Archaeology Fantasies

Transoceanic Mammoths Caught In Stone.

Posted on January 30, 2017 by ArchyFantasies

img_20170130_094244_processed-01

The fourth article in The Lost History of Ancient America is titled ‘Eyewitness Engraving of Ancient American Mammoths’ written by Frank Joseph.

It appears at first to be a puzzling article choice, as it seems to have nothing to do with transoceanic travelers or providing evidence of Europeans in America before Columbus. Joseph spends a good deal of the article filling it with ad hominem attacks, emotional appeals, and a strange Internet argument he had with a skeptic on Wikipedia.

The apparent main argument of the article is that woolly mammoths were either still alive at the time of Paleo-Indians, or later descendant tribes preserved ancestral memories of woolly mammoths and made carvings of them that have lasted to modern-day. The articles kinda flip-flops between these two arguments never really settling on either. It also doesn’t try to outright explain what this has to do with cultural diffusion or transoceanic travelers, the reader is expected to already understand the connection. Joseph does use some academic sources and footnotes to cite with, and it’s these sources that show how these ‘mammoth’ images link to transoceanic travelers.

For a bit of background, The woolly mammoth died out in the Americas roughly 13,000 years ago. This was roughly 1,000 years after the first appearance of humans on the continent. It also corresponds with the extinction of a lot of the megafauna in the Americas, as we’ve discussed before. Does this mean humans killed off the woolly mammoth, or was it climate change? We’re still not 100% sure, but I’m willing to bet it was a little of both.

That said, there is known overlap of humans and mammoths in the Americas. One major site demonstrating this is the very site Joseph opens with, the Old Vero Site. There, hundreds of human and megafauna bones, including mammoth bones, have been found in association to each other.

Joseph mentions one of the more accepted finds, made by fossil hunter James Kennedy sometime in 2007. He reportedly found a bone fragment that had an incised image of what appears to be a mammoth on it (Rawls 2009). This find has been tested by a variety of methods, and though none are completely conclusive, it is relatively accepted that the Vero Bone is both authentic and roughly about 13,000 years old. This puts it squarely inside a known time period of human and mammoth coexistence.

Joseph references an article written by Randolph E. Schmid, and spends the better part of his own article repeating everything Schmid wrote. This is a repeated tactic that is noticeable in the other articles in Lost History, where an entire entry in the volume is really just a book report of an article written somewhere else. Usually an internet source, or some small, unverified publication.

However, it’s in Schmid’s article from the Huffington Post (2011) that makes the link between Joseph’s article and the overall topic of this section.

“The newly found North American image is similar to some found in Europe, raising the question of whether this is merely coincidence or evidence of some connection between the two, the paper noted.

Stout said the suggestion that the similarities between this and ancient European art might imply some cultural contact or movement of people across the Atlantic very early is controversial. That idea has previously been proposed by Stanford and others, but has attracted a lot of criticism and skepticism from other archaeologists, he said.” (Schmid 2011)

So the implication here, that we really had to dig to find, is that since the mammoth images in America look like those in some European sites, that is evidence of transoceanic travel and cultural diffusion. This claim took some digging, and it’s part of a larger trend from the book. There is a conversation going on among the fringe, and this book is like eavesdropping in random moments. There is a nuance that is lost on the causal observer when reading this book. Often the reader is expected to understand what is being said with no attempt to explain.

After presenting us with an actual artifact that already fits nicely into the understood archaeological timeline, Joseph tries to present us with further evidence. If his stated argument for this article is to convince us that humans and mammoths existed at the same time, he’s already done so. If his actual argument is to convince us that mammoth images are the result of transoceanic cultural diffusion, his examples leave a lot to desire.

Joseph presents us with five more examples of mammoth images, some more credible than others. First is the Holly Oak artifact.

1889_hollyoak

Very briefly, the Holly Oak artifact follows along a familiar storyline that we here at this blog recognize as evidence of a non-artifact.

Hilborne T. Cresson, an archaeological assistant at Harvard’s Peabody Museum, presented what would become the Holly Oak artifact in 1889. He claimed to have found the engraved shell pendant some 25 years earlier while out for a walk with his then music teacher. Said music teacher was himself a student of archaeology who had studied directly under Eduard Lartet, the archaeologist credited with finding an engraved mammoth tusk at La Madeleine, France in 1864. The images on the tusk and the pendant were strongly reminiscent of each other, and due to this and the dubious discovery story, the pendant wasn’t widely accepted as an authentic artifact.

This would have been the end of it but for a revival of the artifact in 1976, when J.C. Kraft and R.A. Thomas published a paper in Science arguing that the pendant was genuine. This new announcement was quickly challenged (Meltzer and Sturtevant 1985, Lewin 1988, Griffen et al 1988) and more reasons for the artifact to be fraudulent were brought forward. A few reasons being that the orientation of the image on the pendant in relation to the boreholes was inconsistent with other known examples and the radiocarbon analysis of the shell placed it around 885 CE. much too late to be old enough to be authentic (Meltzer and Sturtevant 1985).

As it stands today, the Holly Oak artifact is not seen as an authentic artifact.

Joseph then offers up the Lenape Stone.

495px-lenape_stone

Ken Feder covers the Lenape stone, another gorget style pendant, fairly well in his 2011 book Encyclopedia of Dubious Archaeology: From Atlantis to the Walam Olum. He points out that Mammoths probably went extinct in North America about 10,000 years ago, while most gorgets, like the Lenape stone found in other sites are less than 2,000 years old. Beyond that, the discovery of the stone is suspect. There is no proper documentation, other artifact of a similar style were found on the site, the stone was supposedly cleaned harshly rendering any testing impossible, lastly is the carving on the stone itself (Feder 2011). The Lenape stone was discovered in two pieces, and these two pieces appear to have been carved separately and do not line up (Feder 2011). It’s most likely that the stone was carved after it was broken and was carved in a way as to mimic the other actual artifacts found in the area.

Joseph offers up a suggestion that the stone used to make the gorget might have been selected because of the mammoth carving already being on it (Joseph 2017). This suggestion ignores that the actual artifacts that present a similar style only date to 2,000 years ago or that the carving doesn’t line up.

Joseph tries to use the tired old trope of “A simple farm boy would not have been capable of perpetrating a hoax (Joseph 2017)”. It’s a paradox that the fringe sets up for themselves. The claim that no simple man could do such a fraud is counter to the unspoken fringe idea that the common man can do complicated archeology and analysis.

Needless to say, the Lenape stone is not an accepted authentic artifact.

Joseph then offers up the Jacob’s Cavern Bone.

jacobsbonemastodon

Joseph offers up a 1952 article by Ludwell H. Johnson published in The Scientific Monthy called “Men and Elephants in America”. What little I can get of the article (it’s behind a paywall) seems to show Johnson in favor of the Jacob’s Cavern Bone being authentic. Joseph even uses a lengthy quote from Johnson’s paper, which taken out of context, appears to show that Johnson is arguing for the age of the deer bone to be around the age of 14,000 years (Joseph 2017). What can’t be clear at this point is if Johnson went on to argue that the bone and the carving are both related and authentic.

It’s important to note here, that even though the bone itself might be 14,000 years old, that has no bearing on the age of the carving. No explanation of the age of the carving is offered by Joseph either.

Michael Fuller, professor emeritus of anthropology, brings up this point as well (Fuller 2007), making a note that the image typically interpreted as a mastodon doesn’t fit known examples of such from other Paleo-Indian and Archaic sites in Missouri (Fuller 2007). Honestly, the carving looks like many things, the least of which is a mastodon or mammoth. I am inclined to agree with Fuller, and a great many others, that though the bone itself is old, the carving is not. The Jacob’s Cavern Bone is not a viable artifact.

Joseph then bring up the Moab Mammoth petroglyph, particularly one that does look a lot like some kind of long nosed beast.

mammoth1

This petroglyph is real, can be seen by anyone who hikes out to Utah, and isn’t disputed by anyone as being an authentic image. Whether or not it’s a Mammoth is another thing, probably it’s not. I say this because it’s a whimsical image, with an undefined body, long trunk, and four distinct toes on each foot, but Mammoth’s were not known to be in Utah.

This is image #2 that is authentic that Joseph has mentioned. Two out of six.

The final bit of evidence that Joseph offers up is the Lake Michigan Sunken Petroglyph, aka, Lake Michigan Stonehenge. It’s also referred to as a variety of other things, depending on who’s looking at it. Lake Michigan has been accused of hiding everything from sunken pyramids to Masonic symbols. Needless to say there is no actual evidence supporting any of these claims, and so this is not reliable.

Joseph makes an effort to use various Native American myths to support his idea of ancestral memory. This is a murky area to wander into at best. Oral histories can be filled with historical retellings, exaggerated facts, or just plain ‘ol entertaining stories. As an outsider, it’s difficult to impossible to discern one from the next. When anthropologists interact with a native culture and their oral traditions, we try not to interpret what we are told. We accept the information given to us and leave the interpretation to the culture that created it. Taking oral traditions out of context can create a slew of issues, much like removing an artifact from it’s context. Doing what Joseph does in his article is one such issue.

Joseph tries to reinterpret the various myths he has cherry picked to be proof of an ancestral memory of Mammoths. These cannot be convincing evidence as they are basically appropriation of native American oral traditions to try to prove a fringe theory.

Summary:

Once we do a bit of digging we find the connection between this article and the theme of section one.

Joseph is making the argument that since the mammoth images in America look like those in some European sites, that is evidence of transoceanic travel and cultural diffusion. He does this by obfuscating it in the twin theories that man coexisted at the same time as Mammoths (we already known this to be true) and that younger images of Mammoths were made due to reverence of ancestral memory.

The article tries but falls short of proving either the major argument or the later theory because the evidence offered is made up mostly of fake artifacts. Of the six presented, two are accepted as real, the rest have either been debunked or are not accepted as authentic.

This article is the last in section one, and like the others, provides little reason to believe the argument that the Americas were visited by Pre-columbian transoceanic travelers.

If you’d like to support this blog, consider donating on Patreon or PayPal under ArchyFantasies@gmail.com
Want more on this topic? Go to: ArchyFantasies Reviews – The Lost History of Ancient America.
Comment below or send an email to ArchyFantasies@gmail.com.

Resources:

Feder, Kenneth L.
2011 Encyclopedia of Dubious Archaeology: From Atlantis to the Walam Olum. ABC-CLIO/Greenwood. p. 159.

Fuller, Michael
2007 Jacob’s Cavern , 23MD149. Webpage prepared by Professor Michael Fuller, 2 October 2007 http://users.stlcc.edu/mfuller/jacob’scavern.html. Retrived 1/30/17

Griffin, James B. , David J. Meltzer, Bruce D. Smith and William C. Sturtevant.
1988 A Mammoth Fraud in Science. American Antiquity. Vol. 53, No. 3 (Jul., 1988), pp. 578-582 Published by: Society for American Archaeology DOI: 10.2307/281218. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/281218 https://www.jstor.org/stable/281218. Retrived 1/30/17

Johnson, Ludwell H.
1952 Men and Elephants in America. The Scientific Monthly Vol. 75, No. 4 (Oct., 1952), pp. 215-221 Published by: American Association for the Advancement of Science Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20754 https://www.jstor.org/stable/20754?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents Retrived 1/30/17

Kraft, J.C. & R.A. Thomas.
1976 “Early Man at Holly Oak, Delaware”. Science 192(4241): 756-761. (May 21, 1976). http://science.sciencemag.org/content/192/4241/756 DOI: 10.1126/science.192.4241.756 Retrived 1/30/17

Lewin, R.
1988 “Mammoth Fraud Exposed”. Science vol 242(issue 4883): pg 1246. (Dec 2., 1988). http://science.sciencemag.org/content/242/4883/1246 DOI: 10.1126/science.242.4883.1246 Retrived 1/30/17

Meltzer, D.J. & W.C. Sturtevant.
1985 “The Holly Oak Pendant.” Science 227(4684): 242 + 244 + 246. (Jan 18, 1985). http://science.sciencemag.org/content/227/4684/242 DOI: 10.1126/science.227.4684.242 Retrived 1/30/17

Schmid, Randolph E.
2011 13,000-Year-Old Bone With Mammoth Or Mastodon Carving May Be First In Western Hemisphere 06/22/2011 12:20 pm ET | Updated Aug 22, 2011 AP/The Huffington Post. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/22/mammoth-mastodon-bone-carving-florida-photo_n_882177.html. Retrived 1/30/17

Categories: ArchyFantasy Reviews, The Lost History of Ancient America, Uncategorized | Tags: Ancient America, Holly Oak artifact, Jacob’s Cavern Bone, Lake Michigan Sunken Petroglyph, Lenape Stone, Moab Mammoth petroglyph, Old Vero Site, transoceanic travelers, Wooly Mammoths | 1 Comment

Bast Worshiping Hopewellian Egyptians in Pre-Columbian Ancient America.

Posted on January 23, 2017 by ArchyFantasies

img_20170119_143207_processed-01

Our third chapter in in the Lost History of Ancient America edited by Frank Joseph is an article titled Egyptian Style Cat Burial in Illinois written by Professor Julia Patterson (1931-2015). I can find nothing about Professor Patterson professionally, and other than this article in the edited volume, I can’t find anything else she may have written. She is presented in the book as a former professor of archeology and anthropology at London College and the University of Illinois, Urbana (Joseph 2017:17). So I would expect to find something with her name on it. I have nothing to compare this article too as far as her writing style. If anyone has anything they can share about Professor Patterson with me, it would be appreciated.

The article sufferers from the shortcomings of a lot of the other articles in this volume. There are exactly two footnotes in the article and they both refer to a magazine article in Science from 2015 written by David Grimm. Beyond that there are no citations, footnotes or otherwise, and the actual site is never referenced nor is the actual paper about the site. I find this strange as an academic, especially in the field of archeology working at a university or college, would have had access to the site report. Another slight anomaly is that the volume indicates that Patterson passed away in 2015, which is the same year that both the paper and the article about the site were published. It’s a quick turn-around, not impossible, just quick.

The article begins with a description of a site in St. Louis, Missouri. This is the Elizabeth Site, a 2000 year old Hopewell mound site. The article then makes an incredible claim:

“The Hopewell were a mound builder people of far-flung Traders and skilled Artisans who florist from Circa 600 BCE to their extermination at the hands of Native American tribes by 400, CE. (Patterson 2017)” (emphasis added)

There’s a great deal wrong with this statement. To start, ‘Hopewell’ refers to a culture movement that began around 200 B.C.E It encompasses a large group of Native American tribes, not a single people. Hopewell culture stretched from as far North as Michigan, as far South as Florida, as fear West as Nebraska and all the way to Virginia. The Hopewell center of culture appears to be in Ohio with its impressive Mound City, and Newark Earthworks, and Serpent Mound. Hopewell sites share artistic traditions along with their mound building skills. They also maintained an impressively large trading network taking advantage of the large waterways they routinely built their bigger settlements along. Sometime around 350-400 C.E the Hopewell tradition began to decline. There’s no clear reason for this, but several factors appear to play into the decline:

“Little is known about why Hopewell mound-building ended, either about AD 200 in the lower Illinois Valley, and about AD 350-400 in the Scioto river valley. There is no evidence of failure, no evidence of widespread diseases or heightened death rates: basically, the smaller Hopewell sites simply aggregated into larger communities, located away from the Hopewell heartland, and the valleys were largely abandoned. (Hurst 2016)”

“Around 400 A.D Hopewell culture began to decline for an unknown reason. Archaeologists hypothesize is that there was a cultural collapse within the communities, as the succeeding settlements showed signs of a large-scale societal transition to larger, permanent, more isolated communities. Also, technological developments — including the introduction of the bow and arrow — made for a shift in hunting, gathering, and war, which may have forced Hopewell societies to become more secluded for survival. Earthen mounds became less prominent and the trading routes diminished in this period; but the legacy of the Hopewell cultures can still be seen today. (OHC N.d)”

There is no evidence to support the article’s claim that ‘The Hopewell’ were wiped out by ‘Native Americans’. Most likely the Hopewell culture simple did as all culture movements do, and simple evolved and was absorbed into other culture groups around them. Spawning new traditions that then continue the pattern of one culture evolving from another.

However, this opening statement by the article set up the actual argument the article is trying to make. That the Hopewell, were not Native Americans, but some other culture that was either influenced or directly descended from Ancient Egypt. The article tries to defend this by using the unusual burial of a bobcat kitten.

The burial in question is known as Burial 22 (Perri et. al. 2015), and was originally marked as a ‘canid skeleton’ by the original excavators. It wasn’t until Angela R. Perri, Terrance J. Martin, & Kenneth B. Farnsworth reexamined the remains that they discovered the classification error.

“The burial did not appear to represent the ritual sacrifice of an animal but instead paralleled the mortuary treatment of humans from the mound, with care taken to position the remains and to include grave goods. (Perri et. al. 2015)”

Perri et. al. (2015) did an extensive look at the bobcat, and found some interesting things. One such detail that the article focuses on is the necklace found with the bobcat kitten.

“The only available plan-view photograph taken during the excavation that exposed Burial 22 indicates that the fully articulated animal was placed on its left side with its head oriented northeast (Figure 8) and was not associated with any human remains. Burial pits were not observed for any of the burials (human or felid) on the ramp extension. Two carved bone pendants and four shell beads were found posterior to the front legs and positioned in the area of the animal’s chest in an arrangement that suggested to the excavators a necklace or collar (Charles, Leigh, and Albertson 1988:165; Leigh and Morey 1988:281). (Perri et. al. 2015)”

“Included on the bobcat’s necklace (Figures 8 and 9) was a pair of effigy carnivore canine teeth that were carved from mammal bone. (Perri et. al. 2015)”

“The bulbous outline is more reminiscent of a black bear (Ursus americanus) canine than a canine from a canid or felid. The Elizabeth Mound 7 bobcat and a domesticated dog from the habitation site of Dickson Camp (Fulton County) (Cantwell 1980:484) are the only two Illinois Hopewellian animals known to have been buried with bear-canine or bear canine-effigy pendants. (Perri et. al. 2015)”

The article concludes with important, and cautious observations about what this burial means to the archaeological record:

“Nevertheless, the bobcat appears to have survived long enough for the inhabitants of the Elizabeth site to form an attachment that merited an elaborate burial in a sacred mound: the first and only of its kind known. The inclusion of grave goods commonly found in human burials, which have been strung into an apparent necklace (see Figure 1), further alludes to a close bond. Elizabeth Mound 7 Burial 22 is the only decorated wild cat burial known from the prehistoric archaeological record. Though the burial of an individual bobcat is not evidence for domestication, the Elizabeth Mound 7 bobcat burial enhances our understanding of the relationship between prehistoric people and wild cats, revealing strong evidence for the taming of at least some early felids in the Americas. (Perri et. al. 2015)”

Yet the conclusion that the article pulls from all this is a massive, unsubstantiated leap.

“It had been adorned with a necklace reminiscent of ancient Egyptian representations of Bast. (Patterson 2017)”

Bast aka Bastet, an Egyptian cat headed goddess whose history is more evidence of cultural evolution. What she doesn’t have, is any evidence of connection to this bobcat burial. Unlike what the article argues.

The author of the article makes very little effort to actually connect the two things as well. We move from talking about the bobcat burial to talking about unrelated cat burials and mummifications in Egypt, most of which predate the Elizabeth site by almost 3000 years. The author attempts to create an argument that since Egyptian households often mourned the loss of a cat, that this bobcat burial, showing signs of being an ‘elaborate burial’, must be the same thing.

The problem here is, we don’t know why the bobcat was buried. Remember, there are no human burials in relation to it and no other grave goods beyond the necklace. It is not, as the article will have you believe (Patterson 2017), in relation to one of the infant burials from the same site (Perri et. al. 2015). So the article’s divergence into some idea that Bast is a goddess of childbirth and there for the bobcat is somehow a representation of her protecting the infant (which is only one of several infant/child burials at the site) is a major leap of logic.

The article then sums up it’s original argument thusly:

“These comparisons join a vast body of complementary evidence acclimated on behalf of a pharaonic influence at work in pre-Columbian America. At very least, they suggest that, although the Hopewell or not themselves transplanted Egyptians, they were none the less inheritors of cultural legacies left behind by visitors from the Nile Valley to our continent during prehistory. (Patterson 2017)”

There is simply no evidence to support this, and the article doesn’t provide any either.

Summary:

There are no citations beyond an already reduce popular science article that is hardly a complete report of the findings of Perri et. al. Grimm’s (2015) article does a fine job of breaking down the work that Perri et. al. did into a brief snapshot, but it shouldn’t be used a the entire basis of an article attempting to do what this article is. What’s more confusing is the lack of use of the actual work of Perri et. al. and their published findings, which are as available as Grimm’s article. There was a clear choice made here, and the one made is confusing coming from a professional archaeologist. I have a personal theory here, but will keep it to myself as I have nothing to back it up just yet.
The underlying statement that ‘The Hopewell’ were somehow not Native American and were subsequently destroyed by ‘The Native Americans’ is simply wrong. To continue to try and support this narrative of non-native cultures being the actual creators of Native American culture is insulting and damming. With this being the third articles in the Lost History book, the actual agenda of this edited volume is quite clear, and it’s not friendly.
Lastly, the jump from Hopewell bobcat kitten burial to Bast worship is unfounded and unsupported. Beyond the article simply telling us that’s what we should believe, it provided no evidence to support this. There are no identifiable similarities between the burial and Egyptian cat mummifications, just as there are no similarities between Hopewell culture and Egyptian culture.

This article is not an article I would have selected to help support an argument of pre-Columbian, transoceanic trailers coming to America. It has far too many flaws to overlook, and offerers no actual evidence of anything. It’s more like reading a book-report on a magazine article than anything resembling actual academic research. It’s a strange choice, and not a helpful one for Frank Joseph’s arguments.

References:

Grimm, David
2015 Ancient bobcat buried like a human being . Science Magazine Online. July 2, 2015. http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/07/ancient-bobcat-buried-human-being
Retrieved 1/10/17

Hurst, K. Kris
2016 Hopewell Culture – North America’s Mound Building Horticulturalists. About.com. January 09, 2016. http://archaeology.about.com/od/athroughadterms/g/adena.htm. Retrieved 1/10/17

Joseph, Frank
2017 The Lost History of Ancient America. Edited Volume. The Career Press. Wayne, NJ.

Ohio History Central (OHC)
N.d Hopewell Culture. http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/w/Hopewell_Culture. Retrieved 1/10/17

Patterson, Julia
2017 The Lost History of Ancient America. Edited Volume by Frank Joseph. The Career Press. Wayne, NJ.

Perri, Angela R., Terrance J. Martin & Kenneth B. Farnsworth.
2015 A Bobcat Burial and Other Reported Intentional Animal Burials from Illinois Hopewell Mounds. Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology. Volume 40, Issue 3. Pages 282-301 | Published online: 01 Jul 2015 http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1179/2327427115Y.0000000007. Retrieved 1/10/17

Categories: Uncategorized | 7 Comments

New Patreon Only Content Coming In February!

Posted on January 20, 2017 by ArchyFantasies

img_20170119_223350_processed-01

I’ve been tossing this idea around for a while, and with the success of the podcast I’m interested to see how well this will work out.

Recently, I’ve been playing around with the idea of an Audio Blog. Nothing fancy really, just me literally reading the blog posts. Maybe a little background music, but no real embellishments. When I suggested this to the Facebook page, they were excited about the idea. Many people commented that listening to podcasts and audiobooks is a growing pastime, and that they would enjoy hearing the blog on top of (on instead of) reading the blog.

I’ve done a few test recordings, and found that the resulting episodes are about 10 to 15 min in length. They’re quick to record and have forced me to look at my older posts and correct or expand. So there’s that.

What I have decided to do is make these Audio-blogs available to my Patreon supporters first. I’m thinking about making them available to everyone later down the road, but I want my Patreon folks to get something unique as a thanks for their support.

So if you are interested in this new content, you can get access to it easily by joining my Patreon page and pledging a small amount, or more if you’re feeling generous! And if you’re already a Patreon patron, get ready in February for what I think will be fun and cool new content.

Categories: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Welsh Indians and Lewis’ Murder: America Unearthed S1Ep 9.

Posted on January 18, 2017 by ArchyFantasies

screenshot_20170113-205135-01-01

As with previous blog posts in this series, I’m going to summarize things at the bottom for you to make following all the claims in the show easier, but I’m driven to break this down. If you don’t want to read the whole post just skip to ‘In Summary’ at the bottom. Don’t be surprised, though, if you ask me a question, I refer you to read the whole post first.

Despite the horror film introduction and the warning of the graphic nature of the imagined suicide/murder of Meriwether Lewis, this show isn’t actually about any of that. The actual premises of the show is a buried a bit and is a little hard to swallow.

The apparent premise of the episode is that Meriwether Lewis, of Lewis and Clark fame, was killed to keep secret the truth of the things he found out while investigating the American frontier.

Now, there is a bit of a controversy on how and why Lewis died on his trip up the Natchez Trace. Many historians agree that Lewis killed himself during a depressive episode, and this news appearers to have made sense to close friends of Lewis’ at the time (SHSND 2017). However, the Lewis family insisted it must have been murder, but no inquest into the possible murder ever apparently happened. This is all compounded by the three conflicting stored from the night of Lewis’ death by attributed to Mrs. Grinder, the innkeeper where Lewis was staying at the time of his death.

There are even newer claims that Lewis was neither killed nor committed suicide, but rather died of malaria. This newer idea is outlined by co-authors Thomas Danisi and John Jackson, who explain this theory in their book, “Meriwether Lewis: A New Biography.” Published in 2009 (Hansen 2009). This particular theory, though not particularly popular among historians, isn’t completely discounted by the State Historical Society of North Dakota (SHSND):

“It should be noted, however, that there is the possibility that Lewis suffered from malaria, a disease that is known, in its later stages, to cause forms of dementia and erratic behavior.” (SHSND 2017)

Wolter does a good job of keeping up the ruse that this is the premise of the episode. We get a graphic recreation of Lewis’ death, we get a brief story about Lewis and Louisiana purchase, and we meet Wolter’s friend, Don Shelby who has some nice first editions books. One such book appears to be Lewis’ notebook from his expedition.

old-book

It’s around here that we start to veer from the apparent topic. Shelby tells us that Lewis and Clark didn’t record everything they saw on the trip. He claims there are missing pages from the journals, and no one knows what’s in them. But there could have been something that someone would want Lewis dead to keep secret!

So far this is in keeping with the apparent episode premise. Then Shelby drops a huge hint on us. He tells us that Lewis and Clark were instructed by President Jefferson to look for evidence of pre-Columbian Welsh in the Louisiana Purchase.

So here’s the interesting part about this bit of information. Jason Colavito on his blog took it upon himself to search through and read all of the Jefferson papers at the Library of Congress, the Monticello Museum, the New York Historical Society, and all of the existing correspondence to and from Lewis about the expedition (thanks for that BTW). What he came up with is a lot different from the prevailing story out there, bolstered no doubt by this show. Colavito comes up with an explanation that is a lot more rational.

“Jefferson wrote to Lewis on January 22, 1804 his only mention of Welsh Indians:

““In that of the 13th inst. I inclosed [sic] you the map of a Mr. Evans, a Welshman, employed by the Spanish government for that purpose, but whose original object I believe had been to go in search of the Welsh Indians, said to be up the Missouri. On this subject, a Mr. Rees of the same nation, established in the Western parts of Pennsylvania, will write to you.”” (Jefferson 1804)

Note that Jefferson is either uncertain or unconcerned whether Evans had been in search of Welsh Indians. Instead, his concern is to get Lewis a useful map that will help the expedition. It is reasonable to conclude from this letter that in order to obtain the map, Jefferson agreed to let Rhys write to Lewis about his pet subject, the Welsh Indians. However, Jefferson doesn’t seem at all interested in the subject, and is content to let Rhys write under his own name (i.e. unofficially) about any such inquiry.” (Colavito 2013)

Colavito then points out that neither Lewis nor Clark ever wrote about Welsh Indians in their journals. That was done by Joseph Whitehouse in his own journals that he apparently intended to publish (Colavito 2013). Whitehouse (1805a, 1805b) only mentions them twice and uses the descriptor of ‘Welch [sic]’ to explain their difficult language. Whitehouse makes no effort to express extraordinary interest in the group, or even to point out how these Natives were different from others they encountered beyond saying how nice they were (Whitehouse 1805a, 1805b).

I’ve read the above-mentioned letter from Jefferson (1804), and clearly, Jefferson is not telling Lewis to look for anything. He seems to be informing Lewis of why Mr. Evans has a map of the Missouri, and never mentions it again. Hardly a direct, or secretive, order to look for mysterious Welsh Indians.

So at this point you could be forgiven if you think that the premise of this episode is that Meriwether Lewis was murdered in order to keep the secret that there were Welsh Indians living in the Louisiana Purchase. You’d almost be correct too. Almost.

au-s1e9-brandenburg-inscrition

The show takes us to Brandenburg, KY to meet with Gerry Fischer, a retired archaeologist. He is there to present us with a new stone to add to our collection. This one is the Brandenburg Stone, and the show would have us believe it’s a land claim written in Welsh. Fischer tells us that it’s been translated by professionals, but doesn’t say who, and that he believes it’s real. Wolter is all about this stone, and tells us, that if the stone is real, then it will call into question the legitimacy of the US.

No, it really wouldn’t, it would have no discernible effect at all, but we need a little drama, so…

Wolter’s Ah-Ha moment is that the Welsh made it to America first and left this land claim stone, thereby giving them true sovereignty over the America’s. Also, that Lewis found this out through his interactions with the Welsh Indians and was killed to keep this a secret so that North America could stay firmly in the hands of the new US government. Native Americas need not apply for ownership of America, Europeans only.

And now you have the actual premises of the episode. Hidden in the attention grabbing murder mystery, is the claim that the Welsh were the first transoceanic travelers to make it to the Americas, interbred with the Native Americans they found here, and somehow that makes them the true inheritors of the Americas. Wolter and the show never come out and say this in plain English, but the claim is clear there once you realize what is being said.

The problem with this claim is that it requires two things to be true. One, that the Brandenburg Stone is authentic (it’s not) and two, that the Welsh Indians are a real people (they are not).

Wolter spends the next third of the episode trying to convince us that the stone is authentic, doing his usual “I can tell the carving is old, because reasons” routine followed by his “if I can find similar stone in the area, then it must be true!” shtick.

wolter-looking-at-rock

He tries to make a big deal out of the Oolitic limestone that the stone appears to be carved from, implying that finding similar limestone in the area somehow makes the Brandenburg Stone real. Problem with this is that according to the Kentucky Geological Survey, 50% of the surface rocks in Kentucky are limestone. There’s so much of it, that Kentucky actually exports it for use in road surfacing and making concrete. Basically, it’d be more impressive if Wolter didn’t find limestone.

As for authenticating the stone via carving. I have always had issues with Wolter’s 3D scanning magic that he never really explains or seems to understand. When I see the pictures of the scans, tool marks always look sharp and fresh to me, but Wolter always says they are eroded and weathered. And that’s assuming we even get to see the actual images and not just some weird, fast rotating 3D topo map that could possibly be anything from a ditch to a scratch mark. I know a little about 3D imaging, I don’t like what I see on this show.

All that said, it’s all basically irrelevant because of the alphabet used to create the message on the stone. According to Jon Whitfield, Baram Blackett, and Alan Wilson, the script on the stone is called Coelbren or Coelbren y Beirdd. It’s a Welsh script that supposedly shares characteristics with other ancient scripts like Etruscan, Pelasgian, and Nordic runes (Pennington 2012). The problem is that it’s fairly well documented that Coelbren is a made up language from the 1790’s (Museum of Wales N.d.). Edward Williams aka Iolo Morganwg created the runic-like language and claimed it was a druidic script (McCulloch 2010).

But to bring the show back around to what it was pretending to be about, we head out to Natchez Trace, Hohenwald, TN meet with Meriwether Lewis descendant, Keith Vanstone. Vanstone is also a proponent of exhuming Lewis’ body to have it examined by modern forensics to better determine the cause of death (Vanstone 2009, VOA 2010). This knowledge makes Wolter’s later suggesting to exhume Lewis’ body seem less shocking. However, the show doesn’t mention this so it just sounds like Wolter is being a ghoul on the show. Not sure what the reason for this editing decision was, but it was a bad one IMO.

Since we can’t dig up a 200-year-old American hero, we do the next best thing and examine the monument erected over the general area of his grave. Wolter acts surprised when he sees a Masonic grave symbol on the monument. Somehow this is a sign of a deeper conspiracy, as always. It’s not a secret that Lewis was a Mason, nor should it be surprising to anyone who knows history well. It would honestly be more surprising to me to find out that Lewis wasn’t a Mason, since pretty much every male of any public standing was in the 1800’s.

Vanstone mentions that Lewis’ Masonic apron supposedly has his blood on it and Wolter gets a new idea. If he can’t dig up Lewis, maybe he can test the blood on the apron and that would somehow prove there was a struggle. This isn’t how forensics works, but that’s not going to slow Wolter down.

We jet off to the Grand Masonic Lodge in Halana, MT. to meet Ried Gardiner, Masonic Grand Secretary and curator of the museum at the Lodge, and Thom Chisholm – Masonic grand Master of Montana. They show us Lewis’ very decorative apron. They tell us that there are traces of human and deer blood on it and that it has been tested before. They were not pleased with the former testing and that makes them reluctant to allow Wolter to test the apron now.

tjs-apron

To his credit, Wolter is very nice and patient with the Masons, and they eventually agree to let him take swab samples.

While we wait for the DNA lab to get us results, Wolter talks with Don Shelby again. We get a translation from the stone;

“Toward strength (to promote unity), divide the land we are spread over, purely (or justly) between offspring in wisdom.”

Wolter decides this is a land deed, it sounds like gibberish to me. To be fair, most of the translations that this show produces sounds like gibberish to me. Shelby then explains the whole Coelbren being a fake language to which Wolter replies;

“Just because this isn’t real, doesn’t mean the Welsh weren’t here.”

Well, yah, it kinda does.

Wolter brings up John Dee again and suggests that he might be the originator of the whole Welsh in America thing. He pretty much admits there is no way to know if any of this is true.

So we end the episode in a DNA lab where the swabs Wolter took have been tested and we’re ready for the results. We meet Stephen Fratpietro, the forensic examiner. He tells us that none of the blood on the apron matches Lewis’, but there appear to be two individuals represented by the stains. He tries to explain that this could be a case of contamination.

Wolter’s not hearing any of it and begins to explain to everyone in the room how important a Manson’s apron is to him, and how a Mason would never have a dirty apron. Therefore the blood would have to have been deposited the night of the murder. He pulls his; “That’s all that makes sense to me!” thing that he does and begins to fabricate a story about how this supports his original idea that Lewis was murdered in order to keep the knowledge that the Welsh discovered America first secret. Everyone else in the room tries not to look uncomfortable, and we cut away to recap pictures and Wolter’s voice over telling us that he’s “blown a hole into history.”

au-s1e9-dissapoint-face-1

I see what you did there. Tacky.

Summary:

Despite the meandering of the episode and the show once again debunking it’s own evidence, the premise of the episode was that the Welsh were the first ones to make it to the Americas, interbred with the Native Americans they found here, and therefore are the true inheritors of the Americas. This is the typical white-washing of prehistoric America that I’ve come to expect from the show. I know a few readers don’t like when I point out this white-out tendency of shows and books like this, but I’m going to keep calling it out when I see it.

This episode is also a bit weird in that it pretty much debunks itself, but in order to beat a dead horse, we’re going forward.

1) Lewis’ Suicide/ Murder – Honestly, this is irrelevant to the whole episode. It was the attention-grabbing, click bait headline that made us all want to watch it. It doesn’t matter how Lewis died, though to be fair, there is some controversy over his death. Whether or not he was murdered, the show did not provide any reason for us to think it was to keep the Welsh land claim a secret.

2) The Brandenburg Stone – So fake the show debunks it, which is refreshing.

3) The Welsh Indians – Oh god where to start. Clearly, if you follow the reasoning behind this, you can see that the idea of the Welsh being in the Americas starts way back. It was a political move by Britain to secure their claims to the newly discovered Americas. It was then adopted by Welsh nationalists, and become popular in the 1800’s when Victorian ideals didn’t allow for ‘uncivilized’ Indians to be human enough to have any contribution to the past. It has roundly been debunked and isn’t even tolerated as a theory in academic, and decent, circles anymore. The mention of Welsh Indians to Lewis by Jefferson was clearly as a way of identifying an individual that would be sending an unrelated map to help Lewis and Clark on their expedition. It was not an order to look for them. Lewis never mentioned them in his own notes, that was done by an enlisted man on the expedition who was basically using it to say that the language of the Natives they were trading with was hard to understand.

Wolter’s use of this ‘Welsh Indians’ idea in modern times is incredibly troubling and should be seen a blatant white-washing. This show in general has an amazingly bad track record when it comes to acknowledging Native peoples. It constantly reimagines prehistory in a way as to remove Native Americans from the picture, commandeer their cultural achievements, and awarding them to a rotating collection of white, eurocentric, conquerors. Wolter’s and America Unearthed’s desperate need for there to be a white connection in America is blatant and tiresome. What’s worse, is they even often admit Native peoples were present at the time of these mysterious Europeans arrival, yet this never seems to matter. Whoever the White people were who were first to get here, they are the ones who are owed the land, not the folks who were actually here first.

4) Blood DNA – This is another one that is hard to deal with. Firstly, blood on the apron could never explain if Lewis’ death was a suicide or murder. Blood is simply blood. It can give you DNA, but without a lot more context, it can’t do much more. This particular blood was over 200 years old, had been handled by who knows how many hands, exposed to who knows what, and probably wasn’t kept in the best preservation conditions until recently. Secondly, the first DNA testing done on the apron told us there was deer blood on it, so some of that blood wasn’t even human. Take all of that and add in that the comparison sample came from decent 200 years removed, and you have a recipe for failure right off the bat. I don’t mean to say anything bad about Mr. Vanstone, but 200 years is a long time. Lots of things could have happened in 200 years that could complicate a genetic connection. Even if Vanstone is a direct genetic descendant (and I’m not saying he’s isn’t), the first and second complications alone are enough to pretty much guarantee DNA testing won’t work.

So did the show manage to prove either of its premises? No. All it did was speculate from start to finish, and then debunked its own physical evidence.

If you’d like to support this blog, consider donating on Patreon.

Want more on this topic? Go to Reviews: America Unearthed.

Comment below or send an email to ArchyFantasies@gmail.com

Resources:

Callahan, Jim
2000 Lest We Forget: The Melungeon Colony of Newman’s Ridge. Overmountain Press. p. 57. ISBN 978-1570721670. Retrieved 1/3/17

Colavito, Jason
2013 Did Lewis and Clark Seek Welsh Indians? http://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/did-lewis-and-clark-seek-welsh-indians Retrieved 1/3/17

Hansen, Liane
2009 How Meriwether Lewis Might Have Really Died. NPR interview.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113712695 Retrieved 1/3/17

Jefferson, Thomas
1804 Jefferson to Meriwether Lewis, January 22, 1804.
http://jeffersonswest.unl.edu/archive/view_doc.php?id=jef.00033 Retrieved 1/3/17

1903 The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 10
By Thomas Jefferson 1903 The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association. Washington, D.C.
https://books.google.com/books?id=4dnSClToke0C&pg=PA441#v=onepage&q&f=false Retrieved 1/3/17

Jones, Mary
2004 Edward Williams/Iolo Morganwg/Iolo Morgannwg. From Jones’ Celtic Encyclopedia. Retrieved 11 June 2009 (only USA, see: WayBackMachine). Retrieved 1/3/17

Pennington, Lee
2012 Ch. 11: A Map of Pre-Columbian America. The Lost Worlds of Ancient America edited by Frank Joseph (2012). Retrieved 1/3/17

See, Larry Jr.
2008 Archaeologists gather to hear story of Brandenburg Stone”. (March 19, 2008). Meade County Messenger. Retrieved March 24, 2013. Retrieved 1/3/17

State Historical Society of North Dakota (SHSND)
2017 Was Meriwether Lewis Murdered or Did He Commit Suicide? Corps of Discovery. http://history.nd.gov/exhibits/lewisclark/suicide.html. Retrieved 1/3/17

Vanstone, Keith
2009 Letter to the Secretary of the Interior. http://www.solvethemystery.org/docs/vanstone_letter051909.pdf Retrieved 1/3/17

Voice of America (VOA)
2010 Mystery Still Surrounds Death of Explorer Meriwether Lewis
October 04, 2010
http://www.voanews.com/a/mystery-surrounds-death-of-explorer-meriwether-lewis-200-years-later-104375894/127388.html Retrieved 1/3/17

Whitehouse, Joseph
1805a Journal Entry for September 5th Thursday 1805. Journals of the Lewis & Clark Expedition. https://lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu/item/lc.jrn.1805-09-05#ln22090501 Retrieved 1/3/17

1805b Journal Entry for September 6th Friday 1805. Journals of the
Lewis & Clark Expedition. https://lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu/item/lc.jrn.1805-09-06 Retrieved 1/3/17

Categories: America Unearthed | Tags: America Unearthed, America Unearthed Season 1, Brandenburg Stone, John Dee, Lewis and Clark, Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, Welsh in America, Welsh Indians | 2 Comments

Hindu Corn Goddesses and Tobacco Mummies: New World Plants and Old World Trade.

Posted on January 16, 2017 by ArchyFantasies

The second article in The Lost History of Ancient America is titled ‘Plants Connect the Old and New Worlds’. It’s penned by Dr. Carl L. Johannessen (2017), a retired professor of geography from the University of Oregon.

Johannessen’s article is the longest in the first section of the book and claims that there are 14 plants that were present in both the Old World and the New before 1492. It’s obvious that this article was meant to be a powerhouse of evidence for the book, yet the evidence provided is less than convincing.

The article itself suffers from the same shortcomings as the rest of the articles in the book. There are no citations to back up the claims made or to document research. Everything in the article revolves around the unverified assumption that transoceanic travelers did exist and that they did participate in trade with pre-Columbia Peoples. Johannessen even goes on to assign value to certain commodities, declaring some “moneymakers”, and creating transportation methods for other “attractive” commodities. He muses that Annona was probably used to combat scurvy on long cross ocean trips and that beans and peas would have been good food stuff for these travelers because they could be dried and are high in protein.

Johannessen spends a lot of the article weaving an intriguing story about how and why “tropical sailors” would have been coming to and from the New World. He even references “new evidence of dated discoveries” (Johannessen 2017) that support the reality of these sailors, yet fails to provide any information about what these are or even provide citations in the article documenting them.

Johannessen then acknowledges the “evidence and contributions” of the Norse in pre-Columbian times:

“The fact that there is acknowledged genetic, artistic, cultural, and biological evidence for regular and repeated contact between these Nordic peoples and populations of the northeastern region of North America simply strengthens the hypothesis we are proposing about the tropical sailors of Southeast Asia, India, Africa, and the Middle East. (Johannessen 2017)”

This statement is not supported by any evidence that I am aware of, nor does Johannessen provide any. I can guess that he’s referring to the actual Viking settlement in L’Anse aux Meadows, and mixing in fringe theories such as the Kensington Runestone, the Newport Tower, and other various ‘Viking’ claims.

Johannessen then makes an appeal to authority by shoehorning a quote by Stephen J. Gould (1941-2002) into his article. With this quote, he is trying to set the groundwork for his argument of transoceanic trade by implying that the probability of an identical plant species evolving in two sperate places on earth would be astronomical. Therefore the only explanation would be trade. He then makes the correct observation that when people travel to new places they always leave behind traces of their presence and often bring back evidence of their travels. In this case, Johannessen argues the evidence is plants. What argues against Johannessen’s claim is the exact observation he made earlier, there is no physical evidence that any of the cultures Johannessen mentions interacted in any way.

There are also no shipwrecks to support pre-Columbian trade routes or massive shipping expeditions. There are no settlements that demonstrate massive (or any) transoceanic trade among pre-Colombian people. There are no artifacts here in the New World that can be traced directly to trade in the Old World that date to pre-Columbian times. Simply, there is no real evidence to support Johannessen’s claims.

Johannessen then mentions John Sorenson, a professor emeritus of anthropology at Brigham Young University. Sorenson is known for his insistence that the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) view the Book of Mormon (BoM) as a scientific document. (They rejected that request.) He’s also written several books and articles trying to prove the BoM to be factual. In one such project, Sorenson tried to catalog all known sources of available literature supposedly providing evidence of pre-Columbian transoceanic diffusion. It’s from this project that Johannessen appears to pull the majority of his claims and evidence for trade, but I can really only extrapolate this as there are no citations given.

Johannessen claims that there are an upwards of 97 plant species that could be used to prove transoceanic trade, but he narrows it down to his top 14 (Johannessen 2017).

These plants are:

Tobacco
Coca
Marijuana
Datura
Prickly Poppy
Corn (Zea Mays)
Amaranths
Agave
Annona
Peanut
Kidney beans
Lima Beans
Phasey Bean
Spice Basil

I’m not going to go over every one of these right now. I will fill them in as I have the time. However, I do want to go over a few that are of particular interest.

Tobacco, Coca, and Marijuana.

Using Johannessen’s list, we begin with Tobacco, Coca, and Marijuana. Johannessen brings up the mummy of Ramesses II. Legend has is that there is evidence for tobacco in the remains of Ramesses. However, Buckland and Panagiotakopu (2001) suggest, with cited documentation, that this is actually evidence of body preservation techniques in the 19th cen.

“Radioimmunoassay showed that nicotine was generally distributed through the body, and it is probable that this reflects the application of tobacco water as an insecticide during conservation in the 19th century. This explanation is also probable for the group’s other findings from Central Europe (Parsche et al. 1993) and China (Balabanova et al. 1995), although the lack of care shown by many archaeologists and conservators even in the recent past makes contamination by cigarette smoke always a possibility. (Buckland and Panagiotakopu 2001)”

There is also the presence of an insect, Lasioderma serricorne, or the tobacco beetle, that was supposedly found in association with wrappings that came from Ramesses’ mummy. Buckland and Panagiotakopu (2001) point out that L. Serricorne is native to the Old World and there is a fossil record in the Mediterranean to back this up.

“The third beetle from Rameses’ mummy, Lasioderma serricorne, has led to most speculation, inevitably, because of its vernacular names, all of which seem to refer to tobacco (Steffan 1985). Described by Fabricius (1798) from dried American plants (‘in Americae plantis siccatis’), it was assumed that the species was associated with Nicotiana tabacum, yet despite widespread earlier cultivation of tobacco, the species was first recorded in the United States in 1886 (Reed & Vinzand 1942), and has several congeners, largely feeding on thistles in the Old World (Steffan 1985); Hill (1994) regarded the species as of tropical origin. There are Mediterranean fossil records, which would support this interpretation. As well as Alfieri’s (1931) examples from the tomb of Tutankhamun, Panagiotakopulu (2000) reports the species from Bronze Age Akrotiri on Santorini in the Aegean, and has more recently [in press) found it in the midden deposits associated with the Workmen’s Village at Amarna in Egypt (Buckland and Panagiotakopu 2001).”

Buckland and Panagiotakopu also point out that this pest prevention is the most likely cause of the presence of Cocoa and THC, pointing out that Egyptian culture was more than aware of the narcotic properties of plants:

“The Egyptians were fully aware of the narcotic qualities of certain plants (cf. Emboden 1989), and Andrew Sherratt (pers. comm.) has drawn attention to the symbolism of alternating poppy, mandrake and lotus on the throne of Tutankhamun as an example, but it is surprising that the abundant archaeological, pictorial and documentary record from Egypt does not provide any evidence not only for the use of hashish, but also for the use of hemp fibres, derived from Cannabis spp., for ropes and fabrics (Germer 1985; Vogelsang-Eastwood 2000: 269). (Buckland and Panagiotakopu 2001)”

Wrapping up their paper Buckland and Panagiotakopu (2001) leave us with a warning about testing evidence out of context:

“Scientific techniques without context do not produce valid answers, and there is a real need for researching individual artefact biographies before each method is applied. Lack of information produces unacceptable stories, which often enter the literature as fact. Artefacts and their history have to be viewed as an entity, and the application of scientific techniques cannot be effectively carried out in fragments; each intervention has to be seen as a dialogue with the artefact itself.” (Buckland and Panagiotakopu 2001)”

Corn/Maize

This one had me at a loss for a moment. It wasn’t that I believed Johannessen’s claim that there are images of corn cobs on Hindu temples. It was that I couldn’t readily discover what these cob like images were. However, it didn’t take too much research into the divine images on the shrines to finally find out what this plant is.

Johannessen says in his article that unnamed archaeologists have found evidence of corn stalks and seeds, along with peanuts and annona in an unspecified cave. As there is no citation for this discovery, we can set it aside. However, he does get a bit more specific when talking about the Hindu Temples. He mentions temples in Karnataka Pradesh, India that date to the fifth and eighth centuries. Though he provided no actual images in the article to compare his claims too, some unprovenanced images can be found on the internet (see below).

I was able to locate a few images on the internet that do seem to depict voluptuous women posing with what can be thought to be ears of corn. That said, the objects the women (and apparently some men) are holding can be identified in the context of the native plants in the area. The Muktaphala, or Whipcord Cobra Lilly, produces a vibrantly red cob of berries and are native to India, being known for their narcotic properties.

arisaema_tortuosum2_at corn3

Payak and Sachan (1993) explain how carvings, like the above images, found in Kesav Temple at Somnathpur near the city of Mysore, Karnataka State, India, couldn’t be corn. They point out that there is no connecting linguistic, religious, sculptural, archaeological, agricultural, or botanical evidence for this (Payak and Sachan 1993):

“The stone inscriptions associated with the temple list items or commodities used in worship, maize is not included. We find no evidence for maize figuring in any kind of religious ritual or worship. The word for maize used currently in the Kannada language is “Musukin Jola” which refers to a kind of millet resembling sorghum (“jola”). (Payak and Sachan 1993)”

“We hold that these temple sculptures do not represent maize or its ear but an imaginary fruit bearing pearls known in Sanskrit as “Muktaphala.” (Payak and Sachan 1993)”

It is far more likely that the cob like images in the hands of gods and goddesses on Hindu temples represent something familiar to the culture that was carving it. As there are no ancient references to corn in Hindu mythology, traditional food-stuffs, or anywhere really, it is highly unlikely that these cobs are corn. Rather, it is much more likely that this is the fruit of the Whipcord Cobra Lilly, also known as Muktaphala. A familiar, traditional, and native plant to India.