Importantly, the top of the Newport Tower contains two distinct ten-inch-square windows, and below are three larger windows, each designed with specific viewing angles in mind. Various researchers have documented archaeoastronomical aspects of these windows. William Penhallow, an astronomer at the University of Rhode Island, documented both solar and lunar alignments.98 In a NEARA publication, he showed that the different windows and niches were designed for archaeoastronomical purposes, including a winter solstice rising sun that illuminates a prominent egg-shaped keystone in the west-northwest archway. More recently, Scott Wolter has also observed that there are both morning star and evening star Venus alignments.99 Another researcher has shown that a person of about five feet five inches tall, standing in front of a point marked in the sill of the south window, could see Polaris, the North Star, through the small north window.100
Fig. 15.18. Newport Tower, Rhode Island, ca. 1894. First reported by the explorer Giovanni da Verrazano in 1524, this American landmark could have been built by the Knights Templar around 1400.
While the archaeopriests and skeptics continue to debunk the pre-Columbian roots of the Newport Tower, amazingly it appears on the map of explorer Giovanni da Verrazano (1485–1528), who visited the Americas in 1524 in the service of King Francis I of France.101 According to Sora, Verrazano’s “secret” mission to the East Coast of America was to locate the “lost colony” of the Templars, and that he had the knowledge and maps to know their whereabouts in Newport Harbor. When he reached it in search of Arcadia and the refuge of the Templars, he saw the Newport Tower, but with no colony nearby, he understood that the Sinclair expedition had made it to America, but the colony had moved on or not survived.
But where did the Templars go? As with all ancient travelers and colonists, migrations to the Americas were not without significant hardships, especially for refugees fleeing invading armies, political tyrants, forced expulsions, and climate disasters. Eventually death or, if you were lucky, integration into native tribes was the probable outcome.
The apparent fate of the Sinclair expedition was most likely met by other groups that had traveled to the Americas. Author Gene Matlock makes the case that such a fate befell many of the early Indus Valley travelers, miners, and refugees as well as later travelers who became integrated into native groups, leaving little trace of their Old World origins. In a somber passage from the introduction to his book India Once Ruled the Americas! he wrote, “Until the coming of the Spaniards, English and French, both Americas were the killing fields of the world. Tribes were constantly . . . killing and eating the people they found . . . absorbing them through intermarriage, or chasing them southward.”102
DO WE NEED MORE PROOF?
In the near future, I think it will seem bizarre that Americans believed Columbus discovered America, that they celebrated Columbus Day, and that the “Age of Exploration” began in the late 1400s. The case for pre-Columbian voyages by Asians, Indians, Arabs, Africans, people of Mediterranean cultures, and European Celts, among many others, is so overwhelming that any rational and objective thinker has only to examine the multitude of direct and indirect evidences to be convinced.
As a complement to figure 15.1, “My New History Evidence List,” presented at the beginning of this chapter, the chart that follows below, “Other New History Evidence,” summarizes additional New History clues, including some presented in this chapter.
For those who are not so convinced, there are still more than enough indications that further investigations should go on. To briefly review, these include Old World epigraphy throughout the Americas, written in many languages, including Celtic, Welsh, Hebrew, Phoenician, Latin, Libyan, Norse, and Arabic, among many others. Some of this epigraphy is specific to archaeoastronomical events, including the Celtic Ogham inscriptions in Colorado and Oklahoma that describe equinox light show stories that can still be viewed today. Moreover, the abundance of Old World–style artifacts includes coins, swords, and religious artifacts. On a greater scale, there are similarities in architectural styles and symbols that support the diffusion of the arts and sciences. And perhaps most convincing to a scientific mind is the DNA evidence from some Native American peoples that seems to prove genetic relationships to Old World groups and, therefore, foreign visits and integrations.
Culture Evidence Location/Details Time/Age Chapter
Chinese Maps
Arab Maps
European Maps Pre-Columbus maps showing the Americas China: Hendon M. Harris and other Chinese maps
Arab: Al-Idrisi map, Mustawfi map
Venice: de Virga map
European: Vinland map 1418
1154, 1350
1414
1440 15
1, 15
15
15
15
Phoenicians Crespi Collection Ecuador Ca. 148 B.C. 2
Phoenicians Inscriptions Bourne Stone, Maine Grave Creek Stone, W.V. 600–800 B.C. 1st millennium
B.C. 2
15
Celts Chambers, AS, architecture America’s Stonehenge, N.H., Vermont sites Carbon dating 2000–173 B.C. 4
Celts Inscriptions, AS Crack Cave, Anubis Caves, Sun Temple, many others ca. 200 B.C.–
A.D. 100 7, 8,
9
Indus Valley AS, petroglyphs Bishop, Calif.; Grimes Point,
Nev., many other Great Basin
examples 2000 B.C.– A.D. 1500 12
Hebrews Hidden Mountain Bat Creek Stone New Mexico
Tennessee Ca. 100 B.C.– A.D. 100 14
14
Assyrians Clay tablet (pendant) with cuneiform inscription In 1878 in Montana Chief Joseph gifted artifact to U.S. Ca. 1000 B.C. 15
Chinese Imperial Records The Book of Liang Hsu Fu or Xufu
Huishen to “Fusang” Ca. 219 B.C. A.D 458–499 15
Chinese Similarity of symbols, motifs Jade jewelry, flying serpents 500 B.C.
A.D. 200 5, 15
Mediterraneans Tartessian (Punic) inscriptions Bristol, R.I., and Ohio Sixth century B.C. 15
Japanese Jomon pottery style Pottery and vases Symbols, language Pottery found in Ecuador
Veracruz Mexico
Zuni Native Americans, N.M. Ca. 3600 B.C.
1000 B.C.
A.D. 1350 15
Greeks Greek words in Micmac
language Eastern Canada, NE U.S. 300–100 B.C. 15
Greeks Petroglyphic symbols Red Bird River, Manchester, Ky. 1362? 15
Egyptians Rock inscriptions
Egyptian statuettes
Petroglyph of Anubis
Coca and nicotine Southern Chile
El Salvador (Acajutla)
Anubis Caves (OK, USA)
Egyptian mummies 231 B.C. ~2000
yrs ago ~3000
yrs ago Ca.
1000 B.C. 15
15
8
15
Knights Templar Newport Tower Newport Bay, R.I. Before 1524 15
Asians Calendar start dates Similar dates for Maya, Egypt
and Hindu calendars 3100–3114 B.C. 15
Asians Architectural
resemblances Indian, Japanese, Indo-
Chinese temples resemble
Mesoamerican temples Begin around
400 B.C. 15
Asians Elephants petroglyph
Elephant in mural
Elephant effigy pipe Grimes Point, Nev.
Copan site, Honduras (Maya)
Hopewell, Iowa +5000 yrs.
A.D. 731
100 B.C. –
A.D. 500 12
15
2, 15
Corn to Old World Depicted in sculptures,
murals China
Egypt, and India A.D. 700
A.D. 1300 5, 15
Other plants to Old World Peanuts, tobacco, sugar
apples, chilies, amaranth Asia and Europe Before 1492 15
/> Vikings Runic inscriptions Kensington Runestone, MN .
Spirit Pond, Maine
Heavener Runestone, Okla. A.D. 1362
A.D. 1401
A.D. 750 15
Fig. 15.19. Other New History Evidence. AS = archaeoastronomy.
In other words, the greatest remaining questions are not “Who discovered America and when,” but “Why does the lie about our history continue, and what is being covered up?”
16
The Legacy of the Conquest
Why has our society chosen to ignore the facts of history and instead perpetuate a false view of historical events?
Based on my investigations there indeed has been a cover-up, beginning as early as 1879 when John Wesley Powell of the Smithsonian Institution wrote his On Limitations to the Use of Some Anthropologic Data. This was followed by Cyrus Thomas’s 1894 “Report on the Mound Explorations of the Bureau of Ethnology,” which “proved beyond all doubt that the mound builders were ancestral Native Americans” (chapter 13). But can such a state of perpetual ignorance be linked simply to misguided archaeopriest ideology?
Before we can understand the why of the cover-up, it’s necessary to explore what is being covered up. I offer the following observations to help establish a context for the subjugation of the Americas following the arrival of the Spanish in 1492.
AMERICA BEFORE THE ARRIVAL OF THE SPANISH
Before the arrival of Columbus the northern and southern hemispheres were populated top to bottom by people who had been here over a period of at least fifteen thousand years, arriving in waves from different directions, bringing and evolving different ideas and technologies. The Americas were well settled, with domesticated landscapes, great empires, and hundreds of nomadic bands and tribes with an overall population somewhere between six and twenty million. Moreover, they had evolved many different agricultural and hunting practices that were far more advanced than those of Europe. The Iroquois confederacy had a government, rules, traditions, norms, and trade and kinships structures that were in many respects superior to those of cultures in Europe. Tenochtitlan of the Aztecs (modern-day Mexico City) was one of the grandest cities in the world. The Americas were not the raw, uninhabited wilderness that the Europeans perceived them to be.
For example, it was previously believed that the Amazon Basin was basically uninhabited due to poor soil, an erroneous theory that was reinforced by arguments that the acidic soils would not sustain agriculture. Contrary to this, recent studies show that some thirty thousand square miles of forested islands in a grassy floodplain were cultivated to support extensive human-constructed landscapes that included fisheries and raised fields for agriculture.1 Widespread human settlement in the interior of the Amazon area has now been demonstrated with recent discoveries of an ancient astronomical observatory in Brazil, along with a network of villages and towns connected by roads as wide as 150 feet (forty-five meters).2
While southwestern and southeastern tribes in the United States relied on agriculture, often accompanied by irrigation, in the Great Plains and Midwest natives used fire to clear landscapes for better hunting. Charles C. Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus provides details of how Native Americans transformed forests into prairies by practicing a distinct type of animal husbandry.3
Rather than raising domesticated animals for meat, Indians retooled ecosystems to encourage elk, deer and bear. Constant burning of undergrowth increased the numbers of herbivores, the predators that fed on them and the people who ate them both. Indian fire had its greatest impact in the middle of the continent, which Native Americans transformed into a prodigious game farm. . . . Native Americas burned the Great Plains and Midwest prairies so much and so often that they increased its extent; in all probability, a substantial portion of the giant grassland celebrated by cowboys was established and maintained by the people who arrived there first.4
Fire might have been beneficial to Native tribes of the Great Plains and Midwest, but as mentioned in chapter 13, the use of fire in the Ohio Valley caused floods which ended agricultural enterprises and caused the abandonment of Monks Mound.
While there was a high degree of internal and external conflict in some regions, including Mesoamerica and the American Southwest, other native tribes established cooperative governments, including the Iroquois League, also known as the Five Nations. It was centered in present-day New York and was composed of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca Nations of New York, northern New England, and southeastern Canada. In the Iroquois language it was called the League of Peace and Power, and it was headed by the Grand Council of fifty hereditary chiefs.
In addition to ecological management and animal husbandry by the use of fire, other Native American skill sets and knowledge systems exceeded those of the Europeans of the fifteenth century. Besides agriculture, there was aquaculture, such as the floating gardens of Xochimilco, which is all that is left from what was an extensive lake and canal system that connected most of the settlements of the Valley of Mexico. As for building and archaeoastronomy, the Aztec Pyramid of the Sun in Tenochtitlan and Monks Mound at Cahokia surpassed the largest structures of Europe. The Maya and other latter-day Mesoamericans continued the millennia-old traditions of stargazing, calendar keeping, and integrating cosmological alignments into their buildings. Some of the most celebrated archaeoastronomical achievements in North America are the Fajada Butte calendar alignment petroglyphs in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, documented by Anna Sofaer in 1999. On a single panel Anasazi-era Native Americans recorded the equinoxes, solstices, and the 18.6-year lunar standstill cycle.5
Other Anasazi-era sites corroborate Sofaer’s assessment of the state of Native American archaeoastronomy, including research by archaeoastronomer J. McKim Malville at Chimney Rock, Colorado, who confirms Sofaer’s conclusion that the Anasazi also tracked lunar cycles.6 (See also figure 16.1 below.)
But the continuity of this tradition of pre-Columbian archaeoastronomy and cosmology, so alive in the Americas for thousands of years, was about to come to an end. By 1492, the American Southwest was experiencing the impact of a significant period of drought during the North Atlantic’s Medieval Warm Period, which lasted from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries A.D. It reached a climax between 1276 and 1299, a period known as the Great Drought. Increasingly, food availability was impacted, which caused conflicts, for example, between the Navaho and Apache groups and the Mogollon, Hohokam, and Patayan Pueblos. All this coincided with a mass Anasazi exodus from Chaco Canyon and settlements in what is now the Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico, Mesa Verde in Colorado, and many other places throughout the Four Corners area. Leaving their ancestral homelands, they migrated into the Little Colorado and Rio Grande Rivers drainage areas of Arizona and New Mexico. Today, some of the Pueblo peoples of the region claim the Anasazi as their ancestors. This vast area has not regained the population or the cultural and architectural prominence of the previous centuries before the Spanish arrived in Mexico and the American Southwest in the sixteenth century.
Fig. 16.1. This Solstice Snake on the summer solstice pierces an arrowhead of light at the Behind the Rocks area near Moab, Utah. (Photograph by Randy Langstraat)
Climatic upheavals also resulted in the collapse of other indigenous cultures in the Americas, including the Tiwanaku civilization that flourished from A.D. 300 to A.D. 1000 in the Lake Titicaca area of Bolivia. The Mississippian culture was also impacted, with the greatest decline in the population of Cahokia occurring between 1350 and 1400. By the time of the arrival of Europeans most of its population had dispersed or was experiencing severe social stress and a subsequent reduction in maize agriculture, along with possible deforestation.7 The aftermath of this extended period of drought and famine was a mass emptying of the region.
Another noteworthy development that facilitated the conquering of the Americas was the deep political division within the Aztec empire of central Mexico. With the Triple Alliance of 142
8 composed of three Nahuatl-speaking tribes that had come down from the north, the early Aztec “empire” resembled a collection of rival city-states more than a centralized government. However, by the time Cortés arrived in 1519, Tenochtitlan had risen to power over Texcoco and Tlacopan (Tacuba), the other two members of the triad. This power shift caused great dissatisfaction, particularly because, in addition to the tribute demanded by the Aztecs, the ritual “Flower Wars” were waged to acquire captives for their human sacrifice rituals. In another explanation, according to some historical accounts, the Flower Wars were an attempt to appease the gods in response to drought conditions that impacted central Mexico in the 1450s.8
It is clear from the archaeological evidence and historical documentation that massive sacrificial ceremonies dominated the culture, although the scale continues to be debated. For example, one researcher has estimated that as many as 250,000 captives were sacrificed per year in central Mexico in the fifteenth century, but this is considered exaggerated by others.9 The Aztecs themselves reported that over a four-day period when the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan was being reconsecrated in 1487, roughly 80,400 prisoners were sacrificed. However, according to Ross Hassig, author of Aztec Warfare: Imperial Expansion and Political Control, it was fewer.10
THE CHURCH AND THE SPANISH MONARCHY
Even before Pope Alexander VI divided the newly discovered lands between Spain and Portugal in 1493, in the Dum Diversas of 1452, Pope Nicholas V had authorized King Alfonso V of Portugal to institute the enslavement of Muslims, pagans, and “other unbelievers.” These included the peoples south of Cape Bojador in Africa, which ushered in the West African slave trade. The Romanus Pontifex followed in 1454, written by Pope Nicholas V to King Afonso V of Portugal, which also sanctioned the seizure of non-Christian lands, specifically to “invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens [Muslims] and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ.”11
Secrets of Ancient America: Archaeoastronomy and the Legacy of the Phoenicians, Celts, and Other Forgotten Explorers Page 30