Secrets of Ancient America: Archaeoastronomy and the Legacy of the Phoenicians, Celts, and Other Forgotten Explorers

by Carl Lehrburger

  Fig. 6.22. An image identified by the author as Changing Woman with sun dagger approaching, photographed on March 20, 2014, within two hours of exact equinox.

  The Pathfinder petroglyphs tell a story. Through archaeoastronomy and a collaborative effort by McGlone, Leonard, myself, and others, we were able to propose an interpretation of the Pathfinder noontime heliolithic animation based on Native American mythology. An observation and filming of the morning and noontime alignments on March 20, 2014, by videographer Kean Scott Monahan and me proved the preciseness of the morning and noontime equinox alignments; however, it will be left to other researchers to confirm my interpretations of the petroglyphic images and the story of Changing Woman.

  Fig. 6.23. Detail of Changing Woman alignment (see also color insert). The interaction of the tip of the sun dagger and the petroglyph on the equinox is interpreted by the author to represent the act of primal conception in an early depiction of Native American emergence/creation mythology.

  Many questions remain. For example, where did the knowledge come from such that these early Native Americans could so accurately and graphically create the equinox heliolithic animation? McGlone would eventually show me that other nearby archaeoastronomy sites with equinox alignments provided clues.

  7

  Equinox Sunrise: Celtic Sun Deities in Colorado

  The case for American (Old World) epigraphy and Ogham writing is so convincing that it can no longer be dismissed without fair and open consideration. . . . Everything considered, if understanding the minds of ancient people is a major goal of archaeology and anthropology, then reading a people’s own words in their own hand should be far preferable to merely studying the colors and patterns of their pottery.

  WILLIAM R. MCGLONE AND PHILLIP M. LEONARD, ANCIENT CELTIC AMERICA

  DIFFUSIONISTS AT ODDS

  After my first outing to the Pathfinder site and surrounding locations, I traveled regularly to southeastern Colorado to explore rock art sites and to visit the aging Bill McGlone. Each trip was punctuated with time spent looking at rock art that included archaic Native American petroglyphs, archaeoastronomical sites, and, most important, a handful of American rock art sites that seemed to bear Old World Ogham scripts.

  On the long drives of these expeditions I was able to engage McGlone in conversations to explain how the archaeopriests had been so thoroughly successful at corrupting the history of America. McGlone had much to say on the subject as he had dedicated the latter part of his life to methodically researching and deciphering the scripts left in rock engravings by ancient travelers. He believed that the empirical, scientific evidence proved that the Celts were in southeastern Colorado and throughout America thousands of years ago. The ancient Celts were not limited to Ireland or the British Isles, as one might presume, but lived on the European continent in Spain and France, and some of these Celts were seafarers.

  Eventually McGlone, like Barry Fell, had to debate the archaeologists. He shared with me videos and transcripts of debates he and other colleagues had engaged in with archaeologists, arguing the pro- and anti-Fell positions on diffusionism. Often, these dialogues became heated, but inevitably they came back to the issue of Fell’s credibility.1

  Early in their epigraphic careers, McGlone and his principal collaborator, Phillip Leonard, were colleagues with Barry Fell. But McGlone and Leonard’s 1986 book Ancient Celtic America criticized some of Fell’s work, with the result that Fell was furious, and a major rift evolved that persisted until his death in 1994. He saw McGlone and Leonard as trying to capitalize on his pioneering work while discrediting him in the process, as he claimed others were doing in his circle. The controversy reached a head when McGlone and Leonard resigned from the Western Epigraphic Society. While Fell continued to publish the ESOP journal, the most important and influential journal in the field, McGlone and Leonard pursued careful and scientific analysis of Fell’s thesis, with a focus on Colorado and Oklahoma rock art sites. Their research with coauthors J. L. Guthrie, R. W. Gillespie and J. P. Whittall Jr., culminated in Ancient American Inscriptions: Plow Marks or History?2

  Ancient American Inscriptions addressed the Old World presence in North America with a critical eye. The authors relied principally on their own research and epigraphic decipherments to make the case that Old World peoples traveled to the Americas before Columbus.

  In providing a critical assessment of the state of diffusionism, the book has a particular focus on the epigraphic debate ignited by Fell. According to McGlone, his coauthors and he tried to walk the fine line between honoring and acknowledging Fell’s pioneering work while providing a necessary and discerning critique to advance a credible diffusionist perspective. While scrutinizing and severely criticizing Fell, along with other diffusionist researchers, the authors wrote, “These comments might suggest that the condemnation of Fell and his work is fully justified, and that his place in history will be only as a textbook example of a fringe lunatic. We do not believe this is the case. However unacceptable much of the work is, his overall thesis seems to us to be correct. Time will tell.”3

  In the book, McGlone and the others went on to criticize both diffusionists and nondiffusionists for uncritical investigations of the evidence. Noting that, while there may be less evidence of Old World contacts than many diffusion-ists advocate, there is compelling evidence that supports the diffusionist perspective and the need for a rethinking of American history. They wrote, “It is important to keep in mind that the inscriptions indicating Old World contacts constitute less than one-tenth of one percent of the petroglyphs in this country. It could be argued that their small numbers makes them far less important than the others, but we contend that if any of the glyphs prove to be the work of Old World visitors or to show their influence, the impact on American history would be enormous. This is why the Epigraphic claims must be investigated with sobriety, fairness, and competence.”4

  Besides listening to McGlone’s accounts of the Fell controversy and the state of diffusionism in America, I heard about his interactions with many of the other early site researchers, including Ida Jane Gallagher, Jon Polansky, and Gloria Farley. I was also introduced to other diffusionists, including David H. Kelley (1924–2011), one of the few scholars and epigraphers who was actually ensconced in the archaeology priesthood. Kelley, a professor of archaeology at the University of Calgary, was famous for his early pioneering work on Mayan decipherments because he supported the controversial theory that the Mayan script had phonetic components.

  Fig. 7.1. David H. Kelly was among a handful of diffusionists in the 1950s and 1960s who were also professional archaeologists and were willing to investigate and publish on Old World sites in America. (Photo from southeastern Colorado ca. 1995 by author)

  Kelley also criticized Fell’s research for distorting data and failing to present alternative views. But despite his doubts about some of Fell’s approaches, he was convinced of the overall thesis—that there was an extensive European presence in the Americas before Columbus. He wrote, “I have no personal doubts that some of the inscriptions, which have been reported are genuine Celtic Ogham. . . . Despite my occasional harsh criticism of Fell’s treatment of individual inscriptions, it should be recognized that without Fell’s work there would be no [North American] Ogham problem to perplex us.”5

  A COWBOY GUIDE

  In addition to Phil Leonard, McGlone relied on Ted Barker, another colleague in his field of research. Barker was a rancher who had grown up and spent all his life in southeastern Colorado, so he knew where scores of old petroglyph sites were located. Almost as important, he also knew the ranchers whose permission was required to access them. Barker’s familiarity with the terrain and McGlone’s discipline at identifying the archaeoastronomy resulted in dozens of discoveries over their twenty-year friendship. McGlone was led on expeditions to remote sites that Barker knew from his youth, often accompanied by Alma, Barker’s wife. In his seventies when I met him, he was still tough as nails and not so
far removed in spirit, manner, and style from the cowboys of the old West.

  Ted Barker was born in 1921 in Indian country, and his parents were Native Americans from western Kansas. His dad grew up there on a homestead but ran away early in life, married while still in Kansas, and then moved his family to Deora, Colorado. There they received a land grant and raised a family in a one-room cabin built at the mouth of a little canyon (see color insert).

  Staying in the area where he grew up, Barker took pride in the independence and self-sufficiency embodied by settlers in the American West, as he was one of the first- and second-generation ranchers who had been through the Depression, several boom-and-bust cycles, and the more recent economic decline of the area Throughout it all, he and Alma stayed and raised a family, although the area was and remains very remote. Water was the limiting factor for the homesteaders, so Barker and his father traveled the area looking for regular sources of it on horseback, and this is how he became familiar with the rock art found throughout the region.

  Fig. 7.2. Ted and Alma Barker at Crack Cave (Picture Canyon), Colorado.

  A rancher and history buff, Barker explored rock art and archaeoastronomy sites throughout southeastern Colorado and introduced me to many often secret rock art locations. The insights and stories I gained from his knowledge of the history of the region were amazing and far distant from my urban upbringing. As I rode in his faithful Dodge pickup truck to faraway subcanyons, draws, and creeks, he would point out rock formations and locations of petroglyphs while describing the more recent history of ranchers and farmers of the region. He showed me several places where Kit Carson had carved his name, as well as noteworthy petroglyphs and historical sites.

  Barker’s life took a turn when he first encountered Bill McGlone. They met on the prairie when Barker came up to a lost and frustrated McGlone and asked him what he was doing in the area. McGlone said he was looking for Native American petroglyphs. Barker pointed to a rock outcropping one hundred yards away and said, “The native petroglyphs you’re looking for are all over the place.” According to Barker, McGlone didn’t know much about how to look, and it was he who eventually led him to many important Native American and non–Native American sites known only to a few ranchers. On the other hand, there were also sights near towns that “everyone” knew about, although the meaning of these places remained a mystery.

  CRACK CAVE, SOUTHEASTERN COLORADO

  In the 1920s and 1930s, locals and ranchers from Springfield, Prichard, Compo, and other small enclaves just north of the Colorado-Oklahoma border would travel by horse and vehicles for Sunday picnics to Picture Canyon. There, the canyon walls were endowed with abundant rock engravings of many styles and ages, punctuated by more recent graffiti.

  Barker had visited Picture Canyon many times since he was a boy so, when pioneering NASA engineer, astronomer Rollin W. Gillespie visited the region, Barker was his guide. A mathematician and rocket engineer during the heady days of NASA’s Apollo missions, Gillespie is credited with developing the navigational calculus that plotted the trajectories needed to reliably transport men to the moon and safely return them to Earth. Gillespie asked Barker if there was a gathering place for the tribes in the canyon. Barker said yes, he had seen a cave in the canyon with fragile petroglyphs on the inside and showed it to Gillespie, who, after viewing it, explained how the archaeoastronomy might work. Barker immediately remembered that he’d always thought, “So this is how they kept time!” Thus, Gillespie and McGlone were the first to accurately predict that during the September 1984 equinox there would be a solar event in the cave.

  The cave, located in Picture Canyon, is now known as Crack Cave, named after the vertical cracklike cave entrance. On my first visit to Crack Cave in 1996 I camped in the remote Picture Canyon campground the night before the equinox so I wouldn’t have to make the long drive in the predawn dark. Since Gillespie and McGlone’s discoveries, the town of Springfield hosted an equinox festival twice a year that featured a presunrise expedition to Picture Canyon. There, on the spring and fall equinoxes, staff members from the Comanche National Grasslands open the gate at sunrise, allowing onlookers the opportunity to enter the cave, although in recent years they have discontinued this practice.

  I had arrived the day before with enough time to walk around the canyon and photograph some of the numerous petroglyphs on the canyon walls. After a night punctuated with periodic screeching by the resident screech owls, I was awakened in the predawn by a line of headlights shining into my tent. It was the day of the equinox, and the trucks and cars were moving slowly on the dirt road leading into Picture Canyon. The lead truck stopped and someone got out and unlocked the chained metal road gate; then the caravan of perhaps ten cars and pickup trucks proceeded into the site.

  Fig. 7.3. Outside of Crack Cave in Picture Canyon. In front of it are the remains of an early twentieth-century homesteader’s foundation wall.

  The twenty or so folks who had arrived to see the morning alignment were standing in a line outside the cave near the homestead ruins, waiting their turn for the event. Because the inside of the cave is small and confined, only three or four people can view the alignment at the same time without blocking the light through the narrow opening. McGlone was going to do the interpreting. “I want you to sit right here,” he said to me, and pointed to a perch on a boulder at the far end of the cave. Unlike the onlookers who had lined up outside to take their turn to see the event, I was able to stay seated throughout the whole fifteen-minute light show. In this manner I heard McGlone repeat his story quite a few times, describing how the alignment worked to each new set of onlookers.

  While graffiti cover many of the canyon walls around the cave, miraculously there has been no damage to the fragile inner wall where the sunrise light appears on the cave wall during the equinox. Because of the narrow cave opening, only on the days around the equinox does the early morning light actually strike the inner cave wall bearing the inscriptions. As the sun emerges on the horizon, what McGlone, Fell, and others maintain are well-formed Celtic Ogham inscriptions appear, inscriptions that reveal a message they deciphered to read as, “The sun strikes (here) on the day of Bel.”6

  I had seen Ogham writing in books, but this was the first time I had seen what was claimed to be the real thing. To a neophyte like myself, it was exciting yet perplexing. Even after I had reviewed the pictures in Ancient American Inscriptions and McGlone had explained the phenomena, it was no simple matter to comprehend how the equinox counter at Crack Cave worked.

  McGlone pointed out the three sets of inscriptions inside Crack Cave, and what he called the Ogham lines were distinct and deliberately inscribed on the smooth, fragile sandstone. Characteristic of Celtic Ogham, the inscriptions had individual horizontal stem lines that served as a guide for positioning the vertical letters. McGlone warned me to be very careful around the finely pecked glyphs, noting that they could be damaged by just rubbing up against them.

  At the back of Crack Cave, on a curved rock face is a grouping of lines interpreted by McGlone to read “Grian,” a Celtic name for the sun. McGlone translated the lines as the letters G, R, and N, with the ia diphthong (or angled line) following the R to clearly spell out the word grian, which means “sun.”7

  Another Ogham inscription was pecked on two rows on the south wall of the cave. The top row, made up of four lines, was interpreted as the letter S. Below are the letters for GRiaN, already referenced on the back wall. Leonard and McGlone interpreted this to be aoiS GRiaN, or, in English, “PEOPLE OF THE SUN.”8

  Fig. 7.4. The back of Crack Cave. The inscriptions have been translated by McGlone and Leonard to read “People of the Sun” in Celtic. Note the stem line.

  EQUINOX SUNRISE AT CRACK CAVE

  However, the most significant inscription was the one I had seen in the photo. On Crack Cave’s north wall were incised strokes that follow the curvature of the smooth rounded surface.

  McGlone and Leonard interpreted the inscription to
read, as already noted, “THE SUN STRIKES (HERE) ON THE DAY OF BEL.” Above the inscription are two rows of parallel vertical lines that count the days before and after the equinox.

  Epigrapher David H. Kelley confirmed the interpretation of the Ogham script, also noting that evidence is provided by the repetition of the sequence of 2-5-3 strokes crossing the line at three different sites having astronomical alignments.9

  According to my guides, Bel and Grian are Celtic deities relating to the sun, and they are noted in the Celtic inscriptions at Crack Cave. The Ogham grouping of lines for Bel appears in at least three locations, and Grian is found at six locations in southeastern Colorado.10 While Grian is thought by some to be a Celtic solar goddess who was considered to be the queen of the waxing year, others claim it is solely a feminine word for the sun.11 The appearance of both masculine and feminine Celtic words invoking the sun may suggest a distinction between the spring and the autumn equinox deities.

  Fig. 7.5. Crack Cave inscription translation. (From McGlone et al., Ancient American Inscriptions)

  Fig. 7.6 and Fig. 7.7.

  Left: equinox inscription at Crack Cave in Colorado one day before equinox; right: equinox inscription at Crack Cave on the equinox with all of the vertical counting lines illuminated (see also color insert).

  (From McGlone et al., Ancient American inscriptions, plate V, photos c and d)

  The specificity of the inscriptions referencing the Celtic sun deities Grian and Bel, combined with the precise equinox sunrise solar alignment, offers to many—and I was also becoming convinced—that there is overwhelming evidence of an Old World presence at Crack Cave. While travel to Picture Canyon for the equinox sunrise is not practical for most, several videos of the event have been documented.12