Aiding and abetting such public ignorance are mainstream scholars. Their vested professional and financial interests uphold the fiction of early America isolated from the rest of the outside world in a kind of impervious cultural vacuum. This academic dogma has absolutely dominated consensus reality where our real origins are concerned. Maverick researchers or independent investigators who question official versions of the past are shunned, their careers threatened and sometimes ruined, their reputations held up for ridicule.

A gulf separating certified from vocational archaeologists in the U.S. is immense and unbridgeable. Any finds made by the latter or their opinions, no matter how credible, are never officially recognized. In sharp contrast, a real, working relationship exists between university-trained astronomers and amateurs, who often make important discoveries for the advancement of their science. No such rapport exists between professional and amateur archaeologists, resulting in the stagnation of American archaeology. American archaeologists are necessarily subjective in their approach to our country's pre-Columbian past, which they have done and are doing so much to unearth and preserve. But their training and interpretation traditionally lack the greater scope required to place their finds within the context of the times in which the objects were made and used. Tightly focused views become narrow-minded, and miss the greater picture that at least sometimes provides answers not otherwise forthcoming.

Unfortunately, a rigid unwillingness to look outside the academic box of strictly localized human activities during prehistory amounts to scientific dogma forbidding tenured professionals from so much as stealing a glance at any possibilities for outside influences. Most readers probably assume archaeologists, like geologists or physicists, are scientists. But they are not. Instead, archaeology is taught as one of the humanities at our universities and colleges. Most unscientific is the often-poor rapport between armchair academics publishing textbooks for their students and excavators engaged in the reality of hands-on archaeology.

Himself an accredited archaeologist, Craig Childs admits in his book about the Anasazi, House of Rain, that what one hears "from fieldworkers often differs from what archaeological scholars say." They have little or nothing to say about the mountains of evidence for pre- Columbian visitors to America from the ancient Old World. What, for example, became of the half-billion pounds of high-grade copper excavated around the Upper Great Lakes Region more than three thousand years ago is a question never asked in polite company for fear of embarrassing parallels with the Near East's contemporaneous Bronze Age.

Louisiana's Poverty Point, the oldest city in North America, is a dead-ringer for Plato's description of Atlantis, something altogether avoided in any academic discussion of the site. Mainstream archaeologists teach that the Great Serpent Mound was built by tribal Indians no more than six or seven centuries ago, even though archaeo-astronomers have known since the late 20th Century that Ohio's foremost effigy was deliberately oriented to the Constellation Draco, which it was meant to symbolize, some 4,000 years ago.

At the same time Neolithic Britons gathered at Stonehenge to observe the positions of the sun and moon, similarly structured and aligned "Medicine Wheels" were operative in the Rocky Mountains, although conventional scholars dismiss any apparent relationships as entirely coincidental. They cannot explain Florida's own "Stonehenge", a pillared monument inadvertently excavated during construction of a Miami apartment building during the late 1990s, nor who built the nearby network of stone canals in the Everglades.

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For more information or to purchase this book simply click on the title: Unearthing Ancient America: The Lost Sagas of Conquerors, Castaways, and Scoundrels.

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