throughout Northwestern Europe, home to the oldest monumental architecture in the world.

The mines themselves closely resemble those excavated in pre-Roman Cornwall. From the late fourth to early first millennia B.C., Atlantic crossings would have been less hazardous than they were in later times and should not be deemed beyond the scope of early civilized man. In fact, Bronze Age vessels were on par with those of the early Renaissance, and we know that Columbus himself visited the Canary Islands, Iceland, and Ireland (places of significance to Bronze Age Michigan), while planning his own historic voyage. Epigraphers have uncovered a number of stone inscriptions in Minoan, Phoenician, proto-Norse, and Keltic dialects throughout North America.

Conventional investigators once bristled at the very mention of these inscriptions, even accusing some epigraphers of mental illness for suggesting the inscriptions were made by pre-Columbian visitors from overseas. Recently, though, at least a few leading academics are re-thinking the work of retired Harvard professor Barry Fell and his followers, concluding that the controversial markings may have been made by arrivals from the ancient Old World after all.

Fell pronounced Michigan’s Newberry Stone, composed of local clay and discovered in 1896, to be a Minoan commentary on agricultural omens. He identified the Escanaba Stone, found in the river of the same name in 1957, as a Keltic prayer-stone written in Ogam Consaine, a script in use throughout North Africa and Western Europe, most recently in Ireland, from about 2000 B.C. to A.D. 900. Fell’s translation read, “A prayer on my behalf, let me not drown in the waters.”

The Keltic tradition of prayer-stones continued in Scotland at least until the middle of the 20th century. Scottish soldiers were given small stones to carry in their uniforms, and sailors used to take stones from the Hebredean island of Iona to protect them from drowning. According to Fell, by 1000 B.C. Keltic mariners established small trading colonies along the eastern seaboard of North America, a land they called Jargalon, “the Land Beyond the Sunset.”

In evidence of his interpretation, an Irish Keltic axe has reportedly been found on Garden Island, while numerous “Keltic Chambers” were picked up across the state. Also encountered are stone-lined caves featuring large stone lintels placed over each entrance, facing north. Plentiful in New England, Michigan has a few such caves, as well. One is said to be near Huron Mountain; another atop Beacon Hill, in Champion; two each may be found in Alger and Ontonagon counties; and one lies along the Escanaba River.

An uncorroborated report tells of a Keltic Chamber near Baldwin, in Lake County, surrounded by a group of cairns. Bronze Age Europe evidenced a powerful appetite for copper at the same time it was being mined in prodigious quantities throughout Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Likewise coincidentally, both climate and river levels favored this massive chamber. The circumstantial evidence is compounded by an abundance of material artifacts belonging to a nonnative culture. Their remains were and are situated at locations strategic to maritime commerce, and often reflect a concern for the summer solstice. Whoever the prehistoric miners were, they made every effort to vacate the mines before the onset of winter. In all reality, several different ancient groups probably visited and interacted with the lands and people of ancient Michigan. Enthusiastic amateur antiquarians dig, study, write, and report about the old copper mines. Meanwhile, the professional archaeologists turn a deaf ear to their findings.

But the sheer amount of evidence demands a new paradigm; the official framework for America’s prehistory was erected on sandy soil,

with no firm bedrock beneath to support it within a global context. Michigan has long been characterized as a boom or bust state. History records the commercial empires built upon her fur and timber resources. The state’s 19th-century copper mines supplied as much as four-fifths of North America’s demand for the mineral. And, of course, Michigan dominated the world’s automobile industry for the better part of a century.

But another chapter to the state’s boom and bust history must be added. Michigan copper helped build many of history’s greatest empires. Because of its tremendous mineral wealth and freshwater highways, it occupied a prominent place in the Ancient World, both here and overseas. Popular recognition of this fact should thrust Michigan into the vanguard of future research into American prehistory. As Michigan was the focus of so much ancient attention, so it will be the focus of research in the future.

Joseph, F (2006). Discovering the mysteries of ancient America : lost history and legends, unearthed and explored. USA: Mark Book Press

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