Conference tallis::celt

    Few may know it, and many historians won't acknowledge it, but the
    Irish were here in New England hundreds of years before Columbus made
    claim to the continent, and over 1,000 years before the MAYFLOWER
    deposited her seedy souls at Plimouth.  The Italians, English,
    Spanish, Dutch, and Scandinavians, who claim that one of their own
    either discovered or first settled America, will - of course - be
    disappointed to learn this.  Facts, however, refute their claims, and
    the history books will have to be rewritten.
    
    Besides her warm people and cold pubs, one of the many fascinations of
    Ireland today, is her country-wide array of ancient ruins.  Little
    round rock huts called "beehives", cave like chambers tunneled into the
    earth called "bothains" by the Celts, ring forts, burial mounds, stone
    megaliths, and tripod man-made monuments called "dolmens"", pepper the
    Emerald Isle.  Some were constructed by the Fir-Bolgs and the Tuathta
    De Danann, Celtic tribes that lived in Erin before the invasion and
    colonization of the Milesian Celts from Iberia, hundreds of years
    before the coming of Christ; others were built by Gaelic Druids and the
    first Christian monks.
    
    My interest in the ancient Celts and their age old monuments, homes,
    and tombs, didn't peak in Ireland however, but right here in New
    England, especially at a place called "Mystery Hill Caves" in Salem,
    New Hampshire. Visiting Mystery Hill only a few years ago, I saw that
    the "caves" were not caves at all, but the same "beehives" and
    "bothains" that I saw and explored while visiting Ireland.  The Mystery
    Hill caretaker told me that no historian, archaeologist, or
    anthropologist ever studied this half mile of rock ruins and man-made
    underground chambers until 1937, and that even then, it was by an
    amateur archaeologist named William Goodwin.
    
    After a few years of digging and studying the site, Goodwin, a retired
    insurance executive from Hartford, Connecticut, concluded that Mystery
    Hill was once a Celtic monastery, built by Irish Christian monks in the
    10th Century.  Many professional archaeologists disagreed with him. 
    Some thought the stone structures were merely food warehouses
    constructed by colonial Americans, others thought the Indians had built
    them, and a few conceded that it might have been a Viking village. 
    Although Indian artifacts have been uncovered at the site, most
    archaeologists today agree that Indians did not build the rock
    dwellings at Mystery Hill, and neither did the 17th and 18th Century
    white settlers.  If they didn't, then who did?
    
    When Goodwin uncovered a large rock slab with a deep groove carved into
    its edges at the site, Frank Glynn, President of the Conneticut
    Archaeology Society, recognized it as an ancient "sacrificial table" -
    with groves to catch the blood of sacrificed animals.  The Celtic
    Druids were constantly offering up animals to a variety of gods,
    especially the sun-god, and even the early Christian monks ritualized
    the killing of animals for food.  Finding the sacrificial table
    prompted Goodwin to write a book, "The Ruins of Great Ireland in New
    England," published by Meador Press in Boston, in 1946.  Frank Glynn,
    however, after years of study, concluded that Mystery Hill was not an
    early Christian monastery, but the home of Bronze Age Druids, who
    somehow got to New England from Europe, possibly around the Third
    Century, B.C.
    
    ...
    
    Copied without permission from "The Old Irish of New England",
    by Robert Ellis Cahill, Chandler - Smith Publishing House, Inc.,
    Peabody MA, 1985"
    
    More to follow weather permitting!

    Another interesting book on a similar theme
    
    	The Brendan Voyage
    
    		By Tim Severin

    I find it a bit strange that a monastic settlement
    would have facilities for pagan sacrifice. What
    would have been sacrificed anyway? (Bison? Turkeys?
    Bears?)
    Also there is no reason to think the old Irish
    did sacrifice animals. They were sun-worshippers
    and very interested in solstices and equinoxes
    and so on, and they lit ritual fires in which they
    MIGHT have burned sacrificed animals. (Hence,
    remotely, the word 'bonfire' bone-fire).
    

    
    re .1
    
       It wouldn't surprise me one bit. I understand that Irish monks
    in the middle ages used to push themselves out to sea on tiny rafts
    in order to "give themselves up to God". Personally, I think they
    must have been as flaky as cream-puffs, but anybody who would be
    that crazy might just be crazy enough to float all the way to 
    Greenland and North America. 
       And there would have been all kinds of game to sacrifice on an
    altar. New England at the time would have been teeming with deer,
    moose, elk, etc, and their young.

    Re 546.3
    
    Agreed - and there's also little evidence for sacrificial stones,
    except where some Celtic religions overlapped with others, such as the
    bull-cult of Mithras introduced by the Romans. 
    
    The only form of propitiatory offering that we know of for certain was
    the habit of throwing valuable items (or possibly even people) into
    lakes or bogs. There are some wonderful examples of Celtic art &
    weaponry that have been recovered from Irish peat bogs.  Dating this
    art by comparison to pieces recoverd from burial sites. indicates that
    this practice carried on at the same places for many centuries. 
    
    It seems to methat this sort of evidence undermines the theories that
    Vikings or Celts ever reached the Americas.  If they did, why did they
    suddenly cease the religious practices that they had kept for many
    centuries in their homeland?  Jeez, these guys were so careful that
    they never even lost a bronze pin, gilt brooch or belt-buckle, let
    alone cast them into a pond to ensure a succesful hunting trip.  (Or
    maybe no-one has done a thorough archaeological survey of the New
    England site?) 
    
    Consider other hypotheses that certain cultures travelled long
    distances by sea - such as those hypotheses tested by Thor Heyerdal in
    his "Ra" and "Kon-Tiki" journeys. Here the evidence comes from finding
    culturally-similar artifacts FIRST, (like Polynesian artifacts)
    and then postulating that long sea journeys may have been made in
    flimsy boats.
                   
    Who made the stone huts 'though.....?
    
    Regards,
    
    Colin
    
     
    
    

    
    I believe it is virtually certain that the Vikings reached the
    New World in the Middle Ages, the evidence is as follows:
    
    1) The saga stories of Leif Ericsson and Thorfinn Karlsefni which
       recount how these men sailed with expeditions to land south
       and west of Greenland, where there were viking settlements.
    
    2) The excavation of a Viking village at Lancey Meadows (correctly
       l'Anse-aux-Meduse, Bay of Jellyfish) in Labrador. This is to
       date the only physical evidence of Viking settlement in the
       New World, however it seems to archaeologists to be merely
       inhabited seasonally, indicating that the vikings did not
       take much interest in the new lands.
    
    Celtic contact with the New World is on much more dubious grounds
    resting mainly on the Brendan legends, and the ruins mentioned
    above, all of which much give rise to the verdict "not proven"
    
    Toby

    
    For any who are interested and like hiking. New England if full
    of interesting structures like the ones at Mystery Hill NH. I
    live in north central MA and it's difficult to spend any length
    of time in the woods without finding something of interest. From
    Colonial ruins to pre-colonial ruins and some that are not so
    ruined. 
    
    For my two cents worth. While I can't say who was here first,
    there were those before Columbus. Celts included.
    
    Paul

    Just to add my own two cents here.  My mother who was born, raised,
    and educated in Donegal always told me that she was taught a Irish
    priest travel to North American possibly 500 years before Columbus.
    Wish I could remember more....

Last Summer I read in The Diaries Of Cristopher Columbus (not exact book title),
pub. H-M about Columbus' earlier Northern Voyage to the New World which he made
before his "Discovery Of America" by the Southern route with an older uncle.

He sailed with a group of sailors when young from Ireland  and surrounding 
area to Greenland and beyond.  From the description in the actual diaries 
(translation, mind you), he was in a boat off shore of what we know as 
Newfoundland and land was sighted as expected- a small island ,before bad 
weather made them turn back.

I remember thinking what a rascal he was that he knew that a land mass was
there all along.  He was not the Captain of this cruise and had an old set 
of maps which had been used for some time by the sailors from the North.

This has been recently acknowledged by some historians, and of course the debate
goes on, but the general public does not know the story yet.  His diaries were
translated in the celebration of the x years since Discovery Of America.  I
have exact quotes at home to back this up if anyone is interested.
Quite fascinating reading!

re:- - previous notes in 546:
One of the Irish sailing priests is thought to have been St. Brendan, but I 
think there were also others who also came in leather boats.  "The Brendan
Voyage" duplicates this feat.

A book "Norse Discoveries In North America" pub Dover, includes photos and
sketches of the stone hives.

Couldn't the "sacrtificial alter" have had a more practical purpose like use
for butchering.?  Try roasting a pig sometime without such a tray.

- McIlhenney.

    Okay, maybe some other people just happened to build the huts
    at Mystery Hill that look just like the ones in Ireland, but
    who wrote the Oggam? This is to my mind definitive proof that
    ancient Celts were at Mystery Hill. The boulder with the Oggam,
    as I recall, is too big to have been carried there. (Oggam is
    the ancient Celtic script.)
    
    And the monks in the boats were not fruitcakes. They had a
    belief that God was to be encountered by traveling to a faraway
    island in the middle of the ocean. This is from a book called
    Celtic Heritage.           
    
    Eileen
    
    

In this month's National Geographic it is noted that a plastic time capsule left
in the North American Arctic by an expedition was recently found on a beach by a 
fisherman in Ireland.