Man Across the Sea: Problems of Pre-Columbian Contacts

by Carroll L. Riley (Editor), J. Charles Kelley (Editor), Campbell W. Pennington (Editor)

Whether humans crossed the seas between the Old World and the New in the times before Columbus is a tantalizing question that has long excited scholarly interest and tempted imaginations the world over. From the myths of Atlantis and Mu to the more credible, perhaps, but hardly less romantic tales of Viking ships and Buddhist missionaries, people have speculated upon what is, after all, not simply a question of contact, but of the nature and growth of civilization itself. To the specialist, it is an important question indeed. If people in the Western Hemisphere and in the Eastern Hemisphere developed their cultures more or less independently from the end of the last Ice Age until the voyages of Columbus, the remarkable similarities between New World and Old World cultures reveal something important about the evolution of culture. If, on the other hand, there were widespread or sustained contacts between the hemispheres in pre-Columbian times, these contacts represent events of vast significance to the prehistory and history of humanity. Originally delivered at a symposium held in May 1968, during the national meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, the papers presented here, by scholars eminent in the field, offer differing points of view and considerable evidence on the pros and cons of pre-Columbian contact between the Old World and the New. Various kinds of data—archaeological, botanical, geographical, and historical—are brought to bear on the problem, with provocative and original results. Introductory and concluding remarks by the editors pull together and evaluate the evidence and suggest ground rules for future studies of this sort. Man across the Sea provides no final answers as to whether people from Asia, Africa, or Europe visited the American Indian before Columbus. It does, however, present new evidence, suggested lines of approach, and a fresh attempt to delineate the problems involved and to establish acceptable canons of evidence for the future.

552 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 1971

About the author

Dr. Riley started his education in a one-room schoolhouse before attending Southeast Missouri State University. He served in England with the air division of the U.S. Army during World War II. After discharge from the U.S. Army, he entered the University of New Mexico, where he received his bachelor's degree with honors in 1948. In 1950 he was awarded his master's degree at the University of California Los Angeles, followed by a PhD at UNM in 1952.

Riley worked summers as a ranger for the National Park Service in Mesa Verde National Park and Hovenweep National Monument. While gathering data for his dissertation, he lived among and studied the jungle-dwelling Panare people in Venezuela.

From 1952 to 1955, Riley served as a consultant to the United States Department of Justice Land Division.

Riley began his teaching career at University of Colorado at Boulder and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In 1955, he was offered a position at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, where he spent the bulk of his professional life.

He married author Brent Locke in 1948.

Dr. Riley received several major awards, including Historic Preservation Award in 1985 with Charles and Elizabeth Lange for their work on the Southwest Journals of Adolph P. Bandelier, and Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award in 2015 from the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs, Preservation Division. Dr. Riley died in 2017 at his home in Las Vegas, New Mexico.

Reviews

[Christine · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a compendium of the papers presented at a symposium held during the national meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in 1968. It's of special interest because it includes a paper by George F. Carter on Pre-Columbian Chickens in America. The assumption has been that chickens arrived with the Spanish, but this paper raises significant questions about how that conclusion was reached and offers some analysis that suggests that chickens were in the Americas before European contact. It's a provocative subject and I plan to spend more time studying it and looking at other sources.

[Joe White · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was read in 2006 or 2007, so this review may be based on fuzzy recollections. While the book may have had reaches of fact based on institutional archeology, it was fact based, very logical, and would probably be difficult to dispute except for the lack of some speculative conclusions based on what sketchy evidence is available.
This is a reference type historical archeological work.