My first visit to a museum changed my life.
I couldn't have been more than four or five when my parents decided it was time to start exposing me to Culture and Knowledge. They'd already been reading to me almost from the time I emerged shrieking into the world, and between Mum's choice of poems like The Highwayman, Dad's love of show tunes, and the household subscription to worthy publications like National Geographic, I was able to read by the time I was three or four. I'd also nearly wrecked a youth theater production of Aladdin when I attempted to rush the stage and rescue the hero, but that's a story for another time.
That near-disaster aside, I was a polite, friendly, well-behaved child with a surprisingly long attention span. That may be why the parental units made sure to expose me both early and often to Andrew Carnegie's magnificent legacy to his adopted home, the Carnegie Library and Museum complex in Oakland.
These museums, founded in the late 1890's by the great steel baron/philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, were housed in a wonderful fin de siecle set of buildings on Forbes Avenue. They've since expanded to include a science museum and a museum devoted to native son Andy Warhol, but fifty years ago they consisted of a museum of art (one of the first to feature what was then contemporary art by the likes of Whistler and Homer) and a museum of natural history that boasted one of the finest collections of fossils in the world. It's a dazzling experience for an adult, let alone a small, curious child, and I still remember being awed by the sheer size of the triceratops skull, the slender beauty of the Diplodocus skeleton, the looming majesty of the T-Rex with its incongruously tiny front legs.
I was enchanted, and before we left the building and piled into the Rambler for our trip back to Pleasant Hills, my parents made sure to stop by the gift shop in quest of any and all dinosaur-related items. We already had a copy of a children's book about paleontology by Roy Chapman Andrews, the real-life model for Indiana Jones, and my parents doubtless believed that giving me something tangible about the mighty reptiles of the past would only help me retain what I'd seen and heard and learned.
That is how I came to acquire a set of a dozen plastic dinosaurs, all different.
This was mildly disappointing - I may have been young, but I couldn't imagine that the Ankylosaurus wouldn't be lonely for another of its kind - but that didn't stop me from deciding that since the dinosaurs had come home in the same set, that meant they were all friends, whether flesh or plant-eating. And despite the significant problems posed by the Allosaurus and the T-Rex being from different geological eras, as the largest and fiercest of the dinosaurs, these two had to be a married couple that served as the parents and protectors of all the rest.
That my parents forbore to point out the impossibility of this can be attributed either to their realization that I was a budding science fiction fan or Mum being too busy to pay much attention to the little stories and domestic crises I made up as I played with my new little friends. It may well be that they were simply so happy that I had a vivid imagination that they figured I was better off left alone rather than being hauled off to a child psychologist to be "cured."
That I (or they) might have been part Gallifreyan, and thus had power to manipulate time and space so that a T-Rex and an allosaurus could express their impossible forbidden love cannot be discounted, either.
Regardless, I loved playing with my dinosaurs. Along with a stuffed donkey named (of course) Eeyore and a Penny Brite that was the only doll that I ever much tolerated, these were the chief toys of my early childhood. I made up stories, sent them on adventures, and let my mind roam free. I wanted to be a paleontologist and was not shy about telling any and everyone I met about my ambitions, and it never once occurred to me how radical an ambition this was in an era when the highest most little girls aimed was a stewardess or possibly a nurse.
I even set up what I called "The Dinosaurs' Christmas," a little display on the divider between the entry to our split level Colonial that was a sort of pseudo-creche. At this point I'm not completely sure what this meant, but I'm pretty sure that either the triceratops or the ankylosaurus was Baby Jesus, the allosaurus was the Virgin Mary, the stegosaurus was a shepherd, and the rest were Wise Men, angels, sheep, cows, etc. That my long-suffering mother let me do this two years in a row without so much as a murmur about dinosaurs being extinct millions of years before the first Christmas speaks volumes about her trust in me being basically sane, albeit somewhat odd.
Alas, as Robert Frost so memorably put it, nothing gold can stay, and so it was with my dinosaurs. Our patient, gentle fox terrier died in the winter of 1965, and his replacement, a Cairn terrier I promptly dubbed Toto, was a hellraiser from day one. Much to my grief, Toto not only did not respect the dinosaurs, he chewed the poor allosaurus's head clean off, meaning that not only was our family Virgin Mary a Jurassic reptile that year, she (?) was much closer to Marie Antoinette than any Biblical female. By the next year we were in Cleveland, I was a first grader, and the dinosaurs were packed away with so many other toys and games, never to be seen again.
I haven't been to the Carnegie Museum in years, but I still enjoy reading about dinosaurs, fossils, and excavating the remains of the past. One of my favorite sights in the Metropolitan Museum of Art is the Temple of Dendur, the little shrine given by the Egyptian government to the United States and reconstructed in a special wing near Central Park East, and the Cloisters, constructed from several medieval monasteries, isn't far behind. There's nothing I enjoy quite so much as a day at a museum, viewing the art, history, and material culture created by our maddening, inspiring, ordinary, amazing ancestors.
Best of all, my work as a quilt historian has given me access to the art and artifacts I love. Just in the last few years I've examined a tiny Cimabue at the National Gallery of Art that is almost certainly the first visual depiction of a patchwork quilt, studied a magnificent quilted garment from the early Baroque, viewed an intriguing embroidered rug from the 17th century, helped conserve a wool quilt from the 1820's, photographed an enigmatic Chinese patchwork from the 13th century, and written the first piece in English on a 15th century Italian patchwork pillow. I'm presenting a paper (my fourth) at the Kalamazoo Medieval Studies Congress this May, and just a few weeks ago a woman in the Pacific Northwest asked for my opinion on what might, just might, be the oldest quilt in North America.
I may not be Indiana Jones, or even Roy Chapman Andrews, but in my own small way I'm an archaeologist, and there are times that I have to shake myself to remember that no, this isn't a fantasy, I really am living my childhood dream: I'm a scholar of the past, published in professional journals, with a worldwide reputation in my field. That the most I've ever gotten from this is the occasional speaking engagement, and that my academic reputation and a dollar will get me a cruller at the local Dunkin' Donuts, isn't the point. The point is what I've learned, and what I teach to others. If I can make a solid contribution to my field, no matter how small, it's worth it.
Being a scholar of the past is not nearly as easy as it might seem. Artifacts are frequently scarce, even more frequently in pieces, and it's not uncommon for two people to see the same artifact and draw opposite conclusions. Worse, it's all too easy for the intelligent amateur to read a book or field report, not quite understand what's going on, and decide that the trained experts are stuffy purists who have completely missed the true meaning of what they see.
Tonight I bring you two books that are anything but solid contributions to archaeology. One is a prime example of what happens when an otherwise decent scholar lets cultural chauvinism cloud his/her judgment. The other, immensely popular but almost completely wrong, is a warning to any and all scholars trained in one field who decide to dabble in another without bothering to do the necessary background reading:
Antiquitates Americanae, Sive Scriptores Septentrionales Rerum Ante Columbianarum In America, by Carl Christian Rafn - Carl Christian Rafn is an unlikely candidate for inclusion in one of these diaries. A respected Danish scholar, he spent much of his professional career editing and translating the old Norse sagas into modern languages, helped conserve the manuscripts of Icelandic scholar Arni Magnusson, and edited several academic journals. He was an intelligent, well educated man, and if he hadn't become slightly obsessed with something he read in the sagas, he never would have come to my attention at all. Unfortunately for Rafn, he did, and he did, and when I found out why, well....
Rafn was a careful man, and he made sure that his editions of the classic sagas were as accurate possible. This meant he had to read them as closely as possible to be certain that the meanings of every word and phrase were correct, that the footnotes were accurate, and that the information contained in the footnotes and ancillary material was as factual as possible. And since he was a careful man, whose editions were as good as early 19th century scholarship would allow, he of course noticed when the sagas began to speak of a mysterious place, far to the west of Greenland and Iceland, known as "Vinland."
Previous scholars had dismissed this place, which was named for the abundance of fine grapes that grew wild in its soil, as mere legend. Rafn thought otherwise, and said so. There were too many details, too many references, too many real people named as visiting or exploring or dying in Vinland, for it to be nothing more than a figment of someone's imagination. And since Vinland lay to the west, it seemed logical to him that the sagas described nothing less than an early pre-Columbian attempt to colonize what we would now call North America.
Now, this is not particularly controversial today; excavations at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland have proved quite definitively that the Vikings did indeed establish a small settlement in North America at about the time described in the Norse sagas. L'Anse aux Meadows itself was probably a trading post or winter quarters, not the actual place described in the sagas (that was more likely in New Brunswick or another area on the Canadian mainland), but its mere existence proves that Rafn was right.
That is not why Rafn is in this diary. He had a hunch, it proved to be correct, and modern archaeologists see him as ahead of his time. The problem is in where his ideas took him.
Consider, for instance, Dighton Rock. This large tidal boulder in Rhode Island is covered with mysterious inscriptions, and according to local historians that Rafn consulted while preparing Antiquitates Americanae, these inscriptions provided a written and pictorial record that was remarkably close to the story of one Thorfinn Karlselne, who had settled with his wife Gudrida in the southern part of Vinland in an area they called "Hop." There Gudrida, who seems to have been made of very stern stuff, gave birth to their son, Snorro, while Thorfinn and 151 companions went about the business of fighting the local Skrellings (we call them "Native Americans") and attempting to wrest a living from an inhospitable land.
Rafn was delighted to have his theory that Vinland was actually North American confirmed. He was even more delighted to learn of the survival of a large cylindrical tower of native stone that commanded a great view of what we now call Newport. Clearly this was a Viking structure, possibly a fort, and when combined with the inscriptions on Dighton Rock, all but definitive proof that the first Europeans in America were not the Spanish in the Caribbean, but the Vikings in Rhode Island.
So convincing was this evidence, and so persuasive was Rafn's book, that scholarship regarded the matter as settled until 1916, when a professor at Brown University, Edmund Delabarre, took a good close look at Dighton Rock, then at the illustrations in Rafn's book, and realized that the so-called "Viking inscriptions" were nothing of the sort.
It seemed that Rafn, anxious to prove his theory, had studied the information sent to him and become so convinced that Dighton Rock was indeed a Viking artifact that he'd attempted to "enhance" the actual markings on the rock with his own guesses as how they had originally looked. He was an essentially honest man - his own markings were shaded to distinguish them from what was actually on Dighton Rock - but his belief that the Vikings had to have settled the area around Dighton Rock had lead him to see what he wanted to see, not what was actually there. Delabarre, who lacked the desperate need to see his hypothesis confirmed, was able to see that what were purportedly images of Thorfinn, Gudrida, Snorro, and the other residents of Hop, were far more likely to be meaningless graffiti left by Native Americans than anything of European origin.
Alas for romance! And alas again for the "Viking tower" in Newport, which was about as Viking as Dighton Rock. Far from a relic of Vinland, or a fortification of any sort, the Tower turned out to be nothing more than the remnants of a colonial windmill erected in the 17th century by an early colonial governor named, I kid you not, "Benedict Arnold," whose great-grandson would become a byword for courage for about five minutes before becoming a byword for treason. Fortunately Rafn had died long his hypothesis was seemingly disproved for all time. That he was right all along, only not for the reasons he thought he was, would not clear for another half century.
There the matter would seem to rest. Alas for scholarship! Delabarre's work on Dighton Rock, and archaeological work done in excavations in the late 1940's on Newport Tower, has not prevented a veritable flood of questionable theories about non-Native Americans in Rhode Island from arising in subsequent years. All of these theories are advanced by enthusiastic amateurs, and as annoying as they must be to professionals who've devoted their lives to studying early American archaeology, they're quite entertaining for those of use who cherish the wild, the ridiculous, and the E Street Shuffle the outrageous. Dighton Rock has been claimed for the Phoenicians and the Israelites, while Newport Tower has been attributed to, among others, Chinese concubines trying to build a lighthouse, curious colonials trying to build an astronomical observatory, Portuguese explorers trying to build a watchtower, and Vikings trying to build a fort (or observatory, or watchtower).
That none of these is supported by the archaeological evidence is dismissed as cultural chauvinism on the part of the archaeological establishment, those big ol' unromantic meanies who believe more in mundane trivia like carbon-14 dating, chemical analysis, and those tricky little things called "facts." After all, the site and the Tower look like there should have been Vikings peeking out of the upper stonework or waving miniature replicas of Mjolnir at their enemies, so obviously that is what happened and never mind the science!
It's enough to make a Norseman cry.
America B.C., by Barry Fell - 1976 was a significant year in American history. It was our 200th birthday, after all, and after the bloodshed and destruction of Vietnam, the ugly mess that was Watergate, the assassination of a President, a Presidential candidate, and a civil rights leader in less than five years, and the bland mediocrity of the Ford administration, the country was in the mood to live large, boogie down, and whoop it up as much as possible, preferably while dressing like the bastard spawn of Captain America and Wonder Woman.
The resulting orgy of patriotism had results both good (a renewed interest in social history, research into American material culture such as quilts and needlework, the Tall Ships) and bad (a cattle breeder who staged a Bicentennial Bull Semen Sale, red white and blue false teeth and wigs, John Jakes' American Bicentennial Series and a resulting miniseries that cast Montreal native William Shatner as Paul Revere), but by and large it did much to lift the national spirit after a decade of one horror after another.
And then there was this book. Written by a tenured professor at Harvard University, no less, America B.C. purported to be no less than a completely new theory of European settlement and exploration prior to the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1492, or even Leif Ericsson a few centuries earlier. Based upon nearly thirty years' close study of inscriptions, petroglyphs, and carvings found throughout North and South America, the book held that Europeans had reached American shores thousands of years before either Leif the Lucky or Christopher the Clever had decided to sail into the uttermost West.
These forerunners, who ran from obvious candidates (the Irish, especially St. Brendan), other Celts (who lived on islands and had large ships), the Phoenicians (the scourge of the Middle Eastern coast only two thousand years earlier), the Egyptians (builders of great triremes capable of sailing the Mediterranean), and even the Basques (esoteric and cool, so why not?), had evidently scribbled, scratched, or carved their names, alphabets, and ancient knowledge up and down the New World. If that weren't enough, they'd founded actual colonies, residents of which had intermarried with the locals to produce many of the local tribes who greeted the Europeans of the Renaissance so many years later.
That much of this "evidence" was based on bad research, poor interpretation, and reliance on questionable sources was dismissed by the enthusiastic public. After all, a major article in Reader's Digest, that mainstay of solid American values, proclaimed that
"Now thanks to the genius of a single man...We must include in our American Heritage - Fighting Celts from Spain...daring Semitic Seafarers from Carthage Libya and Egypt. Who knows how many others will be added before the end of [this] epic voyage into the past!" -
And if that weren't enough, Peter Tompkins, author of such masterpieces as
The Secrets of the Great Pyramid, praised
America B.C. as
"A stunning book...an authentic landmark...America B.C. destroys the premise of every previous text."
High praise indeed! Never mind that the author of this groundbreaking book, Barry Fell, was an expert on fossil sea urchins who had zero training in ancient languages or forms of writing - a PhD is a PhD is a PhD, isn't it? Surely marine biology (especially if deals with
fossils isn't that far off from archaeology? And surely the experts who dismissed Fell, who'd founded several amateur associations to study these fascinating inscriptions and carvings that proved America was settled by Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Spanish Celts, etc., were merely jealous that he'd hit the bestseller lists and they hadn't! What other reason was there for him to publish his astonishing work that proved St. Brendan had spread the Gospel in Wyoming and West Virginia in a magazine called
Wonderful West Virginia instead of an academic journal? Or for the Smithsonian Institution to denounce his books with the following harsh language:
"The arguments of America B. C. are unconvincing. The only accepted case of pre-Columbian European contact in North America remains the Norse site of L'Anse aux Meadows in northern Newfoundland. Perhaps some day credible proof of other early European contacts will be discovered in the New World. However, America B.C. does not contain such proof and does not employ the standard linguistic and archeological methods that would be necessary to convince specialists in these fields."
If that weren't enough to curdle Barry Fell's sea urchins, two lawyers, Monroe Oppenheimer and Willard Wirtz, analyzed the available evidence, reviews, and academic writings on Fell's work, and concluded that not only did Fell not know what he was talking about, he was guilty of deliberate academic fraud.
"Ouch," as they say in English. Or أي صوت للتعبير عن الألم in Arabic...or ωχ in Greek...or תאוץ in Hebrew...or heus in Latin...or....
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So...do you have an old copy of America B.C. stuffed into a box in the attic? Have you been to a questionable archaeological site like America's Stonehenge? Graffiti'd a tidal rock? Attempted to pick up Mjolnir? Are you Danish? Do you like Danish for breakfast? It's Saturday night, so raise high the mead horn and drink hearty....
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