Pynchon? I'd Like to Ogham and Kissham! (M&D, p. 600)

[Sherwood, Harrison]

Got my first genuine gut-laugh in 75 pages last night, in re. Capt.
Shelby and the Still/Leyden Jar/"Force Intensifier" and its Ogham
inscription. 'Twould be a spoiler to reveal the text of the inscription,
but suffice to say I got a good thirty seconds of spittle-flecked
mirthful catharsis out of it.

More years ago than I care to enumerate I came across a book written in
1976 by a Harvard fella (oh, then it _must_ be true!) named Barry Fell,
called _America B.C._ In it he presents an occasionally very
compelling--and occasionally utterly wacky--argument that America was
routinely visited in ancient times by Celtiberians, Libyans, and
Egyptians. As evidence he submits a rather bewilderingly (and
suspiciously?) large array of paleographic inscriptions, archeological
finds, and lexicological similarities between ancient European and
African languages and Amerindian ones. 

Concentrating on one site in particular, Mystery Hill in southern New
Hampshire, he builds his case for the Celts as early visitors to
America. The site is a smallish stone shelter, built with
post-and-lintel construction (not a common Amerind technique), atop a
hill, surrounded by stone plinths that seem to act as astronomical
markers. Standing in the center of the site and sighting down toward the
markers, points toward various astronomical phenomena--solstices and
equinoxes and all that. It appears to be an astronomical observatory,
similar in style and purpose to Stonehenge. What is compelling about the
site, and what argues against it as a _native American_ construction, is
the Ogham inscriptions Fell and others  claim to have found on many of
the plinths and in the shelter itself.

Ogham, (also spelled Ogam) is a family of paleographic alphabets, coined
by the Celts, and especially adapted for quick-n-easy marking of stone.
It appears to have evolved out of a sign language used by the Druidical
class for hidden and silent  communication--fingers pointed up or down
signify different consonants, and you fill in the vowels, much as in
ancient Hebrew. The fingers evolved into straight-line scratches or
chips out of the stone. Simple but effective.

Now, I'm operating in a total vacuum here. What I *don't* know about
ancient anthropology and paleographic inscriptions and Celtiberian
astronomy is pretty much everything there *is* not to know. Once on my
way to a Maine vacation I made a side trip to see "America's
Stonehenge," as it's billed on the roadsigns, and to my utterly
unschooled eyes it all seemed simultaneously very interesting indeed and
highly, highly suspicious. The source of my suspicion is basically that
nobody else I've ever come across has ever claimed that the Celts
visited North America. It's only this book and Mystery Hill and a few
other archeological sites. If the theory were commonly accepted, you'd
think all this Columbus-versus-Leif-Erickson nonsense would have been
knocked into a cocked hat.

So I throw this out to all you Anthro./Soc. types: How seriously are
Barry Fell and the Celts-visited-America theory taken in your field? I
mean, I Wanna Believe, you know? Some of the evidence he presents
*seems* extremely convincing. But I can't help being skeptical, like the
next step is Pyramid Inches and Piltdown Man and runestones.

Criminy--the word "Vineland" just popped into my head, and I think I'd
better go lie down.

Harrison "Merry Beltane to yez!" Sherwood