Regarding the confusion over the interpretations and the lack of any serious research since Fell, McAlister noted, “We need a real good researcher that knows all of these things and can decide which one it really is.”8
THE CRESPI COLLECTION FROM ECUADOR
In Saga America Fell describes some of the many items collected by Padre Carlo Crespi (1891–1982) that are now housed in the Crespi Collection of Old World Artifacts in Cuenca, Ecuador.9
Born near Milan, Italy, Carlo Crespi Croci was ordained at age twenty-six into the Salesian Society, a Roman Catholic order devoted to helping the poor throughout the world. A tireless Renaissance man in the truest sense, he earned doctorate degrees in anthropology, natural sciences, music, and engineering, spoke at least five languages, and was, in addition, a botanist, teacher, artist, and organizer of cinemas, along with being a humorous and humanist writer, musical composer, and conductor.10 He first visited Ecuador in 1923 to gather scientific data and artifacts for an international exposition and returned in 1933 to live there permanently.
Among his many passions, Crespi was a collector of the arts, including an extensive collection of archaeological relics that he built a museum to hold. By 1979 it contained paintings, figurines, and statues from many different cultures. Among these were golden statues and tablets with writing and images strikingly similar to those in Old World cultures. These artifacts had been gathered by natives from the Amazon and given to him. Fell said that many of the surviving relics bear inscriptions in Phoenician, along with Assyrian and Babylonian images made on finely executed gold tablets. He also examined a photograph of a gold zodiac discovered in the Cuenca area and suggested that the letters were composed in the Paphian script of Cyprus, probably sometime before 300 B.C.11
Fig. 2.8. Metal tablet from the Crespi Collection in Ecuador. The relief image seems to portray a Phoenician astrologer-priest.
(From Ancient American, no. 68, vol. 11, 2)
From the surviving Crespi artifacts and the photos of others there is also strong evidence that navigators in first millennium B.C. were trading with early Ecuadorians for the abundant gold of the Cuenca region. The date of 148 B.C. has been proposed for one of the plates known as the Masinissa plaque. Writer Warren Cook suggests that the relief image of the astrologer-priest could have originally decorated a temple or shrine as early as 1100 B.C.12
Ultimately, the Central Bank of Ecuador purchased the entire Crespi Collection for four hundred thousand dollars. It considered 6,500 pieces as legitimate; however, only one thousand objects were placed in its Ethnographic Museum, so the shortcomings are many. For example, the metal relief plates with strange languages were mysteriously not even mentioned in the bank’s inventory, and subsequently no relief plates were displayed. Also, many objects that had previously been photographed have not been accounted for or seen since, including photos of figurines and relief plates that were published by Erich von Däniken in his book, Gold of the Gods.*4 There remains confusion over the missing artifacts, with indications that some may remain with the bank or that the Salesians have them, while others may have ended up in private collections.
Fig. 2.9. Padre Carlo Crespi (right).
(Photograph by Warren L. Cook, Ancient American)
A more recent researcher, Richard Wingate, offers evidence in Lost Outpost of Atlantis for the authenticity of many of the items in the Crespi Collection. He notes, “Similar epigraphy in Father Crespi’s collection was also labeled a clumsy Indian fraud until better trained scholars discovered some inscriptions were written in classically pure Egyptian hieroglyphics, Egyptian hieratic, Libyan and Celt-Iberian, and Punic.”13
Beginning about 2613 B.C., the Phoenicians had particularly strong cultural relationships with the Egyptians, who could have arrived in the Americas with the help of the extensive Phoenician mercantile navies, who, according to Fell, left evidence in places such as Brazil, Paraguay, Ecuador, Oklahoma, Iowa, and Massachusetts.
Another writer, Glen W. Chapman, addressed the mainstream scholars who have belittled claims of the Crespi Collection’s authenticity. He stated, “[The] genuine green porphyry patina on many of the articles . . . the enormous quantities of cheaply bought gold articles, the metallurgical uniqueness of some of the artifacts (such as the platinum nose cone and the radiators), the Mid-eastern artistic motifs, and the abundance of articles for which little or no market exists (such as the air pipes and the ‘wallpaper’) pose difficult questions for those who carelessly write the collection off as a hoax.”14
It is true that among the extensive collection there were items deemed to be fakes, but Crespi was probably aware of this and accepted and paid for them to ease the poverty of some of his flock. As for the rest of the Crespi Collection, because of negligence, controversy, and a failure to protect priceless artifacts, it continues to be almost completely ignored by professional historians.
OTHER PHOENICIAN/AMERICAN DISCOVERIES
Fell cited two other examples of Phoenician artifacts in Saga America. He said that a metal urn discovered in an excavation carried out by the Middlebury Archaeological Research Center in New York contained Phoenician themes of the goddess Astarte with dancing women and was cited by Fell as being similar to Cypriot Phoenician ornaments from around 600 B.C.15
Fell also noted an engraved rock inscription in Nevada of Phoenician origin that had previously been described as an “Indian petroglyph.” He wrote that this rock inscription found at Massacre Lake, originally reported in 1958, was a prayer for rain in the Punic language of Carthage. Reading right to left, Fell interpreted it to read, “May the clouds spew forth rain.”16
In other passages of America B.C., Fell wrote that roving bands of Celtic mariners crossed the North Atlantic beginning around 400 B.C. to discover and then colonize North America. These included Irish, Welsh, and Gaelic speakers from Ireland, Britain, and France. He claimed that the Celts in these countries had originally come from Spain and Portugal by way of the Canary Islands where they found the trade winds that eventually carried them to America, as Columbus did much later. Fell explained his rationale:
The advantage of this route was that the winds favor a crossing from east to west, but for Celts accustomed to a temperate climate it had the one drawback that it led them to the tropical West Indies, no place for northerners. So although their landfall lay in the Caribbean, it was on the rocky coasts and mountainous hinterlands of New England that most of these wanderers finally landed, there to establish a new European kingdom, which they called Iargalon, “Land Beyond the Sunset.” They built villages and temples, raised Druid circles, and buried their dead in marked graves. They were still there in the time of Julius Caesar, as is attested by an inscribed monolith on which the date of celebration of the great Celtic festival of Beltane (Mayday) is given in Roman numerals, appropriate to the reformed Julian calendar introduced in 46 B.C.17
THE CELTIC OGHAM WRITING ON THE NEWTON STONE
On the other side of the previously mentioned Newton Stone from Scotland are inscriptions in Ogham, the ancient Celtic alphabet. Ogham survives mainly on stone pillars in Ireland and Scotland, but also in the Iberian Peninsula, Africa, and North America.
Fig. 2.10. Ogham lettering on the left side of the Newton Stone. (Re-created from the Lawrence Austine Waddell original in The Phoenician Origin of Britons, Scots & Anglo-Saxons; © Golux)
Fig. 2.11. Detail of vertical Ogham lettering on the Newton Stone (left side).
Ogham is composed of one to five vertical strokes on either side of a stem line or transecting it. Diphthongs, or vowel combinations, are represented by more elaborate symbols.18
In his third book, Bronze Age America, Fell suggested that the Encyclopedia Britannica is mistaken in dating the origins of Ogham back to only the fourth century A.D. As proof, he cites the example of a circa 2200 B.C. amulet of the mother goddess Byanu that was made in the vicinity of Stonehenge in southern England by the Windmill Hill people.19 We shall learn in chapters 3 and 7–9 t
hat Ogham inscriptions from New England, Oklahoma, Colorado, Kansas, and West Virginia were created before the fourth century A.D. date.
COINS BY THE HUNDREDS
Hundreds of buried ancient coins add evidence that ancient travelers and colonists were in the Americas, and in Saga America Fell noted that, based on the frequency and time frames of production, these coins were directly tied to the rise and fall of ancient Mediterranean navel powers, including the Carthaginians, Romans, Byzantines, Greeks, and Arabs. In North America and Europe, the distribution of coins also shows a strong correlation with coastal and navigable river waterways. While ancient coins have most often been found by farmers plowing farmland, they have also been discovered (using metal detectors) on beaches and stream beds, in wells, and under building foundations. In all, nearly two hundred ancient coins have turned up on the Atlantic coast of New England, and as many as two hundred and fifty have turned up on the Gulf Coast, from Florida to Texas, while the third largest distribution (ninety coins) is in the copper mining regions of Michigan.20
Fig. 2.12. Distribution map of ancient coins found in America. (From Fell, Saga America, 35)
Fig. 2.13. Roman coin from the fifth century A.D. found three feet deep in Springfield, Colorado (see also color insert). (From McGlone et al., Archaeoastronomy of Southeast Colorado)
THE DAVENPORT RELICS CONSPIRACY
While America B.C. and other of Fell’s books and articles presented hundreds of examples of Old World contacts with the New World before Columbus, one of the most compelling to me was what Fell referred to as the Davenport calendar stele, or tablet. It was said to have been uncovered in 1874 in a burial mound near Davenport, Iowa, by the Reverend Jacob Gas, who also had possession of two other inscribed tablets that he claimed he found while excavating other large earth mounds in Iowa.*5 21
Considered quite a significant discovery at the time, the tablet was twelve inches long and about ten inches wide and had inscriptions on both sides that Fell interpreted to be etched in three languages: Egyptian hieroglyphic, Iberian Punic, and ancient Libyan. According to Fell, what seemed incontrovertible about this artifact is that neither Libyan nor Iberian scripts had been deciphered when it was discovered.
The stele appears to be of local American manufacture. It was perhaps made by a Libyan or an Iberian astronomer who copied an older model brought from Egypt or more likely from Libya on a Libyan ship, according to Fell. A priest of Osiris may have issued the stone originally as a means of regulating the calendar in far-distant lands. The date is unlikely to be earlier than about 800 B.C., for we do not know of Iberian or Libyan inscriptions earlier than this date.22
According to America B.C., this stone depicted an eighth-century B.C. Egyptian djed pillar festival that celebrated Osiris’s victory over Set by showing bundles of reeds encircled at the top by rings that represented the backbone of Osiris. Incidentally, Fell was not aware of the two other tablets when he published his interpretation of what he called the Cremation Scene tablet, so named because it depicts apparent dead bodies on the ground around a fire.
I learned that the Davenport tablets were steeped in controversy dating back to the time of Gas’s discoveries between 1873 and 1880. The three inscribed stones along with two elephant-shaped smoking pipes received wide attention in the scientific press, and heated debates arose about their authenticity. The director of Smithsonian Archaeological Investigations, Cyrus Thomas, became the most outspoken opponent, and most archaeologists came to accept his verdict despite his not providing conclusive proof. Because scholars of the time were not able to read the scripts, the relics were not taken seriously, and their authenticity remained in doubt. Then, almost one hundred years later, in 1970, University of Iowa professor Marshal McKusick claimed in his book The Davenport Conspiracy to have found proof of a hoax.23 This was followed in 1976 by Fell, who claimed in America B.C. that he could read the inscriptions and thus prove their authenticity. However, in 1981, McKusick derisively wrote, “Fell provides us with a pretentious series of revelations, a visionary imagining, speculative might-have-beens, all constructed on phony artifacts, phony coins, phony inscriptions, make believe history, and preposterous linguistics. He has previously erred, and in deceiving himself has deceived the reading public. The fraudulent Davenport tablets of Iowa and an aboriginal petroglyphic tablet from Long Island become ‘Egyptian’ texts.”24
Fig. 2.14. The Cremation Scene Davenport tablet in the Putnam Museum, Davenport, Iowa.
Ten years later, McKusick published an updated version, The Davenport Conspiracy Revisited, which again refuted Fell’s claims.25
In light of the importance placed on the tablets I decided to travel to Davenport to see the controversial objects. I called the museum in advance and arranged to meet the curator, who was familiar with the controversy and history of the objects.
The object of most interest, the Cremation Scene Tablet, was mounted in plaster and situated on a wall enclosed in glass, while below and to the left were the other two tablets. The curator provided a brief history of the stone tablets, which I was familiar with from reading McKusick’s first book. She said that in her opinion, they were hoaxes, as McKusick had posited. She also pointed out the pipes that Gas claimed to be real. They had been placed in glass cases next to what the curator said were authentic pipes from the indigenous Mound People.
McKusick’s arguments for a hoax included reference to Cyrus Thomas’s investigation in the 1880s that asserted that the slate material was the same as local slate roofs at the time.26 McKusick also repeated early claims by Thomas that many features of the inscriptions resembled images from Webster’s Dictionary that was published only five years before the Davenport discoveries.27 McKusick concluded that hoaxers had planted the artifacts prior to their discovery by Gas, and to this day, the hoax theory remains the scholarly view.
One of the few serious critical challenges to McKusick’s claim of fakery is from James L. Guthrie, who investigated both Fell’s and McKusick’s assertions in his book The Blind Men and The Elephants: The Davenport Relics Reconsidered.28 Guthrie, a physical anthropologist and DNA expert, stated that McKusick’s hoax scenario, widely adopted by the archaeological community, is “a convenient way of dismissing the relics and discouraging further study. This account, though clearly fantasy, has enjoyed popularity because nothing else is available.”29 Guthrie, along with others, contributed to Ancient American Inscriptions: Plow Marks or History? and therefore is knowledgeable about ancient American epigraphy and many hoaxes that have been uncovered.30 In The Blind Men and the Elephants, he both criticizes Fell’s interpretations and credited him for determining that the Davenport objects reflect North African and Iberian scripts and motifs from the early centuries of the Christian era. Guthrie concluded that the main inscriptions are mainly hieratic, an Egyptian cursive writing that was used alongside hieroglyphics and to which it was closely related. It was primarily written in ink with a reed brush on papyrus and allowed scribes to write quickly without resorting to the time-consuming hieroglyphs. Guthrie wrote:
I have concluded, after a decade of studying photographic and other evidence, and through corresponding with Fell and McKusick about their beliefs, that the Davenport objects are old. The engravings reflect North African and Iberian scripts and motifs of the early centuries A.D., including striking features that would not have been known in nineteenth-century Iowa. Some observations by Fell and McKusick are valid, but many are contrived and can’t be taken at face value. Fell recognized the Iberic and hieratic signs, and some of his ideas provide good starting points for further work by specialists. McKusick has succeeded in erecting a formidable obstacle to further investigation and has provided a classic example of how this can be done.31
Guthrie is the exception in calling for more research into the artifacts. In a recent critique of Fell’s interpretation of the Davenport tablet, Randy Pinsky, a history buff who majored in anthropology from McGill University and is a critic of “pseudoarchae
ology,” argues that the tablets are beyond question a fake.32 Echoing the archaeopriests’ views and referring to Fell’s “notorious” America B.C., Pinsky describes Fell’s theories as “replete with errors, self-contradictions and mismanaged facts.” He makes the case that acquaintances of Gas were probably culprits in a hoax and had manufactured the tablets, most likely with the participation of Gas.
Not being an epigrapher or a trained archaeologist, I didn’t know if the inscribed stone in the display case was a fake or a real ancient artifact, or if Fell’s claim of three Old World languages was accurate. I found the inscriptions were undistinguishable from each other, and a perfectly etched circle seemed out of character with the other etchings. I left the museum with some doubts and not knowing what to believe about the Davenport tablets.
The story of the Davenport calendar tablet begins with and ends in controversy, and Fell’s association with it added more fodder for the archaeopriests’ campaign to discredit him. Perhaps that is why the relics are still on display, enshrined by the Old World historians as examples of so-called fakery and trickery.
THE CRITICS PREVAIL
Despite his pioneering epigraphic studies documenting a New History, Fell made mistakes. For example, in regard to his rendering and interpretation of the Davenport Cremation Scene Tablet, Guthrie points out that he incorrectly drew twelve of the twenty-four signs in the lower arc, omitted three as illegible, and ignored other significant signs. But more than his occasionally poor scientific methods, his single biggest detriment, according to many of his colleagues, was his temperament.33 Reportedly, he rarely could take criticism without feeling attacked.34
Secrets of Ancient America: Archaeoastronomy and the Legacy of the Phoenicians, Celts, and Other Forgotten Explorers Page 5