Indians Discover the Americas

One of my first classes in Mexican archaeology was taught by Phil Weigand, Ph.D., at Stony Brook University. He had spent many years with a Dr. Kelley (?) at the University in Illinois researching aboriginal turquoise mines in the American Southwest. The idea was that this material, traded as far away as the Mayan culture areas (with no known sources there) and appearing in Aztec artifacts in Mexico, was a commodity exchanged across great distances, much like say bitumen in the Middle East (i.e., sealing precious water and other liquid containers, etc.) and were part of larger exchange networks. He and others were collecting samples in these often dangerous mines and a small grant was given by the NSF (National Science Foundation) to try to arrive at a signature of the turquoise from different areas, so that artifactual frauds could also thereby be determined. This is done by exposing samples to "neutron activation" (that other particle with the proton and the negatron or "electron"). At one Southwest American site there is attached on the outside wall of the former abandoned adobe settlement, a small storage building of over 2 million pieces of turquoise in it I was told by a graduate student, and two Meso-American style burials were found under the room, kept out of the public eye by the National Parks Service. Anyway, he related that the problems of archaeology in Mexico are many. One is the facts that descriptions in botanical texts appear in Arabic from perhaps before the time of Christopher Columbus' voyages of discovery (whose mother was Portuguese and some research has shown his father was a "pilot" from Scandinavia. I read he also prior to leaving asked the Bristol, England Masons [they a no-no in the Catholic Church still to this day in Mexico for other reasons, perhaps they and other founders involvement in slavery] about the lands they had encountered fishing to the west of Iceland) and sculptural representations of corn appear in architectural carving in India, a place in trade with Arab merchants on the seas. After all two giraffes were taken by trade to the Kublai Kaan ("Mongolian emperor of China and grandson of Genghis Khan who completed his grandfather's conquest of China; he establish the Yuan dynasty and built a great capital on the site of modern Beijing where he received Marco Polo (1216-1294)" - Word Web 3.02 or was it Ghenghis?) so it is possible that people in other parts of the world were aware of the New World. Recently publicized has been the Chinese expedition to the New World that predated Columbus' voyages by 50 years, perhaps to the West Coast of the United States. I used to work for his wife Celia in the Student Union selling arts and crafts many she made herself, macrame earrings and other products for Mexico and South America, alpaca (or vicuna?) scarves, and things like that. She eventually got her Masters of Arts studying Huichal weaving arts as part of her masters. The more recent odd fact in the archaeology of the nearer past has been the Pilgrims landing on Cape Cod and finding a blonde hair burial on one of their first expeditions. They had been in Leiden, Netherlands for eleven (11) years prior to their sailing and I wonder what decision they made sailing away from Virginia, where they were supposedly going, past New Amsterdam where they might have gone having missed Virginia, and arriving in the Massachusetts Bay. Probably politics and economics. The analyses of the trace elements in the turquoise was analyzed in (around 1980 this was) statistical hyperspace a sort of floating spreadsheet of layers (before spreadsheets) with the grouping of statistical significance arrived throughout the layers of trace elements. It is being used I read by Garmon Harbottle, Emeritus Professor of archaeological chemistry of the Brookhaven National Laboratory (now run by Stony Brook University with a consortium of higher learning, instead of the Federal Dept. of Energy) as it was developed (a mere 50 mgs. or less of material is all that was needed to perform the test though introduces problems of "clinal sampling" across deposits I remember now) to perhaps rejoin pieces that have separate museum locations originally part of the same piece or pieces, thereby putting separated artifacts, back together, though in different parts of the world. Such an inventory is reportedly being made for some stone sculpture. Apparently, according to Weigand, "trading" expeditions (much like a military type) involving peyote and turquoise acquisition and perhaps unknown resources were conducted, he wrote in the "Prehistory of the State of Zacatecas" (Parts 1 and 2) published in Stony Brook University's once published "Anthropology" journal. Interesting, the northernmost range along the East Coast of the Prickly Pear cacti is cited as Long Island, NY where I once saw a tiny one in Mt. Sinai Harbor, NY near Stony Brook, NY where I had attended an archaeological fieldschool on the Pipe Stave Hollow Road, partly in a scallop midden. The scallop is now the "official shell" of New York State after a vote between it oyster and hard shell clam. At the time, hard shell clams were experimentally being grown from tiny seed clams (venus mercenaria, hard shell) in a shed on racks with the seawater pumped through them from the Long Island Sound, to try to "reseed" or renew some of the bays and inlets. Microscopic in size, they had the needed time away from predators to get big enough to survive perhaps large enough to "choke" their predators.