Jack Churchward, grandson of famous Mu proponent James Churchward, kindly sent me some good-quality images of the "relics of Mu" that he discussed in the video I referred to in this post. These may be available elsewhere online, but I wanted to make them available here in any case. I thank Jack Churchward for giving me permission to publish them.

The "relics of Mu" apparently all hail from India.  India was also the source of the Dorchester Pot, another classic OOP-Art.  If I had to guess I would also implicate India as the possible origin of the "bell found in coal" that is hawked by Young Earth Creationists as evidence of a 6000-year-old Earth.

Here are the the photographs of the "relics of Mu:"

I've uploaded a processed and simplified 3D model of the hilt of the California sword (Sword 3) to Sketchfab. I cut the model off where the blade meets the guard so I could calculate the volume of just the hilt. Processing the model down to a size that I could upload (less than 50 MB) resulted in some loss of detail and probably the introduction of some minor "errors" (I was in a hurry and haven't yet had time to do a close comparison of the model with the original). But overall the model looks pretty good.

Models of the Italian eBay (Sword 4) and Design Toscano (Sword 5) swords will be coming soon.  

I've started a separate Fake Hercules Swords page (under construction) to organize everything.

Okay . . . I'm making some headway. Some of my 3D model creation issues are beginning to yield to good old-fashioned trial-and-error, and I've uploaded a test model to Sketchfab.  The original is a Kirk Point from Allendale County, South Carolina.  I didn't do full color capture on it, but I'll try one of those next.  Take a look at the model and see what you think.

As I mentioned in yesterday's post about the "ancient relic of Mu" (a modern copper alloy pot from India), I have just come across Oahspe (pronounced O as in o'clock, AH as in father, SPE as in speak) for the first time. I'm not sure how I never heard of this before, but I'm finding it fascinating. For those of you ignorant of Oahspe, it is an 1882 book of spiritual revelations reportedly produced by John Ballou Newbrough (1828–1891) through automatic writing. The title page contains this description:

Here it is on Google Books.

Several things interest me about Oahspe.  

First, it contains a tale of human racial history and dispersal from a "lost continent" in the Pacific. I'm interested in how the ideas in Oahspe articulate with political and scientific thinking in late 1800's America. 

Second, it's one of several nineteenth century American religious developments based on received revelations. Unlike the Book of Mormon (1830) and the prophecies of Seventh-Day Adventist (SDA) Ellen G. White (experienced from 1844-1863), however, the writings in Oahspe did not develop a large following (I don't know how many Faithists there are today, but certainly many fewer than there are Mormons or Seventh-Day Adventists).

Third, I'm interested in the person and the process. Newbrough was born near where I grew up (Wikipedia says Mohicanville, Ohio, while I've seen other sources online specify Wooster, Ohio, and Springfield, Ohio) and apparently used a typewriter for his "automatic writing." And there are apparently connections between his dental practice and his spirituality.

Anyway, the first thing I did was look for giants in Oahspe.  They're pretty much absent from the Book of Mormon. In SDA and Young Earth Creationist traditions, humans closer to creation were "bigger, better, and smarter" than the degenerated humans of today. What does Oahspe have to say?

Here are the passages from "First Book of the First Lords" (Chapters 1-3) that describe the various interbreedings among animal, human, and spiritual beings:

That's a whole lot of inter-breeding going on.  I made a chart so I could keep it straight:

It appears to me that you can arrange these "races" described in Oahspe on a continuum from "spiritual/angelic" to "animal."  The "sacred beings" that are the products of matings between angels and Asu (apparently some kind of non-spiritual biped) are the I'hin.  The I'hin are rather small, light-skinned people.

In the Oahspe version of prehistory, it's the crossing of spiritual and animal beings that produces "true" humans that are apparently rather small.  This contrasts sharply with the Nephilim-centric view of the past wherein such matings produced corrupt, giant, evil beings.  

When humans (I'hin) go against instructions and mate with the non-human hominds (Asu), they produce something called a druk (druk is equated with "giant" only once that I see in Oahspe -- The Lord's First Book, chapter 1, verse 29). Druks are not fully human. Yaks, the products of matings between druks and the animal Asu, are even worse off. Matings between the not-fully-human druks and the I'hin produce the tall, strong, red-skinned, "half-breed" I'huan, which Faithists apparently take as Native Americans.

I've stumbled across several online attempts to reconcile the racial scheme of Oahspe with the fossil record (druks as Neanderthals, I'hin as Homo floriensis, Asu as Ardipithecus ramidus, etc.). The timing of Oahspe is particularly interesting in that regard. It was written decades after publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) but just prior to the discovery and/or recognition of human fossil remains in Indonesia and Europe in the late 1880's and 1890's. The idea of a sunken continent in the Pacific seemed plausible at the time, and was proposed as a way to account for the geographic distribution of plants and animals as well as the lack of a human fossil record.

I don't know much (yet) about the origin and history of ideas about Mu and other "lost continents" in the Pacific.  I went a little way down the rabbit hole last night, reading a bit online and watching YouTube videos between the time when I got the kids to bed and when I couldn't keep my eyes open. It's fascinating stuff. I owe a thanks to Jack Churchward, grandson of famous Mu proponent James Churchward (1851-1936), for prodding my interest. You can find Jack Churchward's website about Mu here.

To me, the most interesting aspect of the "Mu" stories is how they were/are used to explain human diversity. This is something I'll have to pick apart historically, but it appears that Mu/Lemuria/Pan advocates (including today's Faithist followers of Oahspe) connect population dispersals from a lost continent in the Pacific to the characteristics and geographic distribution of modern human "races." It surprised me to learn that the polygenist ideas of Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), famous racist anthropologist and inspiration to Nazis everywhere, were tied to the hypothesized existence of Lemuria. If that's not an interesting historical tie between science and pseudoscience, I don't know what is.

For today, however, I just wanted to point you to a short video by Jack Churchward discussing the "relic of Mu" that appeared in his grandfather's (1931) book The Lost Continent of Mu.  The "relic" is a bronze vessel that was said to be 12,500 years old and, therefore, evidence of an advanced civilization pre-dating. The video explains that the vessel dates the 17th-18th century and was manufactured in India.  

There are some important parallels between the case of the "relic of Mu" and the debacle of the "Roman sword from Nova Scotia" through which we are still slogging (Woo Alert: J. Hutton Pulitzer's 200-page document on the sword is reportedly coming very soon). In both cases, we have: (1) an object that is familiar enough to be recognizable but unfamiliar enough to seem strange and foreign; (2) an object with no credible provenience; (3) a tautological tie between the object and its explanation (the vessel is evidence of Mu and Mu provides the reason why the vessel should exist); (4) a retreat to the cry of "conspiracy" when the object is shown to be something other than what it is claimed.

I'm still catching up on a backlog of blog-related emails and comments that accumulated during those heady weeks of #Swordgate. I've never been great at promptly returning emails, and going to the mattresses for Swordgate made the problem worse. I apologize if I haven't gotten back to you yet. I hope to answer everything eventually.

Almost a year ago, I wrote this post about some purportedly late radiocarbon dates for mastodons and mammoths that are being used as "evidence" for the accuracy of the Book of Mormon (BOM). The BOM (Ether:16-19) describes elephants in the New World at what would have been about 2500 BC.  The current scientific consensus, however, is that mastodons and mammoths did not survive in the Eastern Woodlands past about 9500 BC. While Mormon scholars continue to cling to a small suite of Holocene radiocarbon dates to argue for much later survivals, it's pretty clear that those anomalously young dates are probably attributable to either contamination, context/association problems, or both. I provided a table of five radiocarbon dates that seem to be embraced by Mormons not because they are good science, but because they remain the "best fit" to the Jaredite time period.  No-one else takes those dates seriously.  They're probably mistakes. 

When I wrote the original post, I was unable to track down the primary sources for the Devil's Den mastodon. Dr. Eric Butler, a biologist at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, kindly found a copy of Martin and Webb's (1974) report and took a look at it. He provided a synopsis in a recent email.  I'll summarize two main points:

Mastodon Remains.  In a long list of fauna from Devil's Den, there is a single entry for Proboscideans: "2 vertebrae, a last cervical vertebrae and an anterior thoracic" from juvenile mastodons.

​Dating and Associations. The age estimate of 7000-8000 BP pertains to an entire fossil assemblage, not just the mastodon remains. While it is not exactly clear how this age estimate was produced (this description sources an unpublished research paper by H. K. Brooks that purportedly references radiocarbon dates, but no specifics are provided), it seems that the young age is not generally accepted by paleontologists in Florida and elsewhere. An age of 7000-8000 BP for the entire Devil's Den assemblage would mean that horses (Equus), saber-toothed cats (Smilodon), giant ground sloths (Megalonyx), Florida spectacled bears (Tremarctos floridanus), and dire wolves (Canis dirus) were running around in Florida at about 6700-5700 BC. There is no other evidence, at archaeological sites or elsewhere, for those species surviving into the Middle Archaic period in Florida or anywhere else.

The long and short of it is that it appears there's good reason to view the late dates of Devil's Den fossil assemblage with significant skepticism.  If it's good evidence for a late survival of mastodon, it's good evidence for a late survival of an entire "Pleistocene" fauna that has no precedent elsewhere.  A simpler explanation is that the age estimate for the assemblage is not accurate. As Butler suggested in his email to me, this assemblage would seem to be a prime candidate for re-dating using modern AMS methods. I wrote the following in my original post:

That offer still stands. If you're serious about resolving the issue of late-surviving Proboscideans, let's make it happen and re-date this material using modern methods and standards.

One final note to show you how these things fit together: Dr. John Sorenson, an advocate of late mammoth/mastodon survivals and one of the primary defenders of the historicity of the BOM, is a prominent advocate for pre-Columbian transoceanic contact in the Ancient Artifact Preservation Society, the hyperdiffusionist organization backing the "100 percent confirmed Roman sword from Nova Scotia" that turned out to be a piece of modern brass tourist kitsch.  Maybe we should do a blood residue analysis on the sword and see if it was used to kill mastodons. Finally . . . it all makes sense! 

Don't worry -- I'm not planning on writing about every Kirk point I look at. I've gained some new readers with the whole "Roman sword" debacle, and I hope to not lose all of them as I transition back into writing more about real archaeology and anthropology. Neither the real science nor the stupid ever stops, but I'll try to mix it up somewhat.

I wanted to write a quick post about a small (n = 6) assemblage of Kirk points from the Nipper Creek site (38-RD-18) in Richland County, South Carolina.  The six points were part of a cache that was exposed during a 1986 archaeological field school directed by Albert Goodyear and Ruth Wetmore. (For those unfamiliar with the archaeological use of the term, a "cache" is a group of objects that were hidden or stored for future use.)  The six points were found within a small horizontal area (about 264 square cm, a little over a quarter of a square foot) and within about 5-10 cm vertically.  It is likely that the points were originally placed in a pit (no outline of a pit was discerned) or on a common surface.

Goodyear et al. described the Nipper Creek cache in a short 2004 paper in Current Research in the Pleistocene (see reference below).  I took the opportunity to take a quick color photo of the points as I was scanning them so I could have a visual record cross-referencing the alphabetic designations used in the Goodyear et al. paper with the numeric designations on the bags and the unique ID numbers assigned to the points in my database. 

One really useful thing about an assemblage like the Nipper Creek cache is that it gives us a "snapshot" view of tools from a narrow window of time. Because these six tools all entered the archaeological record together, transferred from a "dynamic" human behavioral context to a "static" archaeological context in a single act, they can potentially tell us something about synchronic variability in Kirk Points that "broad time" surface assemblages cannot. At least some of the variability in Kirk has to be related to change through time -- how do we pin that down? With the aid of stratified deposits and discrete features that provide context.  "Narrow time" deposits like the Nipper Creek cache are potentially of great utility in interpreting the variability that will be present in a "broad time" assemblage of Kirks from across the Eastern Woodlands.

Goodyear, Albert C., William Radisch, Ruth Wetmore, and V. Ann Tippitt.  2004.  A Kirk Corner-Notched Point Cache from the Nipper Creek Site (38RD18), South Carolina.  Current Research in the Pleistocene 21:42-44.

Update (2/11/2016): 3D model of Biface 3 (5965) completed.
​Update (2/12/2016): 3D model of Biface 2 (5966) completed.
Update (2/15/2016): 3D model of Biface 5 (5964) completed.
Update (2/16/2016): 3D model of Biface 4 (5963) completed.
​Update (2/18/2016): 3D model of Biface 1 (5967) completed.
Update (2/19/2016): 3D model of Biface 6 (5968) completed.

Last Thanksgiving break, I wrote this post about the Early Archaic corner-notched point horizon in the Eastern Woodlands, discussing some of the things we know and pondering some of the questions we can't currently answer. As a refresher, the “Kirk Horizon” (dating to about 8,800-6,600 BC) is marked by a distribution of Kirk Corner Notched points that extends across a huge area, from the lower Great Lakes to the Florida Keys. Its existence has been noted for over four decades (i.e., at least since James Tuck’s 1974 paper “Early Archaic Horizons in Eastern North America”).  

Although many authors have remarked on the striking similarity of Kirk Corner Notched projectile points from across the east, as far as I know there has never been a concerted effort to assemble a dataset of sufficient detail and spatial scope to allow us to characterize and analyze the kinds, amounts, and spatial components of variability among these points. Given how widespread Kirk is, that's a big job.

I assembled a relatively large dataset of Kirk points from the Midwest as part of my dissertation work, and have used that information in a couple of publications (e.g., this one and this one).  I've now started the process of adding to that dataset, beginning with information from Kirk points in large collection from Allendale County, South Carolina, that was donated to SCIAA in the 1990's.  I'm working my way through the Kirk Cluster points in that collection, adding them to my existing database and producing 3D digital models. 

The Eastern Woodlands is big. It took me years of intermittent work with both private and institutional collections to assemble my Kirk dataset from the Midwest.  It's going to take me a while to build a dataset of similar size in the South Carolina and the adjacent Atlantic Coast states.  As you can see from the map, I have no data from the deep south or the Northeast.  

If you're like me and are interested in questions about Kirk (including where it comes from and what it can tell us about the Early Archaic societies of the Eastern Woodlands), I ask you to think about the idea of producing the largest-ever Kirk dataset ever assembled. How similar are Kirks, really, across this large area? How does variability within Kirk break down according to space? Can we identify regional differences in "stylistic" variation?  Are there discontinuities or is variability clinal? What about regional differences in the scales of raw material transport? Is morphometric variability isomorphic with lithic raw materials? Can we identify regional variation in "functional" attributes such as resharpening patterns, haft size, blade configuration, etc.?  Just from looking about the first 30-40 Kirk points I've examined from South Carolina, I'm guessing there might be a higher incidence of beveling (all left hand beveling so far) here than in the Midwest.

Anyway, this post isn't supposed to be high pressure. I won't necessarily be able to devote a great deal of time to this on any given day. I'm just letting you know that if you're interested in Kirk and want to think big, I'm right there with you. Let me know if you want to participate in an effort to create a massive Kirk dataset that we can use to address all kind of potentially interesting questions about early Holocene hunter-gatherers in the Eastern Woodlands. Please pass it on to anyone you think might be interested.

Update (2/12/2016): Guidelines for contributing data to the Kirk Project.

If you were starting to worry that the drama over #Swordgate would diminish once the sword was shown to be a modern creation, you will be relieved to know that we're apparently still moving full speed toward some kind of culminating train wreck. I have some real information to pass on about the Fake Hercules Swords, but this story jumps the line. Cue the music.

On Monday I wrote about a recent letter from Kevin Burns (executive producer of The Curse of Oak Island) to Frank Magazine. In the letter, Burns claims that the Nova Scotia sword was purchased in part to "discredit" J. Hutton Pulitzer. In my opinion, the alleged ploy seems to have worked: Pulitzer committed fully to the sword and still maintains it is an authentic Roman artifact despite several independent lines of evidence (e.g., metallurgical analysis, comparative analysis, etc.) that quite clearly show it is nothing of the sort.

Pulitzer's response to Burns is pretty epic as far as these sorts of things go. I recommend that you read it carefully for yourself. Here are some highlights:

Pornography and Pizza: Pulitzer alleges that Burns "pulled out all the stops" to convince Pulitzer to reveal his secret research on Oak Island, writing that Burns was

The Suppression is Ongoing: Pulitzer alleges that Burns used his influence to squash Pulitzer's appearance on Coast To Coast AM, originally scheduled to air following last night's season finale of The Curse of Oak Island:

All this over a modern brass sword?

Well, no, not really.  Of course there's more to it than a simple dispute over interpretation of an object. To me, this is a struggle about the power to monetize fake stories about the past.  The only winners in that game are the people making the money -- nobody else gets anything of value out of it and, in fact, I feel the whole endeavor of manufacturing and feeding nonsense to the public has the potential to do a significant degree of harm. I'm not rooting for anyone in this fight.  As Jason Colavito wrote on Monday (and see this post from today) "this is more of a King Kong vs. Godzilla thing where you really hope they just take each other out and go away."

​Amen. 

We have a straight, double fullered (stopped), two edged blade with a prominent midrib, no ricasso, cast as an integral unit with the anthropomorphic hilt in a bronze/brass alloy. What does this tell us? First, it is not Roman. Roman blades were iron and mild steel, with no fullers, forged, not cast, separately from a non anthropomorphic hilt in bone or wood, and then constructed, as here, or here, or seen here:​