The debate over the origins of the Mound Builders began in the early colonial era, and nineteenth-century settlers discovered that the local Native Americans had no knowledge of who had built them or why. The Spanish conquistador and explorer Hernando de Soto (1496–1542) first reported the mounds in his expeditions throughout the southeastern United States. However, it was Jefferson’s excavation of a mound in Virginia, described in his 1783 book, Notes on the State of Virginia, that ignited a wider interest. In this study of the Mound Builders, he concluded that the mound he excavated was of Native American origin.
Then, in 1816, James McColloh’s Researches in America championed the similarities between the skulls of the Mound Builders and the native Woodland Indians. However, with the proliferation of artifacts on display throughout the Midwest during the nineteenth century, many came to believe that it had to be an ancient civilized race who built the mounds. The chief candidates were the Egyptians, Phoenicians, Hebrews, Toltecs, Vikings, Celts, and Romans, while in the early 1800s John Clifford’s Indian Antiquities, with additions by Constantine Samuel Rafinesque, suggested that it was Hindus from India, as did Caleb Atwater in his “Description of the Antiquities Discovered in the State of Ohio and Other Western States.”
However, it was Cyrus Thomas, a minister turned entomologist and archaeologist from the newly created Smithsonian Bureau of Ethnology, who ended the debate in 1889 by declaring that forebears of the North American Indians had constructed all the mounds. Thomas had been hired by the well-known explorer John Wesley Powell, then acting as the first director of the Smithsonian Bureau of Ethnology, which had been created by Congress in 1879. Powell strongly advocated that the Native Americans had created the mounds and even wrote in one of his annual reports for the bureau, “[There] is no reason for us to search for an extralimital origin through lost tribes for the arts discovered in the mounds of North America.”5 This reinforced his opinion stated earlier in the 1881 Annual Report to the Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology, “Hence it will be seen that it is illegitimate to use any pictographic matter of a date anterior to the discovery of the continent by Columbus for historic purposes.”6
And in a biography of Powell, he stated his conclusion “Whether we desire it or not, the ancient inhabitants of this country must be lost, and we may comfort ourselves in the reflection that they are not destroyed, but are gradually absorbed, and become a part of a more civilized community.”7
Previously, in 1881, Powell had hired Thomas to study the Mound Builders with funding from the U.S. Congress. For the following seven years, focusing on the Mississippi Valley, he and a large team of researchers investigated over two thousand mounds and produced a monumental 730-page study published in 1894 as part of the annual, “Report on the Mound Explorations of the Bureau of Ethnology.” The report asserted, “The links directly connecting the Indians and the mound-builders are so numerous and well-established, that archaeologists are justified in accepting the theory that they are one and the same people.”8
Among intellectuals and other interested parties, Thomas’s declaration ended the debate on the origins of the Mound Builders, despite nagging contradictions and evidence to the contrary. Of these contradictions the most troubling were purported European artifacts found deep in the mounds.
In a rare and brief admission of the problem, in an 1889 publication, The Problem of the Ohio Mounds, Thomas candidly wrote, “Much more evidence of like tenor might be presented here, as, for example, the numerous instances in which articles of European manufacture have been found in mounds where their presence could not be attributed to intrusive burials, but the limits of the paper will not admit of this. I turn, therefore, to the problem before us, viz, ‘Who were the authors of the typical works of Ohio?’”9
In my interview, May said that, “Powell, Thomas, and the Smithsonian’s refusal to discuss the evidence of European origins of the mounds, including bones, plates with inscriptions, and artifacts found at the earliest archaeological levels of the mounds, may go down in history as the biggest hoax of American archaeology. After Thomas, the Smithsonian’s mantra became ‘no contact before Columbus,’ and all evidence to the contrary, whether it involved the mounds or other North American archaeology sites and artifacts, was carefully ignored, hidden, or destroyed. This policy became the law of archaeology and the ideological orthodoxy of the archaeopriests, and those who disagreed were ignored and discredited.”
Worse, according to May, because of government propaganda, thinking they were fakes, the owners of the lands where the artifacts were found caused large collections of relics to be destroyed and discarded. The U.S. government, in order to get rid of evidence of Old World peoples, reportedly leveled earthworks in Ohio that were in the shape of a menorah. Also, alleged finds in the Grand Canyon that pointed toward Old World explorers have been repressed for more than a hundred years. To this day the cave above the area where they were discovered has been off-limits to researchers. In a front-page story on April 5, 1909, the Arizona Gazette reported the discovery of Egyptian artifacts from the Marble Canyon region of the Grand Canyon by two Smithsonianfunded archaeologists.
COPPER MINING IN MICHIGAN
Many diffusionists believe that early migrations to the Americas involved copper mining in the Great Lakes region, principally in upper Michigan, with waves of different peoples engaged in mining operations of the largest and purest copper deposits of the ancient world.
On Brockway Mountain near Copper Harbor, Michigan, is a historical marker that is titled “The Copper Country,” and it boldly declares,
AN ANCIENT VANISHED RACE MINED NATIVE COPPER HUNDREDS OF YEARS AGO IN COUNTLESS PITS AND TRENCHES SCATTERED AMONG THE HILLS FROM COPPER HARBOR TO ONTONAGON AND ON ISLE ROYALE.
For thousands of years, it seems that foreigners might have sailed to the shores of Lake Superior. These are the world’s richest copper deposits, especially around Lake Superior’s Isle Royale and Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula, where it is up to 99 percent pure.10 In addition to those high-purity deposits near the surface, millions of tons of copper were easily accessible to Neolithic miners because glacial action had separated it from the native rock, making it easy to mine. Moreover, the uniqueness of the Neolithic copper mining in Michigan would have been enhanced since the site was open by water east to the Atlantic, south to the Gulf of Mexico, northwest to the Pacific, and north to Hudson’s Bay.11
WAYNE MAY’S IDEAS AND THE MOUND BUILDERS’ CULTURE
May thinks there is little dispute over the existence of large-scale copper mining by Neolithic peoples. However, the archaeological community believes, as Wikipedia notes, “Native Americans were the first to mine and work the copper of Lake Superior and the Keweenaw Peninsula of northern Michigan between 5000 B.C. and 1200 B.C. The natives used this copper to produce tools. Archaeological expeditions in the Keweenaw Peninsula and Isle Royale revealed the existence of copper producing pits and hammering stones that were used to work the copper.”12
Fig. 13.2. These copper tools, acquired from different sources, are now a part of Wayne May’s collection. (See figure 13.9 for the cuneiform details shown on the three-pronged spear or trident.)
Fig. 13.3. These effigies and other artifacts, which were recovered from Michigan mounds, are now in Wayne May’s collection.
However, contrary to this archaeopriest version, May and others insist that the area was mined extensively by the Egyptians, the Megalithic peoples of the west coast of Europe, and the Minoans, along with other cultural groups, and he suggests the evidence is buried in the mounds along the watery transportation routes. He explained to me that the Mississippi River had provided an easy way to transport copper and other goods from the upper Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. As for stopping-off places, he estimated that there were ten thousand mounds that are evidence of many settlements in the Ohio River Valley and along most of the major waterways in Illinois, Indiana, and Missouri. Some of these could have contained more than
just Indian relics, according to May.
Based on his archaeological research it is clear to May that the North American mounds were built by different types of societies over long spans of time. The earliest mounds found at Watson Brake near Monroe, Louisiana, date from the late fourth millennium B.C., and although some are small and hardly noticeable, others served a wide variety of functions, including burial mounds, individual or collective funerary monuments, and temple platforms for religious structures.
The Mound Builder earthworks include elaborate designs that when viewed from above form serpents, panthers, and birds as well as elaborate geometrical designs and other symbolic shapes.13 Others are small and hardly noticeable, dotting the landscape as mere bumps on the surface.
At Poverty Point, a site in Louisiana that flourished between 1800 B.C. and 500 B.C., there are parts of what were six concentric ridges surrounded by two large mounds, one being sixty-five feet high.14 Poverty Point is situated on a bluff that overlooks the Mississippi floodplain near the confluence of six rivers. The giant earthworks include concentric mounds similar in shape to an ancient Roman amphitheater. However, the rings were constructed with a diameter of three-quarters of a mile, five times the diameter of the Coliseum in Rome. They are five to ten feet high and 150 feet wide and were built with over 530,000 cubic yards of earth, which is thirty-five times the amount of material used in the Great Pyramid of Giza. One of these earth mounds is shaped like a bird and is seventy feet high with a base of seven hundred by eight hundred feet.
As a major population locus, Poverty Point became an important center for the copper trade. But many people, including Taddei, think that more than a trade terminal, Poverty Point would have been a “welcome center” for voyagers entering North America from the Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi River. These excursions to America would have crossed the Atlantic, following the ocean currents to Panama and up the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts to arrive there.
Fig. 13.4. Poverty Point in Louisiana includes examples of early Mound Builder construction from about 2500 B.C. (From Wakefield and de Jonge, Rocks and Rows)15
Fig. 13.5. Monks Mound at Cahokia. A large circle of cedar posts on the platform at the top was determined to be aligned to the solstices and equinoxes, based on the placement of the post holes. (Photo by Skubasteve834)
Cahokia, across the Mississippi River from present-day St. Louis, was another significant Mound Builder cultural and commercial center, built and occupied between A.D. 800 and A.D. 1400. At least 120 mounds have been documented there, and at its height as many as thirty thousand people lived around it. During its golden age, Cahokia was one of the greatest cities of the world and was larger than London in A.D. 1250.
The great mound of Cahokia, what is now called Monks Mound, was the largest pre-Columbian earthwork north of Mexico, standing at 103 feet tall. It is estimated that it took two thousand people nearly two hundred days to complete the flat-topped platform, on which was put a circle of cedar posts aligned to the solstices and equinoxes.16
Charles C. Mann noted in his book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus, the Cahokian mound builders used fire to change the forested landscape in order to grow more maize. Unfortunately, an unintended consequence of burning thousands of acres of mostly river valleys was large-scale floods and, along with climate events between A.D. 1000 and A.D. 1300, resulted in the depopulation of Cahokia. Also, there were other factors, including a major earthquake in the beginning of the thirteenth century that led Mann to suggest that social unrest following the earthquake may have been a contributing factor to the demise of Cahokia, which was abandoned by 1350.17
THE SERPENT MOUND OF OHIO
Strengthening the view that Indians were not the only occupiers associated with the mounds is North America’s largest and most famous earthwork, an effigy of a serpent. The Serpent Mound in southern Ohio is in the shape of a serpent with an open mouth preparing to consume an oval-shaped mound; it averages 3 feet tall and 20 feet wide and is more than 1,330 feet long. However, making a direct connection between the Old World and the builders of the Serpent Mound remains illusive.
As with the Light Serpent I documented at the Mojave North site in chapter 10, special attention had been given to the positioning of the equinox animation, and I found that the orientation of the head and the disc were oriented toward the summer solstice sunrise.18
In addition, as noted in chapter 9, the Kansas Serpent Intaglio earthwork had the same imagery of a serpent and a disc as the Ohio Serpent Mound. Among many other examples are the serpent effigies built by Native Americans in Medicine Butte, Wisconsin; Morgan and Lawrence Counties in Kentucky; Dicks Ridge in northern Georgia; and near Lake Okeechobee in Florida.19 These earthworks appear to have shared similar themes with Old World earthworks, as exemplified by the Avebury Serpent, the largest ancient henge in England. It measures 1,250 feet in diameter and was constructed with standing stones.20 The original ground plan of Avebury was a representation of the body of a serpent passing through a circle and thus forming a traditional alchemical symbol. Unfortunately, during the fourteenth century A.D. it suffered from abuse at the hands of the church, which was trying to quash paganism.
Fig. 13.6. Drawing of an aerial view of the Ohio Serpent Mound.
THE CASE FOR OLD WORLD RELICS FROM THE MIDWEST
There is a significant inventory of claims for pre-Columbian tablets and artifacts with Old World origins from the Midwest. Two of the most famous archaeological findings that could indicate such a presence deep in the heart of America are the Kensington Runestone, found in 1898 in Minnesota, and the Grave Creek Stone in West Virginia, which was found in 1838. (See chapter 15 for Barry Fell’s translation of the Grave Creek Stone from Phoenician Punic.) However, there are also many thousands of stone, copper, and slate tablets from Michigan mounds that local historians and farmers began finding in the 1890s. These are referred to as the Michigan Relics.
Of the several thousand of these artifacts taken from mounds, many have inscriptions. The largest collection was amassed by Milton R. Hunter, who willed it to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ Church History Museum in Salt Lake City, where it was warehoused until December 2002. At that point, it was turned over to the Michigan Historical Museum in Lansing.
Fig. 13.7. Michigan copper plate, 4.75 inches by 7 inches, with cuneiformlike characters. The cuneiform symbol at the top is a distinguishing characteristic of the so-called Michigan Relics (see figure 13.9). (From Wayne May’s collection, photographed by author)
Fig. 13.8. Depiction of Christ’s crucifixion on a Michigan Relic. (Mertz, The Mystic Symbol)
Many of the tablets are carved with great detail, often showing men with amulets and sophisticated clothing, with aprons, robes, and sandals. Some of the tablets show temples and architectural structures, and many depict daily and ritual life. Moreover, a significant number seem to be devoted to themes in the Old and New Testaments, including portrayals of the Creation, the Garden of Eden, Noah and the Flood, and Moses. In addition to Old Testament scenes, the life of Jesus is also found among the tablets, including an etching showing his crucifixion and, on the reverse side, four scenes from his life.
The unifying symbol on the Michigan Relics is a special mark used by the Michigan Mound Builders. Henriette Mertz (1896–1985) called this mark the “mystic symbol,” and she used that term as the title of her book, posthumously published as The Mystic Symbol: Mark of the Michigan Mound Builders.21 (See figure 13.9 below.)
Henriette Mertz was a remarkable woman who was a patent lawyer, a courtroom handwriting analyst, and a military crypto-analyst in World War II, and she also worked on the Manhattan Project. She is known as one of the people who discerned that the Bat Creek Stone was incorrectly published upside down by the Smithsonian, resulting in the belief that it was Cherokee writing instead of being interpreted as Paleo-Hebrew writing (as will be outlined in chapter 14).
Fig. 13.9. The “mystic symbol” is the dis
tinguishing mark of the Michigan Relics. Detail from the copper trident shown in figs. 13.2, 13.7, and 13.8.
Mertz continued her work with an analysis of some of the Michigan Relics beginning in the 1980s and concluded that forgery was out of the question. In The Mystic Symbol, she wrote, “When writing on these tablets was subjected to examination as customary in litigated cases involving forgery, this author, professionally qualified to examining questions of forgery; forgery was not found to exist. Analysis indicated that each individual tablet containing writing originated with a different hand. No two specimens examined produced identical characteristics—a humanly impossible feat if one person alone would have been guilty of forming the entire group of 3000 inscribed specimens.”22
The conclusion of her investigations in The Mystic Symbol was that the tablets were created by early Christians who had fled from the Mediterranean around A.D. 400. She wrote, “In conclusion, we believe the persons who inscribed this material were Christian refugees fleeing from the Decian . . . persecutions [of A.D. 250] and sailing out from the harbors of Rome, Naples, Alexandria, Carthage, and other Eastern Mediterranean ports.”23
Secrets of Ancient America: Archaeoastronomy and the Legacy of the Phoenicians, Celts, and Other Forgotten Explorers Page 23
