Episode Two: Strange Visitors

 Bike summary: 2.5 miles, didn't record calories

Episode summary: Is a stone structure in New Hampshire proof that ancient Phonecians visited North America thousands of years before Columbus? No, but that won't ever stop us!

This is one of my favorite episodes, since I'm a New Englander and this site is only about 30 miles north of me. 

We get a lot of shots of the Palace of Knossos and some other ancient ruins while Leonard Nimoy talks astronomical alignments and then we see the focus of the episode: Mystery Hill, America's Stonehenge, in North Salem, NH. To my untrained eyes, Mystery Hill doesn't look much like any ancient site. It looks like a root cellar or the foundation of a barn.

There's a section on an analysis of charcoal from the site, which was apparently carbon dated to 2000 BC or something like that. It came from between the stones and I'm not sure how that would work to date the site. If it came from something that could plausibly be identified as a cooking or other human-made fire, that could, in the right context, give you a range of dates for human use of the site. But it seems to me that charcoal from between stones that are exposed to the elements a) doesn't tell you if the charcoal is man-made or the result of a forest fire or b) if the charcoal is even part of the site -- if the people living next door to Stonehenge have a cookout today, or burn a police officer in a wicker man, and the smoke blows on to Stonehenge, the logic of this episode suggests we could date Stonehenge to contemporary times because of this contemporary material. 

We also get to hear from Dr Barry Fell, a marine biologist who convvinced himself he could read ancient Phonecian and Ogham and suddenly found Phonecian and Ogham inscriptions everywhere in random rocks in New England that no one else could see. 

One thing that's not really talked about is why the Phoenicians would have come to New England in the first place. European fishermen may have reached the Canadian maritimes (and their huge supply of cod) before Columbus, although I don't think there's any hard evidence for it and I'm not sure there was enough demand would have made such a voyage profitable. Most other trade goods from North America would have been found in the archeology of the ancient Mediterranean and recognized -- the historical Columbian exchange totally changed the European diet and culture -- paprika, tomatoes and potatoes are just three North American plants that assumed paramount roles in old world cuisine. Tobacco reached some very remote places in the Old World very quickly and things like furs of North American animals would have been found in Europe and the Near East and artifacts from there would have been definitively found here. There's no tin or copper in New England and certainly no evidence of the mining or smelting operations Bronze Age civilizations practiced. The Sinai Desert, for example, is littered with holes where copper-bearing ores were dug, as well as slag heaps where the ores were processed for the pure metal. 

There are no burials at Mystery Hill, no midden heaps, no drinking water and strangely for a site supposedly settled by people who sailed across the ocean, it's inland. It's over six miles from the Merrimack River and at least 20 from the sea. Ancient people were not suburbanites living in subdivisions with pre-existing utility hookups, they didn't build cities in places with no resources, with no access to transportation. 

Podcast summary.

This episode of the podcast featured Ken Feder, an archeologist in Connecticut, who had a lot of interesting facts about Mystery Hill. He said that it's still unclear who built it, although the site was substantially changed by a man called William Goodwin, who bought it in the 30s and decided it was the work of Irish monks in the Middle Ages. It wasn't until the 70s that it was promoted as Bronze Age. 

They spend a lot of time talking about HP Lovecraft this episode and I don't know why, other than the coincidence that Mystery Hill started being promoted as a tourist attraction the same year Lovecraft died. They mention that he wrote some pastiches of Arthur Machen transposing Machen's Celtic-inspired fantasy to New England, but Lovecraft was neither a major literary figure in his lifetime nor was he the first person to imagine a more ancient, non-Native American past for the region. 

It was super popular in the 19th century to find evidence of Vikings everywhere. The sagas of Leif Eriksson had been popularized and, probably as a reaction to Irish and Italian Catholic immigration (the Catholic fraternal society the Knight of Columbus was founded in New Haven, CT in 1882), New England WASP elite embraced the blond-haired, blue-eyed Leif from what would become Protestant Scandinavia as discoverer over the swarthy, dark-haired Italian working for those Spaniards with their Inquisition and popery and hostility to free thought.  

Longfellow wrote a poem called "The Skeleton in Armor" reimaging an indigenous grave that was discovered of a man with a copper breastplate in the New Bedford area as that of a European in late medieval plate armor; a windmill in Newport, RI that was probably built in the 1650s was decided to be Viking and a millionaire chemistry professor claimed to have discovered Leif Eriksson's city on the Charles River, conveniently close to his home in Wellesley. 

Eben Norton Horsford was a professor at Wellesley College who invented a popular baking powder, becoming very wealthy. He used his money to promote his theory that the Vikings colonized New England, building a city called Norumbega. Horsford even claimed to find evidence of the Norse language in Native American languages. With his own money he errected a tower in Weston, Mass, where he believed they settled. His daughter later installed a tablet on a site in Cambridge (today sadly overrun by highway) where she believed Eriksson had a country house, she also donated a statue of Leif Eriksson to the City of Boston and it's on the Commonwealth Avenue Mall to this day. This was also the era of the Book of Mormon, the Prince Madoc legends and endless ideas about Native Americans as the lost tribes of Israel. 

They also talk about Native erasure in this episode, which is certainly a thing, but some of the specific imagery I don't remember seeing (maybe they got confused and it was from a different episode, maybe I just wasn't paying attention?)

Ken Feder brought up Dudleytown, a ghost town in Connecticut, that I've never heard of, but people also assume it's much older than it really is. The woods have grown back in many places and you can totally find old stone walls, old foundations and root cellars in the middle of what feels like virgin forest. However, I believe that 90 percent of Vermont was clear cut by 1920, for lumber and paper. They floated huge log rafts down the Connecticut River to the mills at Holyoke and Chicopee. Things weren't allowed to grow back, however, until the Hurricane of 1927, which caused mudslides and major floods and people realized that the trees helped protect river banks and subsequent storms haven't been as destructive, although Irene came close.