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Transatlantic precedence in Algonquin


CULMINATING five centuries' predecessor labors, especially Silas Rand's 1875/88 Micmac primer and dictionary, Fell found Semitic (Arabic specifically separately), Celtic, Greek, Norse, and Egyptian extractable from Algonquin. Without differentiating Egyptian from unlisted Libyan, he knew that originally-Luvian Libyan grew so nearly like Egyptian that "Egyptian" could also or instead be Libyan. Micmac-Algonquin writing was Egyptian hieratic. Arabic Fell detected besides Punic, Hebraic, and the Semitic in Egyptian could have remained from Silk-Road Arabs or pre-Islamic Arabic coeval with Ptolemaic Egyptian, Greek, and Numidian (Egyptianized/Punicized Old Libyan, i.e. Berber) as found together with 1st-century B.C./A.D. Latin in Etruscan (or Neapolitan Chalkidik) alphabet in Burrows Cave that Paul Schaffranke demonstrated 1994. By March 1996 he detected a Numidian//Latin and Numidian/Neo-Punic bilingual, each hailing the chief deity, interchanged Baratha, Ba'al Hammon, and Jupiter. Roman-provincial Further Spain--Andalusia--adopted the Chalkidik alphabet of Neopolitan usage.

Fell astutely identified Numidian but translated it by an Arabic dictionary. We can only regret his pre-poisoned disdain of Burrows-Stone scripts unperused. Other than frontier Turkish and late Norse, the tongues Fell filtered from Algonquin occur discretely on Burrows Stones, if the plentiful but undeciphered ogam is Celtic.

APRIL 1982, Speliologist (subsequently Col. and Gen.) Russell Burrows of Olney, Ill. traumatically discovered the cave off Skillet Fork (a branch of the Little Wabash, which branches from the Ohio) after sensing the ground underfoot hollow. The owner of that area c.1840 had found a gold breastplate in a surface cave, but Burrows Cave, indetectible on the valley floor, showed no trace of modern disturbance. The 250-lb. boulder-lid that covered the entrance-shaft was designed to flip and reclose, but Burrows happened to displace it slightly as he ground his foot while turning. Elbow reflex slowed his drop to a stone-walled entrance. The underside of the foiled lid-stone bore a Gobi/Baktrian two-hump camel in a strange inscription. Many days' heavy labor dislodged the wall keystone, linch-pinned from inside. Crawling 165+ yards over inscribed-stone-studded deep silt beneath a soot-blackened ceiling failed to locate an exit. Burrows could stand upright only in the three crypts he opened.

Thirteen of these water-tight (thus air-tight) masonry crypts lined either side of the stream that hollowed the cavity, amidst Egyptian-hieroglyphic reliefs and standing statues--one foot forward Egyptian-style; funerary jars; urns containing scrolls; abundant gold; repeated images of Anubis, the Egyptian cemetery-guard and Underworld gateman; recurrent ankh and other hieroglyphics; numerous lion representations such as Ptolemies favored, atypical of bull/hawk previous pharoahs. Prof. Warren Cook, of Castleton College, Vt. named Burrows Cave.

This hidden mausoleum exhibiting immense wealth and labor, where a king had long-distance waterway access in all directions not far from the Mississippi/Ohio confluence in southern Illinois gave Burrows the impression by 1995 of an expatriate multinational pirate den. Potsherds from the topmost (usually latest) level, in association with hundreds of stones he and the property owner hauled out, date borderline Woodland/Early Mississippian (800 +50 A.D.)--cord marking diagnostic of Woodland, shell-tempering and applique of Mississippian--concurrent with Cahokia's sudden rise [Wake Forest U. Archaeologist Ned Woodall 1993]. Cahokia, less than a hundred miles west on the Illinois side opposite St. Louis, could have occasioned the cave sealing/abandonment after seven centuries' rites. The New Madrid earthquake Dec. 1811 plausibly accounts for violently-swept rocks and silt to within a foot or 18" of the ceiling (which renders any hypothesis of Cave use later than that date untenable).

The last Yuchi zopathla (sun-king) Samuel Brown Jr. confided to the Columbus, Ga. ethnologist Joseph Mahan nearly a quarter-century before Burrows' discovery that a sealed, secret confederation mausoleum/archive lay in that very vicinity, dangerous to open. A gold Thunderbird and Thunderbird engravings among upraised-wing Aegean forms attest a non-Algonquin, Buddhist-derived Yuchi or Athapaskan presence, consistent with Baktrian camel. Moon-People Yuchis do not understand the Thunderbird a manifestation of Buddha as Sunbird, in fact forgot Buddhist grounding, which Half-Moon Athapaskans may better remember in their more primary Thunderbird emphasis and their name Athapaskan, which means "Protected by the Buddha," i.e. king of Xi-Xia as reincarnation of the Buddha [Stewart 1986, 1991].

A dancing warrior dangling a head on a large Burrows Stone evokes modern Yuchi dancers dangling masks--alternate personalities, said Chief Brown.

YUCHIS were Levites among many or all tribes, teaching ritual and medicine but not war dances. They bore a Buddhist ideal of peace and equanimity, succeeding better than others but earlier reputed for perpetual fighting. They in any case crucially bonded the Algonquin Shawano Confederation. Peacock feathers, lotus blossoms, red turbans, coconut rattles betrayed Kushan-Indus association, although in America eagle replaced peacock feathers and dogwood lotus blossoms.

Seneca-Iroquois devastation of the Illinois Country 1682, plus early 19th-century Indian cessions/removals, erased mausoleum memory in the region itself. Indians preserved the memory in Indiana, Oklahoma, Texas, and perhaps Tennessee. Rumors revived among 19th-century immigrants from stray metal artifacts rather than continuity of local native tradition.

From old maps Burrows discovered 1995 that Algonquin-speaking Shawano confederates who occupied the Cave vicinity 1805 were Kaskaskians and Piankeshaws, who ceded this land to the U.S. Dec. 30 that year.

MEDIEVAL CENTRAL-ASIAN influence came too late for basic shaping of Algonquin language. Starving Algonquins in pre-agricultural, pre-moundbuilding, post-ocean-fishing stagnation--susceptible to tutelage--had confronted Iron-Age salts who did not differ drastically in uncouthness. By the time of Central Asiatic contact Algonquins had regained stabler identity, yet found common ground in sun worship and readily took to jade and smoking feathered-serpent pipes.

First-century-B.C./A.D. Latin lost out to Punic, Greek, Egyptian, Arabic, and Numidian of common and ritual speech. A larger Latin influence came in desperately declining Roman reigns, too late for basic shaping of Algonquin, at any rate superseded by more compatible or more pervasive Uto-Aztec infusion.

ALGONQUIN SCAPULIMANCY--divination by cracks in heated caribou shoulder-blades --did not spread beyond nuclear Algonquins with the spread of their language--further attesting it was language not lifestyle that bound unrelated tribes in the Algonquin domain. Caribou flourished far north in Canada--further attesting formation of the Algonquin nucleus in Canada. Scpulimancy evokes the tons of surviving Bronze-Age Shang oracle-bones, but Sui Chinese still practiced it, also Athapaskans, Khitan of North China (with large Uighur incorporation), and the Tibetan Xi-Xia empire through the 1st millennium A.D. [Wright 1978; Stewart 1991]. Abundant caribou may have invited independent invention of scapulimancy which, if so, entailed independent invention of both shamanism and bone-crack divination. Scapulimancy was neither a Paleolithic nor Neolithic bequest to Bronze China, and was neither a Paleo-Indian nor Maritime-Archaic bequest to medieval Algonquins.

ANTHROPOLOGIST FRANK SPECK observed (1928) the only link of tidewater-Virginia Algonquins with frontier Blackfeet, Cheyenne, and Arapaho (let alone New England and Canadian tribes) was their Algonquin language. Had Algonquin culture coincided with language, we would find scapulimancy practiced throughout the lingual area.

Yakut/Tungus tepees of Algonquin-speaking Sioux, who once resided in Kentucky, did not resemble Algonquin wigwams except in smoke-holes. Ethel learned in Ankara that tepee is Turkish for "cone tent." Algonquin wigwams contrastingly resembled Saharan Gaetulian huts, which Sallust misthought introduced to Morocco by Persians(!) turning beached boats upside down for cabins. Prairie Cree, like Sioux and Comanches, dwelt in collapsible, draggable tepees.

Early explorers who found Comanches roaming Utah could not distinguish them from Shoshoni. Comanches called themselves Nuhmuhna (The People). Eel-River Yukis of Mendocino County, Calif. call themselves Uk-um-nom (In the Valley People). Comanche is Ute for "Enemy." We have no doubt of close Uto-Aztec kinship of Shoshoni, Comanches, & Utes. Co (Man) is common to Yuchi, an isolate in America, yet related across an enormous distance to isolate Yuki, spoken by a short-stature, xenophobic tribe whom archaeologists believe continuous occupants of the North Coastal Ranges for 6,000-10,000 years which, if so, predate the Yuchi language (as may be the case of Algonquins and Algonquin).

Yuki is a neighbor Wintun word for "stranger/barbarian." Though sharing a Green Corn dance--something widespread in the eastern U.S., even among Iroquois but anomalous in western--and resembling in other ways; e.g. Yuki shamans, lamshini, correspond to Yuchi miccos; Yuki creator Tai-ko-no to Yuchi Breathmaster Cohantoney; Yuki su to Yuchi shu for "fish." Yuchis and Yukis improbably ever knew each other, let alone at the site of New Orleans, which Swadesh posited the original common home [1954]. To share the Green Corn Dance they would have split on the Ohio in Mississippian times. Sapir saw a Yuchi/Siouan connection as early as 1921. W.W. Elmendorf found a further Yuki/Yuchi/Siouan relationship 1964. Others have tried to construe Yuki & Yuchi a Gulf or Sioux tongue.

Yukis & Yuchis reached America from the same matrix but in different eras, Yuchis post-Kushan, Yukis earlier enough to have spawned five dialects. Proximity of both Yukis & Yuchis to Athapaskans & Uto-Aztecs in their separate U.S. regions as in Asia gives pause.

CONSIDER THAT CHAUCER and Venerable Bede could not have conversed in English seven centuries separated or we with Chaucer less than six. Resorting to Latin would bear out an analogy to Algonquin as a standard ritual language across eras and cultures afar within a few centuries. We cannot help noticing that the immense area where Algonquin Micmac prevailed was coterminous with the millennia-earlier forgotten Maritime Archaic. Though unrecorded and unremembered, a violent coercive empire in the Woodland period would account for Algonquin prevalence over eastern North America.

Maritime Archaic & Beothuk

CORE ALGONQUIN STOCK may not have changed basically--which could explain huge stature; but its culture underwent revolutions by the time French and English came upon Gaetulian-type villages. The archaeological record indicates Paleo-Indians grew extinct with their large prey. Whether untraced or migrating post-glacier, Algonquin ancestors wended to Great Lakes forests, whence groups descended the St. Lawrence Valley. One group adapted to the ocean before 7,000 B.C., wrought dugouts to harvest whales, cod, and swordfish, incredibly extended up to North Labrador, down to New Jersey, and communicated with North Europe. Norwegian Anthropologist Gutrum Gjessing applied the term "circumpolar" to this ocean culture 1943 after excavations at Varanger Fiord on the top of Norway at 70 degrees N. (above the Arctic Circle) revealed a duplicate of sites excavated beginning 1882 in Maine. Gjessing could not yet conceive a coastline culture communicating with itself even in ice-sheeted Norway only by sea.

Most sites on both sides of the Atlantic submerged at glacier melting. Acid soil dissolved bones in surviving graves--always red from ochring of skeletons beneath shell or rock heaps. Some beach sites survived by geological uplift with removed glacier weight. Alkalinity of "Red Paint" cemeteries at Port au Choix on the west coast east-facing a harbor of Newfoundland's Great Northern Peninsula preserved enough skeletons intact enough for Anthropologist James Anderson to confirm neither Eskimo nor European [1968]. He detailed 69 specimens of 100+ individuals 1975. Identity with North Europe thus was not ethnic. Compare later Mycenaean culture--the same on both sides of the Aegean irrespective of nationality or language (with overlap). Port au Choix' abundant cod & swordfish bones, some whale; plummets; barbed and toggling harpoons (caribou-antler tips fitted into whalebone foreshafts); combs in seabird shape; beaks of great auk; and two carved-stone killer-whale amulets moved Archaeologist James Tuck to rechristen "Red Paint People" Maritime Archaic 1970. Bruce Borque in excavating cemeteries at Turner Farm on North Haven Island off Penobscot Bay beginning 1971 realized the slate adzes & gouges meant woodworking capable of carving rugged dugouts. He produced a 2050+ B.C. carbon date.

By 1975 six carbon dates from Port au Choix ranged 2340-1460 B.C. plus/minus 110 years. Funeral-fire charcoal from L'Anse Amour, S. Labrador dated 5580 & 5305, 140 & 115-year respective sigmas. The same S.-Labrador Archaic at Forteau Bay dated 7050 B.C., raising a question whether this culture originated in America. But skeleton red-ochring and fine stone/bone/wood work had far older European precedent.

At Nulliak Cove, N. Labrador, 1500 nautical mi. north of the Penobscot mouth, William Fitzhugh's Smithsonian expedition (1980) uncovered boulder foundations of 28 Maritime Archaic multi-room rectangular houses extending nearly 100 yards. Translucent gray Ramah chalcedony from its sole source, Ramah Bay, Newfoundland, typified projectile points at Nulliak Cove as at the dozens of located sites, N. Labrador to Maine.

Submergence robs us of origin. Red-ochred burials which Martha & St. Just Pecquart excavated 1927 on Teviac off the Brittany coast 1927 eventually carbon dated 5200 B.C. A red-ochred site at Vedbaek, Denmark yielded Danish Museum excavators (1975) 19 burials older than 5050 B.C.--doubly older than Norwegian and (Bohusan) Swedish relatives. European and American sites alike featured standing slabs visible far at sea, anticipating megalithic cultures on both shores. Nulliak Cove displayed a pebble-heaped Mycenaean-type kergan with heavy doorway lintel hard to link to inland Moundbuilders past 2,000 mi. and two-millennia gap. The same Maritime Archaic at the same time on both sides of the ocean might independently coincide because the time was ripe, except that connecting lined dots in geometric patterns betray religious with technological diffusion [Tromso-Museum excavator of Varanger Paul Simonsen 1987]. Divers discovered a dolmen so decorated submerged 80' at Pil Coa Reef off the Brittany coast [Francis Le Quen 1996].

If this sophisticated Archaic figured in the heritage of Algonquins they forgot it, lost its pattern symbolism, and turned away from the ocean.

OLD COPPER CULTURE of NE North America overlapped Late Maritime Archaic and possibly merged in Algonquin ancestry. A solitary copper pendant constitutes known interaction with Maritime Archaic. But a copper traffic between Great Lakes and Norway flourished in the 2nd millennium B.C. whose termination James Scherz attributes to system-collapse at the Norwegian end. Norwegians also apparently forgot it. Copper artifacts found in America do not begin to account for the gargantuan chunks gathered and gouged in the Great Lakes, while Old-World mines do not for the scale of copper and bronze items found there.

BEOTHUKS--Red Indians, ochre-stained waist up--may have been regressed remnants of Maritime Archaic. John Cabot encountered them at Newfoundland 1497 approximately three millennia after Maritime Archaic demise. Subsequent explorers confirmed Beothuk possession of the Island of Newfoundland, their red self-staining remarked by late-16th-century Englishmen. Canadians have conflated Beothuks and Algonquin-speaking Montaignais, who resided extensively above the St. Lawrence. Early 20th-century Newfoundland Indians referred to vanished Beothuks and quite-present Montaignais interchangeably as Osa'gan'ax (Red People). Speck regarded Beothuk an eastern branch of archaic Algonquin.


He located their nucleus at elongated Red Indian Lake in NW Newfoundland and beside Exploits River which issues from the east end, flows NE, east, then NE into Exploits Bay on the north coast. He ascertained their early-19th-century headquarters as Red Indian Point south of Millerton at the lake's NE end. Indian myths recall a Me'kwe'isit tribe, red-painted waist up. Ishit in Egyptian is Isis. Micmac for Beothuk: Megwe'dji'djik (Red People). These syllables all have Egyptian equivalents but different meanings.

WILLIAM RITCHIE, state archaeologist of New York, located the archaic Algonquin nucleus [1936] in a 75-sq.-mi. area from below Lamoke Lake, Schyler Co., West N.Y., up to Lake Ontario, its distinctive grooved adze recurring northward into Ontario, southward to northern Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
Skeletons showed archaic Algonquins rather tall, skulls non-Mongoloid, longheaded, long-faced--very similar to earlier Maritime Archaic. Ritchie inferred they entered from Lower Canada as the oldest definitely known population of New York--before agriculture, moundbuilding, or pottery.

He found the earliest pottery in the northern U.S. (cord-marked Buff-or-Black Vinette 1) dating c.1,000 B.C. which he traced across New York to Lake Erie, unaware it had a 2,000-year prior evolution in Norway.


A WIDE-HEADED, shorter ethnic group, believed Sioux but not yet Xiong-nu/Athapaskan hybrid, pushed up into New England from the south.

A TWO-MILLENNIA LACUNA separates Late Archaic from Algonquin Moundbuilder Hopewell, which centered in the Ohio Valley and spread east to the Bahamas. It appeared on the Scioto River of southern Ohio c.100 B.C. and raised its last elaborate earthwork there c.550 A.D. These gigantic effigy earthworks, angle-aligned with cosmically-correlated precision [cf. Scherz' 1990 survey of Lizard Mound Park, Wis.] had not characterized Algonquins of Newfoundland/Ontario/New England, as neither had Hopewell deer-antler headdresses, earlobe spools, calumets, or turbans--nor Egyptian either.