Multiple Migrations
Esotericism enters the Dighton Rock debate through the French mythographer Antoine Court de Gébelin and Monde Primitif (1781), who believes it to be Phoenician. Ezra Stiles also favours the Phoenician interpretation and incorporates it into his Gothicist-tinged Election Sermon (1783) which presents...
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| Format: | Book Part |
| Language: | English |
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University of North Carolina Press
2017
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| Online Access: | http://dx.doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469634401.003.0004 |
| Summary: | Esotericism enters the Dighton Rock debate through the French mythographer Antoine Court de Gébelin and Monde Primitif (1781), who believes it to be Phoenician. Ezra Stiles also favours the Phoenician interpretation and incorporates it into his Gothicist-tinged Election Sermon (1783) which presents the United States as a place of White destiny. American westward expansion produces encounters with the mysterious earthworks of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys and fuels the rise of American archaeology. Thomas Pennant in Arctic Zoology (1784) makes an influential case for the Bering Strait hypothesis of the Indigenous arrival in the Americas. Corneille de Pauw publishes Recherches philosophiques (1768-69) arguing the degenerative effect on all life of the climate of the Americas.The Anglo-Irish antiquarian Charles Vallancey argues Dighton Rock was the work of ancient migrants from Asia who were moved aside by the inferior Tartar ancestors of Native Americans. Vallancey’s theory finds near-simultaneous acceptance in a circle of theorists around Stiles as an explanation for the so-called Mound Builders. The author defines this interpretation of American prehistory as the multiple migration displacement scenario. |
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