Barry Fell

Barry Fell
Born	Howard Barraclough Fell (1917-06-06)6 June 1917 Lewes, Sussex, England
Died	21 April 1994(1994-04-21) (aged 76) San Diego, California, United States
Education	University of Edinburgh (Ph.D.)
Known for	Archaeological work in New World epigraphy; research on fossil sea urchins
Scientific career
Institutions	Victoria University of Wellington, Harvard University
Notable students	Helen Elizabeth Shearburn Clark

Howard Barraclough Fell (June 6, 1917 – April 21, 1994), better known as Barry Fell, was a professor of invertebrate zoology at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. While his primary professional research included starfish and sea urchins, Fell is best known for his archaeological work in New World epigraphy, arguing that various inscriptions in the Americas are best explained by extensive pre-Columbian contact with Old World civilizations. His writings on epigraphy and archaeology, despite being rejected by the mainstream, have been confirmed positively by other scholars in associated fields, such as Professor Robert Heizer, among many others mentioned in Fell's book Bronze Age America .

Biography

Fell was born in Lewes, Sussex, England, and was a grandson of the railway engineer and inventor John Barraclough Fell. He moved with his mother to New Zealand in the early 1920s after his father, who was a merchant seaman, died in a shipboard fire.

He returned to the British Isles for graduate work, receiving his Ph.D. at the University of Edinburgh in 1941. Fell then served with the British Army during World War II. In 1946 he returned to New Zealand, where he resumed his academic career, and lectured in zoology at Victoria University of Wellington.

A world authority on fossil sea urchins, he supervised a number of students including Helen E.S. Clark and they published a number of studies on Antarctic seastars. He was recruited by Harvard University in 1964, and emigrated to the United States to join the staff of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard where he worked until retirement in 1979.

He died of heart failure in San Diego, California, aged 77, while discussing a new book with his publisher.

Epigraphy

Although Fell was an accomplished marine biologist at Harvard University, he is best known for three books, mostly written after retirement, which claim that many centuries before Christopher Columbus reached America, Celts, Basques, Phoenicians, Egyptians, and others were visiting North America.

His interest in inscriptions began early in his career with a study of Polynesian petroglyphs published in 1940, but his most famous work came much later, starting in 1976 with his publication of America B.C., in which he proposed translations of inscriptions found on rock surfaces and artifacts in North and South America which he believed to be written in Old World scripts and languages. He followed up this work in 1980 with Saga America and in 1982 with Bronze Age America.

Fell's epigraphic work was not well received in academia. Critics of Fell's work routinely dismissed him as an amateur, pointing out his lack of formal training in ancient scripts and languages.

A scholarly response to Fell's work was prepared by Ives Goddard and William W. Fitzhugh of the Department of Anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution. They stated, in 1978, that "the arguments of America B.C. are unconvincing. The only accepted case of pre-Columbian European contact in North America remains the Norse site of L'Anse aux Meadows in northern Newfoundland. Perhaps some day credible proof of other early European contacts will be discovered in the New World. However, America B.C. does not contain such proof and does not employ the standard linguistic and archeological methods that would be necessary to convince specialists in these fields."

One example of Fell's claims is his contention in Saga America that Brendan of Clonfert may have reached North America centuries before Columbus. This is based on Fell's translation, published in the magazine Wonderful West Virginia in 1983, of two rock-cut inscriptions located at archaeological sites in Wyoming and Boone counties, West Virginia. According to Fell, these inscriptions narrate the story of Christ's nativity and are written in an old Irish script called Ogham, dating back to the 6th or 8th century AD. This led to the publication of articles in the journal The West Virginia Archeologist that were highly critical of Fell's conclusions and methodology, including a 1983 article by archaeologist and historian W. Hunter Lesser describing Fell's claims as pseudoscientific and unreliable. In 1989 lawyers Monroe Oppenheimer and Willard Wirtz wrote an article based on opinions of academic archaeologists and linguists to dispute that the inscription is written in Ogham script. They further accused Fell of deliberate fraud.

David H. Kelley, an archaeologist at the University of Calgary who is credited with a major breakthrough in the decipherment of Mayan glyphs, complained about Fell in a 1990 essay: "Fell's work [contains] major academic sins, the three worst being distortion of data, inadequate acknowledgment of predecessors, and lack of presentation of alternative views." In the same essay, however, Kelley went on to state that "I have no personal doubts that some of the inscriptions which have been reported are genuine Celtic ogham." Kelley concluded: "Despite my occasional harsh criticism of Fell's treatment of individual inscriptions, it should be recognized that without Fell's work there would be no [North American] ogham problem to perplex us. We need to ask not only what Fell has done wrong in his epigraphy, but also where we have gone wrong as archaeologists in not recognizing such an extensive European presence in the New World."

Although his detractors are boisterous and assumptive it is clear many haven't plunged the depth of Fell's research. Fell was indeed able to convince a number of his peers and attained positive confirmations of many of his findings by other more credible scholars, Professors such as Robert Heizer, Pennar Davies, Linus Brunner and Dr. Imanol Agire. cited from Fell's Bronze Age America, (pp 43-44) .

"...One of my former Harvard students, Dr. Jon Polansky, was now doing research at Berkeley, and he made the acquaintance of Professor Heizer and showed him the decipherment I had done on his Owens Valley petroglyphs. As a consequence Professor Heizer invited me to visit him; this came about in May 1979. We became friends and, putting aside his former opposition to the notion of pre-Columbian visitors, Bob Heizer now carefully checked each element of the decipherment and confirmed that I had rendered his original published diagrams correctly in the version in which I inserted the sound values of the Kufi signs. We planned a joint publication, but illness prevented him from accompanying me into the desert that year. Instead, he arranged for one of his former Berkeley students, Dr. Christopher Corson, to take me to some of the inscription areas. Dr. Corson, an archaeologist in the Bureau of Land Management, has the best knowledge of petroglyph sites in northern California and northwest Nevada. He led a party that included John Williams, Jon Polansky, and me, together with Wayne and Betty Struble and their son Peter. Bob Heizer planned to take part in my next field trip, but to our great regret he passed away, struck down by the illness that had already prevented his participation in the 1979 fieldwork. I was obliged to publish the Owens Valley zodiac without the benefit of his contribution, though the illustrations of the paper had been checked by him for accuracy and had his approval. Dr. Heizer’s contribution to American petroglyph studies has been immense, and my colleagues and I knew that a significant point had been reached when Heizer recognized the true nature of the Owens Valley zodiac and opened his mind to a new view of American prehistory in which pre-Columbian visitors and colonists would now play a role. Heizer, as archaeologist and anthropologist, filled an intermediate position between those archaeologists who devote their research to excavation of ancient sites and epigraphers, those linguists who give their energies to the decipherment of ancient inscriptions. By 1979, the same season in which Heizer and I had begun to influence each other, the epigraphers of Europe had already begun to analyze my work on ancient inscriptions in America, and soon authoritative publications began to appear, giving strong support and confirmation. Professor Pennar Davies, a leading Welsh scholar, and, in America, Professor Sanford Etheridge, editor of Gaeltacht (an Irish-language publication), had both written in support of my finding ogam inscriptions in America. In Spain, the leading Basque scholar, Dr. Imanol Agire, advised me that he too confirmed my reports on Basque inscriptions in Pennsylvania, dating from about the ninth century before Christ. In 1980 the volume he contributed to the Gran Enciclopedia Vasca (Great Basque Encyclopedia) contained letter-by-letter analyses of my papers, and in a technical paper published in 1981 Agire acknowledged that my decipherment of the ancient Basque syllabary is correct. These and other published papers, such as those of the Swiss linguist Professor Linus Brunner, provided competent scholarly approval of our American studies on the alphabets and syllabaries that are represented at the site in Peterborough. Their opinions, therefore, together with the detailed analyses that they have published, must be taken into account when some archaeologists, both in America and Britain, attempt to discredit the research on American inscriptions.

See also

• America's Stonehenge
• Bourne stone
• Burrows Cave
• Institute for the Study of American Cultures
• Los Lunas Decalogue Stone
• Mi'kmaq hieroglyphic writing
• Pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact
• Pseudoarchaeology
• Turkey Mountain inscriptions

References

Notes

Bibliography

• Brockie, Bob (7 December 2009). "Kiwi cult figure a genius or away with the fairies?". Dominion Post. Wellington. p. B5.

External links

• [1]
• [2]
• [3]
• Is Carrier Celtic? - Yinka Déné Language Institute article critical of Fell's ideas
• Epigraphic Society website
• Midwestern Epigraphic Society website
• New England Antiquities Research Association website
• Equinox Project page in honor of Fell
• Language on the fringe Archived 8 August 2022 at the Wayback Machine, Mark Newbrook, Skeptical Adversaria, Spring 2011, page 10.