Nexus - 0213 - New Times Magazine-pages

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cal-adventure film Raiders of the Lost Ark in which an important historical artefact, the Ark of the Covenant from the Temple in Jerusalem, is locked in a crate and put in a giant warehouse, never to be seen again, thus ensuring that no history books will have to be rewritten and no history professor will have to revise the lecture that he has been giving for the last forty years. While the film was fiction, the scene in which an important ancient relic is buried in a warehouse is uncomfortably close to reality for many researchers. To those who investigate allegations of archaeological cover-ups, there are disturbing indications that the most impor- tant archaeological institute in the United States, the Smithsonian Institution, an independent federal agency, has been actively suppressing some of the most interesting and important archaeological discoveries made in the Americas. The Vatican has been long accused of keeping artefacts and ancient books in their vast cellars, without allowing the outside world access to them. These secret treasures, often of a controversial historical or religious nature, are allegedly suppressed by the Catholic Church because they might damage the church's credibility, or perhaps cast their official texts in doubt. Sadly, there is overwhelming evidence that something very similar is happening with the Smithsonian Institution. The Smithsonian Institution was started in 1829 when an eccentric British millionaire by the name of James Smithson, died and left $515,169 to create an institution "for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men." Unfortunately, there is evidence the Smithsonian has been more active in the suppression of knowledge rather than the diffusion of it for the last hundred years. The cover-up and alleged suppression of archaeological evidence began in late 1881 when John Wesley Powell, the geologist famous for exploring the Grand Canyon, appointed Cyrus Thomas as the director of the Eastern Mound Division of the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of Ethnology. When Thomas came to the Bureau of Ethnology he was a “pronounced believer in the existence of a race of Mound Builders, distinct from the American Indians." However, John Wesley Powell, the director of the Bureau of Ethnology, a very sympathetic man toward the American Indians, had lived with the peaceful Winnebago Indians of Wisconsin for many years as a youth and felt that American Indians were unfairly thought of as primitive and savage. The Smithsonian began to promote the idea that Native Americans, at that time being exterminated in the Indian Wars, were descended from advanced civilisations and were wor- thy of respect and protection. They also began a program of suppressing any archaeological evidence that lent credence to the school of thought known as Diffusionism, a school which believes that throughout history there has been widespread dispersion of culture and civilisa- tion via contact by ship and major trade routes. The Smithsonian opted for the opposite school, known as Isolationism. Isolationism holds that most civilisations are isolated from each other and that there has been very little contact between them, especially those that are separated by bodies of water. In this intel- lectual war that started in the 1880s, it was held that even contact between the civilisations of the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys was rare, and certainly these civilisations did not have any contact with such advanced cultures as the Mayas, Toltecs, or Aztecs in Mexico and Central America. By Old World standards this is an extreme, and even ridiculous idea, con- sidering that the river system reached to the Gulf of Mexico and these civilisations were as close as the opposite shore of the gulf. It was like saying that cultures in the Black Sea area could not have had contact with the Mediterranean. When the contents of many ancient mounds and pyramids of the Midwest were examined, it was shown that the history of the Mississippi River Valleys was that of an ancient and sophisticated culture that had been in contact with Europe and other areas. Not only that, the contents of many mounds revealed burials of huge men, sometimes seven or eight feet tall, in full armour with swords and sometimes huge treasures. For instance, when Spiro Mound in Oklahoma was excavated in the 1930s, a tall man in full armour was discovered along with a pot of thousands of pearls and other artefacts, the Me of us are familiar with the last scene in the popular Indiana Jones archaeologi- "Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present, controls the past." George Orwell, 1984 by David Hatcher Childress World Explorers Club 403 Kemp Street Kempton, Illinois 60946-0074 USA Tel: (815) 253 6390 Fax: (815) 253 6300 Vol 2, No 13 - 1993 36¢NEXUS 36 by David Hatcher Childress