Ancient Mines of Kitchi-Gummi, a review.

As promised, this is the cat's last book review of 2010.  I believe it is the strangest, and perhaps the most interesting non-fiction work I've ever read.

            Ancient Mines of Kitchi-Gummi  by Roger L. Jewel

            A Review and synopsis by The Cat.

            A few years ago, a friend of mine, a geologist, handed me a book and said, “Here—read this.   I think you’ll find it interesting.”       He neither endorsed nor contested the views of the author.  He just said, “Read it and tell me what you think.”   He went on to explain that the book did not belong to him—it was borrowed and would have to be returned in one week.  He also mentioned that it was out of print and could not be easily replaced.    I asked, “What is it about?”

            He explained that the shores of Lake Superior are dotted with abandoned copper mines, and some of these mines were worked thousands of years ago.  Though the mining methods were primitive, using stone hammers and fire, the mines were so numerous that the total amount of copper removed was still massive—some estimates run as high as one billion pounds.  Recent, more careful estimates put the figure at closer to 50 million pounds.

            Still, that’s many times the amount that the Indians could have ever used. In most parts of North and South America, the Indians used no copper at all. Where it was used, it was used in tiny amounts for personal ornaments. Tribes living near the Great Lakes, where copper was easily obtained, made a few wood-working tools and a few arrow points. But that still accounts for less than 2 percent of those 50 million pounds of copper. So where did it go?  This is a question that has puzzled archaeologists for a hundred years.

            This is the question that Roger Jewel addresses in his book. He assumes that it was the Indians who were mining it, or possibly Indians in collaboration with someone else.  But if the Indians weren’t using it themselves, then who were they trading it to, and for what were they trading it?

            Carbon 14 tests on fragments of the wooden ladders left behind consistently yield dates showing that mining activity began about 2,500 BCE, and continued uninterrupted till about 1,200 BCE, and then abruptly stopped.  As soon as I read this, I said, “Aha!  They were supplying copper to the sea traders from the Eastern Mediterranean!”   The sea trade in the Aegean began after 3,000 BCE,  first with Sumerians, then Minoan/Cypriots, Mycenaeans, Canaanites,  and others.  But it all ended about 1,200 BCE, when a Dorian invasion wiped out every civilization in the Eastern Mediterranean except Egypt.

            The mining activity resumed about 1,000 BCE, and then petered out about two hundred years later.  Jewel doesn’t mention it, but this is exactly what we should expect, since by 1,000 BCE, the Phoenicians had built a trade empire similar to the one which had collapsed earlier. (The name “Phoenician” suggests that it may have been the same empire, since the name phoenix refers to a mythical bird which perishes in fire, and then rises from its own ashes.) But about 800 BCE iron smelting technology improved, and the price of iron dropped sharply, and its use became widespread. After that, the Iron Age had begun, and there was less demand for brass or the copper and tin needed to make it.

            When you consider the dates when these mines were used, it seems likely that the sea traders from the Eastern Mediterranean were the culprits.  Jewel draws the same conclusion, for the same reasons.  No other part of the world had the technology to build ocean-going ships as early as 2,500 BCE.     And if the copper had been supplied directly to the Egyptians, then the trade would not have abruptly stopped about 1,200 BCE.

            When the Bronze Age began, rich surface deposits in the Near East were quickly exhausted.  As copper became precious, traders went searching for new supplies, first to the British Isles, and then, according to Jewel, to North America.  This, he believes, was the copper that fueled the Bronze Age.

            The copper in question occurs as native copper—not just copper ore.  Chunks of pure copper weighing several ton were left behind by the miners because they had no means of easily moving them, or of cutting smaller pieces off.

            The mining process used was simple.  The area has old lava flows that contain copper, which was deposited by water in the cracks in the lava.  The miners would find a copper vein on the surface of an old lava flow and then build a huge fire on top of it. After a few days of continuous fire, they would clear away the ashes and dump cold water on it. This fractures the rock so that when cool, you can simply pick up large chunks of rock and smash them with stone hammers to remove the copper.  The mines were usually cylindrical holes sunk vertically into the rock, 5 to 30 feet deep and 3 to 30 feet in diameter. Many of the abandoned mines have been re-worked and expanded in historic times, which obliterates all traces of the original mine.  Therefore, the amount of copper removed by ancient miners may be much larger than estimates based on the number of mines still there.  As for evidence that the copper was shipped to the Mediterranean, Mr. Jewel supplies a few facts and a lot of conjecture.  But his conjectures fit the facts perfectly, and it’s difficult to conceive of any alternative explanation that would fit them at all.

            If Mr. Jewel’s conjecture is correct, then we should expect to find Minoan artifacts in Michigan, because if boatloads of copper were being shipped to the Near East, then boatloads of whatever  they traded for would have been shipped from the Near East to Michigan—and some of it should still be there. Have we found such things there?  There have been a few finds, but not the vast amounts we should expect.  That’s part of the puzzle.

            From one site that dates to nearly 2,700 BCE (the earliest site so far discovered), they found a cast copper double bladed axe which precisely matches the design of Minoan axes used as a religious symbol at that period. One site, dated to 1,500 BCE, yielded a beautifully made copper serpent.  But Native Americans did not begin using the serpent as a symbol till the Mound Culture, which was somewhat later. Yet this symbol was widely used in the Near East, and was the symbol of the goddess Astarte.

            One piece of evidence that can’t be dismissed are the signatures on an old Indian land deed.   An official New Hampshire land deed, dated 1681, conveys a parcel of Indian land to colonists who purchased it. Some of the Indians could write their names in English, and did so.  Others claimed they would prefer to sign their names in their own written language. The marks they placed on the deed were dismissed by the colonists as random scribbles made by savages pretending they could write. But these marks have now been discovered to be a form of an ancient Cypriot language.

            Jewell quotes the late Dr. Barry Fell, a Harvard epigrapher, for several pages on this subject:

            Fell says that about a dozen different systems of writing were in use by North American Indians when the colonists arrived. In the early nineteenth century, a missionary, James Evans, adopted an Algonquian written language for teaching the Christian religion to Indians. Evans was later wrongly credited with “inventing” the Cree script. But by translating the entire Bible into Cree, he simply preserved this script, and it survives today in Cree tribal lands.

            Dr. Fell says that in 1978, some Basque scholars at the museum in San Sebastian contacted him about the inscriptions on some old Basque tablets.   Noticing that the symbols were identical to the Cree Syllabary,  he tried substituting  Cree sound values, and the resulting language sounded like Basque. He sent these translations to leading Basque linguist, Imanol Agire, who confirmed that it was indeed Basque. Thus, by using the Cree Syllabary, we can now translate ancient Iberian inscriptions.  The Grand Basque Encyclopedia now describes this connection.

            Dr. Fell says that the Indian treaties were signed in a script called Mamalohikan, which was in use till at least 1727 in Northern Main, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia.  Fell says that Mamalohikan symbols are from an ancient Cypriot system of writing, first deciphered in 1871. This system died out in Europe after the reign of Alexander the Great, when the Greek alphabet replaced many other forms of writing.  Therefore this script would have to have been brought to the new world before Alexander.

            Dr. Fell says that though this information is rejected by most archaeologists, it is now firmly enough established among European Linguists as to be incorporated into their most learned publications.

            Jewell then cites other cultural evidence.  He points out that the megalith builders, active in Europe during this time frame, built structures all over Europe. But the main concentration seems to be near sea coasts. Similar structures are found in the new world.  He provides a map with a black dot placed at each megalith site. The pattern shows dots along the coastline of the Mediterranean, from the Aegean and Greece, to Italy, Sicily, and Iberia, up the Atlantic coast and all over the British Isles, and then they are found again along the coast of Nova Scotia and Labrador, down the St Laurence River, and around the Great Lakes.  They are also found in the Hudson River valley, and along the coast of New England.

            Jewell observes that after the melting of the last glacier, the removal of weight from the earth’s crust has caused the land to be uplifted from time to time, and that these uplifts have changed the drainage of the Great Lakes many times. One of these uplifts occurred about 1,600 BCE.  Prior to that time, the main drainage of Lake Superior was through the Ottawa and St Laurence rivers. One could sail from the Atlantic to Lake Superior using this route. But the uplift cut off this route and blocked the outflow till the lake level rose to where it began draining through the Hudson River system.  So both the St Laurence and the Hudson, at some point in time, provided a sea route to Lake Superior.

            Jewell says that religion in both the Mediterranean and the British Isles involved the worship of two deities: the male sun god, Baal, whose symbol is the bull, and the female earth goddess, Astarte (Ishtar,) who is usually depicted as a bare-breasted woman holding a serpent. (He says that the pagan feast of Beltane is really “Baaltane.”)  These symbols are often abstracted to a minimalist depiction of just bull horns or serpents.

            Stone dolmans, usually a large boulder set on three smaller stones, have been found in the Great Lakes region.  Jewell says they are inscribed with a sign identical to the markings on similar dolmans in Europe.  He says the inscriptions are the sign of Baal.  And on both sides of the Atlantic, we find sun calendar chambers.   These are nearly horizontal shafts cut into hillsides so that on a single day each year, usually the spring equinox, the sun’s rays strike the end of the shaft.  According to Jewell, this was not just for time-keeping, but was a religious observance. When the phallic shaft of light from the male sun god penetrated and impregnated mother earth, new life would spring forth.

            One of the most striking items of evidence cited by Jewell to prove ancient trade contacts between Europe and America was the discovery in 1992 that Egyptian mummies contain traces of nicotine and cocaine, both of which are found only in New World plants.  In 1992, Dr. Svetla Balabanova was hired to run drug tests on hair samples taken from mummies.  Dr. Balabanova, of the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Ulm, is highly respected in her field, having pioneered groundbreaking methods for detecting drugs in hair.  When the first tests were positive for both nicotine and cocaine, she assumed there must be an error.  She repeated the tests, using the most reliable method known.  This involves first washing the hair in pure alcohol, and then testing the alcohol and the hair separately.  If the alcohol tests negative but the hair tests positive, then the drug in the hair could not have come from outside contamination.  This test is accepted in any court on the planet as positive proof.  But even this test yielded the same results.  Finally, she sent the sample to several other labs, but they all tested positive.  When she published the results, she was scoffed at.  But Rosalie David, Keeper of the Egyptology, Manchester Museum, heard of the results and decided to have samples from the mummies in her own museum tested. They all tested positive for nicotine.

            But even with all of this evidence, one part of the puzzle that would still remain unsolved is this:   What did the Indians receive in exchange for all that copper, and where is it? Why has it left no trace?  Fortunately, there is one more line of evidence:  DNA.   There are four main haplogroups found in mitochondrial DNA of Native Americans, called A, B, C, and D. These are of Asian origin.   But there is another type, called X, which is mostly a southern European type, and which is found either in very small amounts or not at all in most Indian populations. 

            But Algonquian speaking people, especially Chippewa and Ojibwa, have a higher percentage of this European type; in some tribal groups it’s as high as 20%.  Jewell doesn’t say so, but since this European genotype comes only from mitochondrial DNA, we can guess what was being traded—wives!  Mitochondrial DNA is inherited exclusively from the female line; only European women could have brought those genes to America.

            It’s unlikely that these women would have come here as wives of colonists, because if colonies had been established and maintained for 1,500 years, they would still be here.  Or at least some trace of them would still be here.  And colonists would have demanded some goods from the Mediterranean in exchange for their labor.  And even if they were slaves, a supply of goods would have been required to maintain them, and these goods would have left a record.  Instead of the paltry handful of Minoan artifacts found near the Great Lakes, we’d be finding tons of it.

            Jewell stops short of saying so, but the most economical explanation is that the European women who brought these genes to America were simply slave girls who were sold to the Indians as wives in exchange for the copper. Slavery was the accepted practice all over Europe at that time, and women were a tradable commodity.  (As late as the 10^th century AD, Vikings were capturing Irish girls and selling them to the Moors in Spain.) Since the Mediterranean people at that time were people with olive skin, dark hair and dark eyes, their offspring would not have looked much different from Indians. We should not expect to see blond haired blue eyed Ojibwas. Before the Celtic and Gothic invasions, Europeans did not have those features.  

            For me, Jewell’s book only reinforces a conclusion I’ve had for some time:  The reasonable question is not, “Was there ever a period of trans-Atlantic trade in ancient times?”   The question should be, “Was there ever a period without such trade contacts?”  The answer is yes.  From the onset of the “dark ages” until the voyages of Columbus, there was a suspension of trade contacts for a thousand years.  A similar suspension of about 200 years followed the Dorian invasions of 1,200 BCE.  Except for that, Europe and America have had at least limited trade contacts for most of the last 5,000 years.

            One group that never completely stopped sailing to America was the Basque whaling community.  These people, who are probably descended from Eastern Mediterranean sea traders, continued to visit the shores of eastern Canada.  But they never ventured more than a few miles inland, and had minimal contacts with the natives.  Their settlements, winter fishing camps, left little trace except crude stone shelters.  They were not conquerors, merchants, or colonists. If they traded with the Indians at all, they supplied them nothing that changed their technology or changed their history.  And when they returned to Europe, they sold their whale oil and ivory without telling anyone where they got it. So their voyages had no effect on the history of either continent.

            Still, on Columbus’s first voyage, a large part of his crew was made up of Basque whaling captains.  Columbus went out of his way to recruit Basque whaling captains.  Why?

            Ancient Mines of Kicthi-Gummi is awkwardly organized, poorly written, and the printing is so bad that most of the drawings, maps, and photos are nearly unreadable. Yet it is still a fascinating read.