PRIMATIVE AMERICAN ARMOR

[aiontay]

Yes, those giant skeletons were Welsh basketball players that came over with Prince Madoc before they all ended up in the Dakotas....or Atlantean Yuchis.

If you scroll through to the "Warfare" section in this report, you'll find a description of Cree armor: htp://books.google.com/books?id=te4SAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=notes +on+the+Cree#

[pallas]

i wouldent count out the presence of other cultures in the new world before columbus, but thats a barrel of fish for another day..........


the caqiue tuscaloosa who accompanied desoto on part of his journey through alabama was said to be a "giant" and there was another cheif who wouldent meet with desoto and had to be tracked down and forced back to camp who was also described as such...

[aiontay]

I certainly don't discount pre-Columbian contact at all; I fact, I'm throughly convinced it happened, I just doubt that it was that significant, and I was just poking fun at some of the 19th and 21st theories regarding the mound builders. Of more interest to me, and probably of much more significance were the pre-Columbian contacts between the Mound Builders and Central America.

I don't doubt that the miko of Tushka Lusa (there's a good Chickasaw/Choctaw name for you!) was a giant, or at least an exceptional large individual. Large size may not have been accidental either. As an Osage friend once told me when we were discussing the "Big" Osages and the "Little" Osages, the difference in sizes was intentional. That was part of the function of the clan system, which governed marriage. As he put it, they were bred that way.

[celtan]

I'm not sure about the name, but If IIRC phillologist Barry Fell from Buffalo U., wrote an interesting book unambiguously stating that Celt-Iberian mariners left many inscriptions around water bodies in the current US of A.

One of them, IIRC, reportedly translated into: "[We] Mariners of Qadir (today's Cadiz) have reached here"...

That goes well in hand with the Quetzacoatl legends.

Best

M

Originally Posted by pallas

i wouldent count out the presence of other cultures in the new world before columbus, but thats a barrel of fish for another day..........


the caqiue tuscaloosa who accompanied desoto on part of his journey through alabama was said to be a "giant" and there was another cheif who wouldent meet with desoto and had to be tracked down and forced back to camp who was also described as such...

[aiontay]

I read Fell's book America BC years ago. The problem is, he posits not just Celts, but a whole mess of different folks roaming around the US. He wrote another book which claims Scandinavians visited the copper mining regions in the NE USA and Canada and left inscriptions in North African scripts. So how exactly did folks from Sweden learn Berber scripts in the Bronze Age? Plus, all the inscriptions Fell dechiphers in all his books are so terse as to almost be nonsensical. Like I said, I don't doubt there were pre-Columbian crossing of both the Atlantic and the Pacific for that matter. Based on Caesar's descriptions, Celtic tribes in Gaul had the technological abiltiy to get a ship across the Atlantic.

Again though, the question is how significant was the contact? If you believe Fell, there were Celtic horse ranches out on the Plains of Oklahoma in the early Iron Age. Given the speed with which the Plains tribes adopted horses at a later date, why didn't they acquire them in the BC when it would have been just as advantageous?

[fearn]

I've got to sit with Aiontay on this one.

Thing is, we've got enough archeological evidence for things like the spread of the bow and arrow from the Labrador Eskimo around 2000 BCE to down through the Americas, and we've got some evidence of corn spreading out of Central America by around 1000 CE. What we're missing is substantial evidence of technical or biological transfers from the Old World to the New, with the exception of those Chilean chickens and (possibly) Mayan bark pounders. Not great.

Even at L'Anse Aux Meadows (link), we've got good archeological evidence of the Vinland colony, and material from it shows up in Indian archeology sites. But we don't see the Indians learning to make iron tools from the Norse. Ditto with the Norse Greenland settlement.

Similarly, the only good evidence we have for New World to Old World transmission is the sweet potato from south America making its way into Oceania, probably again from Chile. Again, not much.

It's a wonderfully seductive area to theorize in, but with the exception of the sweet potato transferring to Oceania, there was little in the way of definite technology or cultural transfer. Even with millenia of potential contacts, that's kind of a sad result.

Best,

F

[pallas]

i have an interest in the mystery hill site in new hampshire as there are dolmens/cairns and various underground complexes that seem to be "celtic" in nature there.........

[celtan]

There are many interesting theories out there regarding the amount of influence that numbers of individuals can exert on their surroundings.

You need a certain amount of people to exert enough social pressure to cause persistent and observable changes in a society. There's a term for this concept, that I can't remember right now.

Perhaps isolated bands of bands of lost mariners didn't have the critical numbers to be able to influence the native tribes.

There have been found large cemeteries in China with what appears to be celtic remains, and yet, no signs of their presence has been found beyond these...

Vasques, Galicians and Asturian sailors plied the waters of Labrador for centuries, and yet, no signs of their presence is apparent, beyond a few underwater wrecks.

Vikings had a large colony in Galicia, known as Jakobsland. Yet the only remaining signs I ever saw of the vikings (beyond toponymics) was a couple rowing oars. These were over the altar of a forgotten medieval church, lost in the Galician mountains...

The Spanish reached today's Canada (Aca Nada: Nothing here) in their explorations, and yet only a Helm and a breastplate have ever been found, in the silt of a dredged harbour.

So yes, I also believe that there were many, albeit ephemeral visitors to American coasts, long before Erik and Colon.

Just pondering.

Best


M

Originally Posted by fearn

I've got to sit with Aiontay on this one.

Thing is, we've got enough archeological evidence for things like the spread of the bow and arrow from the Labrador Eskimo around 2000 BCE to down through the Americas, and we've got some evidence of corn spreading out of Central America by around 1000 CE. What we're missing is substantial evidence of technical or biological transfers from the Old World to the New, with the exception of those Chilean chickens and (possibly) Mayan bark pounders. Not great.

Even at L'Anse Aux Meadows (link), we've got good archeological evidence of the Vinland colony, and material from it shows up in Indian archeology sites. But we don't see the Indians learning to make iron tools from the Norse. Ditto with the Norse Greenland settlement.

Similarly, the only good evidence we have for New World to Old World transmission is the sweet potato from south America making its way into Oceania, probably again from Chile. Again, not much.

It's a wonderfully seductive area to theorize in, but with the exception of the sweet potato transferring to Oceania, there was little in the way of definite technology or cultural transfer. Even with millenia of potential contacts, that's kind of a sad result.

Best,

F

[fearn]

Hi Celtan,

The weird part, come to think of it, is disease. There's this theory out there that the Americas were largely depopulated in the 16th Century by epidemic diseases introduced from Europe. Actually, it's a bit more than a theory...

So...I guess everyone before the Conquistadors who made it to America was perfectly healthy. Now there's a weird thought. Did ships get that much faster after 1492? Fast enough, I mean, to bring infectious people to the New World.

F