15.8 America: 0 to 100 a.d.

America

Back to America: 100 B.C to 0

North america

The far north and canada

In the very far north the Dorset Arctic tradition continued to thrive. (See particularly the 6th and 1st centuries, B.C. ). Some further remarks about the Indians on the western coast and islands of Canada seem in order. Their houses were large and rectangular with walls and roofs made of hand split boards. The roofs were gabled and there were no windows. The short front walls had small doors, usually highly decorated, sometimes with carvings, sometimes with paint. There were plaited amts on the dirt floors and no furniture. Houses could be as long as 70 feet. Social classes included a ruling aristocracy, commoners and slaves. Being basically a sea people they built sea-going canoes, some 170 feet long, 61/2 feet wide and 41/2 feet deep, which could accommodate 100 people. They navigated the open seas easily and as we shall note in a later chapter, some of their voyages undoubtedly went to the Hawaiian Islands were the people became Polynesians. The currents and winds alone sometimes carry large logs from northern Vancouver Island directly to Hawaii. The canoes were made of one-half of a large tree trunk and carried only a mat which could be used as a poor sail. For sea voyages two canoes could be tied together and a platform put over both. One man steered with a paddle in the stern and kneeling pairs of men paddled strongly. Three types of fish-hooks were used, none of which have ever been seen in Indonesia or Southeast Asia. These northwest Indians did not have pottery.

The united states

This was the beginning of the maximum expansion of the Hopewell Culture with secondary areas of influence in the so-called Marksville group near the Missisippi delta and the Santa Rosa groups at the base of the Florida peninsula. Their rather elaborate decorations (usually for the dead) included copper from Lake Superior, mica from the Appalachians, obsidian from the Rocky Mountains, alligator teeth and conch shells from Florida and the Gulf and stone from Minnesota and Wisconsin. At the risk of over-emphasizing the rather bizarre hypotheses of Barry Fell, we shall mention that he writes that the builders of the Hopewell mounds were mainly Libyans, assisted by Negroid Nubian crew members who left sculptures of heads and African animals along the Mississippi River system in Ohio, Iowa, Oklahoma and Arkansas. He even suggest that Jewish refugees from the first Romano-Jewish war ended up in Kentucky and Tennessee.

In his most recent book Fell (Ref. 66 ) gives a translation from Plutarch which allegedly tells of how Greek North Africans (Late Carthaginians) sailed westward from Britain passing three island groups equidistant from one another (Orkneys, Shetlands and Faeros?), and then to Ogygia (Iceland?) five sailing days away and then on to the northern coast of a continent, Epeiros, that rims the ocean. South Greenland would fit the alleged distance and direction. Then, says Plutarch,