Thrown to the Fringe: Challenging the Myth of Columbus

Summary

European imperialism, in league with the Vatican, retained the Church’s political support by accepting its moral imperative to Christianize everyone not in its communion. Thus Columbus was a Crusader, and European international law gave heathen lands to the first Christian nation claiming discovery––the Doctrine of Discovery. Two centuries later, the Earl of Shaftesbury’s employee John Locke wrote treatises justifying his employer’s landlord class enclosing common lands in Britain, extending to justify Shaftesbury’s Carolina Colony takeover of American Indian lands: title to land depends on claimant “improving” the land and holding written title exchangeable for money. Nations north of central Mexico therefore had only usufruct privilege. Archaeologists label all those nations’ histories “prehistory”. The Doctrine of Discovery paradigm incorporating Locke’s dicta marginalized scientists outside mainstream archaeology (including Alexander von Humboldt, Carl O. Sauer, Joseph Needham, Baron Nordenskiöld, David Kelley, Gordon Ekholm, Paul Tolstoy, Robert Heine-Geldern, and, outside of Oceania, Roger Green) as well as many avocational researchers. Challenging America’s Malinowskian social charter myth, that Columbus discovered a wilderness New World, these researchers and their data constitute anomalies outside normal science––in Kuhn’s terms––in American archaeology.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Collaborations and Competition between Professionals and Nonprofessionals in the Production of Archaeological Knowledge in the Americas

Keywords

Spatial Coverage