pre-colombian america

[MiskatonicGrad]

I recently dicovered a book originally published 1833 called American Antquities and Discoveries in the West by Josiah Priest. Other then the claims about the lost tribes of israel and the ark built in america he put out some interesting claims about ancient ruins found in the areas around the Ohio river by settelers in the 1700's with the mark of people more advanced then the natives od the "mound-builders" fortifications encompassing several acres and layed out in definite military mindset. has anyone heard about research in this area or any other speulation as to the origin of the ruins?

he went into detail about ruins around Marietta and Zanesville Ohio and Brownsville Pa.

[Eldorado]

Have you read his Wikipedia entry?

"His writing about American prehistory—and this comment is not made entirely to be humorous—might be classified as science fiction or fantasy as well as a subgenre of American Romanticism, the elements of which are pronounced in the early products of popular culture. Winthrop Hillyer Duncan writes, “This author is thought by some to have been the creator or forerunner of the popular dime and nickel novels of the sixties, seventies and eighties.""

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josiah_Priest

[MiskatonicGrad]

I've come across that kind of stuff with other "historical" writings that were written around the same time that don't fit the accepted history. the authors are written off as crackpot snakeoil salesmen out to turn a buck. but, taken as a whole these wrtings may need to be reinspected using modern techniques before being written off IMHO. which I am going to attempt to do. take the brownsville pa ruins for example the account of the soldiers who built the fort during the french and indian war (Fort Burd) on the site said they just intgrated their fort into the works that were already there

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownsville,_Pennsylvania

believe me if you delve into early north american history you end up with more questions then when you started

[TheSearcher]

I recently dicovered a book originally published 1833 called American Antquities and Discoveries in the West by Josiah Priest. Other then the claims about the lost tribes of israel and the ark built in america he put out some interesting claims about ancient ruins found in the areas around the Ohio river by settelers in the 1700's with the mark of people more advanced then the natives od the "mound-builders" fortifications encompassing several acres and layed out in definite military mindset. has anyone heard about research in this area or any other speulation as to the origin of the ruins?

he went into detail about ruins around Marietta and Zanesville Ohio and Brownsville Pa.

There are a few bits that conveniently are forgotten from history classes, because it's one of those disturbing truths. American natives were a lot less primitive than usually is being thought in schools. Take Cahokia for example, a massive Native American city, located in modern day East St. Louis. In 1250, it was bigger than London, featured a sophisticated society, an urban center, satellite villages and thatched-roofed houses lining the central plazas. The city was abandoned by the time white people got to it, however the evidence they left behind, supports a complex economy, trade routes from the Great Lakes all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico and in fact a very advanced society in general

And that's not even mentioning Monk's Mound. Cahokia's pyramid dwarfs the great pyramid in Egypt, both in size and in degree of difficulty...!! This is knowledge that was largely ignored by everybody in the 1800's, because it would be impossible for those "savages" to have build all that. Yet they did, so quite honestly, please give them credit for what they accomplished.

[Frank Merton]

I thought the missing tribes of Israel is what The Book of Mormon is about. That the Indians were decendants of ancient Jews was a popular theory in the nineteenth century. Others had them descended from Egyptians.

The ideas are basically racist. White people saw that many native Americans had advanced cultures and so on, and though therefore they must have learned these things from white people, since only whites are capable of inventing advanced culture.

[The_Spartan]

Now since the Book of Abraham, translated by Joseph Smith turns out to be not exactly what the papyrus had, but more of what Smith interpreted according to his own fancy, It is quite likely that the Book of Mormon, which Joseph Smith had "found" and "translated' too, will also be of the same kind as the "Book of Abraham"

[Everdred]

I recently dicovered a book originally published 1833 called American Antquities and Discoveries in the West by Josiah Priest. Other then the claims about the lost tribes of israel and the ark built in america he put out some interesting claims about ancient ruins found in the areas around the Ohio river by settelers in the 1700's with the mark of people more advanced then the natives od the "mound-builders" fortifications encompassing several acres and layed out in definite military mindset. has anyone heard about research in this area or any other speulation as to the origin of the ruins?

he went into detail about ruins around Marietta and Zanesville Ohio and Brownsville Pa.

Priest was clearly just a fellow interested in American history but lacked much of the information we now have. This led to lots of speculation and flights of fancy that makes his work useless for the modern scholar.

For example I looked at his chapter on Marietta. Here he found a "fortress" that was square in plan. He then went on to claim it was a Roman fortress because they built square forts. But archaeological work has established that the Marietta Earthworks were built by the Hopewell culture, and probably did not function as a fort.

[ShadowSot]

And that's not even mentioning Monk's Mound. Cahokia's pyramid dwarfs the great pyramid in Egypt, both in size and in degree of difficulty...!!

Eh? How do you figure?

It's an earthen mound, not quarried limestone and granite.

And checking it's stats, while I see that the base is similar, the height of the mound is around 100 ft, of course taking into consideration loss of height from erosion.

The Great pyramid in comparison is currently 455 ft tall, and is estimated to have been around 480 ft at the time of construction.