2012, Bunker Hill Publications, Piermont, New Hampshire, 191 pages
This dry, politically correct and careful examination of evidence points to a “circumpolar” maritime culture with technology present 8,000 years before present in Norway, which was then found in Northeastern North America in deposits dating to 4,000 YBP and then mysteriously disappeared, leaving Caucasian skulls which the author is careful not to discuss. Making sure not to break the anthropological doctrine that only Europeans stone age people were incapable of making ocean voyages, the author does point out the great difficulties in studying archeological evidence of human populations in Eastern North America, a place were any evidence of early contact between Europeans and Amerindians must by hushed and denies and vilified.
Archeology, is probably the third most corrupt science in the Postmodern World, being less depraved than sociology and anthropology but a good deal more stifling in terms of inquiry. The amateur level of digs before the innovations in analysis in the mid and late 20th century had been used as a shroud to cloak the bier of pre-Columbian life in Eastern North America.
The author does use the code phrase “Northern Maritime Tradition” without pointing out that deep sea fishing in the relatively narrow North Atlantic all but insured cross ocean contact between Europeans and Amerindians. It is ideologically permissible for Siberian hunters, Japanese Jomon fishermen and even aborigines from Australia to have covered much vaster distances to access the Pacific Coasts of North and South America. However, any admittance by gate keeper academics that their might be a pre-Columbian aspect to European-Amerindian contact, might be construed as suggesting a moral claim to European residency in North America and call into question the high moral value of initiatives to replace European Americans from these shores which have been ongoing since 1619.
Bourque does bring one chariot of the academic gods crashing down and thrusts his intellectual thumb into the eye of Modern Sissydom , when he points out that complex ritual behavior is not something dependent on agricultural societies or even civilizations, but that maritime peoples and hunters and fishermen of the Stone Age have the ability to construct great works of the imagination and have an even closer relationship to divinity than do the slothful chattel of farming societies and their degenerate spawn of industrial and information-based societies.
He discusses evidence that shows these possibly European folks being run off by Eskimos, the same people who ran the Norse out of Greenland 3,400 years later. In terms of defining the hysterically hidebound and deluded precepts of archeology, foremost among them the manic prejudice against any migratory explanation for technological innovation among the most migratory folk in the world—hunters! Bruce Bourque stops short of plunging the knife of speculation into his own neck, but he does not explicitly claim a genetic identity for The Red Pant People, for there is no DNA evidence for who they were, as they behaved like pious visitors. But, this diligent scientist does expose his own fraternity of materialistic ideologues as the most academic hoaxers dedicated to the fraudulent blinding of humanity to our own past.
Farmers have more free time than hunters?
Wrong, but this is archeological scripture.
Farmers have better nutrition than hunters?
Wrong, but this is archeological gospel.
Farmers are better explorers than hunters?
Wrong, but this to stands as archeological gospel.
Farmers are better sailors than fishermen?
Wrong, but even this insanity stands as archeological gospel.
Europeans have always been the least innovative, least adaptable, and least adventurous of all folk?
I suppose this has been proven by Aborigine victory in WWII, African moon landings and Amerindian development of nuclear power.
I recommend the heavily filtered yet detailed vision of a taboo past presented cryptically in The Swordfish Hunters, another piece of the pre-Columbian puzzle—complete with Celtic style burials of long narrow skulls with heads facing into the sunset—that might explain the unparalleled frequency of family and tribal adoption and cross-cultural empathy between migrating Europeans and Indigenes in Plantation America.
Thanks to Bob Johnson for the loan of this book.
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I've got a few bones to pick with this one but it'll take a quick minute.
Luck to have such smart readers that I get to employ you as unpaid fact checkers, editors and proof readers.
Your sarcasm is noted and duly ignored. You may await my criticism.
I am serious—your criticism helps. I have written entire books worth of material based on the sparks generated from reader criticism via email and online here, such as the lead-up material to my Baltimore Riot coverage where Mister Bentham and I discussed police harassment.
I have zero interest in debate, but value criticism as a way of kickstarting my faltering mind.
I really hope you support the academic line that only European stone age people were incapable of oceanic migration.
Thanks.
Unfortunately my sarcasm was missed. Text is such an awful medium.
As to the point my objection is really just to the use of the term "scripture". Havin' grow up in the halls of academia that's just hyperbole and does a disservice to your point. Is there institutional pressure to support or suppress certain narratives? Certainly but the whole of a discipline, much less the whole of the academy, is not a cult that executes nonbelievers though it might deny them access to resources they pursue somethin' unpalatable.
1 - More free time - This one is really situational. The farmer might break his back at plant and harvest but if nothin' else his labor undeniably frees up a percentage of population to pursue somethin' other than subsistence.
2 - Better nutrition - I'm not familiar with the book you're readin' but I doubt it has the reach of say National Geographic which, if anything, is the public gospel on "science". Well Nat Geo ran a special a few years back, I'll try to find a proper link, in which they claimed that the move to agriculture was so malnourishing that humanity lost an entire foot in height and lower life expectancy by 10 yrs. It also humorously turned a bunch of sleek subsaharan spear chuckers into a race of hairy disgruntled paleface dwarves in their dramatic reenactment sequence.
3 - Better explorers - Last time I checked humanity is supposed to have descended upon every corner of the globe to slaughter mega fauna with sharpen sticks long before anybody thought to cultivate wild grasses. If you're familiar with another mainstream narrative you'll have to point me to it.
4 - Better sailors - I thought your citation of Australian aboriginals in the Pacific countered your own point here but I think I begin to understand that your speakin' in particular of European hunter gatherers bein' incapable of such feats without the introduction of miraculous bread.
If that is your point then the closest thing to gospel, which is really an externally applied socio-political pressure, in the archaeological community isn't any of your assertions but simply that the legitimacy of the AmerIndian as the sole inheritor of the American continents must not be challenged and that no legitimacy may be given to the Eutopean dominance of them. You can call that a distinction without a difference but I'll have to disagree. Devil's in the details Mr LaFond.
This is great.
Thanks.
Will use as a clarification article. Such comments really help me un-muddy points I mishandled.