Foreword

This book recounts many ancient travels by people to the Americas—the New World. What it relates is a story much different from the one that we learned in school. This fascinating tale draws upon genetic science, geography, geology, history, archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, and often upon fragmentary accounts of adventure found in sagas, maritime records, national archives, and other dusty sources.

Nobody knows for certain who the first Americans were. Were they from Asia, as most of us have been taught, or were they from Europe? When did those first people arrive? Did they come before or after the last Ice Age? Most scientists who study this question believe they came after the last Ice Age, but a few tantalizing clues found in both North and South America suggest a much earlier date for the arrival of humans in the Americas. Like so much of the human story, the picture has changed and undoubtedly will change again when new information comes to light and gains acceptance as orthodoxy.

To truly understand the complex cultures that Christopher Columbus incorrectly identified as Indians, we need to know about all the ancient visitors to America who had contact with and may have contributed their genetic material to an expanding American gene pool. The so-called indigenous peoples of the Americas most likely comprised a blending of many cultures from all over the ancient world. They lived in complex societies with well-developed technologies uniquely adapted to their environments and lived in communities that rivaled European cities in size and comfort. Scientists are still unraveling the convoluted genetic history of the native inhabitants who greeted the European explorers in the fifteenth and later centuries.

This book is for general readers, not for academics. The view adopted in this book is that the preponderance of evidence supports the likelihood that various cultures made contact with early America thousands to hundreds of years before Columbus. Most, if not all, of the chapters present controversial material often first advanced by equally controversial proponents; hopefully that makes the story all the more interesting. You will not find footnotes or other scholarly devices to support the stories. This book merely provides a collection of some of the more interesting theories of ancient explorations. It is not intended to convince, only to entertain.

You will find at least one instance where the record is not clear or where a story of contact with America fails the test of reasonableness. The purported American voyage of Sir Henry Sinclair, the Earl of Orkney, has many proponents including descendants of the Earl as well as devotees of the Knights Templar legends. I have included the Sinclair story in Chapter 10, but I encourage readers to make their own decisions on whether Sir Henry made it to America.

The stories occur in roughly chronological order, each chapter focusing on a wave of migration or visit, accidental or intentional, by various cultures. Each chapter presents the documentary record of the journey or voyage, when available, and the artifactual evidence of the presence of those visitors in the New World. Many of these alleged voyages left little trace in the historical record and, as a result, there are both well-respected proponents and opponents within the academic community who debate the validity of these voyages. Legendary writers of early exploration, such as Samuel Eliot Morrison, have derided some stories which have equally well-respected advocates within the academic community.

Professor Barry Fell of Harvard University, one of the most controversial and frequently ridiculed writers on the subject of early contact with the Americas by Phoenicians, Irish, and other cultures, has stimulated a great deal of debate over intriguing linguistic artifacts found in the Americas. Fell and his work on the ancient Ogham form of writing received some vindication not long before his death in 1994 when University of Calgary Professor David Kelley—known for his breakthrough in deciphering Mayan glyphic writing—had this to say about Professor Fell: “Despite my occasional harsh criticism of Fell's treatment of individual inscriptions, it should be recognized that without Fell's work there would be no [North American] Ogham problem to perplex us. We need to ask not only what Fell has done wrong in his epigraphy, but also where we have gone wrong as archaeologists in not recognizing such an extensive European presence in the New World."

Ancient Explorers of America starts with an account of the first people arriving in the New World. The story that begins the first chapter of this book is a fictional account based on the latest scientific theory of who these first people were and where they came from. That theory proposes that people of a culture called Solutrean came across the Atlantic from the Iberian Peninsula at the end of the last Ice Age. This fictional material first appeared in my novel, Grave Mistakes. I have included it here in a slightly different form to dramatize the hardships of that first voyage to America and to illustrate how the Solutrean people may have reacted to a promising New World totally lacking in human competition. Subsequent chapters contain less fanciful material extracted from contemporary records and artifacts. I hope you enjoy reading all these stories we never learned in school.

Aleck Loker, Williamsburg, Virginia