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Author Topic: Mammoth � La Mode  (Read 246 times)
Description: Paleolithic Discoveries in 19th Century Europe Spawn Copy-Cat Frauds in America
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Jesus of Lubeck
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« on: September 17, 2007, 08:21:19 PM »

Dr. Hilborne T. Cresson, an archaeological field assistant attached to the Peabody Museum, ended his life in suicide in 1894 amid hallucinations of the Treasury Agents hunting him down as a counterfeiter of greenbacks. Dr. Cresson�s suicide note, however, failed to shed any light on what his professional colleagues at the Peabody Museum and scientists seeking evidence of an American Paleolithic most wanted to know: was his find at Holly Oak, Delaware, of a whelk shell incised with a mammoth or mastodon-like creature a forgery? Nineteenth century American paleontologists and archaeologists (using the term understanding that these sciences were in their infancy) had been seeking a North American Holy Grail, an artifact demonstrating that early humankind co-existed in North America with extinct mega-fauna.

In 1890, Dr. Cresson, near the end of a diligent but unspectacular career seeking proof of an American Paleolithic, announced that he and an associate actually had discovered such evidence some thirty-odd years previously in a peat-bog proximate to a railroad station in Holly Oak Dellaware. At this time, Dr. Hilborne T. Cresson and Mr. W. L. de Suralt found a number of curious bone and shell artifacts.  In the assemblage that resulted from these finds was a pendant carved from a fossil whelk shell.  Incised into the surface of one side of the shell was what clearly appeared to be a representation of a woolly mammoth-like creature.  The find has come to be known as the Holly Oak Pendant.  The authenticity of this artifact has from its discovery labored under a thick cloud of doubt.  Yet despite its dubious authenticity, the artifact has exerted a measurable influence on the debate of the settlement and peopling of the Americas.



Since Eduard Lertet and Henry Christy jointly published their findings of such evidence based on excavations in the cave systems of Dordogne, France, in1865, American scientists had been engaged for some thirty years (by the time of Dr. Cresson�s death) in a fruitless search for evidence commensurate with and contemporaneous to the astounding artifacts and artwork related to the Aurignacian cultural horizon that was estimated to date back to about 35,000 years BCE found in Europe. Indeed, as the nineteenth century�s Belle Epoc drew to a close, American scholars grounded in the findings and work of Lertat and Christy could glance could sit back in their studies and survey an American archaeological science landscape littered with the bones of fraudulent discoveries (Calveras skull, Davenport Elephant pipes, Lanape stone, Nampa Image, etc., latter discussions of these cases will follow).

Dr. Cresson�s announcement in 1890 of his backdated (1864) discovery of the Holly Oak pendant, had all the hallmarks of a fraud, however, its association with a Peabody archaeologist demanded at least a tacit and polite glance from the scientific community.  Most of this story covers points that have been well documented by scholars; however, the case of the Holly Oak pendant is worth noting. Advances in European science, particularly in the nineteenth century, cast a long shadow across related disciplines in the United States.  In the thirty years that paleontology and archaeology were blossoming into a science in Europe, Americans scientists were being schooled in fantastic European advances and had nothing of their own to offer up but fairly recent collections of worked points, bone, and shell middens. 

This is a short two-part sketch of the major points concerning the debate of the Holly Oak artifact�s authenticity and the influence of European influence of European discoveries on North American archaeology and paleontology.  During the thirty years between 1864 and 1894, American scientists seeking evidence of an American Paleolithic did so peering through a lens crafted to place the European Paleolithic into focus and the results were chaotic.

Provenance and Site Context for the Backdated Holly Oak Find:

As with many artifacts of questionable provenance, the record of the Holly Oak pendant find�s exact location (its in situ context) at discovery is hopelessly (perhaps intentionally) muddled.  The first red-flag has already been noted: Dr. Cresson announced his find in 1890 and backdated the discovery to 1864, itself a self-serving ploy to preempt Lertat and Christy.  But there are other problems: one source reports that the pendant was discovered amidst some peat being dug from a �deep� hole on the Delaware River plain opposite the Holly Oak station of the Pennsylvania Railroad (Weslager, 1968).  In this instance, farmers are stated to have been digging peat for use as fertilizer.  Another report of the Holly Oak pendant�s discovery describes a refinement of the peat story; in this version, the pendant was found within a layer of peat already spread on a farmer�s field located near the Holly Oak station of the Wilmington and Baltimore railroad. In this version, the peat that was spread on the farmer�s field was identified as coming from a �fallen forest layer in one of the adjoining estuaries of the Delaware River (Smithsonian Institution Annual Report, 1891). It is worth noting that there is a drift toward legitimizing the Holly Oak find.  The 1891 report states that the pendant was found almost on the surface in a farmer�s field, whereas later sources well into the 20th century report that the find came from a trench of significant depth.

Cresson pursued archaeology in the north Delaware region from 1864 until his suicide in 1894.  He was deeply committed to researching and locating evidence of early man in North America.  During his career, Cresson located and catalogued over one thousand artifacts associated with prehistoric indigenous cultures in Delaware.  Cresson�s assemblages included potsherds, stone knives, arrowheads, stone celts, stone axeheads, shell beads, an a mastodon tooth, as well as numerous bone implements and other artifacts.

The Cresson assemblages, which are divided between the Peabody Museum, and the Museum of Natural History, Smithsonion Institution, contain artifacts that appear to fall into two general periods: the first, to which the lion�s share of the artifacts belong falls within the Archaic period (8000 to 2000 BCE).   A second, smaller group of artifacts, which includes the bone implements and the Holly Oak pendant with its incised supposed mammoth image, is said by some modern specialists to date to the Paleo-Indian period (pre-8000 BCE).

In 1987, carbon dating placed the object in a period range dating from 750 to 1000 BCE. The official scientific community concluded that it could not possibly be a representation of a mammoth modeled after a living animal.  One must therefore consider it to be a forgery, Cresson himself could have procured a welk shell and have engraved upon it the mammoth inspired by the Madeleine sculpture found in Dordogne in 1864.

The Intellectual Context of the Cresson discoveries.

At this juncture, the discussion must beat a tactical retreat from analysis of the Holly Oak pendant itself and shift focus to the broader issue of the intellectual context that researchers, for in this era there was no systematic science of archaeology, of early man operated within during 1864.  Needless to say, science was not static on the subject.  In France particularly, great advances were made in founding the science of physical anthropology and paleontology by Monsieur Eduard Letat.



A native of Dordogne, Lartet, whose family had built its wealth on the practice of law (and had somehow escaped the vicissitudes of the Napoleonic Wars) found that he was able to devote himself entirely to the pursuit of his scientific interests.  He was heavily influence by the written work of Georges Cuvier on fossil mammalia and, among other notable accomplishments during a remarkable scientific career, he was the first paleontologist to map out primate genera.  Lartet�s fascination with the question of whether humans and large mammals cooexisted led him to begin exploring the cave systems of Dordogne, a region that had for centuries engaged in the quarrying of limestone blocks.

In 1834, while exploring in an area around the town of Auch, Lartet made his first major discovery of fossil remains.  This discovery caused him to embark on a years-long systematic survey of cave systems throughout France.  The results from these examinations (they were not yet really excavations) were the publishing of several works of major importance to the foundation of the sciences of paleontology and physical anthropology.  his first publication on the subject being The Antiquity of Man in WesternEurope (1860), followed in 1861 by New Researches on the Coexistence of Man and of the Great Fossil Mammifers characteristic of the Last Geological Period. In this last work, Lartet made public the results of his discoveries in the cave system of Aurignac, where evidence existed of the contemporaneous existence of man and extinct megafauna.




By the mid-1860s, Lartet teamed up with Englishman Henry Christy.  Christy, himself a successful businessman, was at the time of his association with Lartet, an accomplished ethnologist and a member of the Royal Geographic society. His wealth and interest in the search for evidence of the antiquity of humankind funded the project that led to the discovery of Cro-Magnon man in 1868. With Christy�s assistance, the two scientists published their joint research describing the Dordogne cave systems they explored along the river Vzre, a tributary of the Dordogne, along with these systems� fossil remains and artifact assemblages in the Revue arch�ologique (1864).  The spectacular discoveries from the Madeleine cave, which included the famous mammoth statuette, were published by Lartet and Christy under the title Reliquiae Aquitanicae, the first part appearing in 1865. Suffice to say, Lartet and Christy laid the groundwork for the identification of what is commonly known as Aurignacian culture.



News of these exciting discoveries quickly spread across the Atlantic to a United States largely caught up in the throws of the last year of the Civil War.  Nevertheless, Lartet and Christy�s dramatic successes in Dordogne electrified the American scientific community and caught the imagination of some sectors of the war-weary public imagination.  In America, there was a strong desire to duplicate the results of Lartet and Christy and find evidence of an American Paleolithic, even if we had to create the evidence. (End of part one. Part two will discuss the history of the Holly Oak pendant in the 20th century as the science of archaeology and paleontology matured).
Sources:

Early Man at Holly Oak, Delaware
John C. Kraft; Ronald A. Thomas
Science, New Series, Vol. 192, No. 4241. (May 21, 1976), pp. 756-761.
 
A Mammoth Fraud in Science
James B. Griffin; David J. Meltzer; Bruce D. Smith; William C. Sturtevant American Antiquity, Vol. 53, No. 3. (Jul., 1988), pp. 578-582.

Les Mammouths - Dossiers Arch�ologie - n� 291 - Mars 2004 (excerpt translated by Lubby)


Very Best Regards,

Lubby
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« Reply #1 on: September 17, 2007, 08:42:54 PM »

Thank you for that account, Lubby. There is an account of Cresson's claim in the journal New Scientist:
In search of a mammoth fraud: Did a North American from the Stone Age carve the image of a mammoth on a bit of hell? Or is the so-called Holly Oak pendant yet another archaeological fake?
14 July 1990
DAVID MELTZER

Two extracts:

1. One notice referred to his 'tragic death,' but, oddly, none listed his age. I needed to know this, since he had been described as a 'young man' in 1889 when the existence of the pendant was first revealed, and yet he claimed to have made the discovery in 1864. How old could he have been in 1864? And why was the discovery only made public 25 years after the fact? Rather puzzling, the chronology of this story, and initially we did not appreciate the significance of the dates.

2. I turned to the 1880 census. There he was, living in Philadelphia with his Cresson in-laws. The story stayed peculiar to the end: Hilborne, who then had been a Cresson for only five years, is listed as the son and his wife as the daughter-in-law. His age was given as 32 as of 1 June 1880, making him 16 years old in 1864.
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« Reply #2 on: September 17, 2007, 09:15:46 PM »

Hello Administration,

Thank you for highlighting Dr. Meltzer's role in untangling the Holly Oak mystery.  I intend to touch on Meltzer's personal odyssey in these events in a follow up post.  The story does indeed stay peculiar to the end: Dr. Cresson's grave marker is the only one in the cemetery where he now rests in eternal slumber that records no year of birth.

In the twentieth century some hard lessons were yet to brought home by the Holly Oak pendant. Dr. Meltzer's involvement also demonstrates how the archaeologist can profit from historical investigation, particularly if his or her research centers on a controversial artifact.

Very Best Regards,

Lubby

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« Reply #3 on: September 18, 2007, 09:05:51 AM »

You are bringinging into focus some important issues, Lubby. Hard lessons indeed and well worth learning. I look forward with great anticipation to your expounding on this.
 Cheesy
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« Reply #4 on: September 25, 2007, 08:46:58 PM »

In the spring of 1976, Drs. John C. Kraft and Ronald A. Thomas were at the top of their respective scientific professions. The two scientists had teamed up to tackle the question that had vexed American archaeology and anthropology since Lartet and Christy defined the Aragnacian cultural horizon in Europe through their discoveries in the 1860s: was there evidence of an American Paleolithic where humans and Ice-Age mega-fauna co-existed? The two scientists represented an interdisciplinary approach to research that boded well for pushing the frontiers of discovery beyond limitations present within any one discipline of science.  Kraft was the chair of the geology department as well as a professor of marine geology at the University of Delaware in Newark.  His colleague, Dr. Thomas, was head of the section of archaeology (Division of Historical and Cultural Affairs) for the State of Delaware.


Dr. John C. Kraft

In 1976, the team published what would prove to be a contentious paper in the journal Science that, at the very least, would be construed by some academics as an attempt to breath life and legitimacy into the almost forgotten artifact: Cresson�s Holly Oak pendant.  The jointly authored article titled Early Man at Holly Oak, Delaware, already perhaps sent a slight chill down the spines of American anthropologists working on the problem of human settlement of the Americas. Holly Oak connotated something best left out of any serious scientific discussion for a number of reasons already apparent as the 19th century closed; an artifact tainted by serious questions of fraud that had already destroyed the career of its discoverer or manufacturer. Yet here in 1976 the artifact was, emblazoned on the cover of Science magazine, an organ with national readership. The Holly Oak pendant�s new media prominence, in association with new scientific support, threatened to propel the artifact toward a celebrity and credibility that only the 20th century media could provide. It is easy with hindsight and the benefit of Dr. Meltzer�s diligent historical research to dismiss the episode and move on to other subjects. But as a question of science and interpretation of evidence, the question lingers: why did Thomas and Kraft take the artifact back out of its collection drawer at the Smithsonian and use it as the keystone supporting the arch of an otherwise scientifically grounded argument?


An illustration showing geologic sequences from James Hutton's Theory of the Earth (1795).  James Hutton developed the Theory of Uniformitarianism upon which the science of historical geology was founded.

Dr. John C. Kraft received his Ph.D. in Geology/Micropaleontology from the University of Minnesota, graduating in1955.  His professional career first developed in that great incubator of historical geologists, International Oil. Working with Shell Canada, Ltd., Dr. Kraft served as Division Stratigrapher between 1961 and 1964.  The Division Stratigrapher in an oil exploration company plays a crucial role in the risk assessment and geologic analysis of potential hydrocarbon discoveries. In this role, he developed the intricate and arcane art of weighing a combination of fossil and geologic data against the probability of commercially profitable oil recovery.  It is a position that requires a scientist to work objectively while millions of dollars in capital investment hang in the balance, largely dependent on the geologist�s ability to correctly sequence hundreds of core samples.  Dr. Kraft became an expert in this field and excelled in this high-stakes environment.  In 1964, Dr. Kraft began his association with the University of Delaware where his private sector skills in combination with his rigorous practice of science earned him his Professorship and Department Chair by 1969. In was within this academic setting that the Holly Oak pendant first came to Dr. Kraft�s attention.

Dr. Kraft turned his vast private sector experience in historical geology and stratigraphic analysis toward questions fundamental to understanding the earth-history of the continental shelf and coastal margins, particularly those in proximity to the Delaware coast.  His academic writings also demonstrate a special interest in the geologic periods known as the Pleistocene (1,800,000 to 11,550 years BCE) and the Holocene (11,550 years BCE) that extends to the present day. As Dr. Kraft entered into academia, he appears to have shifted his geologic focus to those geologic periods that witnessed the rise of Homo sapiens and human culture.  As the decade of the 1970s commenced, Dr. Kraft appeared particularly interested in how historical geology could help unlock the secrets of human prehistory

This was a very exciting period in the development of geologic science.  As difficult as it is to believe, at the time Dr. Kraft began his career, the phenomenon of continental drift was still a theory and not a widely held one. By the 1970s, academics in the field of historical geology (many having experience in the corporate exploration for hydrocarbons), translated the wealth of offshore core data into solid evidence that the continents were in movement over a geologically plastic mantel. What followed from this evidence were fundamental changes in our understanding of how the planet geologically behaves: by the 1970s, understanding continental drift led to explanations of related phenomena such as subduction zones, spreading ocean floor centers, and patterns of volcanism.


Conceptual model of subduction zone and plate tectonics 

Vast amounts of core data were taken by historical geologists searching for hydrocarbons during the mid-twentieth century offshore oil exploration boom.  Much of this data, from a commercial point of view, were entirely useless and represented geologic sequences either much more recent that those indicative of hydrocarbon deposits, or far older.  Yet to geologists, it was this non-commercial data that, in strictly scientific terms, was the most intriguing.

Dr. Kraft was part of a generation of geoscientists whose knowledge of stratigraphic sequencing in the offshore oil industry was unlocking secrets long held in the bosom of Nature.  The question many of these geoscientists posed was: how does the science of historical geology (stratigraphic sequencing) help science�s understanding of areas of academic or purely scientific concern?  Shorn from its commercial and hydrocarbon roots, could the modern exposition of the science be turned toward solving problems that furthered humanity�s knowledge of itself and its role on the planet.  Could historical geology serve as a lens to bring questions of prehistory into sharper focus?  If so, where to begin?

Running in tangent with the developments in geologic science were equally exciting developments in the sciences of archaeology and physical anthropology.  New dating systems had matured and, as happened with Lartet and Christy in the 1860s in the Dordogne, Richard Leaky�s team in Ethiopia was pushing the frontiers of human antiquity farther back into the mists of time.  Far enough back, in fact, to overlap with areas of historical geology.  In 1974, two years prior to the Kraft-Thomas Holly Oak article, Leaky�s group, searching in East Africa�s great rift valley, located the skull of an ancestral hominid species, Australopithecus afarensis, popularly known to the world as "Lucy". The Leaky finds, cooberated by carbon 14 dating, suggested an age of approximately 3.5 million years BCE for the fossil.  The discovery of Australopithecus afarensis electrified both the scientific and popular communities every bit as much as the finds of Lartet and Christy a little over a century earlier.  The Leaky team�s finds also augured an era of interdisciplinary partnerships from different fields of science designed to better cope with the problems of interpreting artifacts related to human prehistory.


Australopithecus afarensis (AKA Lucy) discovered by the Leaky Group in Ethiopia in 1974

It was against this backdrop of international interest in human prehistory in the wake of the Leaky group�s Ethiopian discovery of Australopithecus afarensis that American scholars Kraft and Thomas embarked on a project designed to demonstrate the utility of historical geology working in concert with archaeology.  The two scientists would proceed in two stages: first, could the science of historical geology (core samples, stratigraphic sequencing, analysis of microfloral and microfaunal fossil forms, etc.) generate an accurate Pleistocene or Holocene geomorphology for the Holly Oak, Delaware coastal region?  Second, using H. T. Cresson�s Holly Oak pendant, would this geomorphology support archaeological evidence for an American Paleolithic? [end of part 2]

Very Best Regards,

Lubby

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« Reply #5 on: October 10, 2007, 10:10:40 PM »

Lubby:
Enjoyed the account of Cresson's attempt to find an "American Aurignacian (sic)"...but why did he commit suicide?

Kentucky
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