by Chas S. Clifton
Many people know that Stonehenge and other European megalithic monuments appear to have served as astronomical and ritual calculator. But controversy still surrounds the suggestion that a series of archaeological sites in the American West may represent an attempt to create similar ritual calendars.
The sites of the Ogham corridor—the nickname of a swath of land reaching from the Oklahoma panhandle into southeastern Colorado—do not involve huge standing stones. But a group of researchers thinks they have a Pagan European origin, an idea that violates conventional American history and enrages many archaeologists.
And in a time when Celtic art, music, and spirituality are all enjoying renewals, perhaps it is only these sites’ remoteness that has protected them from being overrun by seekers of ancient wisdom. Certainly they pose an intriguing question: did pre-Columbian explorers enter mid-North America as much as two thousand years ago? And did they stay long enough to make astrological observations connected to their religious practices? The answers to such questions are, at best, merely conjectural.
The Ogham sites are regarded suspiciously by most archaeologists. One reason is that American archaeologists are not trained to interpret ancient writing, mainly because there is no other evidence of any existing on this continent. Instead, there archaeologists look for artifacts, and so far none have been found in the area that are not believed to be made by prehistoric Indians or by more recent settler. True, a Roman coin once turned up when a septic tank was being dug in the nearby town of Springfield, Colorado, but skeptics point out that you can buy Roman coins cheaply from any coin dealer, and therefore, it could have been planted at a much later date than ancient times.
The situation is similar to what happened with the idea of a Norse settlement in America. For centuries, scholar had puzzled over the accounts in the sagas or Atlantic travel in the Viking Age, and they were skeptical over the ideals that famed Arctic explorer Fridtjof Nansen laid out in his book In Northern Mists. Yet only until indisputable Norse artifacts were found in the 1960s in Newfoundland, proving that a village had existed there, were the North American archaeologists convinced.
At least those voyages had been described in a fairly reliable oral and then written tradition. Nothing similar exists describing voyages of Carthagian or Iberian Celitc explorers two thousand years ago—nothing except a series of rock inscriptions along the Arkansas River in Oklahoma and Texas, inscriptions that most archaeologists prefer to attribute to ancestral American Indians.
In fact, if you suggest to many archaeologists that explorers from ancient Libya (the ancient Carthaginians) or the Iberian peninsula (some of whom spoke a Celtic language before it was replaced by Latin) came to American, you might be called a “racist.” Many nineteenth-century scholars speculated that all evidence of civilization in this hemisphere, whether Mayan temples or the towns of the Mound Builders in North America, was derived from Old World models. These theories, that all civilizations derived from one or two places such as the Near East, were called “diffusionism.” Now, modern researchers lean toward the independent invention of civilization in different places, and diffusionism is very much out of favor, its proponents often accused of pushing ideas of racial superiority. But this swing of the pendulum produces an attitude of scorn toward any evidence that ancient travelers might have come to North America.
Suppose that they had. Maverick American epigraphers, students of ancient inscriptions, make one powerful argument. At three particular sites in Oklahoma and Colorado, they claim, inscriptions can be deciphered to predict astronomical events such as a shadow falling inside a cave at a particular spot when the sun rises on the spring and fall equinoxes. In addition, some controversial dating methods developed by archaeologists at the University of Arizona produce dates of two to three thousand years before the present.
Another argument against these particular inscriptions being modern hoaxes is that in many cases the new, sharper-looking inscriptions are dated and signed by a person from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That much I can attest to myself. A few years ago I sat in a small west-facing cave in the Oklahoma panhandle as the sun sat at the Spring Equinox. As it disappeared, its horizontal light struck rock knobs that cast slow-moving shadows across the back of the shallow cave. Nearby were cut Libyan letters, which the late Barry Fell—an oceanographer and researcher on ancient seafaring at Harvard University—translated to read, “Enact at sunset the rites of Bel, assembling at that hour in worship.” Nearby another inscription in Ogham letters has been translated to read, “The sun six months north; sinks south for space of months equal number.” Above the inscription is the “indicator,” something like a marked-off ruler cut into the rock. On the equinox, a pointed shadow passed the middle of the indicator. The marked-off increments corresponded to the days before or after the equinox, showing where the shadow falls on each of the days.
At Crack Cave, located a little to the north in Colorado, a similar Ogham inscription reads, “Sun strikes [here] day of Bel.” Nearby, again in Old Irish: “People of the sun.” And at a ranch not too far away, another cave inscription was translated to read, “The ring along with the shoulder by means of sun and hill.” However, nothing significant happened there on the solstice or equinoctial sunrises. Since another inscription nearby seemed to include the world “Lugnasa” (also called Lammas in English), the cross-quarter day between the Summer Solstice and the Fall Equinox, member of the ranch family visited the site several days running at sunrise. On August 8, halfway between those two dates, the rising sun shone perfectly through a square overhand before the cave.
If these inscriptions were made by ancient European and North African visitors—imagine for a moment that they might have been—then what kind of people were they? The “people of the sun” inscription (if that’s what it really says) suggests a sort of priesthood, something like the Druids of Gaul and Britain.
To be fair, we have to look at some good arguments against the epigraphers’ case. Unlike with the Norse sites, no foreign artifacts have been found at any of the Ogham sites. But then no one has looked for them systematically. There might well have been none to find—for aside from bronze tools or weapons, or possibly iron ones, which rust away, their possessions might all have been biodegradable. The case for the Norse presence in Newfoundland was based at first only on a small stone weight used in spinning thread and weaving it into cloth. The local Indians did not use such a tool.
Next, the location is unlikely. This part of the United States is lightly populated now—and according to conventional archaeology, it was even more lightly populated two thousand years ago. There are no large ruined villages such as those found on the other side of the Rockies at Mesa Verde National Park, only a few rock structures that might have been huts. Why would anyone want to come here? It was arid, rough country long ago even as it is now, and it was not on the way to another more populated area. Why come all the way across the Atlantic to observe the sun’s movements in a remote area inhabited by a handful of people?
Could the inscriptions have been made by Indians who learned the writing from visitor to these shores? This is a conceivable possibility, but that only replaces one mystery with a larger one.
In any event, some modern Pagans feel heartened by the presence of the inscriptions. The writing, if that is what they are, suggest a more peaceful interaction between visitors and natives. Conquering armies, after all, usually do not stop to make leisurely astronomical observations. Although the Norse sagas say that their colonists abandoned “Vinland” after a series of escalating conflicts with the Algonquin Indians, perhaps the “People of the Sun” maintained better relations with the people they met. When you consider that in 1999, the annual Columbus Day celebration in Pueblo, Colorado, the nearest city, turned into an angry confrontation between an Italian heritage group and American Indian Movement counter-demonstrators, it is tempting to think that history could have taken another, less violent turn than the history of the European exploration that we all learned in school.
Lately, the study of “rock art,” which includes both inscriptions and pictures made on rock, has become a new growth area in archaeology. Scholars are beginning to move into territory that used to be considered too risky—such as the growing tendency to see some designs as depicting shamanic vision. What is more, younger British and European archaeologists are beginning to take an interest in the possibility of ancient inscription in America. Having had different training—and not having the preconceived notion that “it can’t be here” that is exhibited by many American archaeologists, they could be positioned to evaluate these inscriptions more thoughtfully.
In the meantime, some of us continued to wonder: did the People of the Sun ever cross the high plains, following the Arkansas and Cimarron Rivers up out of Oklahoma to a country where the Rockies gamed on this horizon? And if so, what were they looking for? Cities? Knowledge? Visions?