"The public should be exposed to such controversial and thought-provoking views as these, but they must also ask the hard questions and demand the evidence for such views. In short, they must be skeptical, not naive believers of anything in print."
W. Hunter Lesser
Cult Archaeology Strikes Again: A Case for Pre-Columbian Irishmen in the Mountain State?
West Virginia Archeologist, Vol. 35, No.2, 1983
"If one reports that there are pyramids in Egypt and pyramids in Mexico, or mummies in Egypt and mummies in Chile, the automatic response seems to be "When did the Egyptians bring these ideas to the New World?" No one ever asks, "Did the Chileans or Mexicans bring these ideas to Egypt?" (a fair question, in light of the fact that the world's oldest prepared mummies in Chile pre-date Egyptian mummies by two millennia.)"
David L. Browman
Department of Anthropology
Washington University
Commentary on "Robbing Native American Cultures"
Current Anthropology, Vol. 38, No.3, June, 1997
Muslim Wiki currently features a post titled "Islamic Place Names in America." This post (previously deconstructed at Deafening Silence ) claims that many U.S. cities and Native American tribes have Muslim names, and these names are proof of Pre-Columbian Muslim contact.
Muslim Wiki cites only one source in support of these claims- "Salih Yucel, a religious official at the Redfern Mosque in Sydney."
Salih Yucel currently serves as a Muslim Chaplain at Harvard Medical School's Brigham and Women's Hospital, Children's Hospital Boston and North Shore Medical Center. He earned a Bachelor of Divinity degree from the University of Ankara in 1982 and a Master's degree in Theology from the University of Sydney in 1996.
He does not appear to have any scholarly expertise outside the discipline of theology. None of his credentials reflects any training in history, archaeology or anthropology.
A link at the bottom of the Muslim Wiki article takes the reader to the front page of Today's Zaman, an English-language paper based in Turkey. No article written by Mr. Yucel appears there, but a bit of Googling produces a piece titled "First Immigrants of the New World." Mr. Yucel did not write the article- its author is anonymous- but it describes his theories in detail.
It begins:
"Barry Fell (1917-1994), British-born and distinguished Harvard Professor of Marine Biology, wrote Saga America one year after his retirement in 1980, which proves the existence of Muslims in America."
Saga America proves nothing. Like Mr. Yucel, Fell had no training in history, archaeology or anthropology. His methodology and claims have been consistently rejected by serious scholars and none of his writings have ever been adopted by any reputable archaeology or anthropology program.
Fell's best-known books are America B.C., Saga America and Bronze Age America. Writing in the New York Review of Books in 1977, Glyn Daniel, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge, England, described Fell's theories as "ignorant rubbish" and "badly argued theories based on fantasies." In his book Prehistory of the Americas, Stuart Fiedel, former professor of Anthropology at the State University of New York at Purchase called Fell's theories "fantasies" that are "not taken seriously" by contemporary archaeologists.
Fell's theory that ancient Celts, Libyans and Egyptians (among others) discovered America before Columbus was called "hyper-diffusionism" by Professor Daniel. As a term, "hyper-diffusionism" was coined to describe an extreme version of "cultural diffusion." In his textbook Cultural Anthropology, Marvin Harris describes cultural diffusion as "the passing of cultural traits from one culture and society to another" and explains that it was a popular theory early in the 20th century. "Hyper-diffusionism" assumes that this transfer took place not only between geographically neighboring societies, but societies separated by vast oceans and thousands of miles. Both Harris and Fiedel go on to explain that diffusion as a theory reached the height of its popularity in the early 20th century and has largely been discarded in the light of new discoveries and advanced research techniques.
The Today's Zaman article continues:
"Another key discovery relating to the traces of Islam in America, are coins found by Father Thaddeus Mason Harris. These coins were found while he was supervising the construction of today's "Route 16" from Malden to Cambridge, MA, in 1787."
This paragraph is as notable for the innaccuracies it contains as it is for the story it tells. According to the Dorchester Atheneum, there is no "Father Thaddeus Thomas Mason Harris." Thaddeus Mason Harris (1768-1842) was a Unitarian minister, not a priest. Also, he never supervised the construction of Route 16 at any time. According to the story as related in Fell's Saga America, Harris was merely travelling along Route 16 when the alleged incident occured.
I say "alleged" because Saga America is the only source I can find for this story. I have not been able to confirm it from any other source.
Disturbingly, the author of the Today's Zaman article does not even credit Fell with this alleged information. We are left with the impression that this is new information from an independent source- when in fact it is a rehash of material from Saga America, with some basic facts botched.
More from the article:
"In addition to being on the administration of the Boston Dialogue Foundation, Yucel has researched the traces of Islam on the American continent for years. The most important findings he notes also concur with the research of his former professor and member of the U.S. Science and Art Academy Faculty, Professor Barry Fell."
To begin with, Barry Fell could never have been Mr. Yucel's former professor. Barry Fell died of heart failure in San Diego, CA on April 21,1994. Mr. Yucel earned his Master's Degree in Theology from the University of Sydney in 1996, which presumably places him in Australia in 1994, studying. Even if he had travelled to the United States in 1994, Mr. Yucel could not have studied with Fell; Fell retired in 1980. And if Mr. Yucel had studied with Fell before 1980, he would not have been studying archaeology or anthropology. Fell never taught either of those subjects at Harvard or anywhere else. He taught Marine Biology.
Note the assertion that Professor Barry Fell was a "member of the U.S. Science and Art Academy Faculty." I can find no academic organization by that name. It is possible that the name of the organization has been scrambled and misrepresented, like the facts in the coin story previously described. However, even if that is the case, it is much more likely that Fell was honored by some academic society for his work in Marine Biology, not his archaeological theories. Fell was never employed by any academic institution to either teach or do research in archaeology, anthropology or any related discipline. Such subjects were outside his area of expertise and he had no credentials to do so.
The next few paragraphs of the Today's Zaman article describe various rock inscriptions used by Fell to support his thesis. (No pictures of the actual transcriptions are given.) Interpreting supposedly ancient carvings was Fell's chief source of evidence. His interpretive techniques, however, always failed peer review.
Writing in American Heritage magazine, Dean R. Snow, Professor of Anthropology at Pennsylvania State University, said of Fell's methodology: "...not one of his [Fell's] American inscriptions can withstand a test for authenticity, and most yield only gibberish... His assumptions, in other words, allow him to make pretty much anything he wants of the litter of fake and imaginary inscriptions scattered across America."
A good illustration of Snow's criticism can be found in the March 1983 issue of a magazine called Wonderful West Virginia. An article described Fell's interpretation of two petroglyphs in West Virginia.
Fell- who never visited the site in person and worked soley from photographs sent to him by amateur enthusiasts- claimed that the markings were an ancient Celtic script called Ogam and related a detailed account of Jesus' birth as described in the Christian Bible. This, Fell said, proved that Celtic monks had arrived in the New World 7-8 centuries before Columbus and spread Christianity to the natives.
When asked to describe his methods, it soon became clear that Fell had selected or excluded various markings on the rock to support his idea, rather than considering the carving as a whole- and sometimes even added marks of his own. In addition, when experts in Ogam pointed out that they didn't see any markings to indicate vowels, Fell announced that American Ogam didn't use vowells.
Writing in The West Virginia Archeologist in 1986, Monroe Oppenheimer and Willard Wurtz said of Fell's methods:
" What is critical here is that by this device Fell gives himself virtually complete flexibility in "interpreting" any series of consonants he has constructed. If he were dealing only in English he could, for example, make the consonants NGDWTRST mean- if this were the text he had started with - In God We Trust. Yet, they could equally as well be interpreted as No Good Water Site."
They continued:
"...He found whatever "Ogam" consonants he needed by manipulating the slashes as he chose, and then added whatever vowells the test called for...It would be a harmless and mildly interesting game if it weren't played for such high stakes in terms of public deceit."
Charges of sloppy methodology and conclusions based more on fantasy than evidence tainted all of Fell's epigraphic work. According to Oppenheimer and Wurtz, Fell's book America B.C. was dismissed by linguists and archaeologists as "a complete fabrication"; W. Hunter Lesser, also writing in West Virginia Archeologist, holds up Fell's work as an example of "cult archaeology."
"Such 'fantastic breakthroughs' are common in what is called "cult archeology," a form of psuedoscience. The "true believers" diligently (almost religiously) pursue their theories, all the while ignoring contrary archeological, historical, and linguistic evidence as they announce their latest "breakthroughs.""
(It is worth noting here that Fell's work in Marine Biology was accepted and respected. Fell brought both training and professional expertise to the subject and his work withstood peer review.)
In addition to repeating Fell's claims (without clearly attributing them to Fell), the Today's Zaman article also makes this statement:
"Incidentally the Muslim generations who lived during the period in the U.S. are today defined as the Iroquois, Algonquin, Anasazi, Hohokam and Olmec indigenous tribes...Yet these indigenous people, who were illiterate, were amazed with what they found in the schools established by the Arabs."
Here again we encounter the assertion that Native American tribes were actually Muslim and called themselves by Muslim names. (This claim has already been examined by Deafening Silence and the post can be found here.) The inclusion of the Olmec civilization in this list is a new and interesting variation.
The Olmec (a name bestowed by archaeologists who did not know what the civilization called itself) arose in Mexico near what is now Vera Cruz. Their civilization predated the other tribes in the list by 800 years, and their society was effectively obsolete 600 years before Mohammed was born. No Olmecs lived in the United States at any time.
It is also interesting that the article purports to know what Native Americans supposedly thought of the allegedly visiting Muslims. If the Native Americans were illiterate, how can anyone know what they thought? By what source do we have this information? In all my research thus far concerning Native Americans, I have yet to find any Muslim lore.
The article then proceeds to the arrival of Columbus. Many claims are made about what Columbus saw and thought and did, but we are given no source. Columbus no doubt kept ship's logs and journals regarding his travels- I would be surprised if he had not- but we are never told where we can find a copy to read for ourselves. Instead, we are expected to accept that the anonymous author of the article quotes Columbus correctly and in the proper context.
That context becomes troubling in one paragraph:
"Columbus noted that indigenous married women wore cotton clothes, and he wrote that he wondered from where these women learnt the concept of chastity."
Coming from Columbus- a 15th-century European male encountering "savage" Native American culture for the first time- such racist, sexist thoughts are to be expected. But for a modern writer to quote such ideas as "proof" of pre-Columbian Muslim contact is naked bigotry. The entire idea rests on the assumption that Native Americans had no sexual or cultural mores of their own before the alleged Muslim contact.
It is an insult worthy of a racist hack.
In their article "Robbing Native American Cultures" (Current Athropology, vol. 38, No.3 June 1997), Haslip-Viera, Ortiz de Montellano and Barbour point out that one tactic commonly used by psuedoscientists is "an almost exclusive use of outdated secondary sources," and the anonymous writer of the Today's Zaman article falls prey to this. Consider this excerpt from the article:
"According to research conducted by Professor Cyrus Thomas from the Smithsonian Institute, a small hut made of rock fall in the Ellenville region of New York has almost the same structure as a hut made of rock fall in the Akabe region of South Arabia."
Cyrus Thomas was appointed to the Smithsonian Institution in 1881. While at the Smithsonian he conducted excavations of Indian mounds and published his findings. Modern scholars consistently remark on the racist undertones in his work, which questions Native American intellectual development.
To rely on Thomas as a source is to cite research that is nearly 100 years old and ignore any advances since that time.
The modern Smithsonian expressed its opinion of Fell's work in 1978, publishing an official statement regarding America B.C. Representatives of the Smithsonian's Department of Anthropology compiled a list of basic factual errors that destroyed the credibility of Fell's research.
The Today's Zaman article also cites "Professors Heizer and Baumhoff from the University of California" and identifies them no further. Martin Alexander Baumhoff died in 1983 and his major contributions to anthropology/archaeology occurred in the 1950's and early 60's. Robert Heizer died in 1979. Were both men alive today, they would be actively re-evaluating their findings in the light of new research- something the author of the article is unwilling to do.
Overall, the Today's Zaman article describing Salih Yucel's research shows a pattern of deception and distortion. The 'research' described relies heavily on the discredited work of one man (Fell), supported by bogus citations of outdated findings whose authors are conveniently dead. Bigoted assumptions about Native Americans are presented as fact.
This is propaganda disguised as scientific inquiry.
Salih Yucel has stated in other interviews that he wants to establish an official system of hospital chaplains in his native Turkey. That is a noble goal. Also worthy is the stated goal of his organization, the Boston Dialogue Foundation- peaceful dialogue between cultures and religions. I would like to think the Mr. Yucel's research goals- however naive and misguided- are noble as well.
However, a quote attributed to Salih Yucel in the article causes me to doubt this:
"Many doctorate theses may be prepared about this issue," says Yucel. "These studies will shed light on the many documents which remain secret to both Muslims and Americans. They will perhaps prepare the groundwork for rewriting the history of the American continent in the future."
Secret documents- available only to an untrained amateur? A Turkish Imam committed to rewriting American History? Why should Mr. Yucel be so keenly interested in such things?
And how does a man with no formal training or credentials in anthropology or archaeology gain enough credibility to be profiled in a newspaper as an "expert?"
Maybe we should have a seance and ask Barry Fell.
References
A Gigantic hat tip and shout-out to the intrepid Miss Kelly for her invaluable help in researching this post.
Today's Zaman: First Immigrants in the New World
Imam Salih Yucel at Boston Children's Hospital
Imam Yucel in Practice as Chaplain
Dean R. Snow on Psuedoscience and Barry Fell
Saga America, by Barry Fell (paperback ed.)
Prehistory of the Americas by Stuart J. Fiedel, pg 21
Cultural Anthropology by Marvin Harris (reference is from pg. 10-11, 4th ed.)
A Linguistic Analysis of Some WV Petroglyphs by Oppenheimer and Wurtz
Cult Archaeology Strikes Again by W. Hunter Lesser
How Science Works- and How It Doesn't
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann/pg. 204-213
Prehistory of the Americas by Stuart J. Fiedel/pg 260-270 (hardback ed.)
Resume of Dean R. Snow, Dept. of Anthropology, the Pennsylvania State University
Islamic Place Names in America/Muslim Wiki
CA Forum on Anthropology in Public: Robbing Native American Cultures: Van Sertima's Afrocentricity and the Olmecs/Gabriel Haslip-Viera, Bernard Ortiz de Montellano, Warren Barbour/Current Anthropology, Vol. 38, No. 3, June, 1997, pp. 419-441
The above article and its commentaries are available online through JSTOR. Deafening Silence readers are urged to look the articles up in the print edition of Current Anthropology or visit a local library offering JSTOR to its patrons. The effort is well worth it.
Girl, you went to town!! Great, thorough, well-researched and documented job in demolishing Salih Yucel's faux "history." I'm honored to have inspired your take-down.
It's mind-boggling that Yucel relied on Barry Fell's fantastical allegations. It renders suspect anything that comes out of Yucel's mouth about history. Great job!
Posted by: miss kelly | July 11, 2007 at 08:36 PM
Excellent work.
Posted by: Trickshot | September 10, 2007 at 01:33 PM