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

[Monte Davis]

Two answers, no waiting:

1) There are indeed gaping holes in the Just So Story as Told to Black Elk:
that ~12,000 years ago, Dances-With-Mastodons and Princess Summerfall
Winterspring walked arm in arm across Beringia into Eden, where they lived
in isolated eco-harmony until Columbus arrived with smallpox, greed, and
tabloid journalism.

Norsemen at L'Anse aux Meadows in Vine[Newfound]land? Unquestionably.
Japanese leaving some Jomon-period pottery in Chile and Ecuador? Almost
certainly. For a good quick survey of the likelihood that there were more
and earlier (by many millennia) incursions, see Douglas Preston's "The Lost
Man" in the June 16 New Yorker.

Corollary: Thor Heyerdahl was quite right that most archaeologists -- who
spend their time playing in the dirt -- don't know jack about messing about
with boats,
and grossly overestimate the odds against a rollicking (if perhaps
unwilling) ocean trip now and again.

So... on an *anthropological* time scale (and conceptual level), our
collective mom the New World was <gasp> no better than she should be.  

2) That said, Barry Fell's idea of a *sustained* BC/AD presence of Celts in
the Americas, regularly interacting with Europe, is wacko. I was hanging
with some very bright and open-minded historians when the book came out,
and they spent many carefree hours alternately double-clutching trucks
through the holes in his arguments and falling about in giggling fits.

Corollary: Heyerdahl was quite wrong that Central American pyramids must
have been influenced by memories of Egyptian ones. That monumental
constructions last longer if they taper upward from the base is something I
myself
re-discovered independently while playing in the dirt at age 4, when I had
scarcely begun my studies of First Dynasty historiography and Chalcolithic
stone-shaping technic.

So... on a *cultural* time scale (and conceptual level), the pre-Columbian
New World was quite effectively isolated from Eurasia.

-Posts With Forked Tongue <part Cherokee, part Tory, so don't blame me>