

Found a good "North American History 700 BC to 1 AD " link? Let Us Know!
THE FAR NORTH AND CANADA 700 to 601 B.C.
The Arctic Small tradition continued in the far north as previously described.
Indian life throughout Canada was essentially as recorded in the last chapter.
600 to 501 B.C.
There was no real change in the human condition in North America at this time. The Arctic Small Tool tradition is usually divided into two stages with what has been called the Dorset Stage emerging at about 600 B.C. This was an harpoon based hunting culture extending all across the far north.
500 to 201 B.C. (See Below: "North America")
200 to 101 B.C.
There was no interruption of the Dorset Society previously described in the Arctic north. In southeastern Canada, particularly in the region of Nova Scotia, the Micmac Indians eventually had script writing. Although usually credited to work of later French priests, Fell (Ref. 65, 66) gives some evidence indicating an east Libyan origin from near the Egyptian border where Herodotus said that an Adrymachid tribe had adopted Egyptian manners. He dates the contact of Libyan sailors with the Micmacs to this century but only further investigation can really settle this one way or another.
We have recorded previously that some authorities feel that Asian migrations to North America via a Pacific northern route continued by boat down to about 2,000 B.C. If true, then over the vast expanse of some 20,000 to 30,000 years a great variety of people could have made this trek. We know for certain that the Aleuts and the Eskimos are separate from true Amerindians and that the Athabascans of central, north Canada were relatively late comers, different in culture and language from most other Indians. Now we shall describe still another group of people, occupying the far western shore and the off-shore islands of Canada, who appear to be different from all other early North American inhabitants in many ways and who developed in an isolated situation along the Canadian waterways, shut off from inland Canada by precipices and wild mountains. These are the Haida of the Queen Charlotte Islands and the Kwakiutl of northwestern Vancouver Island, both ranking among the tallest people in the world. They appear to be related to the Salish or Flathead Indians who later inhabited northern Montana, apparently coming down gradually from Bella Coola and British Columbia. These people are dolichocephalic while most American Indians are brachycephalic; their complexions are fair and their hair of ten soft and brown, rather than Mongolian coarse and black. The earliest European visitors to the western Canadian islands - Cook, Dixon and Vancouver - all emphasized those features. In addition those northwest coast people of ten had strong mustaches and beards, in contrast to the usually totally beardless Amerindians. Thus they have many Caucasian features and are physically identical to true Polynesians. Their homesites in the Canadian islands probably represent way-stations on the trip these people made from some place in Asia in ancient times to the eventual destination of some of them, in Polynesia. If they are related to Malaysians it is a very distant relationship and the two physically dissimilar peoples must have separated from an original stem in very ancient days, before the Malayasians even migrated down into the peninsula now bearing their name. The theme of the unity of the northwest American Indians and the Polynesians will be further developed in subsequent chapters.
100 to 0 B.C.
All across northern Canada as far north as Ellesmere Island and northern Greenland and down to the northern shores of Hudson Bay and the east side of the Ungava Peninsula, the Dorset people continued to thrive. They carved figures of animals from walrus's tusks and bone, decorating them with peculiar outer marks which Schledermann (Ref. 189) has called an outline of animals' skeletons. In the pictures he shows, however, it hard to identify true skeletal structures and the marks are more reminiscent to this writer of the lunar notations of ancient Europeans described previously by Marchack. (Ref. 139) The northwest American Indians of the Canadian waterways continued in active existence at this time.
0 to 100 A.D.
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 700 to 601 B.C.
Here again, as in the last chapter, we run into the controversial theories of Barry Fell (Ref. 65). Various rock inscriptions of New England, some originally found years ago1 and others just recently, as at Union, New Hampshire, and on Monhegan Island off the coast of Maine, have now been interpreted by Fell as being Tartessian Punic, recording arrivals of Phoenician ships from Spain. It is his hypothesis that these voyagers, dated from 700 to 600 B.C. were probably not explorers but merchants, trading with already settled New England Celts'
In the midwest, the Burial Mound I period of the Adena variation of the Woodland tradition continued. Here again Barry Fell introduces new controversy when he states that excavation of some of the mounds have revealed copper and bronze tablets, pottery, figurines, etc. showing unmistakable similarities to ancient Phoenician constructions. He says these are located in West Virginia, lowa and Ohio, along major rivers. Other students of the Adena Culture mention only stone ornaments and engraved slabs in these mounds, although the later Hopewell mounds (see 3rd century B.C.) certainly had various metals, but of local origin. In the southwest United States the San Pedro phase of the Cochise Culture continued as a desert society, with increasing population and improvements in farming and other skills.
600 to 501 B.C.
The Adena Woodlland Culture thrived in the east and the middle west of the United States and the influence of the Adena burial customs, religion and art can be identified over a large area, including Chesapeake Bay and New York state. In the 1880s Professor Cyrus Thomas surveyed over 2,000 mound sites and collected over 4,000 specimens of this and the later Hopewell Culture. The San Pedro phase of the Cochise Culture continued in the southwest.
500 to 401 B.C. (North America)
The far northern Eskimo Culture, the midwestern Woodland Adena Cultures and the southwestern Cochise traditions continued as before. In southern Utah's Barrier Canyon (now Horseshoe Canyon) on the Colorado River just before it goes into Arizona, rock paintings and figurines dating back at least to 500 B.C. have been found. They may date much earlier. Barry Fell (Ref. 65) has further astounding hypotheses dating to this century.
For example, he has identified a stone temple at South Woodstock, Vermont, to be of Celtic construction, dated after 433 B.C. and like others, oriented with its long axis at compass bearing 123 degrees, which is the horizon azimuth of the rising sun on the December 22 winter solstice, important in the Celtic religion. He says that many monoliths characteristic of any Celtic landscape are found in New England. And still more - Fell states that the Zuni tongue in Arizona is basically Libyan, taken from the limited, racy and colloquial vocabulary of Libyan navy men sailing in this century from ships of Tarshish or Carthage. He insists that the basic Zuni language of today is similar to Coptic, with borrowed elements from Spanish and English. One of the problems involved in accepting this is that most authorities do not think the Zuni existed as a definite people at this early time, and that they developed from the Mogollon Culture much later.
400 to 301 B.C. (North America)
The Dorset Arctic, the Adena variety of the Woodlands and the southwest Cochise traditions continued as described in the preceding two chapters.
300 to 201 B.C. (North America)
In the far north the Dorset phase of the Arctic Small Tool tradition continued. This Dorset Society was to last overall, some sixteen centuries.
By this century, for reasons unknown, the Adena Culture had faded and almost disappeared, but a new North American Indian culture made its appearance in Illinois and soon spread to Ohio. Named the "Hopewell" after an Illinois mound group, this eventually spread widely over a huge portion of the eastern United States, stretching from the Mississippi River to Florida. Although the people probably cultivated corn and other crops, hunting and gathering were still of critical importance. They built elaborate earthworks, some for defensive purposes and some as burial mounds. They worked in copper, mica, obsidian, soap-stone and wood as well as clay. Copper and mica cutouts in various designs were seen in effigy pipes and occasional pottery. Rock carvings of satyr masks almost identical with some of Carthaginian occupied Sardinia and Carthaginian coins of the 4th and 3rd centuries B.C. have allegedly been found along the Arkansas River both above and below Wichita, Kansas, according to Barry Fell, and he feels positive that the Carthaginians traded on the Atlantic side of America for lumber, gold and furs.
In the southwest, in southern New Mexico and eastern Arizona, Coshise Indians continued their agricultural, hunting and gathering society, but with still more improvement in the type of corn, squash and beans, so that a true farming community had materialized.
THE UNITED STATES 200 to 101 B.C.
The expanding Hopewell sphere extended from the Alleghenies to the western border of the Mississippi alley, north to the Great Lakes, south to Florida and the Gulf States. Their craftsmen obtained obsidian for knives and arrowheads from the Yellowstone area of Wyoming as well as other rocks from Montana and North Dakota. We have not emphasized it previously but the Woodland Culture with its burial mounds, pipes, stone and copper gorgets, wooden carvings, pottery effigies and earrings existed in the south as early as 1,000 B.C. onto this 2nd century B.C. and beyond. Burial mounds up to forty feet in height are scattered throughout the south.
We do not like to belabor a controversial point but is perhaps worth mentioning that Fell (Ref. 66) insists that Celt-Iberians were scattered throughout the eastern United States by this period and that coins found in quantity in Ohio were local copies of ancient bronze coins of Evia, an old Portuguese city. This entire question of European and/or North African visitors in America at a much earlier time than heretofore ever mentioned in classical histories is an interesting one. Although Fell and Thor Heyerdahl1, both of whom have written extensively on this subject independently, have not obtained any significant agreement from others in the field, this does not necessarily mean that they are in error. We must remember that in the latter part of the 19th century the initial reports on the extensive and now famous prehistoric cave paintings and engravings from parts of Spain and Les Eyzies region of France were met with complete skepticism by the International Congress of Prehistoric Archeology and Anthropology.
100 to 0 B.C.
According to Barry Fell's original hypothesis North American trade from southern Europe ceased after the conquest of Brittany (55 B.C.) and the Battle of Actium (31 B.C.) because the Romans had no navy and needed none and the memory of America was lost1. In his latest book of 1980, however, Fell (Ref. 66) revises this markedly, having allegedly recently been deluged with finding of European (Roman) coins and rock inscriptions in a great variety of places in North America. Rock engravings which he believes to be copies of multiple coins minted locally in Spain about 20 B.C. in imitation of Roman coins of the same era and bearing portraits of Caesar Augustus, have been found at Castle Gardens, Wyoming. Fell is convinced that this Wyoming site was actually an early bank and center of trade with customers using Celtiberian Gaedelic as their main language. He hypothesizes that people of Wyoming traded with Celtiberians and their Indian wives, after the latter had migrated across the continent from New England to British Columbia and then to northwest United States. West Arkansas and Oklahoma have also yielded coins which seem to fit into this same category. Lacking further confirmation, the reader may make his own interpretation.
In the central and eastern United States there was continued Hopewell expansion with a distinctive ritual and artistic tradition, probably indicating a loosely knit group of societies with common religious and artistic conventions. The Gulf states, too, were heavily inhabited probably as far back as this era. In southern Colorado the Anasazi people entered into what we have already labeled the Basket-maker period. Excavations at Durango show both cave and open village sites, with evidence of maize growing as well as hunting activities. Baskets were made of plant fibers loosely plaited, coiled or stitched and decorated in red and black.
The Mogollon Culture in southern New Mexico and eastern Arizona apparently developed from the Cochise Culture and was manifested by a sedentary life style utilizing a plain pottery and existing on maize along with the fruits of some gathering and hunting. The name "Mogollon" is one lately applied2, and first given to a range of mountains running almost east-west across central Arizona and New Mexico, marking the southern edge of the northern high plateau country. South of this Mogollon ridge the terrain drops several thousand feet into the southern basin with meager rainfall and hot desert valleys with desert grasses, mesquite and cactus. In the middle of that basin there are north-south running mountain ranges going from New Mexico well down into Old Mexico. About 100 B.C. the Mogollon Indians have been identified as inhabiting this region. They continued to live in that large area for 1,500 years, constantly improving their crops and tools.
At about the same time another group of Indians, who may have been still another branch of the ancient Cochise, settled in the hot arid valleys of the lower Gila and Salt rivers. They have become known as the Hohokam3, surviving through their descendants, the Pima and the Papago. The Hohokam lived in Arizona for 1,200 years, building at Snaketown more than 5,000 houses at a rate of 400 a year.
0 to 100 A.D.
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
Mississippi 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,2 if one sails south along the coast one will pass a frozen sea and come to a land where the Greeks settled and married with the native barbarians. (The Davis Strait between Labrador and Greenland becomes an impassable mass of floating ice during the summer season.) As for the place where the Greeks married, Plutarch says it was in the same latitude as the Caspian Sea, thus Nova Scotia and New England. It is in connection with this that Fell quotes Dr. Silas Rand3 who spent a lifetime in the last century among the Micmac and who wrote a Dictionary of the Micmac Language, as indicating a prevalence of Greek roots in their language. An illustrative list of over 50 such Greek roots are given by Fell along with the Micmac equivalents, implying a derivation from the Greek spoken in North Africa in Ptolemaic times, words that were a part of the everyday language of Libya and Egypt. This concept has been reported false by the Smithsonian institute.
Sometime during the Woodland Period maize had made its way from South America and/or Mexico to the southern United States and had spread from there even into New England and the Mid-Atlantic states. Varieties of lint corn or popcorn appeared in the South.
In southern New Mexico and Chihuahua, Mexico the Mogollon people continued to live in their semi-subterranean pit-houses and appeared to have self governing villages under the leadership of civil and religious elders democratically selected. An important feature was a large ceremonial house known as the great kiva, three or four times the size of the usual dwellings. In southern Arizona and the neighboring Mexican state of Sonora the Hohokam people began extensive irrigation systems with dams on rivers and some canals 30 feet wide and 25 miles long. This society developed for over 1,000 years, but the exact date of its origin has long been debated, estimates varying from 300 B.C. to A.D. 500. (Please see the 5th century C.E.). At any rate, they made exquisite jewelry and pottery pyramids and used astronomy. This is another American culture which Barry Fell (Ref. 66) believes to be of Libyan origin carrying the tradition and navigational and astronomical knowledge of the Old World and which had arrived via Pacific travelers as manifested by the original maps made by the famous Maui. (See The Pacific: 300 to 201 B.C.). The frontispiece on Fell’s latest book (Ref. 66) is a map supposedly drawn by Maui showing North America and the eastern Pacific, using the primary meridian as a line through Alexandria, Egypt (as used by Eratosthenes) with an international date line at 180 degrees, passing about 10 degrees east of Hawaii. It shows Hudson Bay and the isthmus of Panama and survives on rock drawings in Nevada. Fell says that additions to the original Libyan lettering have been made later in Kufic Arabic, showing that the map was still in use, probably for educational purposes as late as A.D. 750. It is his contention that petroglyphs and writings from Nevada and California, carefully recorded and filed at the University of California and other places, could not be previously interpreted because the nature of the writing (Arabic) was not recognized. The difficulty in all this is that current authorities including southwest museum directors and southwest anthropology professors in recent publications make no mention of these concepts whatsoever.
Still working on it. . .
Please Read The Website Disclaimer!
Copyright 1986-2012, The Survival & Self-Reliance Studies Institute (SSRsi), All
Rights Reserved
Site conceptualized, designed, created & maintained by MEG Raven
Snail Mail: SSRsi, PO Box 2572 Dillon, CO. 80435-2572