Ancient-History Debate Thrives Into New Century

The patch of pale gray bedrock is partly obscured by moss and fallen leaves. It’s one rock in a woods full of rocks.

Look more closely, says John Friedman.

See how the rock is shaped, most probably by some tool, into three or four right-angled steps? Notice how the steps lead down to a rectangular hole?

The hole was a cistern, Friedman says. Off to the side, that squared-off stone, now tilting at an angle, was an altar. Some time ago, Friedman says, he removed a stone crow’s head from the altar for safekeeping.

The steps and the cistern and the altar are the remains of a sweat lodge, asserts Friedman. This is where the ancient Europeans took steam baths in North America.

In the woods near Woodstock, Friedman conjures history not found in textbooks. He tells of Druids and Celtic sun worshipers who came to this continent, specifically to what is now the northeastern United States, a long, long time before Christopher Columbus.

“Everything that you have been told about history,” he says, “is wrong.”

Maybe.

Mainstream researchers still hold that no Europeans created significant settlements in North America until after Columbus’ 1492 voyage. Friedman’s theory of ancient visitors is an old one, previously dismissed by academics as crackpot--akin to alien abductions and the lost continent of Atlantis.

Yet such theories persist. Rebel scholars continue to turn up ancient evidence, and amateur buffs like Friedman keep seeing signs of long-lost civilization underfoot where others see only piles of rocks.

The controversy centers on claims that North America was visited by ancient peoples from Asia and Europe, such as Celtic explorers in 1500 BC. The catchall phrase for these theories of geographically expansive cultures is “diffusionism.”

The purported evidence is all around us: SUV-sized boulders improbably perched on sets of pointed stones; the “Bat Creek Stone,” discovered in Tennessee in 1899 and inscribed with what some interpret as a Hebrew script from the second century; Mystery Hill in Salem, N.H., where chambers covered by immense slabs of granite have been dubbed “America’s Stonehenge.”

Such arguments percolated for decades before getting a boost in the 1970s from an apparently unlikely source--a Harvard marine biologist named Barry Fell. The late scholar had a passion for interpreting ancient scripts and claimed to have deciphered ancient Celtic writings on stone structures around New England. Fell claimed inscriptions written in various ancient European languages could be found throughout the New World.

Many archeologists maligned Fell’s work; even his defenders judge much of it as flawed. But he became a sort of diffusionist Carl Sagan after his 1976 book “America B.C.” and two sequels introduced a general readership to ideas about pre-Columbus contact.

Fell helped inspire Friedman’s own backwoods wanderings around Woodstock. The 61-year-old architect-artist still keeps handy a dog-eared copy of Fell’s book. Displayed on a wooden stand in the center of his living room is a waist-high stone from the steam bath site. Carved into its surface is what Friedman interprets as a deer being hunted.

“I know this was done by a Bronze Age Scandinavian,” he says.

Although believers like Friedman are commonly dismissed as denizens of the fringe, they have plenty of company. One annotated bibliography of diffusionist books, articles and dissertations lists more than 5,000 entries. More are being written all the time. Diffusionists have magazines and societies, like the Institute for the Study of American Cultures, which met in Columbus, Ga., earlier this month.

Believers in the ancient visitors often claim that the sheer number of unusual ruins and inscribed stones makes their case. The problem is, critics home in on the basic interpretations, casting doubt on all else they would seem to support.

Consider the stone chambers.

Scattered throughout New York state and New England are dozens of semi-sunken stone rooms covered by giant slab roofs. Fell believed these were ancient structures dedicated to a sun god named Bel. He cited ancient inscriptions and the tendency of the chambers to be situated so their doorways faced the sun at key times of the year, such as the winter solstice.

But where Fell saw an inscription reading “Pay heed to Bel, his eye is the sun,” critics saw nothing more than old plow marks.

Joseph Diamond of the State University of New York at New Paltz is among the anthropologists who believe the structures are nothing more than Colonial-era root cellars, with doors situated to take advantage of natural light.

Other diffusionist claims are similarly rebutted: Balanced boulders were deposited by glaciers, inscribed stones are frauds, the structures on New Hampshire’s Mystery Hill were probably built by a 19th century eccentric named Jonathan Pattee.

Diamond says he’s worked on more than 100 digs up and down the Hudson Valley over 25 years and has never come across evidence of ancient Europeans. He is among many scientists who ask: Where are the everyday artifacts?

“We don’t have any houses or any other kinds of sites associated with anything other than these sacred sites,” Diamond says. “Imagine a society only living in churches or temples or mosques--without living in houses.”

Diffusionists counter that other evidence should be considered, like similarities in crops and religions among widely separated ancient cultures; they say that the sweet potato, for instance, thought to be indigenous to the Western Hemisphere, was actually a food staple in eastern Asia in ancient times and could have been introduced to the Americas by those cultures.

They point too to L’Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland--North America’s only known Viking camp, which dates back to 1000 BC and was excavated in the 1960s.

After decades of debate, positions of the two sides appear as hardened as the stones they argue over. Some archeologists still act as if they’re trying to shake off a frenzied dog chomping on their pant leg. Advocates like Friedman believe the evidence is right there in the woods, if only people will see.

Walking away from his steam bath find, Friedman nudges a stone protruding from the forest floor with his shoe and says over his shoulder: “I bet that’s something.”