Posted by:
SL Cabbie
(
)
Date: December 30, 2010 01:22PM
He's another favorite of the Sorenson/Johannessen ancient mariner fan club...
Per Wiki for background...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Fell>Though Fell was an accomplished marine biologist at Harvard University, he is best known for three books which claim that many centuries before Christopher Columbus reached America, Celts, Basques, Phoenicians, Egyptians, and others were visiting North America.
>One example of Fell's claims is his contention in Saga America that Brendan of Clonfert may have reached North America centuries before Columbus. This is based on Fell's translation, published in the magazine Wonderful West Virginia in 1983, of two rock-cut inscriptions located at archaeological sites in Wyoming and Boone counties, West Virginia. According to Fell, these inscriptions narrate the story of Christ's nativity and are written in an old Irish script called Celtic Ogham (also referred to as Ogam), dating back to the 6th or 8th century AD. This led to the publication of articles in the journal The West Virginia Archeologist that were highly critical of Fell's conclusions and methodology, including a 1983 article by archaeologist and historian W. Hunter Lesser describing Fell's claims as pseudoscientific and unreliable. In 1989 lawyers Monroe Oppenheimer and Willard Wirtz wrote an article based on opinions of academic archaeologists and linguists to dispute that the inscription is written in Ogam script. They further accused Fell of deliberate fraud.
So not only did these Irish monks make landfall on the Atlantic Coast, they managed a journey inland of several hundred miles to carve records of their journey into some rocks...
Of course the paragraph that follows this one, quotes an extraction from a Canadian archaeologist voicing the opinion that some of the "Celtic" inscriptions are genuine...
I suspect that's an addition from one of the Mormonites who still infest Wiki...
Last...
http://www.jstor.org/pss/3209452>The Department of Anthropology of the Smithsonian Insititution occasionally receives inquiries regarding the book America B.C.: Ancient Settlers in the New World, by Barry Fell (Quadrangle /New York Times Book Co. 1976). This book attempts to demonstrate that a number of early peoples (including Phoenicians, Libyans, Carthaginians, and Egyptians) had contact with the New World long before the brief visits of the Norsemen about A.D. 1000. The evidence cited includes stone inscriptions found, or alleged to have been found, in the New World; American Indian words, place names, and writing systems claimed to be of Egyptian, Celtic, Norse, Semitic, or other Old World origin; and certain carved stones, stone structures, and artifacts. The statement below has been prepared to explain briefly why Smithsonian specialists in linguistics and New World prehistory conside the conclusions reached in this book to be incorrect.