The earliest archaeological evidence of wine consumption yet found has been at sites in China (c. 7000 BC), Georgia (c. 6000 BC), Iran (c. It is the archaeological consensus that the myriad cultures seen in native North America, including the mound builders, for the most part developed independent of any. Miller & J.H. Hayes, A History of Ancient Israel (Philadelphia,Westminster Press, 1986) 60.

Civilizations Lost and Found: Fabricating History - Part One: An Alternate Reality. Kenneth Feder, Bradley T. Lepper, Terry A. Barnhart, and Deborah A. Bolnick. The Lost Civilizations of North America documentary is one in a long line of failed attempts to populate America’s ancient past with the denizens of lost tribes, lost cities, and, as its title indicates, lost civilizations. While there are many vernacular meanings of the term civilization, archaeologists tend to use it in a limited and precise way to signify a particular kind of society. For example, in his classic enumeration of the features that characterized humanity’s earliest civilizations, prehistorian V. Gordon Childe (1.

More recently, Joseph Tainter (1. Civilizations Lost. To many at the fringes of the historical sciences, the term civilization takes on an entirely different, often coded, meaning—especially when a seemingly innocuous modifier, such as “lost,” is applied to its front end. A vast amount of pseudoscience has been inspired by the simple phrase “lost civilization,” particularly by those who believe that they have found its archaeological spoor and can thus recast the history of a particular people, an entire continent, or in the most extreme cases, all of humanity (Childress 1. Hancock 1. 99. 5, 2. Haughton 2. 00. 7). The history of American archaeology for the aboriginal cultures of North America is especially rife with problems relating to the indiscriminate and often confusing use of the phrase “lost civilization” and its cohorts “lost race,” “lost city,” and “lost tribe.” Many claims about the existence of a lost civilization in antiquity are, in effect, warmed- over versions of Plato’s Atlantis myth: Long ago (commonly placed at more than ten thousand years before the present) and far away (on an island in the Atlantic or under the Antarctic ice cap or off the coast of Japan, etc.), an enormously advanced and technologically sophisticated civilization existed whose impact on human history was vast.

In extreme versions of the lost civilization myth, the society in question possessed technologies that even modern people have not mastered. Alas, as the result of some terrible accident or war or natural catastrophe, that civilization was destroyed virtually overnight and thus became “lost.” In such stories, conventional historians and archaeologists are described as being blind to the evidence for such a civilization or, in some cases, well aware of the evidence but part of a longstanding conspiracy to keep it all quiet, lest it upset the convenient apple cart of history concocted in their ivory towers. In one subset of the lost- civilization genre of pseudohistory, the lost civilization is not a previously unknown group of people residing in the clich. Even restricting ourselves to just North America, the list of such claims is long—though evidence is short—and includes: Celtic kingdoms in the northeastern United States thousands of years ago (Fell 1. Coptic Christian settlements in ancient Michigan (based on the so- called Michigan Relics) (Halsey 2. Roman Jews in Arizona (the Tucson Artifacts) (Burgess 2. Lost Tribes of Israel in Ohio (the Newark Holy Stones) (Lepper and Gill 2.

Old World peoples secreted in hideouts in the Grand Canyon in Arizona (“Explorations in Grand Canyon” 1. Illinois (Burrows Cave) (Joltes 2. These claims are predicated essentially on the same notion: ancient Europeans, Africans, or Asians came to the Americas long before Columbus and long—perhaps thousands of years—before the Norse; they settled here and had a huge impact on the native people but then somehow became lost, both to history and to historians. Today, a group of “independent scholars” (a euphemism often used to mean writers without institutional affiliation, formal training, or archaeological experience) trumpet the evidence for these ancient settlers of the Americas, disseminating their revisionist histories—not in refereed, professional journals but in popular books, magazines, and, perhaps most broadly, on websites and in cable TV documentaries. The Lost Civilizations of North America. A recent iteration of this “alternative archaeology” (another euphemism, this one used for claims about antiquity lacking in credible scientific evidence) can be seen in the documentary The Lost Civilizations of North America (produced by Steven Smoot, Rick Stout, and Barry Mc. Lerran), described on its DVD packaging as “the compelling account of the wanton destruction of an ancient history.” According to the video, this claimed “destruction” is both actual (in the sense of the physical, perhaps intentional, destruction of the archaeological evidence of this civilization) and metaphorical (in the sense of the intellectual denial of its existence).

It is the embarrassing admission of the authors of this article that we naively agreed to participate in the program. We do not agree with the vast majority of the interpretations of ancient American history presented in the documentary. While it is tempting to ignore the documentary as nonsense, the high production values coupled with the selective inclusion of academically credible scholars have resulted in its gaining international attention. Glenn Beck featured it prominently and favorably in the August 1. DVD claims it won the Best Multicultural Documentary Award at the 2. Rick Astley Ultimate Collection Rare. International Cherokee Film Festival.

In a series of three articles, we will provide a scientific commentary on the interpretations expressed in this video concerning the ancient history of North America, using the documentary itself as emblematic of a far broader attempt to write an alternative history of the New World that is wholly unsupported by any archaeological or historical evidence. In this and two subsequent articles, we will address two questions that are particularly relevant: What is the evidence for the “lost” civilizations in North America? And how did this evidence come to be “lost”? An Alternate Reality. Consensus among investigators in organized fields of knowledge is not a conspiracy to ignore, destroy, or sequester deviant or anomalous evidence, as is implied several times in the Lost Civilizations video.

Consensus is based upon recognized rules of investigation and principles of interpretation that have been developed in relation to specific research problems. The emergence of consensus among anthropologists regarding the origin and antiquity of humankind in the New World is no exception. This map shows the configuration of the modern coastlines of northeast Asia and northwest North America, along with the maximum Late Pleistocene extent of the Bering Land Bridge. Its existence, between thirty- five thousand and eleven thousand years ago, provided a broad avenue across which human beings first entered the New World from the Old. The consensus view on this subject among archaeologists (together with geologists and biologists) is based on more than a century of excavating literally thousands of archaeological sites. A convergence of interdisciplinary data indicates that the New World was first populated at least thirteen thousand and perhaps as many as thirty thousand years ago by migrants from Asia (Meltzer 2.

These people entered the Americas via a wide expanse of land—called Beringia—connecting northeastern Asia with northwestern North America during periods of glacial expansion and concomitant lower sea levels (see figure 1). The first human migrants were few in number and entered a continent teeming with wildlife, including many now- extinct forms such as mastodons, wooly mammoths, giant ground sloths, and saber- toothed cats. Exploiting the richness of this “new world,” the human population grew quickly and expanded across the North and South American continents over a few thousand years.