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The Adena/Allegewi culture had flourished for about 800 years before they met their first serious challenge from outside invaders. It is so hard to imagine how long 800 years is. Suffice it to say that that is more than three times as long as the United States has been in existence!

These tall, often fair or red haired people were suddenly confronted with a shorter people; muscular, bearers of a fully grown culture, with gracile skulls. “Gracile” is an anthropological term used to contrast with “robust” bones. These people had less defined cheek bones, not as heavily ridged brows, and their bones were more slender. They were built for graceful movement and speed. The Allegewi would had more robust skeletal features such as those found in Ketls, Vikings, and most early Native American tribes (and many other places worldwide). Think of the difference between someone from Tonga and someone from Sweden — taking all stereotypes for granted, of course. These were definitely not an offshoot of the Adena but, rather, a whole new people.

These people also built earthworks but theirs differed from those of the Adena. While the Adena built fortified enclosures, these people built HUGE ceremonial earthworks with elaborate zoomorphic (animal shapes, often highly stylized) and geometrical designs. They sometimes built several in one area with roads, canals, or causeways linking them. Adding to the mystery of these people, the animal shapes they used were frequently not animals found in North America! Asian elephants, South American llamas, sea lions… They also made earthworks of local animals such as panthers, snakes, lizards, men, bears, and birds. They imported a vast quantity of mica from the Atlantic coast and made jewelry with it. Their jewelry and pipes were usually made in the shapes of animals, perhaps as totems or as a religious attempt to share the spirit of that animal. Who were these people? Where did they come from?

We do not know what they called themselves. We didn’t even know that different racial/cultural groups built the mounds until well after the Civil War. Before then, it was assumed that one group built all of them, even though they differed in shape, size, and burial goods. Then, on the farm of Colonel M. C. Hopewell near Chillicothe, Ohio, they recognized that the people buried here were different from the Adena. Other earthworks were examined (and some destroyed in the process) and it was confirmed. The new people were named for the Colonel — the Hopewell.

There is a healthy argument going on in historical circles about the unity of the Hopewell people. Some say it was not one culture but a confederation of many Native tribes and cultures, all of whom shared some organization, worship, and trade agreements. Others say they were one people who developed slightly different styles of building and burying over time (Wikipedia has the first view as the only correct view. I am not a Wikipedia basher, but their article on the Hopewell is woefully incomplete and assumes way too much).

The Hopewell flourished in the Midwest and in some farther flung areas from around 200 BC to 300 AD. I have crawled all over many of their works. I lived in Lancaster, Ohio for over eight years when I came to America in the late 1980s. Just north of there (30 miles east of Columbus) is the town of Newark. The earthworks there are outstanding. Many of them have been lost to agriculture and grave robbers but what remains is still amazing. A double wall that measures more than six miles has within it a “sacred circle” that encloses more than 200 acres. Inside of that is the Great Circle, a 14 foot tall circle mound with a 20 acre area inside. As early as 1887 this mound confounded the engineers who measured it for it is a true circle. Whoever built this was highly skilled. Connected to the Great Circle is an octagonal enclosure with 50 acres inside of it. That is joined, in turn, to a 170 long mound that is over 20 feet tall. That mound is segmented with mounds set at what seemed to be just slightly off center positions… until someone noticed that one could stand at one position and mark the summer and winter solstices as well as other times and seasons by sighting the sun and stars as they pass along the lines formed by the “off center” mounds and segments. Ancient Newark was a HUGE, accurate, ancient calendar. The calendar was lunar based and remains accurate to this day.

As you can see from the drawing, this site is immensely complex. As you can see from the second, aerial photo, the city of Newark grew over and into the earthworks making more research very difficult. No artifacts have been found within the massive enclosures to indicate that anyone ever lived in them during Hopewell times. This was a ceremonial place, an astronomical computer, not a city. But it is not the largest Hopewell site.

South of Chillicothe is the town of Portsmouth, Ohio. There, straddling the Ohio River, is an earthwork that goes for miles and miles. Sixteen miles of embankments have been found (either in situ or in the records of early explorers) though most of this series of earthworks has been overgrown and lost to building and agriculture in the last sixty years. Much of our knowledge of this massive site would have been lost forever had not ONE copy of an explorer’s notebook not been found in the library of the American Antiquarian Society in Massachusetts. It was dated 1862. The finding excited historians and they commissioned some aerial exploration in the 1930s that revealed walls that marched straight through swamps, fields, and across creeks and the river. Archaeologists went into the area to examine the earthworks more closely but local landowners made that difficult and, sometimes, dangerous (for those who don’t live in the Midwest, a word of explanation: southern and southeastern Ohio is in Appalachia. Some of the same attitudes, culture, and accents you would find in Kentucky and West Virginia are found there. When I lived in Lancaster, it was fascinating to travel  20 miles southeast to Logan, Ohio. Somewhere in that 20 miles, you crossed a line. “Fish” became “feesh” and g’s were dropped from verbs so that “hunting” became “huntin’,” and etc.).

Taking their lead from finds in Newark, the archaeologists sited along the long lines of mounds and found they pointed to Newark and also to a place that was so wonderful it became known thereafter as Mound City. That story, next.

As noted two blogs ago, I don’t buy the whole “the mounds were built by Kelts” theory. However, it would be foolish to discount the presence of Kelts and their lasting influence on the cultures they met. I do not believe that they came to pre-Columbian America in huge numbers but they DID come here and they left art, stories, legends, artifacts, language behind. Here are some of the bits and pieces we have found so far.

We’ve already mentioned the stone village known as Mystery Hill (Or America’s Stonehenge) but there are also several standing stones and other broch-like structures in the eastern US that remain mysteries to those who hold to the Official Story. Were any of them found in Germany, Scotland, Cornwall, or Denmark they would immediately be attributed to the ancient or medieval Kelts. Find them here… and you generally get a lot of silence. Most of them are gone or nearly gone now, victims of neglect or outright abuse. The Great Stone Stack outside of Newark, Ohio is one example. Once, it had a base of 500 square feet and a height of 45 feet. Early settlers drew pictures of it and wrote detailed accounts of it… but they didn’t treasure it. It was pulled down in 1860 so that its stone could be taken to what is now West Virginia. I have often played golf at Tygart Lake and thought of the ancient monument that was pulled down and brought there so that they could dam the river and create that beautiful lake.

Some believe that the habit of Native American tribes (or at least some of them) to paint their bodies is a relic of contact with Kelts. It is true that the Kelts painted themselves (as anyone who saw Braveheart knows!) and some Kelts were called “Picts” by the Romans from a word meaning “painted ones.” However, the mound builders’ designs are not the same as the Kelts or Picts and while they may be related it is at least just as possible that they are not. You see, many tribes all over the world did — and still do — paint their bodies for ritual purposes. The Kelts (and especially the Picts) often took the skulls of their enemies and made them into bowls or cups. So did the mound builders. Still… the Kelts usually took a lot of time to decorate the skulls with elaborate ornamentation and that is not generally found among the mound builders.

There are lots of coincidences that some people like to make into something major such as both the Adena and the Kelts revering the wolf, both of them were accomplished weavers, both of them wore more linen than skins, both wore ritual masks that included mouthpieces, and both had Shaman who wore antlers. I think it is plausible that some of this originated in Keltic contact with the Adena but it is just too much to say that the Adena culture was formed — in total — by a mass immigration of Kelts into the Midwest. One piece of evidence that would have been useful here was lost to us. Several explorers, including Father Jacques Marquette (you have to read about his life sometime. Amazing person), drew and reported on a huge mural with two shamanistic figures drawn on a cliff overlooking the Mississippi River near present day Elsah, Illinois. Native Americans didn’t do large murals, so that is enough to get everyone’s attention. Marquette described them as having antlers on their heads, huge beards, a body covered with scales (chainmail?), and tails attached to their backs. Nothing like it has been found in America. Sadly, local tribes used the mural as target practice shortly after obtaining modern firearms and its destruction was complete when white men quarried the rocks from the cliff in 1920.

It is likely that the mural was a representation of Cernunnos, a Keltic demi-god. The description matches him precisely. Other depictions of Cernunnos (remember to pronounce the C like a K) exist in France and Cornwall. They also have him antlered, with fish scales or chainmail, a tail, and with a heavy beard.

A Keltic coin was found among 15 Roman coins on the banks of the Wisconsin River back in 1994. The Keltic coin showed a man with a very heavy mustache — something a Roman would not wear. Romans were clean shaven and thought of facial hair as a sign of barbarism. The Kelts, on the other hand, traditionally grew as bushy a mustache as they could. Beards were also common.

One wildly controversial area of study is the link between Keltic languages and that of the Algonquian. Some are convinced that there is massive evidence of cultural crossover while others are just as adamant that there is NO evidence. I will have to admit that, after reading both sides several times, I cannot tell who is right.

As previously discussed, the Grave Creek Mound in West Virginia gave up a tablet that, when translated, said the mound had been built for Tasach, another Keltic figure (aka Teth). I know of six stones found that were written in Keltic languages. Dozens more are posited but I am not sure they are what their proponents say they are.

There are many other evidences of Keltic tribes or explorers making it to America, but there are enough differences between known Kelts and the Adena to say that the Adena were a separate people. Perhaps there was a lot of interaction between them and their white visitors and there was certainly intermarriage (stories abound in Native American tradition) but there were also great battles between them such as the battle at the Falls of Ohio that we discussed some months ago. As a rule, the Kelts did not fare well in these battles, perhaps due to smaller numbers, poor health, or just being out-fought by the Natives.

The Kelts would disappear, but the Adena would not reign eternally. Another tribe was about to appear. The days of the Adena were numbered….

Hidden History will be back in two or three days. I’m on the road again. On Tuesday morning, I went to the airport in Detroit to board a Southwest flight to Little Rock. Little Rock being a non-hub, you can’t fly directly there (except on a very rare Delta flight). My flight would go first to Baltimore and then on to Little Rock. Usually, the flights go via Chicago but for some reason that was not an option on Tuesday. I was to meet with a study group Tuesday night and then speak to the Pleasant Valley Church of Christ on Wednesday. My connection in Baltimore was easy — just over an hour.

The first sign of trouble was a sign saying my flight out of Detroit was delayed. I called in to get information because none was available in the airport. It seemed that bad weather over St. Louis (you poor guys in St. Louis. Do you EVER get good weather for an entire day?) was holding up our plane. When the thrice delayed flight made it in, I was very concerned. I was to land in Baltimore ten minutes before my other flight took off. I got off the plane quickly and made my way five gates down… only to see another “delayed” sign. This was unusual — normally, if I want to lose an entire day and not make connections I travel via American Airlines through Dallas.

An hour and a half late, we boarded the plane and pushed back. And sat. And sat some more. We sat on the tarmac for over 2 and a half more hours before we took off. One of the lavatories broke so we had one bathroom for the entire plane. The Southwest crew was sympathetic, informative, and sweet — as they almost always are. They gave us extra peanuts, crackers, and water. They did everything except organize a sing-a-long but it was still quite a long time to sit. I was in a middle seat by a politician — a small city mayor — who’d just been to Capitol Hill to lobby for this or that. He liked to talk. A lot. I wondered: is this what hell is like? Then I remembered — no… hell would be this same situation with the old Northwest Airlines crew, stinky lavs, and no peanuts and crackers.

I arrived at Little Rock too late to speak to a large group of students who had come out to speak with me. That was the main reason I was in Arkansas so I was bummed and very disappointed. The group was made up of Christians, three Buddhists, three Muslims, and an atheist. If they had all walked into a bar, it would have been a great set up for a joke. It took me 13 1/2 hours to fly to Little Rock. Had I just gotten into my car that morning, it would have taken me 14 1/2 hours to drive it. And I would have had more than peanuts to eat.

The church booked me a wonderful large room in a nice hotel less than a mile from their building. I met with some of the students the next day for lunch and had a great time. That night, I spoke to the Wednesday crowd. They couldn’t have been nicer or more receptive. I’m aware I’m not everybody’s flavor of the month so I am always a bit surprised when someone doesn’t take a shot at me. It was cool. After the talk, I met with the elders and their wives at a local coffee shop. I’m not sure how long we talked but it had to be at least an hour and a half.

As I write this, I am back in the Little Rock airport. I get to fly home via Chicago and the plane I am boarding here is supposed to be the plane that will also go from Chicago to Detroit so I don’t have to worry about switching planes and gates. While Michigan is having one of its hottest summers in a long time (and the hottest I have ever experienced), it will be good to get to sub-100 temps. Little Rock is HOT. I saw two thermometers yesterday and they both read “100.” The radio said the Real Feel temp was 107 but I’m pretty sure it was Eighty Bajillion. An hour west of our home in the Detroit area is a small hamlet called Hell, Michigan. I checked online via my Droid and found out it was 82 there yesterday, making Little Rock officially hotter than Hell. (Paradise, Michigan is in the Upper Peninsula. It was 67 yesterday)

They say this kind of heat hangs around about a month each year. I thought of Toronto immediately. Let me explain. My wife and I went to Toronto one winter for a few days break. It is just four hours away from Detroit so it is an easy trip to make. The people of Toronto are well aware that their winters are fierce so they have a huge warren of underground walkways, shops, malls, theaters, etc. You can live warm all year round by living underground. I was thinking…Little Rock needs some tunnels for the summer months. I could live here easily as long as I could live like a hamster in the tube for a month or so.

Thanks to the elders at PV, especially Bill Oliver who set all this up. Sorry to miss all the students. That was a major bummer. We’ll try again in the Spring, maybe. In the meantime, I have to get back to work. I have meetings all tomorrow, a worship to finish planning, a memorial service to do, and a lunch meeting with some missionaries — all before Sunday afternoon.

I’m gonna need more peanuts.

A very interesting book was published this year by Bear and Company, Advanced Civilizations of Prehistoric America. The author is Frank Joseph and that is a good and bad thing. It is a good thing in that that guarantees the book is readable and enjoyable. It is — or may be — a bad thing because Joseph is editor in chief of Ancient America magazine, a magazine that trades in some strange versions of history in an attempt to make the Book of Mormon fit known archaeology. Because I like to know what people are saying, I have subscribed to the mag for years. Most months, I grumble after reading it and toss it into the files believing I have wasted my money. Sometimes, there are nuggets of gold, though so I keep sending my check in. Joseph has written books on the lost continents of Atlantis and Lemuria and readers of this blog know that both of those words cause me to cringe as soon as I hear them. Still, as I noted in the last blog, while I do not hold to this books theory concerning the Adena, I will mention it here.

Joseph correctly reports that ancient writers noted the massive migrations of the Kelts three thousand years ago. The same time that they were moving as far east as China and Mongolia (at least) and into the northern and western regions of Europe, they were taking the to the sea in ships that could carry men and goods for vast distances. He notes that this is about the same time that the Adena arise in North America. Those of us who have taken a few logic courses know the warning “correlation is not causation” so I don’t look at this coincidence as anything but… coincidence. But Joseph is not done and some of the things he says are absolutely true: the Kelts were taller than Asians and the Adena were taller than Native Americans. Both the Kelts and the Adena frequently had red hair and some of the clothing found in Adena mounds is a dead ringer for Keltic clothing styles down to the dyes used and the weaving patterns utilized in their creation.

Joseph brings up the work of William Ritchie, the New York State Archaeologist who did so much to uncover the lives and artifacts of archaic Native tribes in America back in the 1950s. Ritchie was no fool and he was highly regarded so I always sit up and take notice when he is mentioned. He found a pattern of migration from west to east across America, establishing it by comparing skulls found in burials all over the continent. The skulls of the Adena show an eastward migration and they are also markedly more brachycephalic than are native skulls. This indicates that they were Caucasian. Before we get too excited, however, we need to remember that some peoples who lived in Asia were not, ethnically, Asian — they, like the modern day Ainu who live north of Japan — are Caucasian. So, finding Caucasian skulls such as those in Adena mounds and Kennewick Man are not de facto proof of European migration. They open that door but they don’t take us very far down the road.

Joseph also compares sites such as Mystery Hill, brochs, and other standing stone sites (Gungywamp in Connecticut for one) and correctly says that if they had been found in Europe, we would have automatically assumed they were made by ancient Kelts. Found here, we claim that Native Americans built them (though every single tribe says “no” and about a third have tales of a white people who came and built them). He spends a good amount of time showing how burials were laid out, how tunnels were constructed, etc. and says that is enough to settle the matter: the Allegewi (or Allegheny or Adena) were Kelts. If so, we still have not found evidence of how they managed their mass migration leaving very little trace across Alaska down into the Upper Midwest. That is no little problem.

The skulls and bones found by archaeologists certainly show Caucasian traits but they are most likely mixed blooded people. That would make sense; the Kelts tended to absorb people as they passed by… and not all that absorption was done with the permission of those snatched from their villages to serve as slaves or wives. All of these say that Joseph has a possible explanation for the sudden rise of the Adena… but not enough to call it proof.

One of the points Joseph makes really, really needs to be made but almost never is. When settlers entered the Ohio Valley, they found dozens of iron furnaces already in place. Standard history texts claim that some other white people must have come in there sometime after 1600 and built, then abandoned, the furnaces. Almost none of them have had any serious testing done on them, Carbon-14 or otherwise. I have crawled around six or seven of these sites myself. The furnaces are almost always found encircled by mounds. Of course, that doesn’t mean that they were built by mound builders but it is interesting. Whoever built them knew what they were doing. A few artifacts have been found and saved over the last few decades (before then, since no university or government would protect them, they were looted by the locals) including axe heads, a 62 pound massive iron bar (Chillicothe, Ohio near Mound City State Park), and iron knives. And someone finally noticed that some of the artifacts found in the mounds themselves are covered with iron ore.

More on Joseph’s theory (and it is not his alone) next time…

Look at this blog as a sidebar to the continuing look at the Adena/Allegheny culture. The reason I am diverting to a sidebar is because there IS a theory about the origins of the Adena that I don’t hold to but which isn’t as absurd as it seems at first glance: the Kelts came here and established the Adena. There are TONS of problems with that interpretation but it must be said that the Kelts were a long-ranging people. They have always been on the move. It is a mistake to equate Kelts with just the Highland Scots, the Irish, the Welsh, and smaller numbers of people in Cornwall and Normandy. They came from Central Europe and they once roamed the world, leaving precious few records as they traveled.

The occasion of this sidebar comes from the July/August 2010 issue of Archaeology magazine. I have a love/hate relationship with this magazine. It is an excellent read and quite a bargain. That’s good. It also is well written. That’s good. It is not afraid to bring up things which other, more stuffy mags, might avoid. That’s very, very good. However, from time to time it just decides to write off something (such as the Kensington Runestone) and ignore evidence in its favor. THIS issue, however, has a ton of incredible information. One article is germane to our discussion of hidden history — “Battle for the Xinjiang Mummies.” [NOTE: the spelling of Kelt with a K instead of a C is gaining in popularity even though no Keltic nation had a K in its alphabet. The reason? Their C was always hard, never soft. To keep it from being pronounced "Selt," the K is gaining in use]

In a great article by Heather Pringle, the story unfolds like this: Since the 1960’s mummies have been found in the northwest of China. Although found in a desert, many of the very well preserved mummies were found buried in oval boats made of stretched skin over wooden stays. The boats were coracles made in the same style the Kelts have made since recorded history began (and some still use in the west of Ireland). No great studies of the mummies were made and they didn’t make much of a splash in Chinese circles until the 1970’s when massive Communist building programs uncovered hundreds of them. All of them were Western in dress and looks. Many had long red hair and they were much taller than the average Chinese person.

These discoveries caused trouble almost from the beginning. That region of China is home to the Uyghurs (pronounced “Wee-gurs”), Muslims who speak a language related to Turkish and Kasakh. They are ethnically different from the Chinese and they have long pushed for their own homeland (or, at least, an autonomous region). They said the mummies were their ancestors and proof that they lived there before the Chinese did. The mummies were all near the Great Silk Road, a road used by traders between China and Europe. It seems that the road was in use a long, long time before we thought it was.

The mummies are so well preserved that Victor Mair (the preeminent American scholar of the mummies) thought at first that they were wax dummies made to fool the locals. Some of the women still have a hint of their original beauty on their faces and that long red or auburn hair is striking. The remains are dated to 4000 years ago — around 2000BC. The more Mair and others studied the mummies, the more Keltic they appeared to be. The clothes, hair, height, the shape of the skulls, and the goods they were buried with were all Keltic or Keltic-like.

The Kelts originated in Central Europe (they were the Galatians whom Paul addressed in one letter) and moved in massive migrations east, west, north, and a bit south. Along the way, they tended to intermarry and, slowly, disappear as a distinct people. They were never one single nation or culture but a polyglot of cultures and tribes with a common ancestry. Thus, we find evidences that indicate some made it the New World while others went into modern day China and Mongolia. Mair and linguists have determined that the mummies spoke and wrote Tocharian, a language that is much more closely related to European languages than it is Asian ones.

DNA studies are being done on the mummies but they have to be done carefully and under intense Chinese governmental scrutiny. Some of the events described by Pringle in Archaeology magazine bring to mind a spy show or thriller as samples are smuggled out or examined under the noses of armed guards. A series of DNA studies have already been completed on 20 mummies indicating they had one male European ancestor and two female ancestors, one European and one Asian. All of the studies indicate a Keltic connection. None show a connection to either ethnic Chinese or Uyghurs. This has angered both Chinese and Uyghur activists but, as Mair says, “I have so many good Uyghur friends, but I’m not going to distort history.”

So… as odd as it sounds that Kelts might have migrated to the New World in significant numbers, it is not unprecedented. They were always a people on the move, spreading their art, religions, cultures, and language with them. They usually didn’t leave behind enough for us to reconstruct their history as they passed, but in the high, dry desert of northwest China, they remain.

Some of you remember that I wrote a blog about my father once entitled “Born Walking.” It’s what the Kelts do.

Next time, I’ll introduce the Keltic source theory for the Adena. Again, I’m not at all sure there is enough evidence to “buy” it, but since Kelts tend to show up in random, far flung places… who knows?

Let’s take a quick break from Hidden History for a few days and let you chew over this. One of my readers and commenters, Dee, is also one of my favorite people. When she asks a question, I figure it is one that others might want to hear answered, too. She noticed that the Adena/Allegheny culture lasted for over 500 years, was widespread, and highly developed but it still vanished. She asked if that could happen to us.

Yes. It has happened to scores of cultures before ours. Some cultures in Asia flourished for over a thousand years and are now completely gone, their temples overgrown and lost, their language lost. We could look a little closer to home and see the same tragic, sudden loss of cultures hundreds of years old and very advanced in architecture, art, language, religion, trade, and exploration: the Olmecs, the Inca, the Aztec… all gone. And I’ve already mentioned more modern day examples such as the Tasmanian tribes who once had poetry, great art, and large cities but devolved into Stone Age tribes with no memory of their former glory by the time Europeans found them.

Could it happen here? I am not sure how much I am allowed to say here so I will scrub this of names. I sat at a table less than two months ago where top men and women in Homeland Security and various agencies whose names are mixtures of three letters of the alphabet discussed threats to our nation, in particular, and to the West in general. One concerned operative approached the table after a fine speech by a high ranking general and former cabinet member and asked that esteemed fellow a question that was very close to this: “You didn’t discuss something I have been wondering about. How about a person who takes a dirty bomb up in a Cessna 152 and climbs to 12,000 feet over, say, Kansas. He detonates the bomb. What effect would that have on our electrical grid?” The general looked at the man and quietly said, “It would go away.” The man was shocked so he asked for more information. “How much would be gone? What, in particular, would go down? For how long?”

The table were unanimous in their response: a man could pack a dirty bomb in something no larger than a good sized backpack (not even the mountain trekker size) and without any tower involvement (no flight plan, no reporting the planned flight to the FAA) fly a rented or stolen airplane over the Midwest and detonate that bomb… and we would be in the dark for six months to three years, minimum. If he got the plane up to 20,000 and had a bigger bomb — say, the size of three backpacks — we would have no internet, no electricity, and no cell service for up to three years. Most personal wealth would be destroyed as it consists of zeros and ones in digital format. It would be wiped. Government records would disappear. Martial law would be declared but communications would be back in the Revolutionary War mode, at least for the first six months. After that time, we might — might — be able to string enough wire around for each city to have one phone powered by old fashioned electrical systems. We wouldn’t quite be cranking the handle to call up Sadie, like Andy Griffith, but we would have to have small power sources all along the wires. It would be a mammoth undertaking because the nation would be in a state of collapse.

Without communications, power, or information sources most of us would be lost. Only those who know how to repair their own tools and home, only those who know how to farm, and only those who can live without reliable heat in the winter or electrical fans or AC in the summer, only those who found their own water and purified it by boiling it, and only those who knew how to treat most illnesses and injuries without modern medicine would survive. And THEY would only survive IF they were armed well enough to protect their food and water from those who didn’t know how to raise or purify their own. We would be a nation of armed gangs, lawless, and without the protections of law enforcement or the Constitution.

Should the bombing be synchronized with other bombs set off above several European and Asia cities, we would all be Afghanistan. No one could come help us. There would be no calvary. In that scenario, we would devolve as fast as the Adena or Olmec people. Someone else would come along and build a civilization eventually. They would wonder what all those old, rusted hard drives meant. They wouldn’t be able to read them so all the literature, business records, and personal stories of the civilization would be lost. A lot of books would survive unless they were exposed to the elements or burned for fuel.

The general turned to the man who asked — now very pale — and told him, “I’m sorry that I had to add a rock to your pack today.” I will say the same to each of you. Still, it should serve as a lesson to all of us — trust in the Lord, not in nations, armies, flags, or money. He will outlast all civilizations, including ours. Our job, according to Ecclesiastes, is to do our work with joy, enjoy our families, and build the cities even though another will take them apart. Read the book again and, this time, don’t look at this as bad news. It really isn’t. It just puts things in perspective.

Can we do anything to prevent this? Other than becoming a police state where all personal privacy and freedom is erased, no. We keep cuddling up to destructive, evil men and regimes and we keep electing criminals, incompetents, and narcissistic imbeciles who promise “bread and the games!” to us just as Roman Senators did to their constituents while the Visigoths approached in the darkness (see: www.thereligionofpeace.com to see why I shudder when our politicians say inane things about Islam being a religion of peace). When our “leaders” openly say that the job of NASA is no longer to explore space but, rather, to make Muslims feel good about their past achievements and when four Supreme Court justices consistently ignore the Bill of Rights… you gotta wonder how long this will last.

I cannot run wires in my house, creating new electrical circuits, installing ceiling fans and outlets. I’ve tried to learn how. I’ve watched it done a dozen times and I’ve read books from the library but… it isn’t happening. I’ve even tried to get a neighbor to help me (RIP) but that turned out to be inadvisable and, most likely, illegal.

So, I understand ignorance. I don’t like it, but I understand it. What I will never understand is voluntary, willful ignorance.

Figures were released recently that, frankly, scare me… and, yet, explain so much about how our nation got into this mess. Over 40% of high school graduates never read another book their entire life. Over 35% of college graduates never read another book their entire life. The only good news is that about 52% of Americans say they sometimes read for pleasure… but that might be one book a year; a summer beach read, perhaps.

When I saw that study I flashed back to a cool morning in West Virginia. We lived on a mountain just outside the wonderful town of Morgantown, a university city just five miles from the border with Pennsylvania. On the mountain was a grade school serving kindergarten through third grade. It met in a couple low, cement block buildings painted white and a scattering of trailers to handle other classes. The teachers had asked if I could bring in some slides of Scotland and show them to the kids (yes, this was in the 90’s and PowerPoint was just starting up. We still used slides and projectors). I not only showed them slides of Scotland but of a host of other countries, too.  The kids listened in wide eyed awe. It was cool.

One of the kids asked me “How did you get to go to all these places?” Remember — many of the adults in this area had never been more than 50 miles from their place of birth. I said, “I read.” When the kids asked what I meant, I said something like this: “If you like to read, you learn things. Those things give you power. People want to meet you. They want to hear you talk. They ask you to come help them with this or that. The more you read, the more you can do anything you want to do.” We talked about that for a half hour or so and I swear I could see light bulbs going off over some of the kids’ heads.

In life, you can choose to be ignorant but — man! — why would you want to be? Why struggle in a bad marriage when there are tons of books that will teach you how to talk to each other and bond in new and better ways? Why get into financial hell when there are books out there by Dave Ramsey and Steve Diggs (to name just two) that show you simple ways to prosper? Why vote in people who will rob you of your labor, step on your liberties, and treat you like dirt when some reading could have shown you their character long before you saw their first hagiographic campaign commercial? Have you seen the “man in the street” interviews with Jay Leno? These people vote, but they don’t read (or think) and that costs all of us.

I know why some people hate reading: teachers. The vast majority of teachers I’ve met in my life were good people who were sincerely interested in their students but that doesn’t mean they were successful at passing on a love for their subject. My wife had a history teacher that killed her love for history. I’ve seen dozens of teens whose love of reading was killed by the way it was made a chore and by the material chosen. My son would bring home his reading assignments when he was in sixth and seventh grade and I shuddered. Instead of all the cool literature out there that would involve a young person’s mind and transport them to new lands and adventures, he had to read bizarre short stories written by a Japanese author I’d never heard of (but the teacher indicated that his lack of fame pretty much proved his importance), poetry by Maya Angelou, and other “important” literature that had no point, no structure, and nothing to hook the reader in. None of his friends liked to read after a year of that (their teacher piled on the reading so it was not only boring, it was a burden). I’m glad Duncan kept reading.

If you don’t like to read, consider what you are losing. You will never travel to distant lands. You will never tap into the thousands of years of human knowledge that are just a page away from you right this very instant. You will never be able to spread the gospel except accidentally. You will never teach a Bible class or, if you do, it will be dull and flat because you can only draw from your experience and not from the collective experience of all who have gone before you.

Yes, it seems odd to rant about this on a blog where regular readers gather… but maybe someone will print this off and read it to a recalcitrant mate. It’s time to read and grow. Maybe you won’t be able to absorb and understand it all (re: electrical wiring) but you will be growing as a person, creating new pathways in the brain (thus postponing Alzheimer’s and some other dementia) and you will be walking away from the self-referential ignorance that has brought us Paris Hilton, Cass Sunstein, Keith Olbermann, Us Weekly magazine.

I have no idea why people don’t travel more to see Adena sites. They aren’t hidden, though many are ignored. Even the keepers of the Official Story agree that the Adena were an incredible people…but I doubt that 5% of Americans even know their name.

Outside Manchester, Tennessee are the remains of a major Adena fortress-city in the mode of Fort Ancient in Ohio. On a mountain top near where the Duck and the Little Duck rivers join, the walls of this enclosure are shockingly long. One wall is 1,394 feet long, another is 1,094 feet. The north wall is — are you sitting down? — 2,116 feet long and it runs perfectly straight. The walls are punctuated at several places by pedestals. A “pedestal” is an opening in the wall flanked by minor mounds. They vary in size from 35 feet to 48 feet in diameter. The walls are six feet tall and surround an enclosure greater than 50 acres. It is thought that the Adena began this construction in 80AD and worked on it, building, adjusting, repairing for another five hundred years. As I write this, America is celebrating 234 years since the Declaration of Independence. Imagine… five hundred years this civilization lived on that mountain and we know next to nothing about it.

The Adena were exceptional people for their time… who am I kidding?… for any time. One skull taken from the C. L. Lewis Stone Mound has teeth in it, one of which is still capped by a metal cap. Yep — dentistry. It wasn’t ornamental; it actually held the tooth in place. Thirteen plates have been found in Adena mounds that are elaborately carved. Traces of pigment on them give us a clue to their use: they were used to temporarily tattoo people, perhaps when they reached a certain age or rank in society. Their pipes were elaborately carved, many times with the figures of dwarves (technically, they suffered from chondrodystrophic dwarfism). Only one skeleton of a dwarf has been found in the mounds. There are lots of theories about why this might be but, truthfully, we know nothing for certain.

These people were the first to settle and raise squash, raspberries, walnuts, sunflowers, pumpkin, and corn as a regular part of their diet. They knew art, music, and societal organization. Some of the Adena had their heads elongated, probably by having boards tied to the sides of their skulls while they were children. It is assumed that these people were patricians or priests of the Adena.

But… where did they come from? Next time…

Happy Birthday, America! I know very few will be reading this over the Fourth of July holiday, but I had a half hour to write so I took advantage of it! I’ve written before of my trip to Moundsville (named, of course, for the mounds the Adena/Allegheny left behind) and, specifically, of the Grave Creek Mound. Seriously, if you have a chance to be in that area — about two hours from Columbus, Ohio and less from Pittsburgh — Moundsville is worth a visit. The Grave Creek Mound is amazing and the museum is fair in its depiction of the different theories concerning the mound, artifacts found in it, etc. Also, across the street is the amazing, imposing, and frankly scary West Virginia Penitentiary. It is now a tourist destination and it ranks right alongside San Quentin for creepiness and cool combined. Search the blog for “Grave Creek” and you’ll find that post.

Miamisburg, Ohio has the largest mound of its type and the locals think it is as dramatic as Grave Creek. Just outside of Dayton, very near the Wright Patterson Air Force Museum (another “must see”), this mound is perched on a 100 foot tall cliff. It is an amazing mound — nearly 70 feet tall with a base circumference of 877 feet. Two burial vaults are in the mound, one on top of the other. Well over 50,000 cubic yards of earth were used to build this mound. These people were not savages — they were artisans, well organized into teams and trades. Under the top 24 feet of soil, archaeologists found that the burial vaults were entirely faced with stone. In other words, a stone pyramid was built first and then covered with 24 feet of soil.

Back in West Virginia, within sight of the gold dome of the capitol building in Charleston, is the smaller town of South Charleston (which really lies west of Charleston, but since it is south of the river…). There once was an impressive city here with mounds extending in a line eight miles along the Kanawha River. The Criel Mound has been saved from agriculture and road building.

Once upon a time, 50+ mounds dotted that line. Some were minor mounds but others rose 35 feet high. The mounds were joined by circular earthworks making it a very impressive — and very large — city. We have a good idea of what it would look like today had we been able to fly over it. Sadly, most of it has been lost — some recently — and drivers along the West Virginia Turnpike or the other interstates that intersect Charleston have no idea that they are driving through a city that was larger, more impressive, cleaner, and more civilized than London when the Romans ruled Britain. Criel Mound remains but even it didn’t escape unscathed: the top was removed to make a judge’s stand so that he could umpire horse races around its base in 1840. Oh. My. Goodness. Still, the Smithsonian actually got off its rear and excavated this mound so we know that it was full of human remains laid out in wheel patterns around the skeleton of a very large man (the Smithsonian no longer publishes his height but it was once recorded as seven feet tall).

Every Native American tribe contacted by the earliest recorded explorers told the same tale about these scores of abandoned cities: someone else built them, from a different tribe. They were tall, strong, and numerous but they moved on. The “who” and “where” are mysteries to this day but we need not resort to fanciful stories of spaceships or Atlanteans. The builders were Asian, by and large. There were some Caucasian bones and artifacts in some mounds but it cannot be denied that the ancestors of the Native American tribes built these mounds. How, then, did the tribes devolve from such organized, cultured levels to the hunter-gatherer tribes found by early Europeans? There are lots of ideas about that and we will get to some of them but, remember, this is not unusual or unheard of. The natives of Tasmania, a large island south of the Australian mainland, were illiterate and barely functioning at the Stone Age level when Europeans found them. However, a quick look around shows that they once wrote extensively, understood mathematics, and lived in organized towns. What happened to them to make their culture devolve is unknown but it is thought to be a combination of warfare, disease, and famine. That’s probably a good guess.

As you go south of the Miamisburg Mound you find the State Park where Fort Ancient is located. It was once part of a string of mound cities and circular moundworks that went 500 miles (you read that right) along the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. Church of Christ kids in the Midwest know Fort Hill well for at its base is a Christian youth camp that has been used for generations. And every week, we make the kids climb that hill!

But why should Ohio and West Virginia have all the fun? Next time, an impressive moundwork from the far flung reaches of the Adena empire… in Tennessee.

This story can only be called appalling… and bizarre. And yet, it is true and easy to check. It once again demonstrated what happens when you find something that doesn’t fit into the Current Accepted Official Story. I thought of this story recently as I drove on a back road through north central Indiana. I spotted a mound in a farmer’s field. The mound had not been studied (90% or so have never been opened) and it showed some signs of leveling due to agriculture. I stopped the car and looked at it for awhile, wondering if the farmer knew what he had. I remembered the story that unfolded in 1939 Ohio and thought, “Maybe it’s just as well…”

Two postmen who worked a route in New Benton (outside of Youngstown), Ohio noticed what they believed was an Indian mound in a farmer’s field. It was an impressive earthwork almost 100 feet long and six feet high on average. They talked the owner of the land, John Malsberry, into allowing some amateur archaeologists (Willis Magrath and Roy Saltsman) from Alliance, Ohio to excavate the mound. No official archaeologists were interested, per usual. Three weeks of careful, documented digging later they uncovered one of the oddest, most amazing finds in American history. Inside the mound were the remains of a circular building 70 feet in diameter, 20 feet tall. There was a stone wall all around the outside of the building; sandstone slabs laid carefully by — most likely — the Adena/Allegheny. Beyond the stone wall were the remains of posts that once encircled the building. They had been burned before the building was buried for reasons we can’t even guess at.

The whole thing was reminiscent of New Grange in Ireland, a massive tomb complex that is now a major tourist attraction. The find in Ohio would never get to that point, though, because it was too far out of the Mainstream Story. The building had a single entrance with a corridor 30 feet long flanked by wooden posts. Inside was a fire pit, a large eagle effigy made out of sandstone sitting on a clay platform (32 by 16 feet), and human remains. A man’s remains were on the left wing of the eagle, a female’s on the right wing. Both were surrounded by offerings of copper, flint, bone, pipes, and jewelry. Two smashed skulls were at the man’s feet, one at the woman’s. What seems to be an altar made of rough, undressed stone was along the wall. Two more rooms were found eventually containing smaller altars and cremains. Then, beyond that, the skeleton of a very large man. Measuring the skull, Magrath said his hat size would have been nine. He stood 6 feet, 10 inches tall. He was much larger than the other skeletons.

The local paper, the Youngstown Vindicator, documented each stage of the excavation including the find of a swastika symbol on one slab. The swastika is a very, very ancient symbol that is still used by many cultures and religions. Hitler ruined it, of course, turning it into a symbol of unimaginable evil. Many eastern religions use it and it appears in ancient European sites repeatedly. I am no expert on symbols and don’t know the whole history of the thing, but finding it in a mound would have been a shocker, I’m sure.

The amateurs realized they were way, way over their heads. They called in a professional, Dr. Richard Morgan of the Ohio State University. He scrupulously documented every find, every photograph, every artifact. He sent detailed reports to the Smithsonian Institute… and they didn’t respond. No matter how hard they tried, they couldn’t get the Washington gurus interested in their find. It was too… odd. It didn’t fit the simple “savages traveled across the Bering Strait and found an empty land nobody had ever seen before” story that politicians relied upon. Universities didn’t get money from the government if they displease the head honchos in Congress, so the Ohio find was ignored… completely. Fact is, a lot of things sent to the Smithsonian never see the light of day again. Sad, but true.

After a year of trying to interest the Smithsonian, Dr. Morgan gave up. He ordered the site recovered to protect it from the crowds that were gathering every day (one actually trod on a skull, destroying it. That was the last straw). Three feet of dirt was piled on top of the site and that is where it stands today. Whoever built this ceremonial center, this incredible burial ground, did it again and again. There are three other known eagle effigy mounds, two in Wisconsin and one in Georgia. Fact is, the one in Georgia is almost an exact copy of the one in North Benton, Ohio. Also unexplained — and perhaps unexplainable — is one artifact found in both: a hollow copper ball. How in the world did they make that?

We’ll never know. Because the Keepers of the Official Story don’t care to find out.