Europeans in Michigan

[E.P. Grondine]

It is not a case of setting up “kingdoms” or even permanent settlements.
It was a case of pure opportunistic mining of the equivalent of the third world.

Summertime on Lake Superior can be nice.
Winter is brutal.
And the copper would be under snow in frozen ground.

The result is 3, or 4 at the most, month camps.
Hide tents and brush huts.
Things that rot.
The only things that would be left behind when winter came would be heavy stone tools with no use back home.
These tools have been found in abundance.

And of course the local peoples did nothing.

And of course we can safely ignore their memories of what went down, or twist them to conform with our "theories".

And of course no one is supposed to be judgemental or intolerant of any of these loads of s***t.

Once again, exactlly who did what when may be found in "Man and Impact in the Americas".

Anything that disagrees with the data presented there is just plain WRONG, and a lot of nonsense.

[Minimalist]

Insisting that this is so is exactly what the Clovisoids insisted was the case with pre-Clovis man in the New World.

That is a real stretch....even by your standards. BTW, Clovis-first is pretty well dead... no matter what a handful of die hards claim. They've lost.


As for inscriptions....as the article in BadArchaeology suggests, people seem to see what they wish to see....even if they aren't outright hoaxes.

[uniface]

I must have a masochistic streak in me for getting involved in discussions that make me question my sanity.

In both cases (Clovis First & No Nordics Here), defenders of the status quo belief have tried to impose their own special requirements on what constitutes "acceptable evidence."

In this case, that inscriptions, in and of themselves, "prove nothing." ONLY if a stratified habitation site of theirs is found and professionally excavated will it be proven that they were here (or wherever). Rubbish

If a criminal leaves his fingerprints at a crime scene, he was there. End of story. It isn't additionally necessary that he drop his wallet there with his drivers' license in it.

Similarly, artifacts that date to the pre-Clovis era prove -- in and of themselves -- that there were people here then. No additional "requirements" (as demanded by the Clovisoids) can be imposed with a straight face.

The attempted distortion of the evaluation criteria -- the rearguard strategy -- is the same in both cases.

Clear now ?

[Minimalist]

Rubbish

You have again ignored the hoax issue. Or the wishful thinking issue. If that inscription is Minoan what does it say?

Cyrus Gordon seems to be something of a quack.

Gordon also held that Jews, Phoenicians, and others crossed the Atlantic in antiquity, ultimately arriving in both North and South America. This opinion was based on his own work on the Bat Creek inscription[1][2][3][4] found in Tennessee and on the Paraiba inscription[5] from Brazil, as well as his assessment of the Los Lunas Decalogue Stone.[6]

The Bat Creek "inscription" is more appropriately the Bat Shit Inscription and was shown to be a fraud. The Los Lunas Decalogue Stone has previously been discussed around here as a Mormon forgery trying to buck up their nonsensical tales of Jews in America.

Crazy is still crazy.

[uniface]

Objection, Your Honor -- the witness is hallucinating.

[uniface]

Cyrus Gordon seems to be something of a quack.

Au contraire. If scholars were athletes, there would be few today who could carry Cyrus Gordon's jock.

"In a country where people have read about horses but never seen one, donkeys will come to be called 'horses.' And woe betide whoever tries to inform them otherwise."

From an historical perspective, that is certainly the case where scholarship is concerned.

Although people today seem oblivious to it, the goal of a scholarly education in years past was a comprehensive grasp of a field, supported by a sound familiarity with related ones. In other words, the attainment of a perspective point from which the whole picture was in view (rather than one detail of it), enabling the significance of a given discovery or theory to be accurately assessed. These "big picture" thinkers were men like Gordon in Middle Eastern antiquities, Eliade in Cultural Anthropology, Witthoft and Dragoo in North American archaeology, and Campbell in comparative mythology. They understood what they were looking at.

This is not to say that their judgements were infallible; only that they were (and are) the points of departure for subsequent investigations. And whenever one of them decided to cut loose the way Robert Graves did in The White Goddess, or Campbell in The Hero With A Thousand Faces, they left would-be "critics" speechless.

Today, of course, it suffices to dismiss Gordon as a "crank" because his views were incongruous with prevailing orthodoxy. But whether this conclusion damns Gordon or the one evaluating him remains an open question.

Any informed appraisal of the value of his opinion on such enigmas as the Bat Creek Stone and the Brazilian Inscriptions would begin with awareness that he grew up tri-lingual from childhood (English, Hebrew and Aramaic), adding Ancient Greek, Latin, Hittite and Ugaritic as he went along. Also that, having reached the point where he could view the entire Antiquities field from the summit of it, he both saw connections we wasn't supposed to, and pointed them out, whether this annoyed people who were big fish in small ponds or not. E.g.,

"Homer and Bible," 1955, Hebrew Union College Annual 26, pp. 43–108.

The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations, 1962/1965, Norton Library, New York

"Vergil and the Bible World," 1971, The Gratz College Anniversary Volume, Philadelphia: Gratz College.

These are in addition to basics in languages like

Ugaritic Grammar, 1940, Pontificium Institutum Biblicum, Rome. and

Forgotten Scripts, 1982, Basic Books, New York (revised and enlarged version, previously published 1968, now containing Gordon's work on Minoan and Eteocretan).

If you were aware, as he was, that (for one example) Saul was given the proper Homeric funeral due a fallen leader in wartime, join the Stinky Old Poopy Heads. You're a heretic.