Traveling Prehistoric Seas

Critical Thinking on Ancient Transoceanic Voyages

Alice Beck Kehoe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315416397
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Historia militar y marítima

Until recently the theory that people could have traversed large expanses of ocean in prehistoric times was considered pseudoscience. But recent discoveries in places as disparate as Australia, Labrador, Crete, California, and Chile open the possibility that ancient oceans were highways, not barriers, and that ancient people possessed the means and motives to traverse them. In this brief, thought-provoking, but controversial book Alice Kehoe considers the existing evidence in her reassessment of ancient sailing. Her book-critically analyzes the growing body of evidence on prehistoric sailing to help scholars and students evaluate a highly controversial hypothesis;-examines evidence from archaeology, anthropology, botany, art, mythology, linguistics, maritime technology, architecture, paleopathology, and other disciplines;-presents her evidence in student-accessible language to allow instructors to use this work for teaching critical thinking skills.

Chapter 1

Critical Thinking Method

Science, history, engineering, philosophy, medicine, law, and business all demand skill in Critical Thinking. Practitioners must look for empirical data, then reason logically from observing data to interpreting their significance. We must always be aware that “knowledge” accepted uncritically can undermine Critical Thinking. We realize that in matters of spiritual faith, people may choose to accept teachings from revered authority; in matters of science, authority and custom are not admissible. So we say, yet many examples exist of scientists rejecting valid data and reasonable interpretations because influential academics claim they can’t be true. To think critically requires more than data and reason; it often requires resisting received dictates about what could be possible.

In his influential text, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Thomas Kuhn described “normal science” as fitting observations into a standard paradigm, that is, a model. Over time, scientists would see data that appeared anomalous, unexpected, or contradictory to the paradigm. Scientists who insist on confronting colleagues with anomalies risk careers. A generation ago, the received notion that Pueblo communities in the United States Southwest were peaceful people caused observations of traumatic deaths associated with destroyed villages to be rejected as mistaken, and at least one graduate student who refused to delete these data from his dissertation was denied the doctoral degree. As Thomas Kuhn expected, thirty years of more and more such anomalous data shifted the paradigm to accommodate the fact that Pueblo communities suffered warfare, recounted in their histories to archaeologists who would listen. Kuhn’s model of science was not steady progress toward verified knowledge, but a series of plateaus separated by jumps from one paradigm to another.

Peaceful Pueblos were part of the romantic myth of the noble savage, a way of criticizing the violence and greed in modern American life. The notion that America had been deeply different from the “Old World” of Eurasia and Africa supported European invaders’ policies of eradicating native cultures in favor of imposing European practices and religion. American First Nations had failed to develop true civilizations, the conquering powers asserted, and this could be because they had been cut off from Old World religions, arts, and sciences. Their ancestors had walked over the Bering Strait when sea level was lower, in the Ice Age, then were isolated when the climate warmed and the Strait was flooded. Russian explorers’ observations of Inuit traders in Siberia, and documentation of Chukchi and Inuit traveling by boat over the Strait, including intermarriage, was ignored. So have been data attesting to contacts between the Americas and the Old World farther south.

If Kuhn was correct about the power of anomalies to advance scientific understanding, these anomalous data relating to pre-Columbian transoceanic contacts ought to be critically examined. DNA tests are now presenting similarities that cannot be dismissed as subjective opinions. Charred sweet potatoes excavated by highly reputable professional archaeologists, dated to a thousand years ago and identified as a South American species, indisputably prove a round-trip voyage between Central Polynesia and northwestern South America (Green 2005:50, 61; Roullier et al. 2013). A new paradigm has been forced upon archaeology.

The Paradigm of a pre-Columbian Global World

Critical thinking rests upon open-minded collection of data. A priori rejection of certain data because “everyone knows” something “is impossible” isn’t scientific. Scientists should examine how data have been obtained, consider how they may fit known scenarios, and suggest an explanation that accounts for the data in a straightforward manner. In the historical sciences, data are literally given, not manipulated in a laboratory, and human behavior is observed in the widest range globally and historically. The critical thinker neither throws out babies with the dirty bathwater nor embraces every fantasy of extraterrestrials and spirits. What is usually most difficult for a person wishing to think critically is to be skeptical of what “everyone knows”—that which was learned in childhood or taught by authority figures.

In this book, we begin with the myth that Christopher Columbus discovered a hitherto unknown continent. The prevailing paradigm has been that only the development of fifteenth-century European ships enabled humans to cross oceans. That idea is disproved by histories of Asian ships, including the vaka—seagoing canoes from Oceana—that settled Polynesia. Once the feasibility of oceanic voyages before 1492 and by non-Europeans is accepted, on strong evidence, the possibilities of long-distance transmission of technologies, arts, and cosmologies are greatly increased. So, too, is demand for careful evaluation of sources of data. Then comparisons must be sought in archaeological and historical records, without preconceptions about “primitives” and “civilizations.” Best fit can be presented, followed by discussion of its strengths and weaknesses. As is explained in chapter 4, historical sciences seek the more probable explanation, not absolute proof—actual history is infinitely vast and very imperfectly preserved, beyond the reach of human thinking. Scientific thinking in historical sciences begins with data recovered from archaeological, paleontological, and geological surveys and excavations, then proceeds to compare these data with historical texts and present day similar organisms, structures, or processes. The present day or historically documented best-fit comparison becomes the most tenable—most probable—explanation.

Although the new paradigm superficially appears to resemble nineteenth-century researches into diffusion of culture traits, it is significantly different (Storey and Jones 2011). In chapter 3 of this book, we adduce evidence for remarkable antiquity of ocean crossings and recognize several millennia-old major traditions of shipbuilding and navigation, particularly strong for marine travel in Asian seas. For Critical Thinking, this wealth of data on seafaring provides a secure foundation for the next step: historical documentation of long-distance maritime trips in the medieval and earlier eras, and archaeological evidence for transportation of material items to and from islands (chapter 4). This step supports the basic knowledge that ocean-going vessels were constructed and used for millennia, with concrete documentation of motives for travel. Chapter 5 introduces the definitive case: Polynesian voyaging, in which the means (seagoing ships), motive (cultural tradition of eastward exploring), and supporting data drawn from reputable excavations, radiocarbon dating of actual transported items, and DNA identities combine to make the case for high probability. Chapter 9 presents the other indubitable case, the Norse in northeastern North America from 1000 CE to mid-fifteenth century.

Subsequent chapters make the argument for cases less well supported than that for Polynesians, yet still probable. This book does not discuss low probability cases such as extraterrestrials, Templar knights looking for or carrying a Holy Grail, Egyptian religion, lost continents (Atlantis, Mu), lost tribes of Israel, exiled ancient Chinese kings, or Christian hermits. While transoceanic trips would be possible for all but extraterrestrials, recent lost continents are geologically improbable, and the other cases impute motives not congruent with historical documentation of the groups suggested. In contrast to improbable cases, movements of valued cultivated plants have a higher degree of probability, as do transmission of useful technologies such as paper and the impressive architectural art styles known to have diffused throughout all of Asia and Island Southeast Asia, to the latter areas by seagoing ships (chapters 7 and 8).

Diffusion

Ah, the D word! Dr. Phuddy H. Duddy, the famous American archaeologist, sits in the bar during a Society for American Archaeology meeting, speaking an Indo-European language originating in the Russian steppes and carried overseas to all the continents. He is drinking beer developed in the eastern Mediterranean, exchanging business cards of paper invented in China, wearing clothes of cotton domesticated in India and cut to a pattern from the Asian steppe. Mention the word diffusion, and he sneers. “That went out ages ago with Elliot Smith’s nonsense about Egyptian pyramid builders being the Olmec,” he tells his students.

Contrary to Phuddy Duddy’s scorn, diffusion is not an outdated term. Sociologists and geographers have charted the diffusion of farm innovations in Iowa and Sweden, the diffusion of electric lighting in the United States, the diffusion of kindergartens, diffusion of automobiles, and on and on to the diffusion of smartphones and the Internet (Rogers 2003). In earlier eras, gunpowder and printing were diffused from Asia to Europe; earlier still, domesticated livestock, horse-riding, and wheeled transport (Hodgen 1964; Anthony 2007). Each of these cases is true diffusion: the introduced artifact or behavior spreading throughout a population, like molecules spreading throughout a gas. Or, like Starbucks coffee shops spreading to nearly every business corner in every city.

Pre-Columbian voyages did not necessarily lead to diffusion. In the case of sweet potatoes in Polynesia, the cultigen did diffuse through most of the islands, welcomed as a better root crop than its predecessor, Asian-derived taro. Other items, such as figurines mounted on wheel-and-axle platforms, appear in a limited area and in what seem to be ritual sites, not generally in households; technically, they did not diffuse through a population. Contacts with foreigners can lead to stimulus diffusion: an unfamiliar object or technology sparking invention of a similar but modified object (Kroeber 1952). Stimulus diffusion has led to proliferation of social media applications. An unfamiliar example is Catholic Reformation adoption of Aztec realistic pictures of human hearts, seen by missionaries at temples in Mexico and then pictured in Jesus’ chest in European paintings meant to humanize the deity (Kehoe 1979). This case illustrates how meaning can change while a picture does not—the Aztec heart representing human sacrifices to nourish the power of the sun, and the Catholic heart representing a deity’s love for devotees. When assessing probability of contact, the differences between diffusion of an introduced item, limited acceptance of it, or stimulus diffusion should be kept in mind.

Independent Invention

Stimulus diffusion leads into the large space between contact introductions and independent inventions. The case for frequent independent inventions rests upon our species’ common genetics, brain structure, and biological needs. Everyone needs to eat, drink, sleep, and be sheltered from damaging weather, plus most humans want to reproduce—obviously, only those who did passed on their genes. Finding that tropical forest residents shelter themselves from rain by placing large leaves over a light pole frame doesn’t mean the idea was invented once and diffused throughout the tropics, because it is obvious and easy. On the other hand, it is unlikely that people who had no draft animals or wheeled vehicles would invent wheels with axles to propel animal figurines, especially when the occurrence of these mobile figurines is very limited in time and space in Mesoamerica, and nowhere else in the Americas.

To claim independent invention, we would need to show that the two apparent inventions are far apart in time as well as in space, for space can be traversed but time cannot. Most claims endeavor to show precursor inventions that could lead to the item in question; for example, wood block printing leading to the printing of books. In that large space between certain borrowings and independent invention, we see that wood block printing of pictures in Europe made it easy for Gutenberg and others to see how alphabet letters could be formed and used to print books; they had learned from travelers that this was being done in China with Chinese writing characters. Also in that large space are similarities in flint- and chert-knapped tools, given the crystalline structure of this class of rock and common purposes of cutting meat and scraping hides, activities developed many thousands of years ago and diffused with the spread of humans across the continents. Roughed-out chunks of flint or chert in a quarry often look like very ancient Paleolithic hand axes. Found in a prehistoric quarry in a Washington, D.C. park, such chunks were thought to indicate great antiquity for humans in North America, until careful comparisons of many chunks, and comparisons with village trash from relatively large First Nations communities, showed that the park site is a quarry and the chunks had simply not been removed for further working (Holmes 1897). This pioneer archaeological investigation is a landmark in scientific method in a historical science, with its emphasis on unbiased collection of data and broad but detailed comparisons.

Independence in inventions is a very important subject today, not only in anthropology but in business. Thousands of attorneys earn their livings advising or litigating issues of whether patents infringe on other claimed independent inventions. Histories of science reveal that debates over independence, and over priorities, of inventions began with the discussion of whether Isaac Newton or Gottfried Leibniz invented calculus, and this continues to the present day (Merton 1973:287–288). Our modern Western culture believes individuals possess capabilities to deploy for personal advancement or failure, so that success in society is a sign of an individual’s superior qualities, while conversely, ordinariness signals limited abilities or laziness. Political philosopher C. B. Macpherson (1962) termed this ideology “possessive individualism,” linking it to modern Western culture’s emphasis on private property, including workers’ property in themselves to sell their labor. Money and fame link, as do poverty and ignominy. Hence, “independent invention” is emotionally loaded in our society. “Possessive individualism” may seem far removed from archaeological debates, but societal values are deeply inculcated and can subconsciously influence judgment even in science, as sociologist Robert Merton described for many instances.

Inventions are usually cumulative. A better can opener cannot be invented until tin and aluminum cans are invented, and commercial canning and marketing through neighborhood food stores is developed. These processes depend upon rapid transport of large cargoes, and technology related to railroads, highways, and airplanes. All these are the result of multiple processes of extracting, refining, and distributing metals and other materials; and on this chain continues. Truly independent inventions are extremely rare. When considering the issue of transmission versus independent invention, probability lies on the side of transmission. Independent invention in a particular case needs to be supported by evidence of precedent conditions for each example. The case for transmission of wheel-and-axle mounted animal figurines in Mesoamerica rests upon the absence of any precedent conditions, neither wheels and axles, nor wagons associated with domesticated animals. Dramatically, no follow-up took place, either—no inventions of wheeled transport devices or domestication of animals for transport in Mesoamerica (not even importation of llamas from South America). Cumulative antecedents historically are precondition for inventions.

Historical Contingencies

Franz Boas, the immigrant German scientist who struggled to combat racist ideas prevalent in American anthropology in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, insisted on the principle of historical particularism: every society has its own history combining population movements and encounters with adaptation to its environment. Unique events occur, whether natural disasters, trade markets, wars, alliances, charismatic persons, gifted artists, philosophers, or leaders. No universal line of cultural development exists and no end stage exists, but always, dynamic adjustments to local possibilities and setbacks can be found. Boas’s view did not sit well with American propaganda about the White Man’s Manifest Destiny. In the next chapter, you will read about the myth of Columbus invoked to promote that ideology. Here, the point is that historical particularism supports the picture of antecedent conditions important for inventions. It also provides, in hundreds of ethnographic-ethnohistorical studies, an abundance of examples of contacts between societies and resulting transmissions of art, technologies, stories, cultigens, and persons.

Archaeologist Peter Jordan carried out a detailed comparative analysis of constituents of cultural traditions in three societies, using both ethnographic observations and historical and archaeological data (Jordan 2015). His subjects were Siberian Eastern Khanty who combine winter hunting and trapping, summer fishing, and herding reindeer; Coast Salish in southern British Columbia, Canada, who lived by fishing, primarily for salmon; and northern California First Nations living by fishing, hunting, and harvesting acorns and other plants. The two American groups are termed hunter-gatherers although they cultivated root crops, maintained berry bushes, and the Californians planted acorn oak orchards. Trade was economically and socially important. Jordan found that societies’ transmission of cultural behavior, including material items, down through generations tended to show sets that cohered, such as language, but also many customs and crafts that had different histories might change or drop out. Items with strong pragmatic use, such as hunting and fishing equipment, could be modified or replaced, often with discussion among the practitioners (Jordan 2015:200–201). Aesthetic elements, as on baskets in California, showed transmission across political and language communities (Jordan 2015:300). Above all, Jordan came to appreciate the effects of historical contingencies (Jordan 2015:312, 347).

Jordan’s empirical study of culture transmissions counters the Western stereotype of other societies being enslaved to tradition and hostile to strangers and to innovation. Especially pertinent to this book is his choice of two Pacific coastal regions where ships from Asia might have made landfalls, carried on the Japan (Kuroshio) Current originating off Taiwan and the Philippines, flowing eastward past Japan. Both the Coast Salish region of British Columbia and northern California have temperate rain forests kept moist and warm by this strong current along their shores. Alternately, trading expeditions and shorter trading enterprises could have sailed around the North Pacific Rim to the Aleutians, southern Alaska, British Columbia, and on south. Iron for knives came to Northwest Coast communities as early as 1450 CE, possibly across the North Pacific (Acheson 2003:227; McMillan 1999:90–91, 157–158). For critical theory, Jordan’s combination of firsthand ethnographic observation of Khanty life and practices, down to minutiae of ski bindings and sledge runners, along with direct discussion w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• 1. Critical Thinking Method
• 2. The Myth of Columbus
• 3. The Question of Boats
• 4. Peripatetic People
• 5. Polynesian Voyaging: Landfalls in the Americas
• 6. The Strongest Evidence: Plants and Animals
• 7. Technologies
• 8. Art, Architecture, and Mythology
• 9. The Atlantic World
• 10. Critically Examining pre-Columbian Seas
• 11. Dubitanda
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author