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Topic ClosedOlmec of african descent?

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Direct Link To This Post Topic: Olmec of african descent?
    Posted: 21-Aug-2006 at 16:36
I apologize for any errors in spelling .
 
I would like further information on the subject of the Olmec people having some connection with African peoples. I believe this is derived from giant stone heads thought to be produced by Olmec people that bear a very distinct similarity with peoples of Africa.
 
Any takers?
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 21-Aug-2006 at 18:23
Ive seen a very good document called something like "universal rain" If I remember well it was a nathional geographic document. Sorry, but the name was in spanish, this is the translation.
 
It talks about a theory that shows this images and explain it more detailed.
 
I hope you like it.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 23-Aug-2006 at 01:52
again, if any mesaomerican culture was influenced or contacted bya foreign culture, where are the probes about those contacts ? why there`s no evidence of iron tools or metallurgic ? what I`m trying to say is that when a culture is influenced by others, there are aspects printed as result from those contacts such as tooling, ideas, etc.

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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 06-Sep-2006 at 15:11
Noone knows if they really may have seen Africans, and thus depicted them, but it seems really unlikely. I've read many theories, and some of them suggest that it was people from "black Egypt" and other such nonsense.
Untill someone come up with a really convincing reason to believe that idea, besides claiming that the stoneheads could look like Africans, I'd say there's really no reason to believe in ANY connection.
 
One thing is sure, the Olmecs influenced the other people in Mesoamerica a lot, even if they may be a proto group that have later merged with some of the other people. The recent findings in the el-mirador area sugests, that the southern Maya may have been somewhat contemporary with the Olmecs, btw.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 06-Sep-2006 at 17:29
Using the Olmec heads to suggest Africans colonised Mexicon is rather like insisting flat headed giants colonised Easter island.
 
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 06-Sep-2006 at 18:39
Originally posted by Paul

Using the Olmec heads to suggest Africans colonised Mexicon is rather like insisting flat headed giants colonised Easter island.
 
 
Not Quite the same. The Olmec heads are realistic representations of apparently real people, just on a very large scale.  Decidedly different personalities exist in each head, there isn't heavy stylization as in the Easter Island heads.  The Olmec heads have decidedly African features.
I personally feel the Olmec heads are considerably older than they're given credit for.


Edited by red clay - 06-Sep-2006 at 18:41
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 29-Sep-2006 at 10:38
Originally posted by red clay

Originally posted by Paul

Using the Olmec heads to suggest Africans colonised Mexicon is rather like insisting flat headed giants colonised Easter island.
 
 
Not Quite the same. The Olmec heads are realistic representations of apparently real people, just on a very large scale.  Decidedly different personalities exist in each head, there isn't heavy stylization as in the Easter Island heads.  The Olmec heads have decidedly African features.
I personally feel the Olmec heads are considerably older than they're given credit for.
 
Hi,
 
No. The Olmec heads are not realistic. They are squared peaces of stone with very little relief. For a realistic despiction of Olmecs you have to see their jades.
 
All scientist agree that there weren't West Africans in the Americas in pre-contact times. There is not a single arquelogical, genetic or any other piece of evidence whatsoever, Mande script was invented in 1820, and West Africans of contact times didn't have the material means to reach the Americas, and they even lacked the knowlegde of the sail at those times.
 
It is final. Olmecs were Amerindians.
 
Pinguin
 
 
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 29-Sep-2006 at 18:37
Originally posted by pinguin

Originally posted by red clay

Originally posted by Paul

Using the Olmec heads to suggest Africans colonised Mexicon is rather like insisting flat headed giants colonised Easter island.
 
 
Not Quite the same. The Olmec heads are realistic representations of apparently real people, just on a very large scale.  Decidedly different personalities exist in each head, there isn't heavy stylization as in the Easter Island heads.  The Olmec heads have decidedly African features.
I personally feel the Olmec heads are considerably older than they're given credit for.
 
Hi,
 
No. The Olmec heads are not realistic. They are squared peaces of stone with very little relief. For a realistic despiction of Olmecs you have to see their jades.
 
All scientist agree that there weren't West Africans in the Americas in pre-contact times. There is not a single arquelogical, genetic or any other piece of evidence whatsoever, Mande script was invented in 1820, and West Africans of contact times didn't have the material means to reach the Americas, and they even lacked the knowlegde of the sail at those times.
 
It is final. Olmecs were Amerindians.
 
Pinguin
 
 
 
 
All Scientists Agree!!??  You couldn't get all scientists to agree on what to have for lunch, let alone something as controversial as this.Tongue
The Olmec heads are much more than "squared pieces of stone"  They are realistic representations, apparently of people who lived in the area where they were carved.  Chiseled, carved stone, not relief. Have you even seen an Olmec head?
The west Africans of contact times may not have been seafaring, but we are talking several thousand years before contact [pre columbian] 
Final? What sources are you using for that one?  The case for diffusion has gotten stronger in the last ten years.  With new discoveries almost weekly, to rule anything out is setting yourself up.  There is so little known about West African civilizations BCE to say anything is final is absurd.  


Edited by red clay - 29-Sep-2006 at 18:38
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 29-Sep-2006 at 20:07
If I suggested the vikings were negroid, people would look at the Scandinavians of today and reguard it proof that the claim was untrue. Surely the same holds with the Olmecs. Why aren't the Olmec of today black if their ancestors were?

Edited by Paul - 29-Sep-2006 at 20:19
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 29-Sep-2006 at 20:08
Originally posted by red clay

 
 
All Scientists Agree!!??  You couldn't get all scientists to agree on what to have for lunch, let alone something as controversial as this.Tongue
The Olmec heads are much more than "squared pieces of stone"  They are realistic representations, apparently of people who lived in the area where they were carved.  Chiseled, carved stone, not relief. Have you even seen an Olmec head?
The west Africans of contact times may not have been seafaring, but we are talking several thousand years before contact [pre columbian] 
Final? What sources are you using for that one?  The case for diffusion has gotten stronger in the last ten years.  With new discoveries almost weekly, to rule anything out is setting yourself up.  There is so little known about West African civilizations BCE to say anything is final is absurd.  
 
I don't want to debate the point. Actually, I know the African contact theory was developed by Afrocentrist "schollars" like Ivan Van Sertima and Clyde Winters, which are really a joke for the serious archaeologists.
 
However, these are some points you should know if you want to enter in a discussion.
 
(1) Native Americans didn't have inmunity for the diseases that affected them so much during the 16th century. Most of those diseases originated in Africa. If contact existed they would have developed inmunity.
 
(2) There is no physical remain of contact whatsoever. All the "proofs" that are always mentioned are hoaxes, including the "African bones" and the Mande script (the Mande script was invented in 1820). The plant interchange and thousand of other pseudo-historical claims are also false.
 
(3) There is no genetical marker of African ancestry in pre-contact peoples of the Americas, and not in today's Native American pure populations.
 
(4) West African kingdoms become important ONLY in the Middle Ages. By that time Olmec culture had already being replaced by the Maya. Chronology does not match.
 
(5) West Africa simply did not have the tech for long distance sailing into the open sea. Actually, Native Americans were more advanced than Africans of the time in navigation. If any contact existed would have happened the other way around.
 
I suggest you read this article before you attempt to answer. Is called "
Robbing Native American Cultures: Van Sertima's Afrocentricity and the Olmecs"
 
 
It was written by a scientist and blow Van Sertima up.
 
Read it carefully, please.
 
Pinguin
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 28-Feb-2007 at 03:44
 
Originally posted by red clay

 
All Scientists Agree!!??  You couldn't get all scientists to agree on what to have for lunch, let alone something as controversial as this.Tongue
The Olmec heads are much more than "squared pieces of stone"  They are realistic representations, apparently of people who lived in the area where they were carved.  Chiseled, carved stone, not relief. Have you even seen an Olmec head?
The west Africans of contact times may not have been seafaring, but we are talking several thousand years before contact [pre columbian] 
Final? What sources are you using for that one?  The case for diffusion has gotten stronger in the last ten years.  With new discoveries almost weekly, to rule anything out is setting yourself up.  There is so little known about West African civilizations BCE to say anything is final is absurd.  



One thing when debating this that you have to keep in mind.. Is that according to Spencer Wells A Genetic Scientist said that humanity started in Africa,

and when the water levels were low the Africans traveled threw the water, into Asia, Australia, Europe,

and they kept traveling until they completely made it across the whole entire earth....By that time their appearance was different.....

See if the africans was the cause of all the other races on the earth who's to say that their were'nt black(african) people who's body hadn't gone threw the evolution stages  in that same area  during the times of The Olmecs?


Edited by AfrikaJamaika - 28-Feb-2007 at 03:51
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 28-Feb-2007 at 07:59
Originally posted by AfrikaJamaika

 ...
One thing when debating this that you have to keep in mind.. Is that according to Spencer Wells A Genetic Scientist said that humanity started in Africa,
 
No doubt about it Man originated in Africa. Perhaps near Kenya in a small group of human beings closely related to today Khoisan.
 

Originally posted by AfrikaJamaika


and when the water levels were low the Africans traveled threw the water, into Asia, Australia, Europe,
 
Africans went out to Arabian. Once there the following generations were not Africans anymore.
 
Originally posted by AfrikaJamaika


and they kept traveling until they completely made it across the whole entire earth....By that time their appearance was different.....
 
Who knows, that's not very clear. Evolution to the so called specialized "races" could have happened partly inside Africa as well as outside. More scientific work is needed to clarify the point
Originally posted by AfrikaJamaika


See if the africans was the cause of all the other races on the earth who's to say that their were'nt black(african) people who's body hadn't gone threw the evolution stages  in that same area  during the times of The Olmecs?
 
Semantics...
 
Olmecs were Native Americans. That's was theirs ethnic group. Of course Natives Americans, descend of Africans of 60.000 ago, like anyone else on this planet. But that's very far from saying they were of the Bantu Ethnic group, because they weren't. The closest living group to ancient Olmecs are the Mayans of Guatemala.
 
Pinguin
 
 

 



Edited by pinguin - 28-Feb-2007 at 08:00
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 28-Feb-2007 at 19:07
Originally posted by pinguin

Originally posted by red clay

 
 
All Scientists Agree!!??  You couldn't get all scientists to agree on what to have for lunch, let alone something as controversial as this.Tongue
The Olmec heads are much more than "squared pieces of stone"  They are realistic representations, apparently of people who lived in the area where they were carved.  Chiseled, carved stone, not relief. Have you even seen an Olmec head?
The west Africans of contact times may not have been seafaring, but we are talking several thousand years before contact [pre columbian] 
Final? What sources are you using for that one?  The case for diffusion has gotten stronger in the last ten years.  With new discoveries almost weekly, to rule anything out is setting yourself up.  There is so little known about West African civilizations BCE to say anything is final is absurd.  
 
I don't want to debate the point. Actually, I know the African contact theory was developed by Afrocentrist "schollars" like Ivan Van Sertima and Clyde Winters, which are really a joke for the serious archaeologists.
 
However, these are some points you should know if you want to enter in a discussion.
 
(1) Native Americans didn't have inmunity for the diseases that affected them so much during the 16th century. Most of those diseases originated in Africa. If contact existed they would have developed inmunity.
 
(2) There is no physical remain of contact whatsoever. All the "proofs" that are always mentioned are hoaxes, including the "African bones" and the Mande script (the Mande script was invented in 1820). The plant interchange and thousand of other pseudo-historical claims are also false.
 
(3) There is no genetical marker of African ancestry in pre-contact peoples of the Americas, and not in today's Native American pure populations.
 
(4) West African kingdoms become important ONLY in the Middle Ages. By that time Olmec culture had already being replaced by the Maya. Chronology does not match.
 
(5) West Africa simply did not have the tech for long distance sailing into the open sea. Actually, Native Americans were more advanced than Africans of the time in navigation. If any contact existed would have happened the other way around.
 
I suggest you read this article before you attempt to answer. Is called "
Robbing Native American Cultures: Van Sertima's Afrocentricity and the Olmecs"
 
 
It was written by a scientist and blow Van Sertima up.
 
Read it carefully, please.
 
Pinguin
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
The "scientist" you refer to is an assistant prof. of sociology and the other two??
 
 

Reply to My Critics


by Ivan Van Sertima

An attack on my thesis that Africans made contact with America before Columbus in two major pre-Christian periods (circa 1200 b.c. and circa 800 b.c.) in addition to the Mandingo contact period (1310/1311 A.D.) has been circulated in advance to hundreds of subscribers to a journal, Current Anthropology.  Copies of this attack by Bernard de Montellano, Warren Barbour and Gabriel Haslip-Viera were also sent out to African-American scholars, some of whom were cited in the attack, dishonestly titled "Van Sertima's Afrocentricity and the Olmecs."  The title's emphasis is meant to suggest that all revisions of African history by so-called "Blacks" belong to a common school, radiate from a common brain, and are cast in the same "racialist" hue and mode.  This circular, which precedes my new book, REPLY TO MY CRITICS (scheduled to appear in Sept), seeks to highlight the brazen and malicious lies, slanders and misrepresentations that characterize this attack.  Let it be noted that I was invited to respond to this attack but was forced to withdraw.  The editor, after verbally agreeing that I could reprint my commentary, after the issue of the Journal appeared, did a dramatic about-turn when pressed to sign a written agreement to back up his word.  He wrote that I could only reprint my "commentary" (15 pages) if I also reprinted the attack on me (50 pages) since "they form a unit."  To feel the full absurdity of this, just imagine the Jewish Defense League being forced to republish an extended Nazi-type attack on their positions in order to republish a brief response to such a slanderous attack.

LIE ONE: - "Van Sertima's expedition allegedly sailed or drifted westward to the Gulf of Mexico where it came in contact with inferior Olmecs.  These individuals created Olmec civilization." - De Montellano, Barbour and Haslip-Viera.

THE TRUTH: As far back as 1976, I made my position on this matter very clear. I never said that Africans created or founded American civilization. I said they made contact and all significant contact between two peoples lead to influences.  "I think it is necessary to make it clear - since partisan and ethnocentric scholarship seems to be the order of the day - that the emergence of the Negroid face, which the archeological and cultural data overwhelmingly confirm, in no way presupposes the lack of a native originality, the absence of other influences or the automatic eclipse of other faces"-p. 147 of "They Came Before Columbus."  See also Journal of African Civilizations, Vol 8, No. 2, 1986 "I cannot subscribe to the notion that civilization suddenly dropped onto the American earth from the Egyptian heaven."

LIE TWO: None of the early Egyptians and Nubians looked like Negroes.  "They have long, narrow noses..." "Short, flat noses are confined to the West African ancestors of African-Americans."  Again, "there is no evidence that ancient Nubians ever braided their hair.       This style comes from colonial and modern Ethiopia."

THE TRUTH: Narrow noses have been found among millions of pure-blooded Africans.  We can see this among the Elongated and Nilotic types.  My critics know nothing about the variants of Africa, ancient or modern.  All the six main variants of the African have been found in the Egyptian and Nubian graves.  For examples of ancient braided Nubian hair, see Frank Snowden's "Before Color Prejudice," As for Egypto-Nubians only having narrow noses, see Egyptian pharaohs in Vol 10 and 12 of the JAC and major Nubian pharaohs in Peggy Bertram's essay (JAC, Vol.12) -Ushanaru, Plate 8, p 173; Taharka as the god Amun from Kawa Temples, Plate 9, p. 173; Shabaka, Plate 12, p. 176. Tanwetamani, Plate 16, p. 180.  To say that these are narrow noses is to exhibit a colossal ignorance of African types in ancient Egypt and Nubia.  The agenda behind this is to bolster their case that they could not have been models for any of the Olmec stone heads.

LIE THREE; Modern Egyptians look exactly as they did thousands of years ago. The composition of the Egyptian has not changed over the last 5000 years. Invasions by the Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, Arabs and Romans left them looking the same today as in the dawn of history.

THE TRUTH: This is a hasty misreading of the work of scholars like A.C. Berry, R. J. Berry and Ucko who point out that there is a remarkable degree of homogeneity in this area for 5000 years. What a superficial reading of this fails to note is that the period ends with the close of the native dynasties BEFORE the invasions of the Assyrian, Persian, Greek, Roman and Arab foreigners

LIE FOUR: Faced with the startlingly Negroid features of some of the Olmec stone heads, my critics try 4 ways out: (a) They are "spitting images of the native;" (b)  they appear dark because some of them were carved out of dark volcanic stone; (c) some were made of white basalt which turned dark over time; (d) ancient Egyptians and Nubians were remote in physiognomy from sub-Saharan Negroes and none of them could have been models for any of the "Negro-looking" heads. Having said all that, they then claim that "races are not linked to specific physiognomic traits."

THE TRUTH: No need to shoot them down on this. They turned the gun on themselves.

LIE FIVE: Nothing African has been found in any archeological excavation in the New World.

THE TRUTH: In the drier centers of the Olmec world - at Tlatilco, Cerro de las Mesas and Monte Alban - the Polish craniologist, Andrez Wiercinski, found indisputable evidence of an African presence. The many traits analyzed in these Olmec sites indicated individuals with Negroid traits predominating but with an admixture of other racial traits. This is what I have said. The work of A. Vargas Guadarrama is an important reinforcement of Wiercinski's study. He found that the skulls he examined at Tlatilco, which Wiercinski had classified as Negroid, were "radically different" from other skulls on the site, bearing indisputable similarities to skulls in West Africa and Egypt.

LIE SIX: Van Sertima presents no evidence that a New World cotton (gossypium hirsutum var. punctatum) was transferred from Guinea to the Cape Verde in 1462 by the Portuguese and there is no hard proof that West Africans made a round trip to America before Columbus.

THE TRUTH: I cited evidence in 12 categories to establish Mandingo voyages to the New World circa1310/1311 A.D. This included eyewitness reports from nearly a dozen Europeans, even Columbus himself, metallurgical, linguistic, botanical, navigational, oceanographic, skeletal, epigraphic, cartographic, oral, documented and iconographic evidence. With regard to New World cotton in Africa before 1462, Stephens spoke in two tongues to pacify isolationist colleagues.

LIE SEVEN: My critics claim that I said the bottle gourd came in with Old World voyagers.

THE TRUTH: I was at pains to point out that this is ONE PLANT THAT COULD DRIFT TO AMERICA WITHOUT THE LOSS OF SEED VIABILITY. "Bottle gourds got caught in the pull of currents from the African coast and drifted to America across the Atlantic. Thomas Whitaker and G.F. Carter showed that these gourds are capable of floating in seawater for 7 months without loss of seed viability" - "They Came Before Columbus," 204. They indulge in an even more vicious dishonesty with regard to cotton, claiming that I said "Old World cottons came into America with a fleet of Nubians circa 700 B.C." I never linked cotton transfer to Nubian contact.

LIE EIGHT: My critics admit "we cannot unequivocally date the heads" but they single out one which they say Ann Cyphers confidently dated about 1011 B.C. Note the date! This is 200 years AFTER the Egyptian contact  period c. 1200 B.C. Yet they claim that the dating of this one head proves "Negro-looking heads" were being carved, mutilated, and buried prior to 1200 B.C.

THE TRUTH: The stone heads could not have been buried before they were carved.

LIE NINE: Egyptians stopped building pyramids "thousands of years" before 1200 B.C. No relationship whatever exists between Old World/New World pyramids.

THE TRUTH: Enormous obelisks, calling for the same complex engineering skills of the pyramid age were built at Karnak as late as 1295 B.C. A pyramid was also built as Dashur circa 1700 B.C. Bart Jordan, the mathematical child prodigy, to whom Einstein granted special audience, established startling coincidences between Old World and New World pyramids. He agrees with me that "The overwhelming incidence of coincidence argues overwhelmingly against a mere coincidence."

LIE TEN: My critics claim that I have trampled upon the self-respect and self-esteem of native Americans and they have come forward to champion their cause.

THE TRUTH: My people (for I am part Macusi and part African) would be horrified to have, as champions of our cause, De Montellano, Barbour, and Haslip-Viera, who disgrace us with the charge that "native Americans would have sacrificed and eaten the Africans if they came."

 

 

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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 28-Feb-2007 at 19:07
Mayans of Guatemala:
 
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 28-Feb-2007 at 19:19
) There is no physical remain of contact whatsoever. All the "proofs" that are always mentioned are hoaxes, including the "African bones" and the Mande script (the Mande script was invented in 1820). The plant interchange and thousand of other pseudo-historical claims are also false.
 
 
 
 
 
Olmec, recovered from an archeological site by Mexican scientists.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 28-Feb-2007 at 19:22
What happens to you guys?
 
Doesn't Africa have enough cultures and "greatness"?
How come you have to go through the world claiming cultures that doesn't not belong to you.
 
Afrocentrism is pseudoscience.
 
Well, any educated people knows. Just get informed.
 
How West Africans arrived to the Americas? Swimming?
They didn't even have sails in West Africa by the time the Olmec culture developed LOLLOLLOL
 
Pinguin
 


Edited by pinguin - 28-Feb-2007 at 19:23
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 28-Feb-2007 at 22:10

more evidence

Afrocentrism in 'Lear' overlooks native people


James Terry

The production of Shakespeare's "King Lear" currently playing at the Yale Repertory Theatre is set among the Olmecs of ancient Mexico, and the cast is entirely African-American. One might mistake this for a misguided attempt at surrealism, but the program tells us otherwise: "Although the Olmec origins are still a mystery to us, archaeological evidence indicates that Africans made their way to the New World thousands of years before European colonizers and formed the civilization's foundations." In fact, we are told, "The Africans who made their way to Mesoamerica thousands of years ago created a prodigious civilization."

Indeed, something is prodigious here, but I'm afraid it isn't just the accomplishments of the ancient Olmecs. Claims that Africans "created" complex societies in ancient America may come as a surprise to those who have studied the archaeological evidence, as that evidence indicates nothing of the sort. But these claims will come as no surprise to those familiar with popular strains of archaeological fraud that look beyond the Americas for the origins of complex American societies. The Afrocentric pseudo-history accompanying the Rep's "King Lear" takes its place in a long, ignoble history of fanciful theories involving Vikings, Phoenicians, lost tribes of Israel, refugees from Atlantis or the lost continent of Mu, and of course those ever-popular extraterrestrials. What these theories have in common is the assumption that Amerindians on their own could not have risen above the level of "savagery," which is the level to which they were assigned by racialized theories of cultural evolution during Europe's colonial expansion. Only outsiders, it was held, could explain the existence of "high culture" among the savages. The racism underlying this assumption is one of the hardiest of Eurocentrism's many weeds, and what we see on display at the Yale Rep is merely a newer, Afrocentric variety. Unfortunately, the Afrocentric narrative is neither more credible nor less offensive than the Eurocentric predecessors on which it is modeled.

Director Harold Scott and lead actor Avery Brooks credit Ivan Van Sertima as the primary source for their ideas regarding the Olmecs. In his 1976 book "They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America," Van Sertima argues that African voyagers came to America around 700 B.C., conquered the "less advanced" natives and introduced them to the arts of civilization. For their part, the conquered indigenes came to "revere" their African overlords. Van Sertima's theory has been debunked elsewhere. What should be stressed here is that Van Sertima has no grasp of Mesoamerican religion or cosmology and even seems a bit confused by the region's chronology and cultural geography. Methodologically he is unscrupulous; works of art supporting his argument are held to be realistic portraits of Africans; those that don't are too "stylized" to be analytically useful. His narrative proceeds with a willful indifference to archaeological data; it relies mostly on secondary sources, most of which were discredited or outdated even before he wrote his book in the 1970s.

But evidence and logic have little to do with the Afrocentric argument that the Olmecs were African. The impetus here is racial chauvinism. Van Sertima's narrative of conquerors carrying civilization to grateful natives should seem familiar: it was -- and remains -- one of Europe's self-aggrandizing myths, used to justify colonization and slavery across the globe. That fantasy has now been assigned to black actors, but nothing else has changed. Eurocentric methods, categories and norms are put to Afrocentric ends. Van Sertima's statement that the ancient Americans were "less advanced" bears the stamp of Eurocentric theories of cultural evolution. Many of his secondary sources come from this same tradition: they are Eurocentric attempts to prove that "Caucasian" Egyptians founded ancient American "civilizations." Van Sertima merely replaces "Caucasian" with "black," "Nubian-Egyptian." In this case Afrocentrism is just what scholars such as Gerald Early claim it to be: Eurocentrism in blackface.

Contrary to the crackpot fantasies of Afrocentrists and Eurocentrists, archaeological research in Mesoamerica suggests, unequivocally, that indigenous cultures developed in situ. To date no artifacts from across the seas have been found in controlled archaeological context in Mesoamerica; no transfers of technology from Africa or Europe, such as metallurgy or the wheel, were present when the Spaniards arrived, and none have been excavated. What we do find, however, is ample evidence for cultural change, from hunter-gather societies, to villages, to cities. It is a history of population growth accompanied by increasing social complexity. There are no sudden, mysterious florescences, no ex nihilo creations requiring recourse in diffusionist myth-making. The ancient Mesoamericans, it turns out, were much like humans everywhere: sometimes noble, sometimes savage, often ingenious; they created art and cities and elaborate philosophical systems. And they did it all on their own.

Unfortunately the program for "King Lear" tells another story, one that is an affront to the First Peoples of the Americas. Worse, that affront is now being distributed to New Haven schools as part of the Rep's outreach program. It is a sure bet that nobody associated with this production would tolerate claims that Africans did not build Great Zimbabwe; but apparently the legacy of Native Americans is still available to be plundered. None of this is as bitter as the original Eurocentric version, but that hardly makes it palatable.



(James Terry is a graduate student in the History of Art Department.)


Edited by pinguin - 28-Feb-2007 at 22:11
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 04-Mar-2007 at 08:30
I just realized that you're KawashkarWacko
 
Small world, eh!
 
Anyway, this page is really strangely formatted, with the text to the far right?
 
I think it's pretty sad when people do plants just to "prove" some point, it show they really do know they're wrong and lying themselves.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 04-Mar-2007 at 08:37
Originally posted by Jams

I just realized that you're KawashkarWacko
 
Small world, eh!
 
Anyway, this page is really strangely formatted, with the text to the far right?
 
I think it's pretty sad when people do plants just to "prove" some point, it show they really do know they're wrong and lying themselves.

Just Sir, small world isn't it?

I am Omar E. Vega, alias Kawashkar and allias Pinguin Big%20smile. I am not the same that JaguarSalsero though, a fellow Peruvian friend that share my passion for truth.

Perhaps you know me from "EgyptianSearch" of the times when I pulled the legs of Clyde Winters and his Mandinga writting theory LOLLOL
 
Yes, it is pretty sad when all the evidence shows otherwise. Olmecs were Native Americans and the Natives peoples of the region should be recognized as the only inheritors of that culture. That's a matter of justice.

Pinguin

 

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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 05-Mar-2007 at 08:12
Actually it was the Biodiversity forum!
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