Hi Rako
I enjoyed the map of the distribution of nations which you posted, but it is post contact.
The best place to start is most likely with this article:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/n ... 14481/?all
Now to start off with few notes on general apparat:
There were no "Mounbdbuilders" as one distinct people.
Different peoples used earth as a construction material to build structures for a variety of different purposes.
"mounds" are the ruins of those structures after the passage of a time of abandonment or being driven away.
There were no "Adena" people; Adena is the name of a material culture.
Based on the physical evidence, the people who produced those material remains were Andaaste.
The were no "Hopewell" people; the term is generally used to refer to the material cultures of a number of peoples,
in very different and widely separated regions,
who adopted a general form of tribal alliance and laws of diplomatic interaction.
I do not know if your statement about solar alignments is correct.
I leave astronomical analysis to my colleague Fletcher Wilson, who is one of Ohio's best naked eye astronomers.
The R Y haplogoup allele distribution is interesting, but probably useless, based on Hardachre's Observation.
In Europe it has been found that mt DNA is about the only useful genetic diagnostic at this point of time in the development of genetic studies.
As far as any pattern in R Y distribution goes, if you place the Americas on the right side of your map of it,
and then remember that the Thule people pretty well died off at the time of Viking contact,
to be replaced by Inuit (as near as I remember),
then the northern distribution may make sense, but not the sub-Saharan African distribution.
IN general keep in mind that ANY proposed genetic evidence must be consistent with the archaeological evidence.
[quote="Rako"]
South America is quite a far distance from New England. It's hard to use that as a way to match up artifacts found in Northern US or Canadian sites.
[/qoute]
The "Solutrean " artifacts in question were found on the floor of the Chesapeake Bay, not in New England.
Yes, but we now know that man was using boats quite early, and can pretty well show that Clovis technologies
came from South America to the Gulf Coast of North America.
I'm not going to go into the differences between European dolmens and North American glacial eratics,
other than to note that there are a lot of nuts out there who try to build imaginary pre-Columbian European empires in the Americas.
Copper came from 4 sources:
First, Lake Superior,
Second, float copper from the mid-continent which was deposited there from Lake Superior by glaciers,
Third, Copper Hill North Carolina,
Fourth, a small deposit in the SE US, which I am not going to speak of.
I will simply point out that with the advent of metal detectors,
one of the finest collections of Old Copper Culture artifacts is in the hands of a private collector.
Rako, you have to remember that the money for archaeological work in North America is in general very very limited.
The colonists only interest in the native peoples was how to use them for profit,
get their lands,
and get rid of them.
The racism persists to this day,
as literal genocide is followed by cultural genocide.
The first researchers' interest was mainly in how to make the native peoples fit into a literal interpretation of the Bible.
A few argued that the natives were people, and deserved to be treated as such.
Then came nuts of other religious varieties.