OK, I will try and tie it all together. This will be long, so bear with me.
First, a whole lot of the rock art spread around the country is clearly not Amerindian work. The symbols, writing, astrological knowledge etc. involved just do not match. Plus many of the old reports of interviews with tribal elders show that Amerindians acknowdged that the art was there when they moved in.
Thus then brings up the question of who did it and why. In the South West, at least, a lot of the symbols show a North African, or Carthage, relationship. Some of these carving are just explorers graffiti, but others show a well established knowledge of astrology and the need to determine solstices, equinoxes, etc. So we have a spread of knowledge and purpose.
Why would Carthagians come to the South West? The same reason the white man did centuries later. Gold, silver, copper, and good land to set up settlements on to feed the miners.
So now we have established settlements supporting established trade. But, admittedly, at the literal ends of the earth from a Mediterranean point of view.
Most of this is built in the premise that there was not enough copper in the Old World to make all the bronze used in the Bronze Age. Thus the need for the mines on Lake Superior and in the South West.
Second, as far as knowledge of the Assyrians coming is concerned. It is pure conjecture on my part. But I find it hard to believe that they could assemble a multi hundred thousand man army in secret. And world politics was as much a topic of conversation then as now. Especially among traders who had to buy and sell stuff coming from and going to far away places.
The fact that they were willing to take the short, fast, direct route across the water has been shown by Ballard and his discoveries in the Black Sea, Mediterranean Sea, and even Atlantic Ocean. He has found wrecks of merchant ships that were far out of sight of land. His conclusion is that they were so heavily loaded that they were not blown far off course before they went down. But that the went down pretty much when they were pretty much on course.
The need for this long distance, and both physical and financially dangerous, trade died off with the discovery off how to make iron weapons and tools. Iron was better, it was cheaper, and you could find it locally. There just wasn’t enough money in it to make it worth while anymore.
I have to take back the Roman shipwreck in the Amazon statement. It was in Rio de Janeiro. That is much further south. But what is important it that it was there and that it was a merchant ship, not military. This guy was not out for glory, god and country. He was out to make money. And there were people there to trade with. In the Amazon basin and he seemed to think further on as well.
I think the important lesson to be learned by all this is that history is written by historians who are most often employed by the governments of the time. So it is written from the governments point of view, usually military. But these explores were outside that box. They were looking for a profit. And if the found a new source for a commodity, or a shortcut that saved travel time and money, they didn’t brag about it. It was a trade secret and kept close to the vest.
ROMANS IN RIO?
In 1976, diver Jose Roberto Texeira salvaged two intact amphorae from the bottom of Guanabara Bay, 15 kilometers from Rio de Janeiro. Six years later, archeologist Robert Marx found thousands of pottery fragments in the same locality, including 200 necks from amphorae.
Amphorae are tall storage vessels that were used widely throughout ancient Europe. These particular amphorae are of Roman manufacture, circa the second century B.C. Much controversy erupted around the finds because Spain and Portugal both claim to have discovered Brazil around 1500 A.D. Roman artifacts were distinctly unwelcome. More objectively, the thought of an ancient Roman crossing of the Atlantic is not so farfetched. Roman wrecks have been discovered in the Azores; and the shortest way across the Atlantic is from Africa to Brazil -- only 18 days using modern sailing vessels.
(Sheckley, Robert; "Romans in Rio," Omni, 5:43, June 1983.)
From Science Frontiers #28, JUL-AUG 1983. © 1983-2000 William R. Corliss
News in Science - Ancient Amazon home to large 'cities' - 19/09/2003
[This is the print version of story
http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s949687.htm]
Ancient Amazon home to large 'cities'
Maggie Fox
Reuters
Friday, 19 September 2003
Brazil's northern Amazon region, once thought to have been pristine until the encroachment of modern development, actually hosted sophisticated networks of towns and villages hundreds of years ago, according to a new study by U.S. and Brazilian researchers.
A report by Dr Michael Heckenberger of the University of Florida and colleagues, published in today's issue of the journal Science, suggests the society was advanced and complex, and had worked out ways of using the Amazon forest without destroying it.
WASHINGTON, DC Sept. 18, 2003 —
The Amazon River basin was not all a pristine, untouched wilderness before Columbus came to the Americas, as was once believed. Researchers have uncovered clusters of extensive settlements linked by wide roads with other communities and surrounded by agricultural developments.
The researchers, including some descendants of pre-Columbian tribes that lived along the Amazon, have found evidence of densely settled, well-organized communities with roads, moats and bridges in the Upper Xingu part of the vast tropical region.
Michael J. Heckenberger, first author of the study appearing this week in the journal Science, said that the ancestors of the Kuikuro people in the Amazon basin had a "complex and sophisticated" civilization with a population of many thousands during the period before 1492.
"These people were not the small mobile bands or simple dispersed populations" that some earlier studies had suggested, he said.
Instead, the people demonstrated sophisticated levels of engineering, planning, cooperation and architecture in carving out of the tropical rain forest a system of interconnected villages and towns making up a widespread culture based on farming.
Heckenberger said the society that lived in the Amazon before Columbus were overlooked by experts because they did not build the massive cities and pyramids and other structures common to the Mayans, Aztecs and other pre-Columbian societies in South America.
Instead, they built towns, villages and smaller hamlets all laced together by precisely designed roads, some more than 50 yards across, that went in straight lines from one point to another.
"They were not organized in cities," Heckenberger said. "There was a different pattern of small settlements, but they were all tightly integrated.
He said the population in one village and town complex was 2,500 to 5,000 people, but that could be just one of many complexes in the Amazon region.
"All the roads were positioned according to the same angles and they formed a grid throughout the region," he said. Only a small part of these roads has been uncovered and it is uncertain how far the roads extend, but the area studied by his group is a grid 15 miles by 15 miles, he said.
Heckenberger said the people did not build with stone, as did the Mayas, but made tools and other equipment of wood and bone. Such materials quickly deteriorate in the tropical forest, unlike more durable stone structures. Building stones were not readily available along the Amazon, he said.
He said the Amazon people moved huge amounts of dirt to build roads and plazas. At one place, there is evidence that they even built a bridge spanning a major river. The people also altered the natural forest, planting and maintaining orchards and agricultural fields and the effects of this stewardship can still be seen today, Heckenberger said.
Diseases such as smallpox and measles, brought to the new world by European explorers, are thought to have wiped out most of the population along the Amazon, he said. By the time scientists began studying the indigenous people, the population was sparse and far flung. As a result, some researchers assumed that that was the way it was prior to Columbus.
The new studies, Heckenberger said, show that the Amazon basin once was the center of a stable, well-coordinated and sophisticated society.
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I hope this helps. I will have to dig up the Columbus and his maps reference. But any good search on his name should find it. It is well known by historians if not by storytellers.
