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The Cherokee called them the Moon People. The Utes and Paiutes spoke of a hideous race of cannibals ten feet tall living in caves. And the Choctaw also have an account of the race of giants that first colonized the Ohio Valley. 

From Old World Roots of the Cherokee, chapter 5, "America's Middle Ages," pp. 78-79, we read:

What kind of Indians lived in the territory the Choctaw and Chickasaw carved out for their new home? According to their traditions, reports Cushman, as confirmed by excavations of bones in Tennessee, it was a “race of white giants”:

[T]he tradition of the Choctaws . . . told of a race of giants that once inhabited the now State of Tennessee, and with whom their ancestors fought when they arrived in Mississippi in their migration from the west, doubtless Old Mexico. Their tradition states the Nahullo (race of giants [literally, wizards]) was of wonderful stature; but, as their tradition of the mastodon [which used to be found on the Great Plains], so this was also considered to be but a foolish fable, the creature of a wild imagination, when lo! Their exhumed bones again prove the truth of the Choctaws’ tradition (151).

These giants could have been Rafinesque’s Atlans.

Cushman then recounts the discovery in 1880 at a burial mound site near Plano, Texas, of human bones “of enormous size . . . the femoral bones being five inches longer than the ordinary length, and the jaw bones . . . so large as to slip over the face of a man with ease.” Cushman goes on to identify them with the older occupants of North America called Allegewi or Taligewi (Talegans). Many historians, moreover, speculate they were the builders of the Adena mounds.

As for the Chickasaw, Cushman notes that they have no record of their history before the colonial period, although it is assuredly "the same as the Choctaws, being one tribe and people until the division made by their two chiefs Chikasah and Chahtah many years after their arrival and location east of the Mississippi River" (p 358). Of the Natchez, Cushman records that they, "if tradition may be believed, also came from Mexico where they had lived for centuries" (p 440).

A story was told by the Comanches in 1857: 

Innumerable moons ago, a race of white men, ten feet high, and far more rich and powerful than any white people now living, here inhabited a large range of country, extending from the rising to the setting sun. Their fortifications crowned the summits of the mountains, protecting their populous cities situated in the intervening valleys. They excelled every other nation which was flourished, either before or since, in all manner of cunning handicraft—were brave and warlike—ruling over the land they had wrested from its ancient possessors with a high and haughty hand. Compared with them the palefaces of the present day were pygmies, in both art and arms. They drove the Indians from their homes, putting them to the sword, and occupying the valleys in which their fathers had dwelt before them since the world began. At length, in the height of their power and glory, when they remembered justice and mercy no more and became proud and lifted up, the Great Spirit descended from above, sweeping them with fire and deluge from the face of the earth. The mounds we [i.e. the speaker Chief Rolling Thunder and his Spanish listener] had seen on the tablelands were the remnants of their fortresses, and the crumbling ruins that surrounded us all that remained of a mighty city.[i]

The word Nahoolo or Nahullo “is now emphatically applied to the white race and no other . . . The Nahullo were of white complexion, according to Choctaw tradition, and were still an existing people at the time of the advent of the Choctaws to Mississippi,” concludes Cushman (p 153) . In agreement, the Indian trader Adair often refers to the Nani Ishtahoolo as departed white ghosts vested with spiritual powers whose descendants were priests and magicians. Their cries and magic spells could still be heard in the mounds like those at Ocmulgee.[ii] These references contribute to the suspicion that the “Indians” who preceded Asiatic tribes from Mexico were, as we would say today, Caucasian.

About exactly a year ago on this blog, we published a post about "Neanderthals in America," mentioning also the peculiar archaic skeleton that is now a roadside attraction in Arizona, called The Thing. In the meantime, we acquired a copy of Fritz Zimmerman's book, The Nephilim Chronicles, which reproduces over 300 historical accounts of Giant skeletons. Many are associated with the earliest mound sites in America, but Zimmerman's survey of this worldwide phenomenon ranges from the Hunter-Fisher People of northeast Europe and Red Paint People whose movements were circumpolar to the giants of the Bible, noted by the Babylonian Talmud as having double rows of teeth, and "Giants' Remains in the British Isles" (pp. 157-65).

Navajo legends speak of the Starnake People, a regal race of white giants endowed with mining technology who dominated the West, enslaved lesser tribes and had strongholds all through the Americas. They were either extinguished or "went back to the heavens." The name may be a corruption of the Biblical race known as Anakim (Num. 13:33, Deut. 1:28). The name Og (Hebrew "chief") appears to be characteristic (see Zimmerman, pp. 188-91). The ogham alphabet is attributed to this cultural founder. 

Certainly, many of the mound sites uncovered in the nineteenth century tell a story of constant warfare by incoming Asiatic tribes  against the giants occupying the land. One grisly scene showed thousands of skeletons, male, female and young heaped in a mass grave, with warriors' skulls pierced by arrows. It would appear that as these aboriginal inhabitants of the Ohio Valley were gradually displaced, some members of their society went over into the ranks of the new conquerors, bequeathing a strain of great stature still noticeable, for instance, in the Mobilian chief Tuscaloosa and DeSoto's Indian queen Cofitachiqui, both of whom were said to be seven feet tall.

We are struck by the following traits of this giant race or ethnic group from human prehistory:

• Mother Goddess religion
• Copper (not bronze) axes 
• Polished slate tools including fishing plummets, which were apparently regarded as sacred
• Belief that the Grandmother Moon was the repository of souls
• Diet emphasizing shellfish (for which the double row of teeth probably was selected as an evolutionary advantage in their beachcomber origin out of Africa?)
• Building of fish weirs in North American rivers to trap migrating eels
• Certain vegetarian habits (wild rice, for instance)
• Inscriptions on artifacts, especially pipes, often buried with the dead
• Use of coal and petroleum
• Weaving and looms
• Knowledge of seafaring, mathematics and engineering, including canals and irrigation
• Burying of a dog with a child to guard the latter in the afterlife
• A language apparently Afro-Asiatic and close to Semitic tongues
• Kingcraft:  nobles were buried in seated positions on thrones surrounded by a coterie of their retainers

"All the lights in the House of the High Priests of American Anthropology are out; all the doors and windows are shut and securely fastened (they do not sleep with their windows open for fear that a new idea might fly in); we have rung the bell of Reason, we have banged on the door with Logic, we have thrown the gravel of Evidence against their windows; but the only sign of life in the house is an occasional snore of Dogma. We are very much afraid that no one is going to come down and let us into the warm, musty halls where the venerable old ideas are nailed to the walls."

These biting words were penned by Harold Sterling Gladwin in Men out of Asia, the famous archeologist's most popular, non-technical work. Published in 1947, Gladwin's book presented a maverick view of the peopling of the Americas identifying five migrations of diverse races including Negrittoes and Austronesians to the New World. Heretically, he placed the first migration as early as 25,000 years ago and argued that the earliest colonists were Australoid. 

The reaction of his colleagues in the anthropological establishment was stony silence shading off into hrumps and pshaws of injured pride, for Gladwin illustrated Men out of Asia with campy cartoons by Campbell Grant making fun of the sacred keepers of knowledge at the Peabody Museum at Harvard, Carnegie Foundation and Smithsonian Institution. In one, the dean of Southwest and Maya archeology Alfred V. Kidder is depicted as Dr. Phuddy Duddy sitting in academic robes atop a whistle sounding the alarm of illogical chronology. In another, a bespectacled Gladwin and his tweedy friend Professor Earnest Hooton of Harvard are shown in the academic doghouse "by request." 

The Establishment is still uncomfortable about Gladwin, who died in 1983 after a distinguished career of more than 60 years. Although willing to praise his meticulous fieldwork on the Hohokam at Snaketown and exacting methodologies developed at the research center he founded at Gila Pueblo outside Globe, Arizona, they do not know quite what to say about his conclusions and hypotheses, which grew more adamant toward the end.  

The destroying angel of unorthodox theories, Stephen Williams of the Peabody Museum, can only think that Gladwin succumbed to his "whimsies" and grew soft-headed in his old age. "I have always regarded Men Out of Asia," Williams writes in Fantastic Archeology (p. 229), "as a sort of 'hyper-diffusionist' spoof."

We wonder whether the laddies in Harvard Yard and Castle on the Mall do not protest too much.

In a similar high-toned snipe, Williams dismisses the author of Pale Ink with its discussions of ancient records of Chinese explorations in America as "a sweet old lady (p. 185)."  Louis Leakey, who believed on the basis of the Calico Early Man excavations he organized in California that humans occupied North America as long ago as 400,000 years, comes in for like treatment. Williams implies that Leakey was senile and hurried in his judgment (p. 303). 

If a controversial interpretation of the archeological record cannot be debunked as lacking "soil truth" or the hard-won verities of the dig and thus being nothing but "armchair archeology," then one must resort to that time-honored device of the Ivy League sneer. For instance, Jeffrey Goodman's controversial American Genesis "mimics a scientific book very well" (p. 303), but it cannot possibly be taken seriously because, well, you know, no person in his right mind subscribes to a North American or Asian origin for humans! In addition to coming from a homely, unpatrician Western background, Goodman was also part Native American, which helped make him a pariah. 

But to the happily hidebound Dr. Phuddy Duddys, we say in the words of Blake:

Mock on, Mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau;

Mock on, Mock on, 'tis all in vain.

You throw the sand against the wind,

And the wind blows it back again.  

The winds of change may have the last laugh.

Yes, according to Bill Tiffee, whose article on Solutreans in America will appear in volume 29 of the series Epigraphic Society Occasional Papers. Titled "Were Ancient Egyptians the Solutreans Who First Settled America?" the new study, he says, "looks at the possibility that the Solutreans who first settled America were from Egypt, and that the genetic marker X is found in the highest concentrations among the Druze (who migrated from Egypt 1,000 years ago)and the descendants of the Moundbuilder Native groups including the Sioux and Algonquin and possibly the Cherokee."

We have previously suggested that the Cherokee incorporate both Greek and Egyptian DNA. Chapter 3 of Donald Yates' new book Old World Roots of the Cherokee is devoted to the DNA story of the so-called "anomalous" Cherokee lines, including haplogroups T and X. 

Several prominent scholars have argued that Europeans known to archeologists as the Solutreans of France and Spain around 18,000 years ago were the first to settle the Americas. Tiffee examines the similarities between Solutrean and Clovis or Paleo-Indian stone technology and reconstructs the Solutrean culture in Egypt beginning 24,000 years ago (p. 119). He links ancient Egyptians with genetic marker E-M78, mitochondrial haplogroup X, Tula and the Spiro Complex mounds in Oklahoma, among other North American sites. He also discusses the Great Flood of about 10,000 years ago, the legends surrounding Osiris and the rise of agriculture in southern Turkey (Gobekli Tepe). 

"Perhaps," he concludes, "Egyptologists need to rethink their paradigms of ancient Egypt. And perhaps modern Native American descendants of the Moundbuilders, the Algonquin groups, Sioux, Cherokee, Chickasaw (and other Native cultures closely related to mound-building) need to reconsider where their most ancient ancestors came from (129)."

In DNA Consultants' Cherokee DNA study, "Anomalous Mitochondrial DNA Lineages in the Cherokee," as well as numerous blog posts since 2009, it was reported that haplogroups U, T, K, J, N, X and L are found in Cherokee descendants in frequencies mirroring those of Egypt. 

Sorry, Jack, no cigar. Your Grandpa's Indians are not what you think. And it is not true "most free African American families that originated in colonial Virginia and Maryland descended from white servant women who had children by slaves or free Africans" (source). Negro males did not go around selectively "fathering" little man-children on "white servant women" in early America.

It is ironic that these fantasies should even emerge in the recently publicized report, "Melungeon DNA Study Reveals Ancestry, Upsets a 'Whole Lot of People.'" The authors of the report, Roberta J. Estes, Jack H. Goins, Penny Ferguson and Janet Lewis Crain, have spent the better part of ten years trying to prove they and others with Melungeon ancestry are just plain folks, that is, white folks.

Maybe they are just that, though. Among the conclusions of the report are that Melungeons aren't Portuguese, aren't Native American, aren't Jewish, aren't Romani/Gypsy, aren't . . . . On and on. They just have a teeny-tiny bit of Sub-Saharan African in some lines. Not to worry, though, it is just a little soupçon of non-white. And it goes back to a few heroic "negroes" (the report's language) who left a trace their Sub-Saharan African Y chromosomes in the fathers and sons and grandpas of three Melungeon families.

From an article published, lo! way back in 2002 in the Appalachian Quarterly, now sadly defunct,

Shalom and Hey, Y'all (243 KB)

comes the true story of these "negroes" (the report's language) fathering "multiethnic" babies on innocent white indentured servant women.

In discussing the will of Indian trader James Adair, the author of the study remarks on the fact that Adair did not apparently approve of his daughter Agnes marrying John Gibson (from the selfsame Melungeon Gibson family that is creating all the brouhaha today). (Agnes, by the way, was not an indentured servant; her father had a considerable fortune.)

           "Notice the harsh treatment Adair accords his daughter Agnes, leaving her and her husband John Gibson the nominal sum of only one shilling (if he had left her nothing, she could have protested to the probate court that he simply forgot her). John was one of the “mulatto” Gibsons of the Great Pee Dee river valley region. Gideon Gibson stands large on the pages of history for his role in the so-called Regulators Revolt. The Gideon Glass Antiques Store today pays testimony to the “richest man in South Carolina” of his time. When members of the Gibson family first moved to the state in 1731, representatives in the House of Assembly complained “several free colored men with their white wives had immigrated from Virginia.” Governor Robert Johnson summoned Gibson and his family and reported:

            I have had them before me in Council and upon Examination find that they are not Negroes nor Slaves but Free people, That the Father of them here is named Gideon Gibson and his Father was also free, I have been informed by a person who has lived in Virginia that this Gibson has lived there Several Years in good Repute and by his papers that he has produced before me that his transactions there have been very regular. That he has for several years paid Taxes for two tracts of Land and had several Negroes of his own, That he is a Carpenter by Trade and is come hither for the support of his Family [Box 2, bundle:  S.C. Minutes of House of Burgesses (1730-35), 9, Parish Transcripts, N.Y. Hist. Soc. By Jordan, White over Black, 172.]

"The Gibsons are discussed as Melungeons in Brent Kennedy and as true-to-form Sephardic Jews in Hirschman. Melungeon Gibsons derive their origins from the Chavis family, one of the oldest Portuguese-Jewish names in America. If they are Jewish, it is ironic—and probably funnier than any Fanny Brice skit—that historians trot them forth as shining examples of non-slave African American colonials owning land and marrying white women."

The moral of the story? Melungeons have often been hauled into court to prove they are not black. Now they are being dragged through the court of Internet opinion. The outcome is doubtful.

Now about those Indians . . . That will have to wait until another blog post.

Photo: Black Revolutionary soldier. Blackpast.org.

Article cited:  Donald N. Panther-Yates, “Shalom and Hey, Y’all:  Jewish-American Indian Chiefs in the Old South,” Appalachian Quarterly 7/2 (June 2002) 80-89.

More information about Melungeons
Toward a Genetic Profile of Melungeons in Southern Appalachia
Melungeon Studies
Melungeon Match
Melungeon DNA Fingerprint Plus
The War on Melungeons
Melungeons.com

Shalom and Hey, Y'all (243 KB)

Brent Kennedy's book on Melungeons
Elizabeth Hirschman's book on Melungeons
Lisa Alther's new novel on Melungeons

Describing himself as "a cultural geographer by training," Peter McCormick contributed an interesting chapter mentioning Melungeons to a recent volume of political science and anthropological essays. Titled Border Crossings:  Transnational Americanist Anthropology, the collection is edited by Kathleen Sue Fine-Dare and Steven Rubinson and published by the University of Nebraska Press (2009). It may be the first time a practicing academic historian has committed to a considered opinion on the subject since Melungeons first appeared on the radar of Americanists with Price's "tri-racial isolate" definition in the 1950s.

McCormick has a Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma and is an associate professor of Southwest studies and Native American and indigenous studies at Fort Lewis College in Colorado. His most recent work has been on the autogeography and autohistory of his extended family in the plains, the Southwest, Appalachia, Iberia, South America and the Mediterranean.

Here's how he describes Melungeons (p. 286):

The Melungeon population of Appalachia has been the subject of a tremendous amount of interest and controversy lately. A consensus appears to be building that this population, once thought to be small, is rather large and is a result of the mixing of Iberian and Middle Eastern settlers who had been part of Spanish and English trading parties with the indigenous population of the American Southeast. Later migrations into the Piedmont and upper South by refugees of the Inquisition (Sephardic Jews and Moors) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries supplemented this population (see Hirschman 2005; Kennedy and Kennedy 1997). Our families were of this mixture.

Professor McCormick goes on to write about his personal Melungeon genealogy:

Sephardic names include Cuba, Pillo Monnis Callahin, Jorgas, Nassi, Khanadi, Rosa, David, Baez, Santos and Gascon. The families that were at one point crypto Jews include Kieffer, Mayabb, Dula D'Aultun, Baigne and Ball.  Our Melungeon families are Sizemore, Yates, Brashears, Collins, Lucas, Noel, Bass, Kennedy, Davis, Nash, Mullins, Center and Carrico. The family names on the Miller-Guion and Dawes rolls include Tunnell, Mabe, Waller, Yates and Doolin.

McCormick's testimony and evaluation of the evidence, together with his willingness to name names and self-identify as a Melungeon in academia, are important signs that the Melungeon thesis advanced by Kennedy and further documented by Hirschman and others is winning the day.

We thank McCormick for his part in bringing the true story of Jewish and Middle Eastern ancestry in Appalachia to a wider attention.

Review of Border Crossings
For anthropologists and social scientists working in North and South America, the past few decades have brought considerable change as issues such as repatriation, cultural jurisdiction, and revitalization movements have swept across the hemisphere. Today scholars are rethinking both how and why they study culture as they gain a new appreciation for the impact they have on the people they study. Key to this reassessment of the social sciences is a rethinking of the concept of borders: not only between cultures and nations but between disciplines such as archaeology and cultural anthropology, between past and present, and between anthropologists and indigenous peoples.

Border Crossings is a collection of fourteen essays about the evolving focus and perspective of anthropologists and the anthropology of North and South America over the past two decades. For a growing number of researchers, the realities of working in the Americas have changed the distinctions between being a “Latin,” “North,” or “Native” Americanist as these researchers turn their interests and expertise simultaneously homeward and out across the globe.

Melungeon DNA Studies

More information about Melungeons
Toward a Genetic Profile of Melungeons in Southern Appalachia
Melungeon Studies
Melungeon Match

Recent genetic studies have tended to throw cold water on the size and decimation of American Indian populations on European contact after 1492. A new study shows the falsehood of this thinking, and perhaps we are back to using the word "conquest" instead of the euphemistic term "contact." The conqueror of the Americas was not Europeans, though, but the diseases they unleashed on Indians.

According to Science magazine, "a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences pushes the pendulum back toward dramatic population declines. Using both modern and ancient mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from Native Americans, an international team concludes that about 500 years ago, the number of reproductively active Native American women quickly plunged by half, indicating a 'widespread and severe' contraction in population size."

The study summarized is:  Brendan O'Fallon and Lars Fehren-Schmitz, "Native Americans Experienced a Strong Population Bottleneck Coincident with European Contact," Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (Dec. 5, 2011);  doi:  10.1073/pnas.1112563108.

Critics of the study say that the conclusions may be illusory since we do not have a lot of ancient Native American DNA. But we will never have a lot of Native American DNA. That objection seems lame, and we applaud the new study as at least a step in the right direction of rectifying the true story of the Americas and escaping the apologist blinkers of colonial "Smithsonian-styled" methodologies and mindsets.

 

Phyllis Starnes drew many threads of Melungeon research together when she delivered her presentation on autosomal DNA validation studies at the Fifteenth Melungeon Union, held atWarren Wilson College, Swannanoa, NC July 15-16, 2011. Sponsored by the Melungeon Heritage Association of Kingsport, Tenn., the conference was appropriately titled, "Carolina Connections: Roots and Branches of Mixed Ancestry."

Starnes, who is administrator of DNA Consultants' Melungeon DNA Studies as well as an assistant investigator responsible for authoring reports, began her presentation by telling her own story. In 2002, she read an article about the occurrence of Familial Mediterranean Fever in Appalachia, where she grew up. "This article was the catalyst for me to address my own health and ancestry," she told participants.

She had met N. Brent Kennedy, author of the touchstone book The Melungeons:  The Resurrection of a Proud People, and soon became acquainted with both Elizabeth Hirschman (Melungeons:  The Last Lost Tribe in America) and Donald Panther-Yates, both speakers at Melungeon Fourth Union in Kingsport. The resources she needed for understanding her peculiar heritage were coming together.

Starnes summarized the Hirschman-Yates study of Melungeon DNA results published last December in Appalachian Journal and went on to reveal the results of a validation study of the Melungeon data in which the DNA profiles of the 40 participants were fed back into the database atDNA, expanded to reflect the world's only autosomal DNA Melungeon sample.

Astoundingly, many Melungeon DNA project participants had Melungeon as their No. 1 match, including Starnes.

In 1990, physical anthropologist and chemist James Guthrie analyzed blood sampled from 177 Southern Appalachian people identifying as Melungeon tested by Pollitzer and Brown in 1969. Guthrie's analysis was consistent to a remarkable degree with the Hirschman-Yates study.

All studies to date have verified and confirmed repeatedly that Melungeon descendants carry an unusual mix of Jewish, Mediterranean, Turkish, Iberian, Native American and African DNA. They also inherit genetic predispositions toward developing Familial Mediterranean Fever and other disorders.

This overarching thesis explaining what makes Melungeons different was advanced over twenty years ago by Brent Kennedy. It has now been re-examined, probed, tested and validated by unimpeachable followup studies, but little has turned up to change Kennedy's original thinking. It would be wrong to say that Melungeon origins today are controversial or mysterious. There is much we do not know about them, but their genetic and medical profiles are clear.

Starnes is enrolling people in Phase II of the Melungeon DNA Study. She has also inaugurated a password-secured blog where participants can freely share their experiences.

More information about Melungeons
Toward a Genetic Profile of Melungeons in Southern Appalachia
Melungeon Studies
Melungeon Match

If you think haplogroup testing for Native American DNA is in sad shape, you should look at autosomal testing. It has been practically nonexistent. Even the major 2007 study by Wang et al. has glaring gaps and methodological quandaries(1).

DNA Consultants' newest autosomal product is the Native American DNA Fingerprint Plus based on 21 published studies of Native American population groups as well as informal customer data. Results for many individuals were validated with older haplotyping methodology.

There were data for 3,583 Native Americans available in development of the product. These test results came from articles published between 1997 and 2009. They included individuals identifying with tribes or nations as follows:

Apache
Athabaskan
Huichol
Inupiat
Kichwa
Lumbee
Navajo
Salishan
Yupik

Alaska
Arizona
Brazil
British Columbia
Colombia
Ecuador
Florida
Guatemala
Mexico
Michigan
Minnesota
North Carolina
Oklahoma
Ontario
Saskatchewan

Nothing labeled as Cherokee -- the largest Native group in the U.S., with more than 400,000 representatives -- has ever been tested. Anecdotally, people of Cherokee descent often receive matches to North Carolina or Michigan Native Americans. The reason for the latter matchup is obscure. North Carolina as the Cherokee's original homeland makes a lot more sense.

1. Wang, S. et al. (2007). “Genetic Variation and Population Structure in Native Americans.” PLoS Genetics 3/11 (with good bibliog.):  http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pgen.0030185.

I got a holiday present from my wife of an unusual little book titled On the Trail of Spider Woman. Petroglyphs, Pictographs, and Myths of the Southwest, by Carol Patterson-Rudolph (Santa Fe:  Ancient City Press, 1997). Putting this intriguing study together with a travel book by David Hatcher Childress, my son and I took a 4-day road trip into the homeland of the Indians credited with having the first civilization in the Southwest, a settled town life marked by desert agriculture, canals, pottery, baskets, ballcourts, plazas and adobe pueblos, pithouses and kivas. Previous occupants of the area were non-sedentary hunter-gatherers considered to be "paleo-Indians."

We visited Painted Rock Petroglyph Site outside Gila Bend, in the middle of nowhere, and ended the trip in the barren sands outside Phoenix, where we began it, visiting the Hohokam Pima National Archeological Monument, also known as Snaketown. The former is little seen, and the latter cannot seen, because the Pima (now Gila River Indians) had the ballcourt and other ruins reburied by backhoes in the 1970s. The caretakers of this declared national treasure decided not to open it to anyone to view or visit because of its "sensitive" nature. There are no signs, no roads, nothing left above ground.

Overview of pecked records and markings of Hohokam, 200 B.C.-A.D. 1300, on granite outcropping called Painted Rock in South Central Arizona.

At Painted Rock, the first mystery we pondered was why it was called "painted" rock when there is no paint. Petroglyphs are produced by pecking away the dark desert varnish to make a negative image on the underlying lighter rock. We wondered if it had anything to do with the Paint People, or Phoenicians, Kanawah Indians of the East Coast or Cherokee and Saponi Paint Clans.

The second mystery was the abundance of snake imagery. Famously, snakes in Indian tradition stand for boats and water. We noticed a Corn Cross, the symbol of the Feathered Serpent or Quetzlcoatl religion, supposedly introduced into Mexico from both the East and the West by white, bearded strangers in ships, who brought rule by laws and numerous arts of civilization and banned human sacrifice.

The third thing we remarked upon were the many Great Goddess or Earth Mother or birthing/fertility symbols. Such places were probably shrines where women came to be blessed and get married and give birth. Sun Park in Hopiland has numerous hemispherical carvings about two inches wide where people ground out minerals to eat. These cupmarks or cupoles at petroglyph sites puzzled archeologists until an important article in a scholarly journal clarified their meaning as part of the worldwide phenomenon of pica (pronounced "pie-ka"), "the desire to ingest nonfood substances such as rock powder, clay, chalk, dirt, and other material by some humans, especially pregnant women" (Kevin L. Callahan, "Pica, Geophagy, and Rock-Art in the Eastern United States," in The Rock-Art of Eastern North America, ed. Carol Diaz-Granados and James R. Duncan, Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2004, p. 65.

Neolithic Cupmarks in Kh. Umm El-Umdan, Israel. 

In general, petroglyphs are ignored both by archeology and anthropology, and their study is a no man's land. Sun Park has a birthing cave and birthing stone. Canyon de Chelly has the most photographed Mother Earth rock formation in the world, Spider Rock, a chthonic monument discussed on page 83 of the Spider Woman book by Patterson-Rudolph.

Who Were the Hohokam?

There were also clear images of horses, riders, people praying, spirals, axis mundi (center of the earth) symbols like the iron butterfly and cross, labyrinths, bilobed axes, irrigation plans, horned beasts, felines, palaces or villages and warriors with spears and shields. We searched in vain for anomalous depictions of whales, elephants and deep water fish, found at other similar sites, but the sun was sinking and we did not have time to make a thorough inspection of the motifs. There is a famous petroglyph of a whale at Old Oraibi.

The name Ho-ho-kam is usually explained as meaning "Those Who Are Departed," but such an etymology is more a gloss than a literal translation of its meaning and origin. Like many words in the Hopi, Zuni, Pima and Azteco-Utan languages in general it is composed of South Semitic elements. In Egyptian, it literally means "Sea Peoples" or "Foreigners." The historic Sea Peoples came from Asia Minor and once threatened to conquer the Egyptian empire. The Philistines and Phoenicians are related to them. They were remarkable for their feather bonnets and, like their relatives the Cretans (whose language also came from Asia Minor), for a long-protracted continuance of Mother Goddess worship down into the Bronze Age.

Haplogroup B is the signature lineage of certain Indians in North America. Its ultimate source is Southeast Asia (not Mongolia, as has been suggested for the other three classic Native American haplogroups A, C and D), whence it took multiple circum- or trans-Pacific migratory routes to the Americas (Eschleman et al. 2004). It has high frequencies in Polynesia, which was settled from Southeast Asia, and among the Western Indians of the U.S. such as the Hopi, Zuni (77%), Anasazi (78%), Yuman, and Jemez Pueblo (89%). It is also found in frequencies approaching 70% in the Cherokee and Chickasaw.

We believe Spider Woman is simply an aspect of the Stone Age Great Goddess worshiped by those who came from Southeast Asia through Polynesia and helped colonized the American Southwest. She is the same as the Earth Mother. As in other cultures, she was replaced by sky and sun deities and male hierarchies. But her religion seems to have persisted in the Hohokam, Cherokee and Hopi tribes in a similar fashion to the survival of her cult in the Cretans, Phoenicians and Sea Peoples. 

According to Hopi and other traditions, at the end of the last age, the Mother Goddess ceased to be the leader of the people in their wanderings and went back "under the sea" to the east and west whence she and they had emerged. We can only infer from this that Spider Woman, as she was called in Asia and the Pacific, and the Great Goddess, as she was known in the Old World of the Middle East, relinquished her role as supreme deity to the new male pantheons and withdrew across the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans to the distant origins of civilization outside the Americas. Ironically, her memory survived better among the Indian nations than in the war-torn empires and materialistic cultures that dominate world history elsewhere. Indian societies today exhibit rare examples of matriarchy as opposed to patriarchy.