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Archaeological Cover-ups?
DaltheJigsaw
Mountain View Veteran
Most of us are familiar with the last scene in the popular Indiana Jones archeological adventure film Raiders Of The Lost Ark, in which an important historical artifact, the Ark of the Covenant from the Temple in Jerusalem, is locked in a crate and put in a giant warehouse, never to be seen again—thus ensuring that no history books will have to be rewritten and no history professor will have to revise the lecture that he has been giving for the previous forty years.
While the film was fiction, the scene in which an important ancient relic is buried in a warehouse is uncomfortably close to reality for many researchers. To those who investigate allegations of archaeological cover-ups, there are disturbing indications that the most important archaeological institute in the United States, the Smithsonian Institute, an independent federal agency, has been actively suppressing some of the most interesting and important archaeological discoveries made in the Americas.
They aren't the only ones. The Vatican, too, has been long accused of keeping artifacts and ancient books in their vast cellars, without allowing the outside world access to them. These secret treasures, often of a controversial historical or religious nature, are allegedly suppressed by the Catholic Church because they might damage the church's credibility, or perhaps cast their official texts in doubt. Sadly, there is overwhelming evidence that something very similar is happening with the Smithsonian Institution.
The cover-up and alleged suppression of archaeological evidence began in late 1881 when John Wesley Powell, the geologist famous for exploring the Grand Canyon, appointed Cyrus Thomas as the director of the Eastern Mound Division of the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of Ethnology.
The Mounds, discovered in the Americas through the south and Midwest, had been built by a sophisticated people for over a thousand years before Europeans conquered the New World. While "mounds" don't sound very impressive, excavating them showed them to be the remains of sophisticated cities, in which some buildings may have even had plaster walls.
Who were the Mound Builders? No one was sure. But, in a period when the prevailing attitude was that Native Americans were primitive and savage, whites didn't believe they could possibly have been the Mound Builders. When Thomas came to the Bureau of Ethnology he was a "pronounced believer in the existence of a race of Mound Builders, distinct from the American Indians."
However, John Wesley Powell, the director of the Bureau of Ethnology, was very sympathetic toward the American Indians, since he had lived with the peaceful Winnebago Indians of Wisconsin for many years as a youth. He felt that American Indians were unfairly thought of as primitive and savage. As soon as Thomas's appointment was complete, the Smithsonian began to promote the idea that Native Americans were descended from advanced civilizations, in spite of Thomas's previously published position; and, thus, were worthy of respect and protection.
The Smithsonian also began a program of suppressing any archaeological evidence that lent credence to the school of thought known as Diffusionism, a school which believes that throughout history there has been widespread dispersion of culture and civilization via contact by ship and major trade routes.
The Smithsonian opted for the opposite school, known as Isolationism. Isolationism holds that most civilizations are isolated from each other and that there has been very little contact between them, especially those that are separated by bodies of water. In this intellectual war that started in the 1880s, it was held that even contact between the civilizations of the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys were rare, and certainly these civilizations did not have any contact with such advanced cultures as the Mayas, Toltecs, or Aztecs in Mexico and Central America. By Old World standards this is an extreme, and even ridiculous idea, considering that the river system reached to the Gulf of Mexico and these civilizations were as close as the opposite shore of the gulf. It was like saying that cultures in the Black Sea area could not have had contact with the Mediterranean.
http://www.paulcilwa.com/Metaphysics/Archaeology/index.asp
While the film was fiction, the scene in which an important ancient relic is buried in a warehouse is uncomfortably close to reality for many researchers. To those who investigate allegations of archaeological cover-ups, there are disturbing indications that the most important archaeological institute in the United States, the Smithsonian Institute, an independent federal agency, has been actively suppressing some of the most interesting and important archaeological discoveries made in the Americas.
They aren't the only ones. The Vatican, too, has been long accused of keeping artifacts and ancient books in their vast cellars, without allowing the outside world access to them. These secret treasures, often of a controversial historical or religious nature, are allegedly suppressed by the Catholic Church because they might damage the church's credibility, or perhaps cast their official texts in doubt. Sadly, there is overwhelming evidence that something very similar is happening with the Smithsonian Institution.
The cover-up and alleged suppression of archaeological evidence began in late 1881 when John Wesley Powell, the geologist famous for exploring the Grand Canyon, appointed Cyrus Thomas as the director of the Eastern Mound Division of the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of Ethnology.
The Mounds, discovered in the Americas through the south and Midwest, had been built by a sophisticated people for over a thousand years before Europeans conquered the New World. While "mounds" don't sound very impressive, excavating them showed them to be the remains of sophisticated cities, in which some buildings may have even had plaster walls.
Who were the Mound Builders? No one was sure. But, in a period when the prevailing attitude was that Native Americans were primitive and savage, whites didn't believe they could possibly have been the Mound Builders. When Thomas came to the Bureau of Ethnology he was a "pronounced believer in the existence of a race of Mound Builders, distinct from the American Indians."
However, John Wesley Powell, the director of the Bureau of Ethnology, was very sympathetic toward the American Indians, since he had lived with the peaceful Winnebago Indians of Wisconsin for many years as a youth. He felt that American Indians were unfairly thought of as primitive and savage. As soon as Thomas's appointment was complete, the Smithsonian began to promote the idea that Native Americans were descended from advanced civilizations, in spite of Thomas's previously published position; and, thus, were worthy of respect and protection.
The Smithsonian also began a program of suppressing any archaeological evidence that lent credence to the school of thought known as Diffusionism, a school which believes that throughout history there has been widespread dispersion of culture and civilization via contact by ship and major trade routes.
The Smithsonian opted for the opposite school, known as Isolationism. Isolationism holds that most civilizations are isolated from each other and that there has been very little contact between them, especially those that are separated by bodies of water. In this intellectual war that started in the 1880s, it was held that even contact between the civilizations of the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys were rare, and certainly these civilizations did not have any contact with such advanced cultures as the Mayas, Toltecs, or Aztecs in Mexico and Central America. By Old World standards this is an extreme, and even ridiculous idea, considering that the river system reached to the Gulf of Mexico and these civilizations were as close as the opposite shore of the gulf. It was like saying that cultures in the Black Sea area could not have had contact with the Mediterranean.
http://www.paulcilwa.com/Metaphysics/Archaeology/index.asp
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Comments
Diffusionism was very unpopular for a long time (and still is controversial, even when there's evidence for it) because it was considered racist, as the article above implies. When the Mayan ruins were first discovered in the 1800's, no one could believe that the ancestors of the Native people living around the ruins could have built such sophisticated architecture and grand cities. A similar thing happened in Southern Africa, when the Zimbabwe ruins and other archaeological sites were discovered. And in fact, the theories of the day, that Egyptians floated to Central America on rafts or reed boats and built the pyramids in Mexico and Guatemala, and so forth (the latter-day version of which theory is that extra-terrestrials built the Mayan ruins) were based on racial prejudice. So diffusionism as a theory has remained a hot potato.
Whether or not the Smithsonian actually had or has a policy of suppressing evidence of cultural diffusion, I don't know. Kind of sounds like a conspiracy theory, and notice the article is filed under "Metaphysics". But still, you never know. Strange things happen. Usually, though, biases in anthropology/archaeology are unconscious, and important evidence gets neglected because the researchers tend to find what they're looking for, and overlook anything that goes contrary to their beliefs.