ANOMALOUS ARTIFACTS

Rewritten Chapter 11 of Genesis Unveiled

© Ian Lawton 2003, 2010

The supposed evidence for anomalous skeletal remains of modern humans dating back many millions of years is far from credible. However in the last few centuries a number of anomalous artifacts have been found that just might provide some additional evidence of the level of culture of our forgotten race. The artifacts we will consider in this chapter are those that, although potentially advanced for the period to which they appear to date, are not technologically advanced in the modern sense.

There are a number of sources of information on such artifacts, but most of them are relatively old and, sadly, unverifiable. Consequently a degree of indulgence is required while we examine evidence that is clearly of questionable reliability, although this will of course be factored into our conclusions to this chapter.

Donnelly’s Dazzlers

The first source is Ignatius Donnelly, who is best known as the man who resurrected the modern interest in Atlantis. His main work for our current purposes is Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel, published in 1883, in which he examines various scientific issues in support of his search for a forgotten race. In this work at least he does not stray into the realms of fantasy and advanced technology as have so many of his successors.

The first reports of anomalous artifacts that he presents are of boats and pottery turning up in unexpected places:[i]

In the seventeenth century Fray Pedro Simon relates that some miners, running an adit into a hill near Callao [Peru], ‘met with a ship, which had on top of it the great mass of the hill, and did not agree in its make and appearance with our ships’.

Sir John Clerk describes a canoe found near Edinburgh, in 1726. ‘The washings of the river Carron discovered a boat thirteen or fourteen feet underground; it is thirty-six feet long and four and a half broad, all of one piece of oak. There were several strata above it, such as loam, clay, shells, moss, sand, and gravel.’

In the State of Louisiana, on Petite Anse Island, remarkable discoveries have been made. At considerable depths below the surface of the earth, fifteen to twenty feet, immediately overlying the salt-rocks, and underneath what Dr Foster believes to be the equivalent of the Drift in Europe, ‘associated with the bones of elephants and other huge extinct quadrupeds’, ‘incredible quantities of pottery were found’; in some cases these remains of pottery formed ‘veritable strata, three and six inches thick’; in many cases the bones of the mastodon were found above these strata of pottery. Fragments of baskets and matting were also found.

In common with all early accounts of anomalous artifacts the original sources contain little in the way of attempts at dating, partly because the disciplines of geology and archaeology were in their infancy. Nevertheless the inclusion of depths and details of overlying deposits are attempts to provide a context.

Donnelly also reproduces several drawings of anomalous art, including one of a large black marble statue found ‘twelve feet below the surface’ when a well was being dug at Marlboro, Stark County, Ohio, and in which the overlying sand and gravel were reported to have been totally undisturbed.[ii] He then moves on to an account in a magazine in which reports of ‘pavements and cisterns of [that is, resembling] Roman brick now lie seventy feet underground’. On further investigation he established that they were discovered in the vicinity of Memphis, Tennessee, although he provides no further details.[iii]

The final account from Donnelly that we might consider here is his reproduction of a quote from geologist Alexander Winchell regarding the discovery and analysis of an apparently anomalous coin:[iv]

I had in my possession for some time a copper relic resembling a rude coin, which was taken from an artesian boring at the depth of one hundred and fourteen feet, at Lawn Ridge, Marshall County, Illinois.

Winchell continues by describing a letter from a Mr W H Wilmot of Lawn Ridge, dated 4 December 1871, containing details of the exact nature of the boring and the circumstances of the find, indicating that it could not have come originally from a ‘depth of less than eighty feet’. Winchell then describes the coin itself which was:

...about the thickness and size of a silver quarter of a dollar, and was of remarkably uniform thickness. It was approximately round, and seemed to have been cut. Its two faces bore marks as shown in the figure, but they were not stamped as with a die nor engraved. They looked as if etched with acid. The character of the marks was partly unintelligible. On each side, however, was a rude outline of a human figure... around the border were undecipherable hieroglyphics...

This object was sent by the owner to the Smithsonian Institution for examination, and Secretary Henry referred it to Mr William E Dubois, who presented the result of his investigation to the American Philosophical Society. Mr Dubois felt sure that the object had passed through a rolling mill, and he thought the cut edges gave further evidence of the machine-shop. ‘All things considered’, he said, ‘I can not regard this Illinois piece as ancient nor old (observing the usual distinction), nor yet recent; because the tooth of time is plainly visible.’

After indicating his support for the authenticity of the object, Winchell’s account closes with details of further anomalous remains discovered nearby:

In Whiteside County, fifty miles northwest from Peoria County, about 1851, according to Mr Moffatt, a large copper ring was found one hundred and twenty feet beneath the surface, and also something which has been compared to a boat-hook. Several other objects have been found at lesser depths, including stone pipes and pottery, and a spear-shaped hatchet, made of iron.

The majority of the anomalies discussed by Donnelly were discovered in North America, which is a regular source of such reports as we will shortly see. As for the man himself, he was for many years a renowned US politician – although quite what impact that has on his reliability as a compiler of evidence from various sources is a moot point. In any event, some of these cases are valuable if only in that they are rarely mentioned by modern researchers.

Wilkins’ Wonders

The next source is British journalist and writer Harold Wilkins, whose work is often quoted by modern revisionists. Unfortunately the most cursory of inspections reveals that, by contrast to Donnelly’s Ragnarok, there are minimal source references, and much of the content appears highly fanciful. This is particularly the case when he discusses Atlantis and its fellow lost continent, Mu, as if his statements were strict fact rather than pure conjecture. Nevertheless we do find in his Secret Cities of Old South America, published in 1950, a few references to anomalous artifacts that follow along similar lines to, and in some cases replicate, Donnelly’s. The first accounts that are worthy of note concern, once again, ancient ships – although this time in Europe:[v]

Giovanni Pontano, an Italian historian and statesman who died at Naples in AD 1503, was one of many persons, who, in his day, on a mountain top high over the sea at Naples, saw, enclosed in the middle of a great boulder brought down by a hurricane, the remains of a great and ancient ship of antediluvian make. It was certainly no old Roman, or Carthaginian galley or trireme. The rock completely enclosed the old ship and it was evident that such a petrifaction must have taken thousands of years...

Again, in AD 1460, miners digging for metals in the mountains of the canton of Berne, in Switzerland, found, at a depth of 100 feet in the bowels of the earth, a most ancient wooden ship which must have perished untold ages before. It had carvings and was well-fashioned. By it lay masts, broken and eaten away with secular corrosion. There was an anchor of iron, and what gave the old Swiss miners a horrid turn was the sight in the timbers of the bones and skulls of forty men. Another contemporary account, in Latin, says that the ship had rotted shreds of what looked like sails of some woolen fibre adhering to her masts. Eye-witnesses told the story to old Baptista Fulgosa, Italian writer in forgotten Latin folios of many curious things in nature, read only by curious scholars of today.

Wilkins then cites the discovery of a large nail of some sort in Peru:[vi]

At Cayatambo, in Peru, in the sixteenth century, there was found by Spanish miners, deep in a silver mine at the eighth stage of its depth, a nail or spike shaped like a cross and embedded in the body of a very hard rock, from which it had to be hacked out with another hard stone, clamped with a sharp point. The nail had been riveted to a piece of wood. It was about 6 inches long and the viceroy, Don Francisco de Toldeo, who wanted it for his cabinet as a curio, was forestalled by an Augustinian monk who took it home to old Spain. The nail, it is said, was as free from rust as if it had only that day been placed in the shaft.

Are the reports Wilkins cites at all reliable? Our confidence is not exactly enhanced when, immediately following the above account, he lists the supposed discovery in California of ‘six-toed giants’ and ‘an amazing human skull of giant size with a double row of teeth’.[vii] Not only that but after the first sighting of a ‘flying saucer’ by Kenneth Arnold in 1947 Wilkins became fascinated by the phenomenon, and he was arguably the first true proponent of the Ancient Astronaut theory.[viii] Nevertheless his earlier, less outrageous reports of non-technological artifacts make interesting reading at the very least.

Steiger’s Specials

The next source is Brad Steiger, a prolific American author of numerous works on revisionist history and other more spiritual topics. His most important work for our current purposes is Worlds Before Our Own, published in 1978, not long after Erich von Däniken and Zecharia Sitchin had gripped the public’s imagination with their visions of extraterrestrial visitors in antiquity. As for Steiger’s scholarship, although he includes an extensive bibliography the list of ‘works cited’ is far shorter; furthermore, like Wilkins before him, he provides few proper references.

The first of Steiger’s accounts of nontechnological artifacts that appear to be of anomalous antiquity again involves archaic artistic endeavor in the form of small carvings:[ix]

Professor Walter Matthes, head of the College for Prehistorical and Early History Study in Hamburg, discovered the objects on a steep stone bank of the River Elbe. Professor Matthes stated his assessment that the carvings represent ‘the oldest man-made likenesses yet discovered’ and estimated that the pieces were as much as 200,000 years old.

For the most part, the carvings are no larger than match boxes, and they depict the heads of human beings and Ice Age animals. According to Professor Matthes, the human heads bear few, if any, of the apelike characteristics so commonly associated with Neanderthal man.

Unfortunately Steiger does not tell us when this find was made, and further details seem impossible to come by.[x] In any case the next report is of a more intricate piece of artwork discovered in a mine:[xi]

On April 2, 1897, a very peculiar piece of rock was removed from the Lehigh coal mine in Webster City, Iowa. The slab was found just under the sandstone, which was 130 feet beneath the surface.

The tablet was about two feet long by one foot wide and four inches thick. The surface was artistically carved in diamond-shaped squares, with the face of an old man in each square. Of the faces, all but two are looking toward the right. The features of each of the portraits were identical, with each bearing a strange mark in the shape of a dent in the forehead.

Another account of anomalous art is of a fragment of bone engraved with a representation of a ‘horned quadruped’ and ‘traces of seven or eight other figures’ found by well-known archaeologist Frank Calvert near the Dardanelles in 1873. His brother wrote to amateur archaeologist Sir John Lubbock about it, who in turn wrote a letter to Nature magazine.[xii] Unfortunately Calvert dated the piece to the Miocene, which would make it many millions of years old. Meanwhile in Steiger’s plates section we find a reproduction drawing of yet another possible piece of art that was found when a well was being dug:[xiii]

In August 1889, near Nampa, Idaho, M A Kurtz picked up an odd-looking lump of clay that had been brought up from a depth of 300 feet during a well-drilling operation. When he broke it open, he discovered what he thought looked like a tiny human figure made of clay. The controversy over the apparent antiquity of the Nampa Image has raged ever since.

However genuine pictures show that this small statue is not particularly sophisticated. In any case, despite any concerns we might have about Steiger’s more outrageous theories and about his lack of source references, he has amassed a considerable number of reports of supposedly anomalous artifacts, some of which deserve to be included in this review.

Cremo’s Canons

Finally we come to the work of Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson. By contrast to Wilkins and Steiger their work is well referenced and, whatever we might think of their main theme of anomalous human remains, it would be an omission not to include some of their additional cases of anomalous artifacts here.

They devote considerable attention to reports of a number of finds made by miners during the Californian gold rush of the mid-to-late nineteenth century.[xiv] Although there were a number of surface finds of uncertain age, many of the more interesting artifacts were supposedly discovered in the numerous deep mine shafts that were sunk to reach the auriferous gravels under the mountains. They included spearheads and large stone pestles and mortars, apparently found at depths of as much as several hundred feet beneath the surface.

These finds caused great excitement at the time, and much is made both then and now of the extent to which the miners involved either would or would not have been qualified to judge them in situ. Could they have been intrusions from indigenous Indian burials? Might they have fallen through cracks and sinkholes long ago, or been dislodged from higher levels, and so on?[xv] Various geologists visited the sites of the finds, including J D Whitney, the state geologist of California, and George F Becker, who submitted reports to the American Geological Society for official consideration. It has nevertheless been suggested that most if not all of the finds were deliberate hoaxes, perpetrated either by indigenous Indians or, more likely, by the miners themselves – who, after all, were nothing if not opportunists. It is also worth noting that supposedly anomalous human remains, whose general provenance has already been rejected, were found in conjunction with them.

Let us now turn to Cremo and Thompson’s other anomalies.[xvi] The first is an iron nail ‘several inches long’ that was found partially embedded in a block of sandstone at the Kingoodie quarry in Scotland, a report on which was presented to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1844 by the Scottish physicist Sir David Brewster.[xvii] In the same year the London Times reported that quarrymen working on the banks of the River Tweed near Rutherford mill had found a gold thread embedded in stone at a ‘depth of eight feet’. And their final case that we might consider here concerns an iron cup found embedded in a large lump of coal by a Mr Frank J Kenwood in 1912, apparently in the presence of a colleague, at the Municipal Electric Plant in Thomas, Oklahoma. The coal was traced to the Wilburton coal mines, and the circumstances were confirmed by Kenwood in a signed and witnessed affidavit in 1948, a copy of which is still in existence.

Conclusion

There are obviously a number of questions that we have to ask about these artifacts. First of all, how reliable are the numerous reports? There must clearly be some doubts as Cremo and Thompson, for example, freely admit:[xviii]

The reports of this extraordinary evidence emanate, with some exceptions, from non-scientific sources. And often the artifacts themselves, not having been preserved in standard natural history museums, are impossible to locate.

We ourselves are not sure how much importance should be given to this highly anomalous evidence. But we include it for the sake of completeness and to encourage further study.

In this chapter, we have included only a sample of the published material available to us. And given the spotty reporting and infrequent preservation of these highly anomalous discoveries, it is likely that the entire body of reports now existing represents only a small fraction of the total number of such discoveries made over the past few centuries.

It is true that the majority of these artifacts themselves are no longer available for inspection, let alone the exact locations in which they were found. In addition the vast majority of the finds date from the nineteenth century and even earlier, with very few in the last century, and this presents a number of problems. First, skeptics point to this as evidence that professional archaeologists are no longer as gullible as their mainly amateur forerunners once were, however much some of these reports were published in reputable scientific journals of the time. But it is surely equally fair to say that the orthodoxy has become much more dogmatic and resistant to findings that do no conform to the consensus view, with the modern insistence that ‘extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof’. This is a double-edged sword, because of course it keeps standards high, but there is also a risk that important information and evidence is ignored, at least for long periods, before being given an airing that sometimes produces huge changes in viewpoint. We see this happening all the time. And of course another potential explanation for the paucity of modern finds is the issue of how modern technology is now used in construction, mining and farming, as mentioned in the previous chapter.

Next we come to the problem of identification. From the perspective of the finds themselves this is generally less of a problem for artifacts such as these than it is for skeletal remains, the understanding of which has moved on enormously in the last century. Nevertheless it is obvious that some of the finds mentioned by revisionists are in fact worthless because of this very factor of mistaken identification. For example Steiger reports on a ‘metallic vessel’ that was blasted out of some rock:[xix]

In its June, 1851, issue the Scientific American carried an item about a metallic vessel that had been blasted out of an ‘immense mass of rock’ when workmen were excavating on Meeting House Hill in Dorchester, Massachusetts. ‘On putting the two parts together, it formed a bell-shaped vessel, 4½ inches high, 6½ inches at the base, 2½ inches at the top, and about an eighth of an inch in thickness. The body of this vessel resembles zinc in color, or a composition metal, in which there is a considerable portion of silver. On the sides there are six figures of a flower, or bouquet, beautifully inlaid with pure silver, and around the lower part of the vessel a vine, or wreath, inlaid also with silver. The chasing, carving, and inlaying are exquisitely done by the art of some cunning workman. This curious and unknown vessel was blown out of the solid pudding stone, fifteen feet below the surface... Dr J V C Smith, who has recently traveled in the East, and examined hundreds of curious domestic utensils... has never seen anything resembling this... There is no doubt but that this curiosity was blown out of the rock.’

He then goes on to quote from a letter to him by the then owner of the vessel, a Mr Milton Swanson of Maine:

It had been given to Harvard College, but because of its mysterious origin they relegated it to a closet. The building supervisor finally brought it home to Medford, Mass. He sold it to me just before he died in his eighties.

Through the years I have had so-called experts look at it, and no one ever came up with an answer. Its age and use is just unexplainable. It is almost black, but the metal is composed of brass with zinc, iron, and lead. The inlay is pure silver, and I had to put lacquer on to protect it. I always felt that it was a burial ash container.

The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston has the world’s finest and most complete laboratory, which was built in cooperation with MIT. I was able to have them run it through every kind of test for two years. Still no answer as to its period or origin.

But this is where skeptics like Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews come in, because he and his colleagues have written about many of the artifacts mentioned in this chapter on their Bad Archaeology website. Admittedly in many cases their attempts to explain them away are no less plausible or biased than those who grasp at all such artifacts without questioning them at all. But in some cases they do come up with normal explanations that seem by far the most likely. And the first is with this apparently mysterious object and its strange metallic composition because, for all the excitement of Steiger and others, Matthews points out it is almost certain just from the photograph that it is merely a highly decorated, Victorian candle holder that somehow got caught up in the explosion.[xx]

Next we come to one of Cremo and Thompson’s supposed anomalies, albeit that this time the misinterpretation is rather more understandable. The American Journal of Science of 1820 reported on a number of stone columns, wooden tools and coins discovered by quarrymen in Aix-en-Provence in France in 1788, at a ‘depth of fifty feet’. Apparently they also found a large fragmented wooden board that, when pieced back together, was similar to the workboards they used themselves when quarrying, with the same rounded edges. But Matthews asserts that what they discovered were almost certainly fossilized tree stumps and their petrified branches, which would have been far less understood at that time.[xxi]

The same can surely be said of the so-called ‘London hammer’, found in a lump of sandstone on a ledge next to a waterfall in London, Texas, by a Mr Max Hahn in 1934. The iron head was about ‘six inches long by one in diameter’, and the wooden handle was broken off but protruding from the stone. But as Matthews points out it seems almost certain that dissolved sandstone had merely accumulated around a relatively recent, discarded hammer, a process that is again not commonly understood by amateurs.[xxii]

Another supposed anomaly reported by Steiger shows how misleading written reports can be when there is no accompanying picture of the artifact. It concerns a report in Nature in November 1886 about a block of coal that broke open in an iron foundry in the Austrian town of Vöcklabruck in 1885. This one supposedly contained a small steel cuboid, of several inches in diameter, with a deep groove running around it and two rounded opposing faces. But Matthews produces a rarely seen photograph showing an irregularly shaped object with pocked faces, which is probably a piece of cast iron ballast for mining machinery.[xxiii]

The other problem with identification concerns the dating of the finds. Most of them were merely described as being found at a certain depth under the surface but this is only the most general of guides, because a find at only a few meters down in one geological location can be far, far older than one hundreds of meters down in another. Even more important is the issue of possible intrusion from a higher stratum, which is especially possible when you are dealing with well-borings for example. Modern, professional archaeologists take an age dealing with these issues of local context, and they are the very thing that so often causes huge disagreement about the age of finds, even with the advent of radiocarbon dating. We can see that some of the reports of anomalies do attempt to indicate undisturbed strata above the find, but in general we have to be clear that some of the finds may be far more recent than their eventual position suggests. Of course ‘recent’ could mean tens of thousands of years old instead of hundreds or even millions, which would tend to support our general hypothesis of a culturally advanced forgotten race. But it might also mean tens or only hundreds of years old, which would not.[xxiv]

Finally we must of course consider the possibility of hoaxes. We have already seen that there are question marks over the finds in the Californian goldmines, but another obvious example mentioned by Cremo and Thompson is that of a gold chain found in a lump of coal by a Mrs S W Culp of Morrisonville, Illinois, in 1891. The report in the local paper suggested it was about ‘ten inches long’, weighed about twelve grams and was ‘of antique and quaint workmanship’. But this lady was none other than the wife of the newspaper’s editor, and the story appeared on the front page. Of course by that time the citizens of the US had been fired up by similar reports for some time.[xxv]

Given the dating problems and the possibility of hoaxes in some cases, what are we to make of all this? Perhaps we can cautiously submit that the body of evidence of anomalous artifacts that we have considered is sufficient that we can reasonably apply the ‘no smoke without fire’ maxim, and accept that some of it just may provide general support for our hypothesis of a forgotten race who possessed a far higher level of culture than the orthodoxy currently allows. If so the nature of the material under consideration suggests not just that they had culture proper in terms of artistic sophistication, but maybe also advanced culture in terms of boats, brick buildings and so on. But we must remember that supposed finds involving the latter are the earliest and most anecdotal of all. We should also be clear that there is nothing in this putative evidence that is strong enough to warrant a major rethink of the timelines of human evolution, given the abundance of other anatomical and contextual evidence.

Source References

[i] Donnelly, Ragnarok (Sampson Low and Co., 1883), part 4, chapter 1, pp. 345–7. His source for the boat accounts is Edward Burnet Tylor’s Early History of Humankind (London, 1865), p. 330 (it is on pp. 322–3 in the edition I consulted). We might note that Allan and Delair, whose we will meet in the next chapter, reference Cieza de Leon’s Chronicles of Peru, part 1, pp. xxxii and 367, as their source for the same account – a source that should be reasonably reliable; they also briefly reference two further ancient ship reports, one in Russia in Strahlenberg, P. J., A Historico-Geographical Description of the Northern part of North and Eastern Europe and Asia (London, 1738), p. 405 and the other in South Africa in ‘Ship Discovered in the Earth in Africa’, Quarterly Journal of Literature, Science and Arts 5 (1818), p. 150, s.v. General Literature and Miscellaneous Communications; see When the Earth Nearly Died, part 6, p. 342, endnotes 58–61. Meanwhile for the pottery Donnelly’s source is Foster’s Prehistoric Races of the United States, p. 56. Two other contemporary sources from which he quotes regularly are Sir John Lubbock’s Prehistoric Times and Maclean’s Manual of Antiquity of Man.

[ii] Ibid., part 4, chapter 1, p. 353. He also notes that marble is not found locally.

[iii] Ibid., part 4, chapter 1, p. 354. The article was by David A. Curtis, ‘The Mississippi River Problem’, Harper’s Monthly Magazine, September 1882, p. 609.

[iv] Ibid., part 4, chapter 1, pp. 355–8. The source is Winchell’s Sparks from a Geologist’s Hammer, p. 170.

[v] Wilkins, Secret Cities of Old South America (Rider and Co., 1950), chapter 9, p. 417. Researcher Ulrich Magin has confirmed that, although Wilkins himself is not the most credible of sources, both Pontano and Fulgosa were genuine figures of the times stated; the former lived in Naples and wrote a book called De Bello Neapolitano, which may have been the source for this account, while the latter – who has been variously referred to as Fulgosus, Fregoso, and Fregosus – compiled a book of supposed anomalies entitled De Dictis Factisque Memoralibus Collectanea, which was published in Milan in 1509 and includes the ship report in Book 1, chapter 6; see Magin, ‘The Petrified Ship in a Swiss Mine: An introduction to the Mystery of Out-of-Place Ships’, Fortean Studies 5 (1998), pp. 74–8. Note that Magin includes a number of other ‘ancient ship’ accounts (see pp. 78–83), but admits that the primary and secondary sources for all of these are highly unreliable.

[vi Ibid., chapter 9, p. 418.

[vii] Ibid., chapter 9, p. 419.

[viii] Some might say Charles Fort and H P Lovecraft beat him to it in the pre-saucer era. It is also worth nothing that writers such as Peter Kolosimo and W Raymond Drake were following this theme long before von Däniken popularized it. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_astronauts.

[ix] Steiger, Worlds Before Our Own (Berkley, 1979), chapter 9, p. 143.

[x] The only other reference to it in internet searches comes from Joseph Jochmans in an article at www.forgottenagesresearch.com. Judging by his support for other anomalous artifacts and theories that are almost certainly ill-founded, his scholarship is again questionable, but he reports the following: ‘Toward the middle of the last century, an engineer named Hans Eleischlager accidentally uncovered over five hundred stone figures of men and animals on the banks of the Elbe river near Hamburg. German archaeologist Walter Matthes established that they indeed were sculptures fashioned by human hands, yet they dated from before the Ice Age. Presenting these finds to a Rome conference on prehistory, Matthes noted that the stone figures of human heads were the most remarkable, for they showed the faces of Homo sapiens, not ape-like creatures.’ He also mentions a W Kristly as the author of an article on the finds, but this does not come up in internet searches.

[xi] Steiger, Worlds Before Our Own, chapter 9, p. 146.

[xii] Ibid., chapter 2, p. 17. Lubbock’s letter is reproduced at www.nature.com/nature/journal/v7/n178/abs/007401b0.html.

[xiii] Ibid., plates section. Note that a lengthy report of this find was provided by G F Wright in ‘The Idaho Find’, American Antiquarian 11 (1889), pp. 379–81, which is reproduced in William Corliss’ 1978 work, Ancient Man, chapter 3, pp. 458–60. This latter compilation contains a wealth of original articles concerning not only anomalous artifacts, but also many of the reports of anomalous human remains that are cited by Cremo and Thompson.

[xiv] Cremo and Thompson, Hidden History (Govardhan Hill, 1994), chapter 5, pp. 94–101.

[xv] This latter possibility appears to be reduced in that often the artifacts were supposedly found many hundreds of meters along horizontal shafts.

[xvi] Cremo and Thompson, Hidden History, chapter 6, pp. 104–22. These pages include a number of the reports already cited, as well as photographs or drawings of some of the artifacts. A number of other reports of, for example, fossilized shoe prints are omitted from this summary because they deal with supposed artifacts that are almost certainly natural rather than man-made.

[xvii] Brewster’s report is reproduced in Corliss, Ancient Man (Sourcebook Project, 1978), chapter 4, pp. 651–2.

[xviii] Cremo and Thompson, Hidden History, chapter 6, p. 103. Note that in the original Forbidden Archaeology these reports were demoted to an appendix only.

[xix] Steiger, Worlds Before Our Own, plates section.

[xx] See www.badarchaeology.net/data/ooparts/dorchester.php.

[xxi] See www.badarchaeology.net/data/ooparts/aix.php.

[xxii] See www.badarchaeology.net/data/ooparts/london.php.

[xxiii] See www.badarchaeology.net/data/ooparts/cube.php.

[xxiv] We might note that, as they did with their supposedly anomalous skeletal remains, Cremo and Thompson apparently sought the advice of modern geologists in attempting to age a number of the artifacts we have discussed. The lowest date that they derive is for the Illinois copper coin at 200,000 to 400,000 years old. Thereafter their dates become ever more at variance with the orthodox framework for modern human evolution: for the Idaho figurine, the Californian gold-mine artifacts, the Illinois gold chain, the Oklahoma iron cup, the Rutherford gold thread and the Kingoodie iron nail they derive minimum ages of 2, 9-55, 260, 312, 320 and 360 million years respectively. But without the proper micro context these results are frankly meaningless.

[xxv] For a fuller discussion of the fraudulent environment in the US at the time see the chapter ‘Archaeology and Religion’ in Stephen Williams’ 1991 work Fantastic Archaeology. Meanwhile for a more general perspective on frauds and hoaxes in archaeology see Kenneth Feder’s 1999 work Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries.