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…