I've been reading (trying to read between income-based interruptions) my autographed copy -- thank you, Fred -- of Fred Rydholm's Michigan Copper, The Untold Story, A History of Discovery.
Fred makes the case that some ancient people mined many millions of tons of copper from Upper Michigan and from Isle Royale. Note that I didn't say he poses the argument. No, Fred makes the case quite definitively, I think. Most archeologists and historians completely discount or ignore the notion that there "was more copper used just to build the Great Pyramid than could be found in all the old world". But just how many copper chisels were turned to dust shaping over two million granite blocks? My guess is about two million.
As with anything, it boils down to: who, when, where, why
Only a couple tons of copper artifacts have been found in North America associated with indigenous peoples. Where did the rest of that ancient Michigan copper go? No, it wasn't abducted by aliens. The short answer is: Across the ocean. When did it go? A very long time ago. Who took it? Why would they take it from Michigan? I want to address each of those questions in a little more detail.
Across which ocean? Well, predominantly, the Atlantic. Fred's theory (shared by a lot of folks) is that Michigan copper was the prime source of copper for the "Bronze Age". "The Bronze Age" spanned all of Eurasia and at least the northern parts of Africa (southern Africa is generally considered as going directly from neolithic culture to iron age culture). And across the Atlantic was, seemingly, the shortest water route. But the Berring Straits is actually a much narrower body of water. It's dificult to see, however, how it would be more economical to transport all that copper overland to the shores of Alaska just to take advantage of the shorter sea voyage and then overland again all the way across Asia to power the Bronze Age in Asia, India, Europe and North Africa. And economics is what it was all about. As Fred says, copper was the Microsoft of the Bronze Age and whoever controlled it was that era's Bill Gates. And, I think, whoever transported it was that era's Intel.
When was the Bronze Age? Well, it depends on which Bronze Age you are considering. In the Near East, the Bronze Age is generally accepted as being divided into three stages:
* EBA - Early Bronze Age (c.3500-2000 BC)
* MBA - Middle Bronze Age (c.2000-1600 BC)
* LBA - Late Bronze Age (c.1600-1200 BC)
While in Scandinavia, the "Nordic Bronze Age" didn't begin until 1,500 BC and lasted until at least 500 BC.
In East Asia, bronze culture spanned 3,300 BC to 100 AD
So the "when" is a lot more telling for determining "the route."
But "the route" would be chosen by "the who". Who was the Bronze Age's Bill Gates? Or rather, who were "they" over a period spanning some 3,400 years.
Well looking at the dates, one who believes in cultural diffusion but also believes that the dates assigned to the "Bronze Age" would conclude that probably the Dynastic or late pre-Dynastic Eqyptians started it. Wrong. Thank your for playing. They merely continued after the previous board of directors met an untimely fate.
I think I can show that the transoceanic trade in copper and tin to make bronze probably goes back at least 7,000 to 10,000 bce.
We'll start with one of the most anomolous finds in copper country, in this case, Isle Royale. Thanks again to Fred for documenting it for this generation.
Imagine digging straight down through solid rock for twenty feet to retrieve a 5,000 pound copper boulder half the size of a Volkswagon. Now imagine that you had the digging done and were now raising the boulder on oak cribbing in preperation for transport. You have the boulder halfway to the surface and -- you quit and walk away.
This scenario was real. The site was on Isle Royale and we know the diggers used oak cribbing because the hewn cribbing became preserved by copper solution, in effect, becoming "petrified" -- but with copper, not stone replacing the cellular matrix of the wood. Any geologist will tell you that petrification takes tens of thousands of years. Well, I think in this case, once the abandoned pit filled with water, the process was probably accelerated by the reaction of the copper to the tannic acid in the oak. Never the less, it certainly didn't happen over night. Seven to ten thousand years may be more than required to complete the conversion, but certainly not a lot less time transpired before modern discovery of the site in the 1850's.
And while all these folks were working so diligently to extract these large copper boulders, some of there compatriots were off gathering and or growing food for them. Division of labor. Civilization. Culture. Bronze age culture.
"You have no supportive evidence". What I lack is definitive proof. There is quite a bit of evidence, actually.
The culture known as the "Red Paint People", although thought by professionals to be local to New England, Newfoundland, and Labrador, actually left their tracks all along the Atlantic coasts of Europe, the Americas, Greenland, northwest Africa, the Azores, etc. The non-Canadian sites are generally dated to seven to ten thousand bce. Only one skeleton has been associated with Red Paint sites outside of Canada and its state of preservation was not all that great. The skeleton may indeed have been insitu before the Red Paint culture occupied that particular site, since the midden is what preserved the skeleton. So we don't really know enough about them to assign a racial affiliation. Even the Canadian sites held relics that predated the burials by a thousand years.
We do know that they were truly ancient, that they practiced deep sea navigation, and they were transoceanic. No evidence of extensive metal relics have ever been associated with the Red Paint culture. They were subsistence hunters, primarily of deep sea mammals.
So what the heck does that have to do with a copper boulder on Isle Royale? Division of labor. Somebody was providing food for the diggers.
Somebody was also transporting the copper. The Red Paint culture definitely knew how to sail and probably, apparently knew how to navigate great distances. Seven thousand years ago.
More later. I have to go finish an article for Ancient American December issue.
Oz
Wednesday, November 08, 2006
Sunday, November 05, 2006
Okay, what the heck is the Oopa Loopa Cafe? It is a place where I sit and drink coffee (or top shelf tequila once in a while), eat sweet stuff, and ruminate about artifacts found in places they shouldn't be -- Out Of Place Artifacts, OOPA, or OOPArts. These items might include Norse axes in Minnesota, Egyptian heiroglyphics in Australia, Roman Coins along the Ohio river, stone depictions of Templar Knights in New Hampshire, gold chains in coal seams, the Ica stones, or the Burrows cave artifacts. The physical Oopa Loopa Cafe, for now, is whatever computer I happen to be using at the time.
Although the Glen Rose, Texas dino and human tracks are not technically artifacts (at least the dino tracks aren't), that type of scenario is also something I contemplate under the general heading of OOPA.
Now, having set that premise, I have to say that I have reservations about some OOPAs. Some of them seem to be too convenient and, indeed, probably are fakes. Others have surfaced with undeniable provenance and the archeologists either ignore them, try to explain them away (usually as a hoax, sometimes as a misinterpretation), or sometimes even rebury them so they don't have to deal with it.
Prime examples of OOPAs would be the Burrows cave relics, the Michigan tablets, the Newark Decalogue, the Kennsington and Heavener stones, and the Ica stones, among others, all of which have been labeled as hoaxes by "expert" archeologists. Most of those relics were never examined first-hand by any credentialed archeologist, but rather simply pronounced as fakes because "they couldn't possibly be real" under the "no one before Columbus" doctrine that is so prevelent in professional archeology.
I hope to address the hoax allegations on a case-by-case basis, even for some cases where I think the experts may be correct. I would do this seemingly contradictive analysis because, in those cases, the reason and logic used by the experts is all wrong. Why would I do this? Because these cases show that the "expert line" is so entrenched that they use it automatically, not even considering the evidence or their own logic and how it applies to evidence, but rather applying the line to any and all evidence that doesn't fit their pre-defined doctrine.
In many cases, there are photos available on the internet of the OOPAs I talk about and, when available, I will post the link. For Burrows' Cave relics, many of these photos appear either on the Ancient American Artifact Preservation Foundation (AAAPF) website or on the Ancient American Magazine website. Other items appear other places.
But I want to start with Burrows' Cave (BC). Russ Burrows story is one of mystery and contradiction. A few bloggers have concentrated on the man and his character and found both wanting. I've never met the man, and I don't have any pre-conceived notions of him or his character. I will try to concentrate, instead, on the relics themselves. Having said that, some of the story is inseperable from the man and his character.
Many of the BC relics were gold. As OOPA relics, ostensibly created by some pre-Columbian, possibly Euro-African immigrants, they were priceless; So much so that Russ and his partner, Jack Ward, couldn't sell them. As gold bars without any distingishing marks, they became liquid assets. So the two supposedly made molds of the relics and reproduced them in lead, then melted the gold down and sold it as scrap. And they sold the lead copies, too, and those are now in the hands of collectors. Perfoming some very basic math based on the reports of the number of relics that met this fate, Russ and Jack should have been millionaires. Jack died several years ago and his widow would now qualify for medicare and other "entitlements", so I don't think any great wealth went that way. I don't know how much the pair made in reality, but Russ does a lot of travelling, and I may be wrong, but his supposed Army retirement wouldn't support it (there is also considerable debate as to his actually having served, but that's not my concern here).
In all, some 7,000 BC relics are now in the hands of various collectors and Burrows has said there are at least twice that many still in the cave. If they are hoaxes, then Russ and Jack working together would each have had to produce a "relic" every 3 minutes of every waking hour for weeks. Two guys, each producing an engraved stone tablet from a polished blank every three minutes for a sixteen hour day with no breaks comes to 640 items per day. I have used flint to inscribe the same kind of mudstone and shale as some of these relics. It is possible. Polishing the blanks while leaving no evidence of advanced machinery would take longer. I've tried that, too. Hours for each one, large ones take tens of hours. Okay, maybe it's not impossible, but it is certainly less plausible than having found them in situ. Just polishing 7,000 blanks could take a decade without machinery (many or most were polished on both sides). I may have missed something in my experiments, but I fail to see how it is possible to produce more than about one a day per side.
Some of the aforementioned bloggers that disected Russ' character also sliced and diced Frank Joseph (editor/contributor of Ancient American Magazine). I wish to sidestep that one. I can't altogether, but I'm really not into analyzing the people, just the OOPA's. I have met Frank Joseph, and I have the same impression of him that I have of anybody who won't look me in the eye during a conversation. And that is all I have to say about that.
Frank put forth the theory that the relics are the result of the court of Ptolemy having escaped the invading Roman Legions and transporting themselves and the treasury to southern Illinois. He actually made a pretty good argument. Many of the BC relics seem to point to such an origin in northwest Africa. Indeed, some seem to commemmorate Hannibal by including elephants in the motif.
These depictions of elephants are very interesting -- and may be very telling as to the validity of the relics and Frank's theory. Here is one example. This is one of the reproductions of a gold relic and it shows the profile of an Asian elephant. The shape of the head is distinctive between Asian and African elephants. This is an Asian elephant, no doubt about. So why would an Asian elephant show up in a bunch of relics supposedly produced by north African refugees? The professionals would cite this as poor planning on the part of the hoaxers and definitive evidence of the hoax. I would rebutt that the professionals haven't done their research. Hannibal used Asian elephants. Which, by itself is evidence of long distance sea voyages, albeit still along the coasts of the old world. But those same professionals are loathe to admit that the ancients had even that capability. The reality is that although the Romans traded goods with India, the Romans merely imported and exported without going there themselves. Alexander DID go there, but he went overland. The Roman - Indian trade was by sea, but not with Roman sailors. The sailors were north African. During the first Punic wars, Roman-Indian trade ceased. After the Roman defeat of Carthage, that trade resumed with the sailors being slaves of Rome. Without the north Africans, Rome had very limited seagoing capability. Before the Punic wars, the ships were called simply "galleys". The post-Punic name is "slave galley".
Given the number of relics produced combined with "unique identifiers", such as the Asian elephant depictions, makes it very dificult to concieve that a retired military guy (RB) and a life-long arrowhead hunter (JW) could come up with all this on their own.
Although the Glen Rose, Texas dino and human tracks are not technically artifacts (at least the dino tracks aren't), that type of scenario is also something I contemplate under the general heading of OOPA.
Now, having set that premise, I have to say that I have reservations about some OOPAs. Some of them seem to be too convenient and, indeed, probably are fakes. Others have surfaced with undeniable provenance and the archeologists either ignore them, try to explain them away (usually as a hoax, sometimes as a misinterpretation), or sometimes even rebury them so they don't have to deal with it.
Prime examples of OOPAs would be the Burrows cave relics, the Michigan tablets, the Newark Decalogue, the Kennsington and Heavener stones, and the Ica stones, among others, all of which have been labeled as hoaxes by "expert" archeologists. Most of those relics were never examined first-hand by any credentialed archeologist, but rather simply pronounced as fakes because "they couldn't possibly be real" under the "no one before Columbus" doctrine that is so prevelent in professional archeology.
I hope to address the hoax allegations on a case-by-case basis, even for some cases where I think the experts may be correct. I would do this seemingly contradictive analysis because, in those cases, the reason and logic used by the experts is all wrong. Why would I do this? Because these cases show that the "expert line" is so entrenched that they use it automatically, not even considering the evidence or their own logic and how it applies to evidence, but rather applying the line to any and all evidence that doesn't fit their pre-defined doctrine.
In many cases, there are photos available on the internet of the OOPAs I talk about and, when available, I will post the link. For Burrows' Cave relics, many of these photos appear either on the Ancient American Artifact Preservation Foundation (AAAPF) website or on the Ancient American Magazine website. Other items appear other places.
But I want to start with Burrows' Cave (BC). Russ Burrows story is one of mystery and contradiction. A few bloggers have concentrated on the man and his character and found both wanting. I've never met the man, and I don't have any pre-conceived notions of him or his character. I will try to concentrate, instead, on the relics themselves. Having said that, some of the story is inseperable from the man and his character.
Many of the BC relics were gold. As OOPA relics, ostensibly created by some pre-Columbian, possibly Euro-African immigrants, they were priceless; So much so that Russ and his partner, Jack Ward, couldn't sell them. As gold bars without any distingishing marks, they became liquid assets. So the two supposedly made molds of the relics and reproduced them in lead, then melted the gold down and sold it as scrap. And they sold the lead copies, too, and those are now in the hands of collectors. Perfoming some very basic math based on the reports of the number of relics that met this fate, Russ and Jack should have been millionaires. Jack died several years ago and his widow would now qualify for medicare and other "entitlements", so I don't think any great wealth went that way. I don't know how much the pair made in reality, but Russ does a lot of travelling, and I may be wrong, but his supposed Army retirement wouldn't support it (there is also considerable debate as to his actually having served, but that's not my concern here).
In all, some 7,000 BC relics are now in the hands of various collectors and Burrows has said there are at least twice that many still in the cave. If they are hoaxes, then Russ and Jack working together would each have had to produce a "relic" every 3 minutes of every waking hour for weeks. Two guys, each producing an engraved stone tablet from a polished blank every three minutes for a sixteen hour day with no breaks comes to 640 items per day. I have used flint to inscribe the same kind of mudstone and shale as some of these relics. It is possible. Polishing the blanks while leaving no evidence of advanced machinery would take longer. I've tried that, too. Hours for each one, large ones take tens of hours. Okay, maybe it's not impossible, but it is certainly less plausible than having found them in situ. Just polishing 7,000 blanks could take a decade without machinery (many or most were polished on both sides). I may have missed something in my experiments, but I fail to see how it is possible to produce more than about one a day per side.
Some of the aforementioned bloggers that disected Russ' character also sliced and diced Frank Joseph (editor/contributor of Ancient American Magazine). I wish to sidestep that one. I can't altogether, but I'm really not into analyzing the people, just the OOPA's. I have met Frank Joseph, and I have the same impression of him that I have of anybody who won't look me in the eye during a conversation. And that is all I have to say about that.
Frank put forth the theory that the relics are the result of the court of Ptolemy having escaped the invading Roman Legions and transporting themselves and the treasury to southern Illinois. He actually made a pretty good argument. Many of the BC relics seem to point to such an origin in northwest Africa. Indeed, some seem to commemmorate Hannibal by including elephants in the motif.
These depictions of elephants are very interesting -- and may be very telling as to the validity of the relics and Frank's theory. Here is one example. This is one of the reproductions of a gold relic and it shows the profile of an Asian elephant. The shape of the head is distinctive between Asian and African elephants. This is an Asian elephant, no doubt about. So why would an Asian elephant show up in a bunch of relics supposedly produced by north African refugees? The professionals would cite this as poor planning on the part of the hoaxers and definitive evidence of the hoax. I would rebutt that the professionals haven't done their research. Hannibal used Asian elephants. Which, by itself is evidence of long distance sea voyages, albeit still along the coasts of the old world. But those same professionals are loathe to admit that the ancients had even that capability. The reality is that although the Romans traded goods with India, the Romans merely imported and exported without going there themselves. Alexander DID go there, but he went overland. The Roman - Indian trade was by sea, but not with Roman sailors. The sailors were north African. During the first Punic wars, Roman-Indian trade ceased. After the Roman defeat of Carthage, that trade resumed with the sailors being slaves of Rome. Without the north Africans, Rome had very limited seagoing capability. Before the Punic wars, the ships were called simply "galleys". The post-Punic name is "slave galley".
Given the number of relics produced combined with "unique identifiers", such as the Asian elephant depictions, makes it very dificult to concieve that a retired military guy (RB) and a life-long arrowhead hunter (JW) could come up with all this on their own.
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