The so-called “starchild” skull (source Wikipedia)

The “Starchild skull”, a real enough skull, is claimed to be physical evidence for a dead alien (or alien/human hybrid) right here on earth. Unfortunately, like so many of these objects that are supposed to derive from elsewhere in the cosmos, it is treated as private property and access to it for testing is tightly controlled. No independent scientific reports on it have ever been published and there are suspicions that data that demonstrates that it is human has been suppressed. Yet it has a very vocal community of supporters who tout it as proof of extraterrestrial contact (or a variety of other equally outlandish claims). The problems with the skull go way beyond simple data collection, analysis and interpretation: there are important ethical issues about the way in which the remains of a child – whether are human or alien – are being used for commercial gain.

Discovery

The skull is supposed to have been discovered in the 1930s by an American girl from El Paso (Texas, USA) in an abandoned mine near Copper Canyon in Mexico, about 160 km south-west of Chihuahua. According to its current “owners”, the discovered died in the early 1990s and it did not come into their possession until 1998, so information about its discovery is third hand, at best (it should be obvious that the discoverer cannot have given an account directly to its current “owners” after her death). Nevertheless, it is said to have been discovered with the complete skeleton of an adult that lay exposed on the floor of the mine. The skeleton to which this skull belongs was covered by a small mound of earth, leaving only an arm and hand projecting from it; the child’s hand was clutching the upper arm of the adult. Although the girl tried to recover both skeletons, a flash flood washed away most of the remains and all she could take home were the two skulls.

The skulls were given to Ray and Melanie Young in 1998; Melanie is a neonatal nurse and was convinced that the shape of the child’s skull could no be the result of ordinary human deformities. To try to find out more about it, they approached the author Lloyd Pye, although it is not clear why they sought his assistance in examining the skulls rather than an archaeologist or palaeopathologist. He had published Everything you know is wrong, book 1: human origins in 1997, which promotes the ideas of Zechariah Sitchin about the alien origins of humanity, using tendentiously wrong translations of Sumerian texts as his principal evidence. This makes the choice of Lloyd Pye as someone to research the remains look as if the Youngs had already formed an idea about the nature of the child’s skull. Pye and the Youngs founded The Starchild Project early in 1999, when Lloyd Pye became the “caretaker” of the child’s skull. Since then, all access to the remains has been controlled by Pye who, by 2010, had engaged the services of his own geneticist for reasons that will become apparent. The Project has promoted the skull, principally to UFO and New Age groups, among which the term “star child” is used to refer to alleged human/alien hybrids or to “the next stage in human evolution”.

Description

The skull of the child is large, with a capacity of 1600 cm³, some 200 cm³ larger than the average human adult, although it falls within the overall range of 1000–1900 cm³. Although claims have been made that it is composed of a material resembling tooth enamel, it is of the standard mammalian bone chemical calcium hydroxyapatite. It contains the usual bones of the skull, together with all the features such as muscle attachments found in humans. However, it exhibits considerable deformities in all of them. For instance, the orbits are unusually shallow and the canal for the optic nerve is closer to the base of the orbit, suggesting a rotational deformity, while the occipital bone at the back of the skull is flattened. There are said to be no frontal sinuses, a condition that affects about ten percent of the population. Analysis of a detached portion of the right maxilla showed unerupted permanent dentition and an age at death of around five to six years has been suggested.

Three views of the ‘starchild’ skull

The first DNA test was carried out by the Bureau of Legal Dentistry laboratory of the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada) in 1999, which recovered a small quantity of nuclear DNA, which was said to demonstrate that the child was male. This result has now been set aside, as it is said to have been the result of contamination, although we are not told how the contamination occurred: if the skull as a whole is contaminated, it means that any DNA results from it will be compromised. A second test was carried out in 2003 by Trace Genetics of Davis (California, USA), a commercial company with a singularly unhelpful website (perhaps its takeover by DNAPrint Genomics Inc. in 2005 has something to do with this). According to the report on the examination, “has mtDNA consistent with Native American haplogroup C, as revealed through two independent extractions performed on fragments of parietal bone”. The inability to extract nuclear DNA is unsurprising and the analysts cite a number of factors that could make its sequencing difficult, including evidence “that X-Ray exposure damages and degrades DNA, which may have decreased the quantity and quality of DNA available in the bone prior to extraction”.

In 2010, further DNA analysis was undertaken by the National Institutes of Health BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) programme, which “compares nucleotide or protein sequences to sequence databases and calculates the statistical significance of matches… to infer functional and evolutionary relationships between sequences as well as help identify members of gene families”. The procedure found that 265 base pairs could be matched, demonstrating “that at least some of the nuclear DNA from the Starchild is from a human being”. What Lloyd Pye is keen to promote, though, is that a sequence of 342 base pairs produced no significant similarities; Pye spins this statement into “there is NO known earthly corollary for what has been analyzed!”, which is not what the report says. He also glosses over the part of the report that explains why no significant similarities have been found, saying that it is merely “an automatically generated list of possible procedural errors designed to help geneticists check all possible flaws in their testing techniques”. It would be helpful to see this!

Further testing was carried out in 2011, which concentrated again on the mtDNA. This time, we are not told the name of the laboratory that carried out the analysis (although we are told that it involved techniques similar to those of the National Institutes of Health’s BLAST programme) or the names of the scientists as “[t]he identity of certain research team members requires temporary anonymity”. This is not helpful, especially when it is appended to an appeal for $7,000,000 as “funding needed to carry out the recovery and sequencing of its entire genome”. Yet another claim was made in 2012. Firstly, an extrapolation of the anonymous 2011 tests made it appear that the child’s mtDNA differs in 977 places from humans, comparing it with the 385 places in Denisovan humans and 1500 places in chimpanzees. The second (“preliminary”) claim is that there are significant differences in the FOXP2 gene (a gene that is believed to be implicated in the development of language skills). According to Pye, there are 56 differences, which mean that this gene is not human, althoughsignificant mutations of the gene are reported.

A Mexican skull exhibiting deliberate deformation (source)

Dating

Radiocarbon dating was carried out in 2004 by Beta Analytic of Miami (Florida, USA), which gave a determination of 900 ± 40 bp, which calibrates to Cal AD 1117 ± 59; an earlier test on the adult skull gave exactly the same result. This places the two bodies firmly within the Casas Grandes tradition of the later Mogollon culture, which flourished in northern Mexico and the south-western USA in the early second millennium CE. Significantly, skull deformation was widely practised by this culture.

Significance

Deformed skulls are a widespread phenomenon in the ancient Americas. The skull of newborn infants consists of bones that are not yet fused (the fontanelle on the top of the head is where the frontal and parietal bones will eventually meet) and can be persuaded to grow into artificial shapes by means of pressing boards against the head and binding. A variety of deformations has been practised; the flattening of the occipital bone visible on the ‘starchild’ skull looks like this type of cultural flattening. However, other aspects of the skull look distinctly pathological: the lack of frontal sinuses, the over-large cranial capacity and the shapes of the orbits.

The DNA tests performed on the skull for Lloyd Pye have shown that it belongs to haplogroup C, a typical Native American type, demonstrating that the child’s mother was beyond doubt a Native American, not an alien. The adult skull recovered with the child’s yielded mtDNA of haplogroup A, another Native American type, but which means that the skull cannot be that of the child’s mother, which would by definition have mtDNA of the same haplogroup. Pye’s insistence that the failure to extract a coherent sequence of nuDNA is evidence that the father was not human is simply not a valid inference. There are greater difficulties in the extraction of nuclear DNA from ancient bone than in the extraction of mitochondrial DNA, so the lack of nuclear DNA from the ‘starchild’ skull is not at all mysterious and certainly not evidence for a non-human father. What Pye does not dwell on is the identification of both X and Y chromosomes, which show that the child was a boy; Y chromosomes can only be inherited from the father (men have an XY chromosome pair, women an XX chromosome pair), so the child’s father must have been as human as his mother.

So why does the skull look so unusual? Although Lloyd Pye quotes doctors who state that it cannot have been a pathological condition, he ignores similar skeletal remains that are clearly the result of hydrocephalus, a condition in which the skull fills with cerebrospinal fluid in and around the brain and which can be fatal. Another condition that can yield similar skeletal pathologies is progeria, in which symptoms resembling premature ageing are caused by a genetic mutation. Add to this the deliberate deformation of the skull likely to have been started immediately after birth and it is obvious why the skull should look so odd.

The scientific evidence shows very clearly that the ‘starchild’ skull is that of a very sick human boy who probably died from the condition that caused the unusual pathological features of the skull. To promote this unfortunate Native American, whose remains are being displayed for public entertainment, is immoral, does an immense disservice to his memory and is something that under the American NAGPRA legislation is probably illegal. Lloyd Pye is not a scientist who is about to bring astounding revelations about alien contact with humans to public attention: he is a writer who already believed this before being given the skull and his promotion of it is nothing short of disgusting.

Aliens in popular culture

In 1987, a new image became a cultural icon: the almond-faced alien with shining black eyes that adorned the cover of Whitley Streiber’s Communion, painted by artist Ted Seth Jacobs. From that moment on, virtually every alleged encounter with alien beings reported in the English speaking world involved creatures of this type, commonly referred to as ‘Greys’. This is not the place to delve into the complex world of alien typology, but it is worth noting that Greys seem to be a largely American alien, with other regions reporting predominantly different types of creature (such as the South American preference for dwarves, the European preference for Nordics, all of which suggests a strong cultural component to the phenomenon). However, during the burgeoning of the stories of alien abduction during the 1980s and 1990s, the Grey quickly established itself as the abductor par excellence if only because the majority of abduction accounts come from North America and the USA in particular.

A Grey alien or a fake?

Photographs of Greys and other aliens are notoriously unreliable and easily faked. Many look like models (indeed, many photographs of supposed aliens touted on the web turn out to be stills taken from Hollywood films or television dramas), some are crudely retouched photographs of humans, some are misidentifications of shadows and so on, and at least one shows a dead human pilot horribly burnt following a crash (the wire rims of his spectacles are glearly visible). Photographic evidence, as so often in UFOlogy, is useless. So what other evidence might there be for their presence on earth? Not the fantasies of Erich von Däniken, who has been unable in a career spanning more than forty years, to produce a single artefact of extraterrestrial origin, despite his penchant for ascribing virtually all of humanity’s cultural achievements to assistance given by aliens.

Nevertheless, Lloyd Pye continues to promote the skull as evidence for an alien/human hybrid (although he does not appear to specify whether this is an artificial hybrid made by manipulating the DNA of the fertilised egg or the result of inter-species sex). Such hybrids have been reported by numerous “alien abductees”, whose (usually hypnotically recovered) accounts of their abductions often refer to the aliens’ obsessive interest in their reproductive organs. Some claim to have undergone frequently painful and disturbing procedures to remove eggs and sperm; some claim to have become pregnant as a result of their treatment and subsequently to have discovered that they are no longer pregnant following a further abduction. There are accounts of abductees being shown humanoid but emotionless children during an abduction and being given impressions that these are their own offspring.

Whatever the objective reality of alien abduction experiences, physical evidence for the existence of the aliens themselves would be a powerful support for the veracity of the abductees’ stories. So how well does the “Starchild skull” match the available descriptions of Greys? First, we have to acknowledge that we are evidently dealing with the skull of an infant (based on the eruption of maxillary teeth, it has been estimated that the individual was aged around five or six years old when it died, although if we really are dealing with an alien or even an alien/human hybrid, it is a moot point whether we can use human tooth eruption data to assign an age at death!). Abductees have reported seeing hybrids but no infant Greys.

A reconstruction of the appearance of the “Starchild” around the time of its death

If we assume that the dental data can be used, then we have to recognise that the development of Greys from infancy to adulthood might well involve morphological changes to the shape of the face as subcutaneous fats are redistributed. This is the “puppy fat” that gives human children rounded faces and chubby cheeks that most lose during puberty. The reconstruction shown here – made by those promoting the skull as alien, it should be noted – depicts a child of distinctly human appearance. There are problems, of course, in that we do not have a mandible with which the reconstruct the appearance of the lower part of the face, but it has to be said that the eyes are much too close together, the nose too prominent and the width of the upper part of the head proportionally much greater than would be expected if this is the skull of a genuine Grey alien. We could always argue, of course, that if it is a human/alien hybrid, then human characteristics are dominant in this individual (although this would be a post hoc rationalisation).

There is nothing in this child’s skull to indicate that it is anything other than the remains of a very sick and very human individual whose parents’ culture encouraged them to flatten the back of its head. This head binding may well have contributed to its early death, but, whatever the precise nature of his pathological condition, the boy was clearly not destined to like to a ripe old age. Despite supporters of the alien hybrid claims saying that the child was in perfect health at the time of its death, a moment’s reflection will show that this cannot be the case: the child died, after all, which is not something that happens to healthy people unless they suffer trauma, for which there is no evidence at all.

This is a very sad object lesson in why we should treat human remains with respect. The bones of dead people are not analogous to artefacts, but are what is left of what was once a person. To use these bones for financial gain and for self-promotion says a lot about Lloyd Pye and his morals.

The ‘keystone’, the first of the so-called Holy Stones to be discovered

In 1860, amateur archaeologist David Wyrick (1806-1864) discovered a number of unusual objects while excavating a series of Native American mounds 16 km (10 miles) south of Newark (Ohio, USA). The first object to be found, today known as the ‘keystone’ was found in a pit some 3.7 to 4.3 m (12 to 14 feet) deep (although the stone itself was said to have been found near the surface) and was encased, apparently deliberately, in a clay ball; it is carved from novaculite, 152 mm (6 inches) long and 41 mm (1.625 inches) thick and is inscribed on each of its four faces with standard Hebrew letters. Wyrick took the stone to his friend Charles Wittlesey (1808-1886), also an amateur archaeologist with an interest in the mounds of North America. The three men agreed that the lettering was Hebrew but as none of them could read it, they took the stone to Reverend John Winspeare McCarty (1832-1867), who was known to be able to read Hebrew.

The four faces of the ‘keystone’ (which are displayed clearly here) read קדשקדשים (QDŠ QDŠYM, “Holy of Holies”) | מלךארץ (MLK ’RṢ, “King of the Earth”) | תורתיהוה (TWRT YHWH, “The Law of God”) | דבריהוה (DBR YHWH, “The Word of God”). These letters are of a form that was current in the nineteenth century, which ought to raise suspicions.

Harper’s Weekly, 1 September 1860, dismissing the ‘keystone’ as a fraud

The discovery was reported in Harper’s Weekly (1 September 1860, 545-6) by David Francis Bacon, whose story ‘The Ohio “Holy stone”’ included illustrations of the four sides of the object. It was dismissed as a fraud, Charles Wittlesey having pointed out that the Hebrew letters were modern, while a Newark Mason had suggested that the object was a Masonic keystone (which is how it derived its name). In his article, Bacon commented “no stone, whether novaculite or any thing else (even granite), can be buried in that soil for so much as half a century without becoming covered by a calcareous incrustation… or acquiring a ferruginous or other stain from the earth which encloses it. And yet this Newark Holy Stone comes up from its entombment of some thousand some hundreds and some odd years as clean and bright and slick as a new whistle!”

In November 1860, just a few months after the first discovery, a sandstone box was found, containing a carved black limestone slab 175 mm (6.875 inches) long, 73 mm (2.875 inches) wide and 44 m (1.75 inches) thick. It depicts a man surrounded by a inscription, again in Hebrew letters, although of an eccentric form. Nevertheless, these letters were of an archaic type, unlike those on the ‘keystone’. The inscription, which runs covers the entire surface of the stone, with the exception of the human figure (labelled משה, “Moses”), is a contracted version of the Decalogue, the Ten Commandments. A sandstone bowl, this time uninscribed, was also found, apparently associated with the box.

It is known that the Newark mounds had been dug over during the early nineteenth century in a search for the reputed treasure of the Scottish pirate William (“Captain”) Kidd (1654-1701). Although the box, the inscribed slab it contained and the cup were said to have been found under a stack of stone forty feet (12.2 m) high, the stack had been completely removed before 1832. In 1850, a group of farmers digging on the site discovered a wooden coffin embedded in clay, which Wyrick excavated ten years later. Clearly, the site was not undisturbed.

The ‘Decalogue’ stone

Wyrick is said to have been a believer that the so-called “Moundbuilders” were of Israelite origin (one of the so-called “lost tribes”), although no evidence has been produced to show that this was the case. Indeed, he failed to mention this idea in an 1861 pamphlet that he published about the discoveries. However, Charles Wittlesey believed that Wyrick was the fraudster and this has long been the accepted explanation. As Wyrick overdosed on laudanum (which he was taking to relieve the severe rheumatoid arthritis that had led to his early retirement as County Surveyor in 1859) on 16 April 1864, it has been thought that his suicide was in prompted by his shame at engaging in the fraud. This seems grossly unfair: it seems more likely that Wyrick was driven to this extremity by the pain of his arthritis.

More recently, Rochelle Altman has suggested that the objects are of late medieval type and belonged to a Jewish settler in North America during the early nineteenth century. Her reconstruction of the circumstances of deposition connects the surviving objects with another found by the banker and amateur archaeologist David M Johnson (1837-1914) in 1867, which was apparently found attached to a damaged skull. This object, now lost, is identified by Altman as a head phylactery; the ‘Decalogue’ would be a hand phylactery, with carrying case to prevent it becoming ritually tainted, the cup a special vessel for ritual ablutions and the ‘keystone’ a water flow detector. Their owner was murdered and thrown into a pit that contained Native American remains disturbed by the earlier digging around the Newark mounds.

This is intriguing. It would explain many of the anomalous features of the inscriptions, but it does not explain why the second inscription answered the objections raised by the first. Nor does it explain various anachronisms in the second inscription, such as letter forms apparently borrowed from Greek and Sabataean, or the presence of a blasphemous image of Moses.

Instead, the work of Brad Lepper and Jeff Gill has pointed the finger of suspicion at the Reverend McCarty. He certainly had the knowledge to create Hebrew inscriptions and was in the right place to plant objects for discovery. They suggest that he was influenced by the 1839 prediction of his Bishop, Charles Petit McIlvane (1799-1873), that ancient Israelites had built the mounds of North America and that it was only a matter of time before artefacts proving him right would be found. McCarty was young and ambitious; he was also deeply involved with the abolitionist cause. As Lepper and Gill point out, proving his bishop correct in the view that Native Americans were descendants of the ancient Israelites would undermine the idea that they, along with negroes, were a separate creation from European humanity, and could be enslaved or exterminated.

The Newark “Holy Stones” are thus not evidence for an ancient Israelite migration to the New World, as envisaged by those who believed that the mounds could not have been constructed by Native Americans. They are irrelevant to the mounds of the Adena-Hopewell culture complex (a purely indigenous phenomenon), whether one accepts Rochelle Altman’s ingenious explanation or that of Brad Lepper and Jeff Gill. Given the discovery of marks on the ‘keystone’ that appear to have been made with a mechanical grinding wheel, the objects can hardly have been made before the nineteenth century.

Olof Ohman and his family in the 1890s

In 1898, Olof Ohman ((Öhman) 1854-1935, né Olsson and born in Forsa, Hälsingland, Sweden) was clearing away trees from a hillock on his farm in Solem (about 3 km north-north-east of Kensington, Minnesota, USA), when he discovered a stone entangled in the roots of a poplar (sometimes known as aspen or cottonwood) at a depth of around 15 cm (6 inches); the precise day of discovery is not known: according to some accounts, it was in August, while others give the date as 8 November. Nearby trees said to be of the same size as the felled example were examined in 1910 and found to be thirty to forty years old, based on a count of their growth rings, suggesting that the stone had been in the ground since before about 1880. The stone is carved from greywacke, is 79 cm long, 41 cm wide and 14 cm thick (31×16×5½ inches: these are maximum dimensions, as the stone is not perfectly rectangular) and weighs around 104 kg (230 lb). One face bears an inscription consisting of nine lines of runes (with the end of line 8 consisting of three Latin letters, AVM), while one side (to the left if one is looking at the inscribed face) has three more lines of runes; allegedly, it was Olof’s ten-year-old son Carl Edward (1888-1950) who first spotted the inscription, as it had been lying face down in the ground. The stone has broken along natural lines of cleavage and none of the faces was dressed in preparation for the inscription; Ohman cleaned the letters of the inscription on the side with the point of a nail, but is not said to have cleaned the main inscription in this way.

The Runestone displayed in the Runestone Museum

Because Ohman’s family was of Scandinavian origin (as were many settlers in the area), the symbols were soon recognised as runes, although Ohman claimed that he first thought it was an ancient “Indian almanac”. This is curious, as Ohman owned books with accounts of runes and they were still used by Scandinavians in folk texts. Runes were an ancient north European writing system that probably first developed in the second century CE under Roman influence and which were regularly taught to Scandinavian schoolchildren in the nineteenth century. On 1 January 1899, the mayor of Kensington, John P Hedberg (1853-after 1933), sent a copy of the inscription was to his friend Swan Johan Turnblad (1860-1933, né Sven Johan Olofsson), owner of Svenska Amerikanska Posten (an American Swedish language newspaper). The newspaper published translations on 14 and 28 March 1899, although it had been pre-empted by the Minneapolis Journal, which had already published one on 24 February. The stone itself was put on display in a bank (although one account available on the web describes it incorrectly as a “drugstore”). In view of the subsequent controversy over the authenticity of the stone, it is worth noting that Ohman never sought to make money from his discovery.

Over the years, a number of transcriptions and translations have been made of the runes on the stone, of which the best known is that of Hjalmar Holand, first published in 1908. They have varied only in minor details. The most recent, by Richard Nielsen, published in The Kensington Rune Stone: Compelling New Evidence, coauthored with Scott Wolter and published in 2005, has introduced some minor changes, with Nielsen arguing that the thau-rune, Þ, may have an additional value, /t/. His new transcription thus reads:

8 g:öter: ok : 22 : norrmen : po :
…o: opþagelsefardþ : fro :
vinlanþ : of : vest : vi :
hafþe : läger : veþ : 2 : skŁar : en :
þags : rise : norr : fro : þeno : sten :
vi : var : ok : fiske : en : þagh : äptir :
vi : kom : hem: fan : 10 : man : röþe :
af : bloþ : og : þeþ : AVM
fräelse : af : illu

här : 10 : mans : ve : havet : at : se :
äptir : vore : skip : 14 : þagh : rise :
from : þeno : öh : ahr : 1362

Nielsen translates:

8 Götalanders and 22 Northmen on
this reclaiming/plundering journey far
to the west from Vinland. We
had a camp by 2 shelters one
day’s journey north from this stone.
We were fishing one day. After
we came home we found 10 men red
from blood and death. Ave Maria,
Save from evil.

There are 10 men by the sea
to look after our ships 14 days’ journey
from this island. Year 1362.

If genuine, this is clearly a document of huge importance for the history of the European exploration of North America. It claims that a part of eight Goths (Swedes) and twenty-two Northmen (Norwegians) had reached the mid West of the USA, setting out from Vinland, far to the east; ten of the party had been killed at a camp by a lake one day’s journey to the north (Kensington lies to the south of an area of numerous lakes). Ten other men had been left to guard their ships at a location fourteen days’ journey from the site, which is described as an “island”, although at the time of discovery, it was a hillock.

First analyses

Olaus Breda

Olaus Jensen Breda (1853-1916), Professor of Scandinavian Languages and Literature at the University of Minnesota, was the first scholar to examine a copy of the inscription, in January 1899; some accounts claim that he never saw the original stone, while Hjalmar Holand’s account states that he was sent it. It appears that he was sent a hand-written copy of the text by J P Hedberg; it is not clear how Holand got this detail wrong. Breda was dismissive of its authenticity, believing it to be a poor attempt at forging an eleventh-century text and an illiterate mixture of Norwegian, Swedish and English (exactly as would be expected from a forgery concocted by a nineteenth-century Scandinavian settler in Minnesota), an opinion shared by scholars in Scandinavia to whom he forwarded copies. Nevertheless, he published a translation on 22 February 1899, the first apparently to do so.

In February 1899, the stone was sent to George Oliver Curme (1860-1948), a linguist at Northwestern University, who arranged for it to be photographed by John Fletcher Steward (1841-1915?), an amateur geologist. Curme was sceptical of the inscription’s medieval origin and noted that although the stone appeared weathered, the inscription was lighter in colour, as if more recent in date. He asked for an excavation to be conducted around the discovery site, but there does not appear to be any evidence that one was carried out or, if it had been, whether anything further was discovered.

Hjalmar Holand

After the stone was returned to Ohman in March 1899 as being of no interest to scholarship, he is said to have used it as a stepping stone near a granary; it seems to have been placed face down. The historian Hjalmar Rued Holand (1872-1963) obtained it from Ohman in August 1907, during an investigation of the history of Norwegian settlement in Minnesota, and brought it to the attention of the Minnesota Historical Society, to whom he attempted to sell it for $5000 in 1910, a ridiculously over-inflated sum at the time. Ohman refused to allow Holand to sell it, as he was still the owner; it was entrusted to the Alexandria Chamber of Commerce and was finally purchased by a group of ten local businessmen on 9 October 1951 for $2500. Holand published an account of the stone in Journal of American History 4 (1910), 165-84, referring to it as the “Oldest Native Document in America”.

The Minnesota Historical Society began its own investigation into the stone, under the direction of State Geologist Newton Horace Winchell (1839-1914). In 1909, Winchell obtained affidavits from Olof Ohman, Carl Edward Ohman, Nils Olof Flaten, Roald Benson and Samuel Olson about the discovery of the stone, which is perhaps how confusion about the date of discovery and who was present at the time arose, as the statements were made ten years after the stone was found. Winchell spent some time interviewing locals and apparently conducted investigations on the site and his report was published as part of a summary endorsed by the Society’s committee in Minnesota Historical Collections 15 (1915), 221-86. The Society also consulted further experts in Scandinavian languages, as its committee seems to have been unwilling to accept the sole testimony of Holand, who was not a linguist. The first approached Gisle Christian Johnson Bothne (1860-1934), Olaus Breda’s successor at the University of Minnesota, who also declared it a fraud. A second linguist, John A Holvik, was consulted. He also thought the inscription a hoax.

Both Holand and Winchell were convinced of the authenticity of the stone. They based this on the discovery that the stone contains a date, which Holand transcribed as 1362: this instantly removed Breda’s objection to an eleventh-century date for the inscription and Holand was convinced that the language of the stone was later medieval. Holand described the numerals as being the same as those used on primstav, a runic calendrical system based on wooden staves, the oldest surviving example dating from 1457. However, while the numerals are of quite different form from those used on primstave, a fact that Holand uses to show that they cannot have been copied from them, their precise nature is a problem for an ancient date for the stone, as we will see.

In 1911, Holand brought the stone to Europe, to have its inscription assessed by runologists. They were unimpressed and most though it fraudulent; Holand’s accounts gloss over this lack of support by those most familiar with European runic texts, which suggests that his belief in the stone’s authenticity dulled his critical faculties as an historian. If runologists were unhappy with the text, Holand ought to have been more robust in his defence. That he was not is worrying. It should be noted that many of those who still support the stone accuse the early twentieth-century experts of incompetence, a technique often encountered among those promoting objects rejected by conventional scholarship: those who disagree are jealous, closed-minded and part of a conspiracy to suppress the truth, while the few who lend their support are true visionaries, mavericks who deserve praise and the only people who deserve to be called “experts”.

If the inscription is genuine…

A 1690 copy of the map by Sigurdur Stefánsson attempting to locate the places mentioned in the Vinland Sagas

If, as Holand was convinced, the inscription is a genuine record of a Scandinavian expedition in fourteenth-century Minnesota, there ought to be an historical context for it. Holand worked hard to find one and to construct a plausible scenario. He believed that the mixed group of Goths and Northmen would have been impossible before the union of the kingdoms of Sweden and Norway in 1319, so the date given by the stone was therefore possible.

Holand’s biggest problem was that the fourteenth century was the dying days of Norse settlement in Greenland, while the known voyages to Vinland took place in the eleventh century. Nevertheless, he pointed out that a fourteenth century date made sense of some of the linguistic difficulties of the inscription: while its language was impossible for Old Norse, this was a period in which many of its features were undergoing change and the mixed dialect could then be explained by the composition of the group.

What, though, of the difference between the purported date of the stone and the much earlier date of the voyages to Vinland? He pointed out that there appeared to be records of a voyage west from Norway in 1355, in search of the colonists in Greenland, who had been out of contact for some years (indeed, there was a report in 1348 that the colonists had vanished). In the autumn of 1354, King Magnus Eriksson (1316-1374; King Magnus IV of Sweden 1319-1364 and King Magnus VII of Norway 1319-1343), commissioned Pål Knutsson, a government officer from Bergen, to sail to Greenland to assess conditions there. Knutsson’s expedition would thus have been led by a Norwegion, under the direction of a Swedish king. Holand believed that, finding the Greenland colony deserted, Knutsson spent many years searching for the lost colonists, evidently reaching Minnesota in 1362, where he and his companions may have perished.

Next, Holand needed to work out how Knutsson’s party had reached Minnesota. The Scandinavians were maritime explorers, not accustomed to crossing continental landmasses. Holand discounted the most obvious route from Vinland into the heart of North America, via the St Lawrence River and the Great Lakes, as this was blocked by Niagara Falls. Instead, he suggested that the voyagers had sailed around the north of Labrador, entered Hudson Bay and travelled along the Nelson River, leaving ten men at its mouth. The reached Lake Winnipeg and entered the Red River; the details of the last part of the journey into the area around Kensington are more difficult to work out. Holand hypothesised that native guides had taught the explorers methods of portage, so that they could move their ships across watersheds; it was while they were in the lakes of Minnesota that ten of the party were killed by locals. The stone was then set up by the surviving members of the expedition who were themselves killed. The ten left at the mouth of the Nelson River may have returned to Norway or may themselves have been killed.

Map showing two routes to Kensington: the yellow is that preferred by Holand, the pale green is the “obvious” route he discounted

Holand examined his hypothetical route from Hudson Bay to central Minnesota in the hope of finding physical traces of the expedition. Along the Nelson River and Red River, he found stones with drilled holes that he believed had been used by the explorers to tie their boats while moored. The case appeared to be strong and gained many supporters, although it never won mainstream acceptance. Why?

Problems and controversies

There are inevitably problems with the discovery, interpretation and significance of the stone. Firstly, none of the finders could agree on when it was found. As already noted, the date is given variously as August or as 8 November (I wonder if this is a confusion over the meaning of 8/11 or 11/8 in a note); some accounts place its discovery as after lunch, others as early evening (although, as Tom Sontag notes in his comment below, “lunch” in Minnesota dialect can refer tothe evening meal). While confusion about precise details is not damning, it could be said that people had not got their stories straight. However, the accounts of discovery were collected ten years after the event and human memory is fallible.

More serious is the objection of context. There is no evidence that Pål Knutsson’s expedition was ever assembled or set out. Although there were occasional contacts with Greenland in the later fourteenth century, its economic importance had declined as there was no longer a market for narwhal and walrus ivory. A merchantman, Bauta Hluti, was fitted out for the voyage in 1366 and was known as the Grœnlands Knörr; after it was lost at sea in 1369, it was not replaced. The last contact seems to have been in 1385, when the Olafssudinn, a ship from Greenland arrived in Norway; it had spent two years in Iceland before travelling to Scandinavia. The passengers reported the death of Álfur, Bishop of Garðar (the cathedral city in Greenland’s Eastern Settlement), in 1379; although successors continued to be appointed until the Reformation, none ever visited their diocese. By this date, even visits to Iceland were uncommon. There were sporadic trips between Iceland and Greenland into the early fifteenth century, but the Western Settlement had long been abandoned. If Pål Knutsson had reached Greenland, he would have encountered Scandinavian settlers living in reduced circumstances from their heyday a century before, but there would have been no need to spend the next nine years looking for others. The reason for journeying into the heart of the North American continent vanishes.

Gustav Storm, populariser of the neologism opdagelse, meaning “voyage of discovery”

The language of the stone has always caused problems. Although early sceptics criticised the rune forms, it has been found that many of them are attested in the medieval period. Rather, it is the words and their grammatical forms that have caused most linguists to reject the inscription. Instead of regular fourteenth-century Norse or Swedish, the inscription is a mixture of the two languages. No matter, say the believers: the party was composed of both Goths and Northmen, so a mixing of languages could be a result of the dictation of the the text by a Swede and its carving by a Norwegian. However, there are further problems. The grammar makes more sense in a nineteenth-century Swedish context than a late medieval. There is also a word – opþagelsefardþ that is unattested during the Middle Ages. Indeed, it was an obscure word that was popularised by the Norwegian historian Gustav Storm (1845-1903) in his 1888 work on Vinland, Studier over Vinlandsreiserne, Vinlands Geografi og Etnografi, parts of which had been serialised in an American Swedish language newspaper in 1889. The very word opdagelse did not enter the Scandinavian languages until the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century and borrows from Dutch opdagen and German aufdecken, both deriving from the French décovrir, “discover’, itself a spelling not attested before the sixteenth century.

Recently, claims have been made that an analysis by Scott F Wolter proves conclusively that the Kensington Runestone has been shown to be of medieval date. One of Wolter’s claims is that there are four R runes with an internal dot; a photograph reproduced on this believer’s site shows that, far from being a deliberately punched dot, the mark is irregular and not as crisply incised as the letter. Wolter’s comparison of the inscription with local tombstones carved in greywacke suggests that the weathering on the Runestone is comparable with inscriptions several centuries old; this ignores the history of the stone, which was discovered buried, which might be used as evidence that the inscription was protected from similar weathering and is thus older. This ignores any damage that might have been caused by cleaning the inscription with a nail (which supporters have used as a reason not to use the weathering (or lack thereof) as evidence for age), although it appears that only the runes on the side of the stone were cleaned in this way. Dating inscriptions by weathering is never an exact science and further work needs to be done to assess whether or not similar weathering could have occurred on a stone carved in, say, 1890, and examined in the early twentieth century; it also needs to be established that no artificial ageing of the inscription has taken place, whether by design or in the course of misguided cleaning (such as scrubbing with a wire brush or soaking in vinegar).

The alleged sword pommel of the Westford Knight

To make matters even more complex, Wolter associates the inscription with a group of Knights Templar, whom he hypothesises fled Europe following the suppression of their order in 1312. This takes us away from Holand’s hypothesis of Scandinavian explorers into conspiracy theory. Fugitive Knights Templar have been blamed for a wide variety of supposed “mysteries”, so it was only a matter of time before they were hauled into the controversy of the Kensington Runestone! Wolter’s evidence is based on cryptograms, which are rarely a good starting point for historical hypotheses. If the stone had been erected by a group of Templars, what else can be attributed to them in the New World? A variety of sites are thrown into the mix, including the Newport Tower and the Westford Knight. The first is a colonial era windmill, the second fanciful over-interpretation of glacial scratches.

Richard Nielsen has produced a comprehensive rebuttal of Wolter’s geological analysis and the hypothesis of a Knights Templar connection, although he continues to support a medieval date for the inscription (albeit cautiously: in a letter to the Runestone Museum, he states that he has “seen no unambiguous evidence that proves the K[ensington] R[une]S[tone] is modern”, which is a curiously lukewarm endorsement). The linguistic aspects of the stone are clearly the most contentious, although Nielsen is in a minority of linguists in supporting its authenticity.

Was Olof Ohman the fraudster?

The balance of probability is that stone is fraudulent. Henrik Williams, Professor of Norse Languages at the University of Uppsala, who examined the stone when it was exhibited at the Historiska Museet (Museum of National Antiquities) in Stockholm in 2003-4, believes it fraudulent. He issued a joint statement with Richard Nielsen in which they point out that its language is appropriate for neither the fourteenth or nineteenth centuries and that it “requires further study before a secure conclusion can be reached”.

The numbers of the pentimal system are the most worrying aspect of the inscription, although Holand saw it as the best confirmatory evidence. The system is not ancient and the earliest attestation of its use is from 1885, in the notes of an eighteen-year-old Swedish journeyman tailor, Edward Larsson. Medieval runes use a different system, based on alphabetic runes with an additional three symbols to give nineteen individual numerals. The numbers on the runestone were clearly a system in common use during the nineteenth century but not earlier, strong evidence that the Kensignton runestone is a nineteenth-century fraud.

An innocent man: Olof Ohman and the Kensington Runestone

Sceptics have tended to lay the blame for the fraud on Olof Ohman. They point to the discovery of a version of the inscription sent by John P Hedberg to Svenska Amerikanska Posten that differs in fifteen places from what is what is written on the stone. The runologist Erik Moltke (1901-1984), a vocal critic of the stone, suggested that this was a preliminary draft of the inscription on the grounds that the supposed errors of transcription, carried out by someone who professed to believe it was in Greek, are actually genuine runes, although forms more difficult to carve. Anyone unfamiliar with runes, as Hedberg and Ohman were supposed to be, would not have supplied symbols that made sense if they were making copying errors. Moltke reasoned that the text that had come into Hedberg’s possession “was made by a person completely familiar with these ‘runes’ and that the carver had simplified difficult shapes.

Some accounts make a great deal of a supposed “deathbed confession”, recorded by Walter Cran in 1973. In it, he claimed that his father, John, had also made a deathbed confession, in which he claimed to have assisted Olof Ohman in carving the stone; Walter had subsequently asked John Ohman, Olof’s son, on his deathbed if this was true, which he admitted. Three deathbed confessions are stretching credibility to the limit, and I think that it is safe to reject this version of events.

Many of the Runestone’s supporters have suggested that Olof Ohman was poorly educated, referring to him as a simple farmer. However, this is clearly an attempt to divert suspicion away from him. He had an ordinary schooling in Sweden (where, significantly, he would have been taught about runes and where they were still in use among country folk) and was plainly literate: he is known to have enjoyed reading, especially about the history of Sweden. There were books in his possession, including one that contained a chapter on the development of the Swedish language and a quotation from a fourteenth-century prayer ending fräelse af illu, exactly as on the stone. Moreover, friend Sven Fogelblad, had a college degree and a library of scholarly books: if Ohman had wished to forge the inscription, he certainly had the information and contacts to enable him to come up with a plausible text.

Interestingly, there is another possible context for the massacre of ten Norwegians in Minnesota, not in 1362 but in 1862. On 20 August of the latter year, a group of Native Americans dressed in war clothes attacked a community of recent Norwegian settlers at Norway Lake. It is a curious coincidence, if nothing else. However, it may have been an inspiration for whoever concocted the inscription.

It has been pointed out that Ohman arrived in the USA in 1879, just in time to have planted the tree in whose roots the Runestone was found almost twenty years later; however, he did not buy the farm until 1890, too late to have planted it, if the assessment of the age of the tree was correct. This alone ought to rule him out as the hoaxer and instead cast him in the position of the hoaxer’s dupe. His behaviour after the discovery of the stone appears to corroborate this: he made no attempt to profit from his discovery and even seems to have abandoned the stone when it was first pronounced a fake, only a few months after finding it. These are not the actions of a hoaxer; some have claimed that the discovery ruined the rest of Olof Ohman’s life, which may be something of an exaggeration, as the runestone was widely accepted as genuine from 1910 to after his death.

Nevertheless, we return to the word opdagelse, which first made an appearance among members of the American Scandinavian community in 1889. This ought to give us a terminus post quem for the writing of the inscription. This means that the stone ought to have been in the ground for no more than ten years when it was discovered and that, for nine of those years, the land had belonged to Olof Ohman. He therefore had the opportunity to plant it; it also means that, if someone wanted to target Ohman as the dupe, they also had nine years in which to plant it. Theodore Blegen found Newton Winchell’s original field notebook in 1968. It contains the geologist’s observations of the roots from which the stone had been removed, suggesting that it had been hidden among them recently; in other words, the age of the tree ceased to be an issue, since it had not grown over a stone already in the ground. Winchell had also noted in 1909 that the chisel marks were fresh and unweathered; it is also apparent today that the H incised by Holand around 1910 and the runes have a similar amount of patina, which makes Wolter’s claims that their age can be established geologically rather dubious.

In my opinion, Olof Ohman was not a hoaxer. He seems to have been genuinely puzzled by his discovery and to have disregarded it when it became apparent that scholars believed it to be fraudulent. It was only when Hjalmar Holand took up the cause on his own behalf that the case of the Kensington Runestone began to take off. Ohman was left without the stone and with a tarnished reputation, which may be what the fraudster had intended from the outset.

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Archaeology: an introduction
The online companion to the fifth edition of Kevin Greene’s textbook, hosted by its publisher, Routledge.

The Council for British Archaeology
Archaeology for all; The CBA is an educational charity working throughout the UK to involve people in archaeology and to promote the appreciation and care of the historic environment for the benefit of present and future generations.

General sceptical resources

The Skeptic’s Dictionary
A website and a book featuring definitions, arguments and essays on topics ranging from acupuncture to zombies. It provides a lively, commonsense trove of detailed information on things supernatural, paranormal, and pseudoscientific. The Web site was created in 1994 and is still evolving. The book was published in 2003 by John Wiley & Sons.

forgetomori
Extraordinary claims. Ordinary investigations. A site by Kentaro Mori, a Brazilian sceptic, with a special focus on UFO claims.

Le site de Marc Hallet
The site of Belgian sceptic Marc Hallet, with a particular focus on debunking UFO and paranormal claims. Vous y trouverez des pistes, des moyens et des conseils qui vous aideront à acquérir une certaine tournure d’esprit qui vous sera utile afin de vous forger désormais vos propres opinions en vous méfiant de tout ce que certains peuvent affirmer dans un but rarement désintéressé… In French.

Sites countering Bad Archaeology

PalaeoBabble
Your antidote to cyber-twaddle and misguided research about the ancient world.

The BS Historian
Sceptical Commentary on Pseudohistory and the Paranormal.

Hot Cup of Joe
Archaeology, Anthropology,Science, & Skepticism by a graduate in Antrhopology from the University of Texas at Arlington, with a fascination with pseudoarchaeology and so-called “alternative” archaeology and what it is that drives people to believe in this and other pseudoscientific notions.

Catchpenny Mysteries of Ancient Egypt
Larry Orcutt’s site debunking various misconceptions and outright lies about Ancient Egypt.

Jason Colavito: author, editor, & skeptical xenoarchaeologist
The sceptical site of “an author and editor based in Albany, NY, … internationally recognized by scholars, literary theorists, and scientists for his pioneering work exploring the connections between science, pseudoscience, and speculative fiction.”

A fanciful depiction of the “women warriors of the Monomotapa” from Johann Theodore de Bry and Johann Israel de Bry’s India Orientalis, c 1599

During the seventeenth century, the Portuguese has begun to dislodge the Arabs as the principal international traders on the coast of Mozambique. As they did, they began to hear stories of a king called the Monomotapa who ruled from a city called Symbãoe or Zimbãoche, some distance to the east. According to some versions of these stories, the Monomotapa’s palace was covered with plates of gold, but in 1531, Viçente Pegado, Captain of the garrison at Sofala, wrote about ruined dry-stone fortresses, a tower more than ‘twelve fathoms’ high and mines and mentioned that Symbãoe meant ‘court’ in the local language. In 1552, the Portuguese historian João de Barros (1496-1570) conjectured that it was the site of Axum, a city of the Queen of Sheba. The stories were heard second-hand from Arab merchants who traded with the peoples of the interior, but the Portuguese merchants did not travel inland.

In 1871, as Europeans began to explore the interior of southern Africa, a Swabian geologist and explorer, Karl Gottlieb Mauch (1837-1875), set out to examine the semi-legendary ruins of Monomotapa that he had heard about from the writings of a German missionary named Alexander Merensky (1837-1918), published in 1867. Setting out with an acquaintance, the ivory collector George Philips, Mauch was able to persuade a local guide to take them to the ruins of Zimbabwe. The ruins were too overgrown to examine closely, although the explorers did meet an elderly local, Babareke, who told them that he was the son of the last high priest of a cult that had once sacrificed oxen in the ruins. Other than this, Mauch and Philips were unable to learn anything about the place.

The Great Enclosure, focal point of the Great Zimbabwe complex

The site

The site of Great Zimbabwe lies in the broad valley of the River Mapudzi, a tributary of the River Sabi, which enters the Indian Ocean to the south of Sofala. The landscape is granite, with small hillocks and crags, which exfoliates (cracks away) from exposed rock faces as temperatures change through the year. This provides a convenient building material, used by the builders of Great Zimbabwe and nearby sites. Soapstone, found 24 km (15 miles) away, was useful for carving, while slate and quartz were also imported to the site. The ruins of Great Zimbabwe sit on top of a steep-sided hillock and cover an area of 0.65 km2 (about 0.25 square miles). The largest structure is an elliptical enclosure (sometimes called the Temple, the Elliptical Building or the Great Enclosure), with the Acropolis at the top of the hill, 550 m (600 yards) to the north; there are other ruins in the valley bottom to the north and east. As the Arab merchants had told their Portuguese rivals, the buildings were of dry stone construction, although the walls were plastered.

The controversy begins

Like so many European explorers, Mauch published a book about his explorations when he returned to Germany; also, like so many Europeans encountering strange ruins, he tried to explain them in terms of known civilisations and cultures. He thought that Babareke had described a Semitic ritual and that the ruins were those of the biblical Ophir, the site of King Solomon’s fabled mines. One of the ruined buildings, he reasoned, was a copy of Solomon’s Temple, while the great oval enclosure (which he called Zimbabye) was a copy of the palace where the Queen of Sheba had stayed in Jerusalem. He believed that this meant that she had lived at Zimbabwe, built by Phoenician architects.

The iconic soapstone bird of Zimbabwe

The inevitable looting follows

Mauch’s book caused a sensation in Europe and made the ruins an attraction for treasure-hunters, keen to locate Solomon’s supposed treasures. When Cecil Rhodes (1853-1902) established Southern Rhodesia in 1889 (basically a private corporation set up to administer a huge territory at considerable profit), the ruins were part of the estate of the South African settlers Willi and Harry Posselt. Willi had tried to remove a soapstone carving from one of the ruins in 1888, but was driven off by locals. According to one version of the story, in 1889, he cut a carved soapstone bird from its pillar in return for blankets and trinkets offered to a local Chief, Mugabe, and sold it to Cecil Rhodes, while yet another version claims that he hid others, intending to return to the site to collect them later. He subsequently published an account, The Early Days of Mashonaland and a Visit to Great Zimbabwe Ruins, bemoaning the lack of treasure on the site.

Archaeological excavations and misinterpretations

In 1891, the archaeologist James Theodore Bent (1852-1897) spent two months excavating in the ruins and was able to remove the soapstone birds, which were taken to the museum at Cape Town (they were returned to Zimbabwe in 1981). In the early years of the Southern Rhodesia colony, an Ancient Ruins Company was set up, with the express purpose of prospecting the ruins for treasure. Franchises were sold by the administrator of Mashonaland, Leander Starr Jameson (1853-1917), for forty or so sites, which yielded little more than 5 kg of gold but which destroyed their stratigraphic integrity.

Bent concluded from his excavations that the site had been built by Sabaeans, Phoenicians or another Semitic people, just as Mauch had conjectured. This was based on the presence of soapstone phalli, the shape of the conical tower and the oval shape of the Great Enclosure, which resembles a building at Ma’rib (مأرب, Yemen) identified as the harîm of Bilqîs, the Queen of Sheba. He suggested that Great Zimbabwe was identical with both the biblical Ophir and the Punt of Ancient Egyptian texts and that it had continued to flourish under Arab influence into the Middle Ages. He believed that a coin of the Roman Emperor Antoninus Pius (138-161 CE) found in a mine-shaft at Mutale (Zimbabwe, Umtali before 1982) strengthened his case. unfortunately, it seems that this is all we know about the coin.

Later explorers and archaeologists concurred with Bent’s opinion. The first was Karl (or Carl) Peters (1856-1918), the creator of German Tanganyika, who had never visited the site but who had explored ruins further east in 1899-1900. His racist attitudes (he referred to the population of Tanganyika as “sickly and useless rubbish” and believed that they should either be used by white settlers as forced labour or exterminated) clearly coloured his attitudes to who might have built the ruins.

Finally, in 1902, the new legislative council of Southern Rhodesia passed a law protecting the sites and a curator, the journalist Richard Nicklin Hall (1853-1914), was appointed to oversee Great Zimbabwe itself. Hall spent two years excavating the great enclosure, which he published in detail. He believed that he could distinguish two occupations – one sun-worshipping Semitic (perhaps Himyarite Arabs), the other medieval Arab – separated by a long period of abandonment. Hall avowedly wished to free the site “from the filth and decadence of the Kaffir occupation”, deliberately removing anything that might link the site with local African peoples and clearing some twelve feet (1.8 m) of deposits in an operation that was described by a visiting archaeologist as “reckless blundering… worse than anything I have ever seen”. As a result, Hall was dismissed from his post.

The truth will out…

However, the site was far from exhausted and further excavations were conducted by David Randall-MacIver (1873-1945) in 1905. Randall-MacIver’s conclusions were startling to the colonial administration. During his excavation campaign of 1905, he had found nothing but indigenous African artefacts and imported medieval goods (including Persian beads, glass and Chinese porcelains), all of fourteenth-century and later date. His criticism of Richard Nicklin Hall pulled no punches, sparking off a bitter debate that lasted for years.

Renewed excavations in 1929, conducted by Gertrude Caton-Thompson (1888-1985), confirmed MacIver’s discovery that the material was much later than the time of Solomon, although she was able to push the origin of the site back to the ninth or tenth century CE. In 1950, Samuel Dickson Sandes (1899-1984), Warden of Zimbabwe National Park, recovered a wooden lintel that had been used as a drain cover in the Elliptical Building, which was radiocarbon dated to 1304±55 bp, with a 98% probability of falling into the range 619-819 CE. The Rhodesian archaeologist Roger Summers was able to use this date in 1955 to suggest a slightly earlier origin, but still no earlier than the fifth century CE. Summers’ views on the indigenous origin of Great Zimbabwe and related sites brought him into conflict with the colonial administration, which was beginning to take a hard line on interpretations of the site.

Racist misiniterpretation

Randall-MacIver’s discoveries did nothing to silence the proponents of external origins. As well as the Semitic origins that had long been popular, origins in southern India (Dravidian traders blown on the monsoon winds) or Malaya (the origin of the population of Madagascar) were also proposed. The Semitic origin theory had been boosted by Henry Rider Haggard’s (1856-1925) adventure novel King Solomon’s Mines, published in 1895, and this remained the most popular explanation for the ruins, despite the impossibility of the dating.

In 1930, the German ethnologist Leo Viktor Frobenius (1873-1938) announced in a Cape Town newspaper that he had identified the “source of the civilisation which created Zimbabwe and many hundreds of ruins scattered over Rhodesia, Portuguese East Africa and parts of Bechuanaland”. He placed its foundation between 4000 and 1000 BCE, much earlier than indicated by the archaeologists’ discoveries, and believed the builders to have been Sumerians from near the Caspian Sea. Frobenius also claimed that Atlantis was located in southern Africa…

It is obvious that the interpretation of site in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was coloured by racial prejudice on the part of white European explorers and, later, settlers. Convinced that so complex a monument could not be of indigenous African origin, explorers, antiquaries and archaeologists ignored, misinterpreted and wilfully destroyed evidence. The excavations carried out on the site for more than a century have shown beyond any doubt whatsoever that Great Zimbabwe is an entirely indigenous monument.

Where are we today?

First settled around the fifth century CE by Iron Age pastoralists of the Gokomere Culture, the great stone architecture has been found to date from the twelfth to fifteenth centuries CE. Sandes’s early radiocarbon date appeared anomalous by the late 1960s and a second sample produced a fourteenth-century date; all but four of the 28 dates now available confirm the dating of the imported ceramics and glassware. The origins of Great Zimbabwe and related sites can now be seen as an opportunistic response to the decline of the Mapungubwe kingdom, a state that lay farther south and which was characterised by its hierarchical society and wide trading links via the ancient port of Rhapta and the Islamic trading post of Kilwa Kisiwani.

Bizarrely, the possibility of a Semitic connection has been raised by DNA analysis of local Lemba people, whose claim to a Jewish ancestry on the male side appears to be confirmed. This has been suggested as the origin for apparently circumcised phallic sculptures found in some of the ruins. However, although the supposed archaeological parallels in burial practice, architectural style and so on have received a great deal of criticism, the Zimbabwean archaeologist Peter Garlake describing them as “worthless polemic”. The Wikipedia article on the Lemba people carries no hint of doubt about the claim, referring to the Lemba as a “Jewish Diasporan subethnic group”; as our understanding of the relatively new science of DNA analysis improves, we may well see these ideas either confirmed or disproved.

During the 1960s and 70s, Great Zimbabwe became a symbol of the African Nationalist movement, as the white government of Southern Rhodesia (which had issued a Unilateral Declaration of Independence from British colonial rule in 1965) suppressed the overwhelming evidence that it is indeed of African origin. The archaeologist in charge of the site during the latter years of Southern Rhodesia, Paul Sinclair, once said in an interview “I was told by the then-director of the Museums and Monuments organisation to be extremely careful about talking to the press about the origins of the Zimbabwe state. I was told that the museum service was in a difficult situation, that the government was pressurising them to withhold the correct information. Censorship of guidebooks, museum displays, school textbooks, radio programmes, newspapers and films was a daily occurrence. Once a member of the Museum Board of Trustees threatened me with losing my job if I said publicly that blacks had built Zimbabwe. He said it was okay to say the yellow people had built it, but I wasn’t allowed to mention radio carbon dates.”.

In 1964, The science-fiction writer Lyon Sprague de Camp was able to write: -“Zimbabwe had the bad luck to get caught up in the great twentieth-century dispute over differences among the races of men. Those who wanted to show that the white or Caucasoid race is better than other have been eager to show that Zimbabwe was built by whites”. Today, we are less concerned with the characteristics of whole ‘races’ because anthropologists (as opposed to political bigots) no longer view ‘race’ as a useful analytical concept.

When Southern Rhodesia achieved majority rule and became Zimbabwe in 1980, the new nation chose the name of the site to represent the entire country. Despite the political and economic problems the country has experienced since independence, Great Zimbabwe remains a potent symbol of African pride.

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British Society of Dowsers
Celebrating their 75th Anniversary in 2008. Smart website, perhaps the best British hope for the Randi $1m challenge.

Wyatt Archaeological Research fraud documentation
A Christian page exposing Ron Wyatt’s discoveries as a fraud.

The Epic of Gilgamesh
This ancient epic contains an account of a flood that is too similar to the account of Noah’s flood in Genesis to be coincidence.

The Creation Museum
Come and see the archaeological proof of Genesis (from the Bible not Phil Collins et al.). This well-funded American operation opened May 28th 2007 near Cincinnati, KY. “Leave your brain at the door”!

Answers in Genesis
There aren’t any.