New England Antiquities Research Association

 

logo1 The Lost Civilizations of North America (DVD)

 Review by Jim Gutherie

 

December 30, 2010

Lost Civilizations [Acuity Productions (DVD), Bountiful, UT. 2010] is a Mormon production designed to implant the idea that North American Indians had a Middle Eastern component and may have been Jews. This claim isn't asserted directly, but the theme surfaces sporadically through innuendo and suggestive photos. Enough legitimate history is presented by scholars such as Alice Kehoe, Terry Barnhart, Roger Kennedy, and Brad Lepper to make the program quite interesting, although some viewers will be put off by its sly duplicity. The academic participants weren't warned that their comments would be used to promote religious doctrine. On viewing the original version, their strong objections caused revisions that yielded a fairly palatable, if curious product. Some participants still resent the fact that that they were tricked by the promoters. The commercial version has a minimum of cringe-worthy moments, despite a number of inaccuracies. As a student of archaeological controversies, I find the DVD illuminating as an attempt to mold public perceptions with a "documentary" that pretends to be learned but is marred with non-sequiturs and misrepresentations.

There are two main themes: examination of reasons for our appalling ignorance about the remarkable civilizations of the First American Nations, and existence of evidence for significant contact between early Americans and others. What is clear and indisputable is that we have inherited a grossly distorted view of early Americans that was shaped by 19th century politicians and academics to further national interests. As many of us are aware from inter-hemispheric transfers of biota and other considerations, pre-Columbian Americans weren't entirely isolated and were involved at least to some extent with the rest of the world. The DVD producers use "diffusionists" to mean those who are aware that Old World people made it to the Americas before Columbus, but this is sloppy and incorrect. The word may have taken on that meaning in popular discourse, but diffusion really means transfer of traits or innovations "hand to hand" over some distance without physical relocation of people. This differs from migration, which is physical movement from one place to another by the people who carry the traits. Studies of "early contact" have to do with evidence for infiltrations by people from other places and shouldn't be called diffusion.

As I saw it, three participants carried the Ball: Alice Kehoe, Roger Kennedy, and the delightful Sonya Atalay, an Anishnabe (Ojibwa) archaeologist from Indiana University who interjected moving comments about what its like to live in the two worlds of modern scholarship and ancient tradition. Without obvious bitterness, she described the marginalization of her people and lamented destruction of evidence of their cultures.

Alice Kehoe clearly outlined how the concept of manifest destiny and related attitudes drove American politics and archaeology during the 19th century. Indians were regarded not as real people, but as problems to be cleared out of the way. Evidence of their high attainments was razed and ignored. Much of what she had to say has been published in The Land of Prehistory (1998) and Controversies in Archaeology (2008), books that have been reviewed in NEARA publications. Her extended comments probably had the most intellectual "meat" of anything in the DVD and may be a bit shocking to viewers hearing this material for the first time. It's not the American history you learned in school. Roger Kennedy, Director Emeritus of the Smithsonian Museum of American History, was used as anchor man, his genial explanations of such things as the conflict between science and religion and the origins of racism being inserted periodically to keep the narration somewhat in focus.

Behind the talking heads flashed a continual display of unidentified "illustrations" that may or may not have had much to do with the subject being discussed. I found this annoying, but it is a regular feature of Ancient American magazine, in which curious, unidentified photos are inserted into the text without the knowledge of the author. The most objectionable were six black slate inscriptions from the "Michigan relics" affair that I know from my own investigation to be fakes. During my five-year study of the case, I identified about two dozen "relics" that almost certainly predate the hoax and may have been the inspiration for its iconography, but none of these was shown. Ancient American has taken the position that almost all of the Michigan material is authentic, despite extensive documentation and internal evidence to the contrary. The DVD opens clumsily with a statement that among the objects shown are some "not accepted" by "science" as authentic. The rationalization is that showing both real and suspect artifacts emphasizes the difficulty of telling them apart. Actually it's not hard if you dig into the details, although it can take years of study, scrutinizing documents, analyzing epigraphy, and doing physical tests.

Popping up in the background from time to time were five inscribed stones that I think are old: the Iberic Grave Creek tablet, the Newark Decalogue and "keystone," the Bat Creek tablet, and the Los Lunas stone that I have reason to think was made by 16th century Mexican converses. Four of these have been discussed in NEARA publications, and as far as I am concerned, none supports the Mormon story. What American "inscriptions" say to me is that indigenous populations assimilated a number of outsiders who were out on the oceans for various reasons. Though diverse, some apparently were from the Mediterranean region. Most American "inscriptions" that I think are old feature a form of Iberic script. Historian Terry Barnhart (Eastern Illinois University), an authority on Ephriam Squier, has published the best modern account of the Iberic Grave Creek tablet, yet he was silent on the topic in the DVD. Were the producers ignorant of his expertise? And for years, Bradley Lepper has claimed vociferously that the Newark artifacts are fraudulent. It’s hard to imagine that he lectured on Newark before a camera without rehearsing his latest hoax scenario. Something is very strange here.

Erroneous comments about inscribed stones showed commentators to have a poor grasp of the subject. Discovery of the Newark Decalogue was garbled by the benighted presenter. It wasn't found in a coffin, it was buried with several other objects under the hard clay platform where the coffin had been. The coffin itself had been destroyed three months earlier. Six men, not nine, were present, and the mound was one of sixteen, not thirteen that had been under the great stone stack. Regarding the Bat Creek tablet, Cyrus Gordon wasn't the first to see that it had been published upside-down by the Smithsonian, and he thought it was Hebrew, not Phoenician. Does it matter? Most viewers will be oblivious to such errors, but they show me that the presenters don't respect their own story enough to learn the facts about the evidence they use, and that they don't respect their audience.

The chapter on genetics bothered me the most. Studies of the human genome are at a stage where partial or preliminary data can be used to "prove" almost anything. Here, the bulk of the discussion involved the "X" variety, or haplotype, of mitochondrial DNA (MtDNA), a European or Southwest Asian type that is now concentrated in the Basque region and along the northern coast of the Mediterranean Sea. In America, it occurs mainly along the St. Lawrence River and around the Great Lakes, suggesting entry from the east. It seems to be absent from South and Central America.

Producers of Lost Civilizations maintained absurdly that MtDNA data show the Hopewell people to have come from Israel and that the mystery of their origins has been "settled." It goes like this. One reputable geneticist has argued that the apparent point of origin or radiation of type X was somewhere in the Levant. But, in the words of the DVD spokesman, it was "in the hills of Galilee." Hopewell remains have a bit of haplotype X, ergo, they were Isrealites, a rather obvious non-sequitur. The DVD makers seem to lack much background in genetics. Haplotype X isn't common in America, and it isn't a recent introduction to America. There seem to have been several introductions of different lineages, starting not long after the Ice Age. Haplotype X wasn't confined to the Levant until 2000 years ago, and it wasn't discovered in 1998 as stated in the DVD. Antonio Torroni reported high levels among the Ojibwa people in 1993, although he used different terminology. There's no evidence that it ever reached Beringia or anywhere close to it. And to claim that present data "settle the question of who the Hopewell were," or that genetic findings are the "final word" on this question is incompetent.

To conclude, Lost Civilizations, which runs about 63 minutes, is worth a viewing or two for people who follow anthropological controversies and who study techniques of propaganda. Others will like it because it reveals some little known American history and provides a chance to see a few controversial characters in action.

 

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