Talk:Pre-Columbian transoceanic contact theories

MiszaBot

For some reason, the bot doesn't seem to be archiving this talk page (all the current content should have been archived already). Does anyone know how to fix this? ClovisPt (talk) 21:13, 20 April 2010 (UTC)

Couldn't figure it out; since it hasn't yet worked on this talk page, I'm removing it, and will continue to manually archive older discussion. Regards, ClovisPt (talk) 19:58, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

Background needed

It should be mentioned that the idea that there were other people before Columbus hearkens back to what Bruce Trigger calls the "Imperial Synthesis" period (c1770 (Edward Long) to c1890) which was eventually replaced with the Culture-historical/Historical Particularism/Boasian school of thought which began in the 1880s.

John Lubbock thought were echoed in the idea of unilinear evolution so popular back then: The most primitive were doomed to vanish as a result of the spread of civilization, since no amount of education could compensate for the thousands of years during which natural selection had failed to adapt them biologically to a more complex and orderly way of life" (Trigger pg 117). This mindset in part led to the Boasian mentality of recording these "doomed" people in detail before civilization's advancement made them go the way of the dodo.

In addition Charles Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg in 1862 put forth the idea of Atlantis being a "Golden Age" civilization that became popular with the masses with Donnelly's 1882 Atlantis: The Antediluvian World and since plate tectonics didn't exist as a theory until 1912 the required land bridges (need for the movement of animals and people) made the idea less fringe then one would think. Nearly all the developmental theories formed in this period have since been rejected due to new discoveries or that the original theories were more based on racial or nationalistic grounds (many times to justify suppression of indigenous populations in colonies) than any real data.

On a side note I should mention this is why the Vikings landing in North American theory had such a hard time of it in the 1960s and 70s--most of the scientific community saw it as a revival of the old Imperial Synthesis idea that the Native Americans couldn't have produced any "civilization" without outside (mostly European or European-like) help.--BruceGrubb (talk) 16:58, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

This reads like a potentially beneficial contribution to the article. If you have some sources to support it, feel free to try and work it in. Cheers, ClovisPt (talk) 23:16, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

Non-settlement contact

I would like to see discussion of claims that European fishermen used the Grand Banks, and sometimes landed in Newfoundland, long before they settled there, and before Columbus. People used to say Cartier discovered Canada, but now Wikipedia says more accurately he "was the first European to describe and map[5] the Gulf of Saint Lawrence" since he himself said French fisherman had been drying fish on the shore there before him. So, that was one century after Columbus, and I do not claim to know what happened. But it is at least reasonable that fishermen would find the Grand Banks well before 1490 and would use them with no interest in either settling or claiming discoveries. Colin McLarty (talk) 12:45, 4 July 2010 (UTC)

Sinclair and Clovis/Kennewick Man

Don't these merit a mention? The Sinclair "discovery" is quite well known in Scotland, and Rosslyn Chapel likes to advertise it.--MacRusgail (talk) 18:28, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

Chinese in Albequerque

I recall at a tourist pueblo some discussion of the pueblo peoples having receive the visiting Chinese exploratory expedition in their oral history; if anyone can find a reference for this it would surely belong on this page 65.46.169.246 (talk) 23:25, 13 September 2010 (UTC)