But why would Odohui go to such length to perpetuate a hoax? It seems far-fetched that such a young man would have invented the story, spent presumably many months or years constructing and inscribing the relics, and then buried thirty-one relics six feet underground within a mass of heat-hardened caliche. It took many Mexican laborers to dig through the caliche during the excavations, and the unearthing of some of the artifacts was witnessed by University of Arizona professors.
Entering into the other side of the controversy that began to surround the artifacts are a different number of professors who argued that they were genuine, including Andrew E. Douglass, the father of dendrochronology, which is the study of the annual growth rings of trees or old timber to discover climate changes. There was also Arizona State Museum archaeologist Karl Ruppert, Neil Judd of the Smithsonian Institution, entomologist Charles T. Vorhies, and C. J. Sarle, one of the eminent geologists of the Southwest.
For lack of space, all the other arguments for and against the authenticity of the Calalus relics cannot be presented.36 However, a most compelling testament to the authenticity of the Calalus relics comes from Todd Bostwick, who as the city archaeologist for Phoenix from 1990 to 2010, was responsible for the management of archaeological sites located within the city limits. Despite the fact that caliche is a calcium carbonate material that, with addition of water, is used throughout the world for building materials and hardens from a slush to extreme hardness in a matter of hours, Bostwick wrote, regarding a report by the geologist C. J. Sarle:
[Sarle] provided a detailed description of the geological characteristics of the deposits in which the lead artifacts were found. He observed three distinct geological deposits in the exposed profiles at the site. The upper section was a dark stratum of soil about fifteen inches in thickness. Underneath that stratum was “a thick zone solidly cemented by [the] deposition of lime,” called caliche. Under that second zone of caliche was the third level, a gravel stratum, where the artifacts were found. In Sarle’s opinion, the geological characteristics of the deposits represented “a seal, which nature has placed on these artifacts, not to be counterfeited.”37
Sarle may have had a small monetary interest in writing the report, but his description of the layers is telling and he was also present, along with as mentioned, other colleagues from the University of Arizona when some of the artifacts were unearthed.
My own experience upon seeing the Calalus relics was that they are credible evidence of a Roman colony in the Americas with both Christian and Jewish influences. The thirty-one objects from Arizona defy the archaeopriests’ claim that there is no solid archaeological evidence proving that Old World settlers visited the Americas long before Columbus.
THE CHEROKEES, DNA, AND OTHER CONNECTIONS TO THE HEBREWS
Cultural connections between the Hebrews and the southeastern Native American Cherokees were noted by several early authors including John Howard Payne, who lived during the early 1800s and Scotsman James Adair, whose 1775 book History of the American Indians mentions twenty-three customs and practices similar to those of Hebrew priests. Adair noted that the Cherokee pronunciation of the divine name was “Ye-Ho-Wah,” the same utterance and consonants as the Hebrew letters Y-H-W to form the name Yahweh.38
In fact, so compelling is the connection between the Hebrews and the Cherokees that the Central Band of Cherokee created the Abraham/Moses Project. Chief Joe Sitting Owl White wrote of the project and his personal beliefs, stating there was an “emerging secret history of the Cherokee People that they begin with, and incorporated ancient Jewish People over their many centuries of existence, right down to the present.”39 His tribe’s research includes the Cherokee Historical Record, the Cherokee Archeological Record, and a DNA collaboration, all of which provide evidence that he states is “consistent with the Cherokee being descendants of the Jewish Peoples.”40
Another tribe called the Yuchis also seems to have had a cultural connection to Hebrews. Unique among Native Americans because their language is unrelated to any other Indian language, the Yuchis make an eight-day pilgrimage every year on the fifteenth day of their sacred harvest month in the fall. During this time they live in “booths” covered with branches but partially open to the sky and celebrate by dancing and calling on the name of God. This ceremony is nearly identical to the Hebrew holiday of Sukkot, known as the Festival of Booths, which is an eight-day celebration dating back to the time of Moses when outdoor structures were constructed. It is still celebrated today on the fifteenth day of the Jewish month of Tishrei, from late September to late October.41
Another Hebrew-like custom encountered by the early English settlers and practiced by some of the native tribes was the wearing of two small leather boxes called “tefillin” or “phylacteries” on the head and arms during prayers. In 1820 one was found in an Indian burial mound in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Because the object contained Hebrew letters, scholars from Harvard were consulted and an investigation was launched. However, with no other reasonable explanation, it was concluded to have been the possession of one of the deceased Indians in the mounds. This item has since been lost.42
In addition to cultural evidence connecting the Hebrews and some Native Americans there are also DNA studies. In one study conducted based on finding similar genetic haplogroups by Donald N. Yates, Ph.D., of DNA Consultants of Phoenix, Arizona, found that fifty-two Native American women of Cherokee descent showed a high degree of interrelatedness with populations from Egypt, Israel, and other parts of the eastern Mediterranean.43 From the genetic perspective Yates additionally notes, “The haplogroup X survives at elevated frequencies in two separate places, Canaan or Judea/Palestine and Native North America. Its presence is particularly noteworthy in the tribes situated around the Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence Seaway like the Ojibwa and Micmac.”44
In addition, DNA evidence linking American Indians in Colorado to European Ashkenazi Jews has shown that they have an identical mutation that dates back more than six hundred years. Professor Jeffrey Weitzel, a cancer genetics expert at the City of Hope hospital in California, conducted the research, which offers proof that converso Jews expelled from Spain long ago reached America and intermarried with Native Americans.45
Thus, we can surmise that there could have been entranceways for Hebrews into North America from the Atlantic Ocean. This might have included sailing into the Gulf of Mexico, where the Mississippi River “welcome center” would have been Poverty Point, Louisiana, a possible jumping-off point for journeys northeast into Cherokee country, perhaps similar to Hernando de Soto’s mid-sixteenth-century expedition. Alternatively, once in the Gulf of Mexico, they could have found the mouth of the Rio Grande River and gained access to the Western United States, leading to the colony of Calalus and presumably Hidden Mountain.
The evidence that I discovered of ancient Hebrew travelers in America is scant, but it suggests that Hebrews did have a presence in North America long before Columbus.
Artifact When and Where Discovered Dating Details
Bat Creek Stone 1889, Bat Creek, Tennessee Paleo-Hebrew, 2nd century A.D. The inscribed stone has been interpreted to read, “A star for the Jews.”
Jewish coins 1932, Louisville, Kentucky, and 1967, Hopkinsville, Kentucky A.D. 132–135 Several Bar Kokhba coins found from the time of the second Jewish revolt against Rome
Hidden Mountain Near Los Lunas, New Mexico 500–100 B.C. Ten Commandments etched in proto-Hebrew into stone
Calalus 1920s, near Tucson, Arizona A.D. 765–900 31 artifacts, including Latin inscriptions and religious relics
Native
customs Noted by James Adair and early settlers 1775 book, 19th century records Cultural links to Hebrew include tefillin artifact, Yuchis festivals
Cherokee Cherokee records Recent DNA links
Fig. 14.16. The most important evidence of Hebrew contact with the Americas.
15
More to Learn about Ancient America
I have seen f
irsthand evidence that convinces me that early Celts built America’s Stonehenge in New Hampshire and the Calendar One site in Vermont and that they inscribed the inscriptions in Crack Cave, the Sun Temple in Colorado, and the Anubis Caves in Oklahoma. I have marveled at the Indus Valley–style petroglyphs of Mojave North in California and throughout the Great Basin, and in the previous chapter, I traveled to Arizona and New Mexico to examine evidence for Roman Hebrew relics and inscriptions at Calalus and Hidden Mountain. Along the way, I documented many petroglyphs in archaeoastronomical animations not made by Native Americans. Amid these compelling pieces of evidence for Old World travelers in ancient America, my short list of the best “Smoking Gun” examples are cited in figure 15.1.
As my knowledge of rock art sites, Old World artifacts, and New History investigators grew, it became clear that there had been many hundreds of detailed investigations and thousands of reports of incidents of Old World peoples in the Americas that complemented my own and offered an even greater context for the New History of the Americas. This chapter documents research by others and provides more evidence that Columbus was not first but was the last to arrive in the Americas. Some of these many studies are addressed in this chapter accompanied by a summary chart at the end; see figure 15.19, “Other New History Evidence.”
While my own encounters serve as proof, collectively the hundreds of incidents found in historical records and the evidence presented by many researchers, writers, and archaeologists provide an impressive body of evidence that the Old History is a gross misrepresentation of the facts, even an intentional lie. The evidence is not limited to what I’ve already presented, as additional overwhelming evidence for the New History has been documented by others. But instead of leading us into a new frontier of historical and archaeological research, diffusionist thinkers have been blackballed and marginalized by the archaeopriesthood protecting the Old History.
Site Location Proof Access Chapter
America’s Stonehenge New England Celtic astronomy; Ogham writing; AS Yes 4
Crack Cave Colorado Ogham writing in Celtic; AS On equinox 7
Anubis Caves Oklahoma Ogham writing in Celtic; AS Private land 8
Sun Temple Colorado Ogham writing in Celtic; AS Private land 9
Mojave North California AS; petroglyphs; inscriptions Bureau of Land Management land 10, 11
Hidden Mountain New Mexico Hebrew writing in stone Yes, with
permit 14
Calalus Arizona Seventh-century Latin writing on lead crosses Limited access 14
DNA studies Within Cherokee tribes’ genetic material High degree of relationship to similar haplogroups in the eastern Mediterranean area Donald N. Yates, of DNA Consultants 14
Fig. 15.1. My New History Evidence List. AS = archaeoastronomy.
The fate of Gunnar Thompson is a lesson, since he was blackballed for investigating Egyptian and Chinese connections in his Ph.D. thesis. His analysis of why alternative theories to the “Columbus first” doctrines have been disregarded is also cogent. He stated that the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s arrival, celebrated with the 1892 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, left an imprint that resulted in the acceptance of the Columbus mythology by academic institutions and that all deviations from the ideology of conquest became treasonous and academic suicide and remain so even to this day.
Fig. 15.2. Historian and archaeologist Gunnar Thompson, Ph.D., is the author of American Discovery: Our Multicultural Heritage. (Photo by Sandra Stowell)
INDUS VALLEY CONNECTIONS
If Columbus is to be considered the last to discover America, the Indus Valley cultures would have been perhaps the first. As recounted in chapters 10 and 11, my colleagues and I uncovered at Mojave North what appear to be Indus Valley connections to America in a notable Shiva linga, Shiva-like petroglyphs employed in cross-quarter day alignments, and the small SEA (Sunset Equinox Animation) Rock petroglyph with Indus Valley motifs.
Even before my exploration of Mojave North, Gene Matlock had researched and written India Once Ruled the Americas! He, in turn, followed a long list of distinguished scholars and historians who concluded the same thing—that some of the Native American peoples originated from or were influenced by Hindus from India. One prominent believer was Baron Alexander von Humboldt, the famous late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century European scholar, explorer, and anthropologist. Many other authors followed him, notably the American diplomat Ephraim George Squier (1821–1888), who was the U.S. chargé d’affaires to Central America in 1849 and who brought to attention many possible connections between India and the Americas. He compared the temples of India, Java, and Mexico, writing in his book The Serpent Symbol, “A proper examination of these monuments would disclose the fact that, in their interior structure, as well as their exterior form, and obvious purposes, these buildings [the temples in Palenque, Mexico] correspond with great exactness to those of Hindustan and the Indian Archipeligo.”1
In more modern times, many others have pointed out the many architectural elements of Mayan temples that resemble Indian, Javanese, and Indo-Chinese pyramids. These people include the famous traditional temple builder from southern India, V. Ganapati Sthapati, whose theories were outlined in chapter 5; J. Leslie Mitchell in his 1935 book The Conquest of the Maya; and Gunnar Thompson in American Discovery. The similarities include the use of receding stages and stairways leading to a platform on top of the temples, vaulted galleries, and corbelled arches, along with common embellishments such as serpent columns.
Calendrical links between the Mayan and Indians were also mentioned in chapter 5, including the similar dates for the beginnings of the Hindu Kali Yuga calendar (February 18, 3102 B.C.) and the Mayan calendar (August 11, 3114 B.C.). Researcher B. G. Sidharth has also presented astronomical similarities in his paper “The Astronomical Link between India and the Mayans,” in which he states that both cultures meticulously tracked the planet Venus.2
Thompson has also noted that Hindu symbols, artifacts, diseases, crop plants, and animals reached the Americas.3 For example, elephants from India (distinguished by the highest point on their heads and lack of tusks) show up in Native American art, including a petroglyph at Grimes Point, Nevada (chapter 12), estimated to be at least five thousand years old, and the later long-nosed deities of the Maya. Elephant motifs are also found in other locations, including the Southeast’s woodlands and the Hopewell Mounds in Ohio, where effigy pipes have been recovered.
Fig. 15.3. Stela B at Copan, Honduras, clearly depicts a turbaned rider sitting on an elephant’s head (Drawing by Gunnar Thompson, American Discovery)
Perhaps the most contentious evidence for contact between the Old and New Worlds concerns corn. While there appears to be conclusive evidence that corn (first domesticated in Mesoamerica and called maize) made it to Asia long before Columbus arrived in the New World, this position is still considered heresy by modern historians, who continue to believe that corn was shipped to Europe only after 1492. For example, in 2013, a writer in Wikipedia asserted that corn spread through the Americas beginning around 2500 B.C. and reached India only “after European contact with the Americas in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, [when] explorers and traders carried maize back to Europe and introduced it to other countries.”4
This mainstream position is diametrically opposed to the published reports presented by many scholars (including Thompson, Johannessen, and Jeffreys, all cited below) who document the diffusion of many plants and animals between the Old World and the New World, including peanuts, tobacco, sugar, chili peppers, amaranth, sweet potatoes, and maize. The compelling nature of this evidence is found in the details.
Hundreds of Hindu sculptures in central India depict Hindu deities holding ears of maize, as noted by Carl L. Johannessen.5
Spanish archaeologist Miguel Oliva found remains of maize in third-century grain silos in the ancient city of Ullastret on the Mediterranean coast.6
According to Thompson, Buddhist d
ivinities with garlands of maize ears are shown in a Chinese statue from the sixth-century A.D.
Maize can be seen in a mural from the Shanxi Province of China, dated to about A.D. 900 by Sidney Chang at California State University (however, this date is disputed by other authorities).7
Maize is shown on pre-Colonial ceramics from South Africa that had already been distributed throughout West Africa when the Europeans arrived.8
The fourteenth-century Welsh imported maize to the British Isles, as can be seen from paintings made before Columbus that include “flint corn,” or maize, from New England.9
Thompson also notes an image of an American turkey on a German cathedral mural from A.D. 1280, along with many other examples of diffusion of plants and animals spread by the Welsh.10
In analyzing the reports of maize in the Old World after A.D. 1500, M. D. W. Jeffreys makes pertinent comments in his article, “Pre-Columbian Maize in Asia.”11 He notes that European commenters agreed that maize reached Europe from Asia before 1570, after which an American origin was suggested in Fernández de Oviedo’s Historia general y natural de las Indias (General and Natural History of the Indies).12 The article by Jeffreys also offers linguistic evidence for the antiquity of the presence of maize in Europe and Asia. Other written connections include the Hindu Katha Upanishad, where it is written, “Like corn man decays, and like corn he is born again,”13 which is reminiscent of symbolism in the Mayan Popol Vuh creation myth.*24
While detailed images of maize on Hindu temples (see color insert) and Egyptian and Chinese murals (all made before Columbus) would seem to be incontrovertible evidence for many rational investigators, the conclusion by most diffusionists that corn made it to the Old World long ago still remains today outside the mainstream of academic credibility.
Secrets of Ancient America: Archaeoastronomy and the Legacy of the Phoenicians, Celts, and Other Forgotten Explorers Page 26
