More (and Considerably Less) on Ogham

[Sherwood, Harrison]

It's been a slow day at work, so I poked around on the Net for info re.
Barry Fell, Ogham, and pre-Columbian Celtic visitors to America as
referred to in _Mason & Dixon_.

Folks, it doesn't look good.

Sci.archaeology just hates Fell _and_ Celts. They don't want to know.
Fell had (apparently he's dead) a Ph.D., but it was in Comparative
Anatomy (as in, ...let's compare...!) . 

There was a web page dedicated to Fell debunkery at
http://www.artzero.com/gnomonicon/stiebing.htm, but the site
overall--something called "Gnomonicon: The Modern Book of Ancient
Knowledge"--looks just about as nutty as Fell himself. 

In short, the Celts-in-America thing has been shot full of holes, quite
a few times by quite a few people. David T. Hughes, Ph.D. a member of
the Dept. of Anthropology at Wichita State University, goes so far as to
say in anthro-l,
(http://www.anatomy.su.oz.au/danny/anthropology/anthro-l/archive/februar
y-1996/0155.html): 

>The concern I have encountered is that in two states various educators>of the
public schools have made attempts to adopt _America B.C._ as THE>final
answer on many American Indian questions. My problem with that,>other
than the at times gross inaccuracies and inadequacies of basic>text, is
that by being hyper-diffusionist (of the grand sort just short>of van
Danikenism) it denies the inherent creativity of the people and>implies
that there is some sort of incapacity to the Indians who were>being
contacted -- potentially reviving (albeit subtly) many of the
old>racist debates.

Well, just ex-key-uuuuse the living shit outta _me_! (I like that "final
answer" phrasing: oooh! that's subtle, Dave!)

Now as to the question of why Thomas Pynchon should allude to what
cannot possibly be anything _other_ than Ogham inscriptions and the
notion of pre-Columbian European astronomer visitors to America, well, I
guess he's just a goddamned von Danikenist racist.

-----

And yet, and yet...

I find this intriguing abstract from a paper published at Wake Forest
(http://www.wfu.edu/~cyclone/):

>THE ALGONQUIN LANGUAGE, which anthropologists have shown genetically related
to the 
>Old World, cannot predate sea transmission, although Algonquin ethnic stock
may. 
>Many tribes and cultures confederated by way of Algonquin as a ritual
language and 
>trade koine, which was not adopted or imposed until the Iron Age....

>Celtic, which was a component of Algonquin, also occurs on Burrows Stones if
their 
>ogam proves Celtic. (It does not read as standard Gaelic.) An earlier
Mediterranean 
>layer could derive from Libyan and/or Saite Egypt and Carthaginian Empire but
not 
>earlier than 800 B.C....

>While many anthropologists refuse to admit endless parallels as evidence of
>consequential transoceanic connection before Columbus, they cannot
regard Old World >languages independently invented in ancient
America--anthropologists themselves >having discovered the genetic
relationship of native American to Old World tongues >(which had not
evolved before the Bering land-bridge submerged and could not have
>remained recognizable after 12-15 millennia)....

Wow. Maybe the jury's still out.

Harrison