I’m a Native American who works for my tribe’s historic preservation office, a department that only exists because of policies like NAGPRA being in place. Our entire job is to document and protect cultural sites, including graves. I just have to say how much I appreciate that you voice your stances on things like scientific racism and the dark history behind American archeology. As someone who works very closely with archeologists and anthropologists, this is a very real problem I have to deal with in my day to day life. It’s nice to hear this being talked about, and brought up with a bigger audience. These are the kinds of discussions that need to happen, and it gives me hope to see you dive into it in your videos. I also have to say that I’ve heard a lot of horrific stories of the things that have been done against indigenous people in the name of science. That being said most of the archeologists that I’ve personally met share a genuine concern and respect for indigenous cultures and their rights. The struggle for indigenous nations to have a say in what happens to their cultural and sacred sites is ongoing, but we’re leaps and bounds ahead of where we were not that long ago. NAGPRA wasn’t passed until 1990 after all.
@@fourleafclover2064 Yep. Imagine how much cultural heritage and how many artifacts were destroyed by these pseudo-archeologists effectively grave robbing and destroying sacred sites. I shudder at the thought.
The text is written in the Coelbren alphabet (ancient welsh or Khumric) its well documented and evidenced by Wilson and Blackett. It can also easily be matched to it. Its not Native american, there were many migrations of Europeans pre columbus, including King Arthur and the Welsh. But academia lies about this fact.
As a Native American who loves archeology and anthropology, thank you so so so much for talking about some of the horrific ideals that helped shape the field. When I hear people talk about "gravesites" in early American archeology, what they're talking about is the equivalent of digging up someone's great grandma from the town cemetery. You calling it out as grave robbing was amazing. Keep being awesome.
But they literally do this all the time in Europe and the United States to make space I’ve literally seen a video of hundreds of gravestones thrown off a cliff an entire graveyard cleared to build like a football field
@@charlesmcgill2974 Again, people only care by the time it's too late. America is even more selfish, since they throw away the remains of natives like they may as well have never existed. Additionally, America has SO much more space than many European countries, they could EASILY just make buildings around grave sites instead of destroying them.
I know, most people are here to listen to you debunking and talking shit about conspiracy theories (me too, don’t worry), but I’d love if you’d make another series called Awesome Archeology and start sharing the great stuff that is going on in the field. You could even make a second wheel with interesting theories
I was born and raised in Moundsville and have spent all my 21 years here. Wish you would have mentioned in the part where you talk about how destructive settlers and archaeologists were, that they literally built a bar on top of the mound, because why the hell not, as well as a museum INSIDE the mound. Goes to show how little respect they had for the Native Americans and their sacred places. Awesome video!
@@BalroomBlitz715And morality was different in Nazi Germany, or tribes that still practice FGM. Just because "they didn’t know better," doesn't mean that it's a blank check to ignore and silence the horrors done to both the dead and living. When we stop talking about how what was done was horrible, we start thinking that those things might be good ideas.
When I was a kid, I said to my brother "these two stars make a line when you connect them." He looked at me disappointedly and said "any two points make a line..." I'm thinking my brother should have been there when that guy suggest ley lines.
There’s a hilarious Seneca myth about a lazy man who loved skipping stones, ran into a man-eating giant, and defeated it with cunning. His name is Skunny-Wundy.
I simply cannot get over how they allegedly found this object clutched in the hands of a dead Native American, deep inside of a Native American mound, within territory that had been only recently been purged of its Native American population who had lived there for thousands of years, and their first thought (and, seemingly, every one thereafter) was that it had to be a European language. It's so dumb in so many ways that I simply cannot wrap my mind around it without collapsing into a black hole of stupid.
Sometimes people will hear folks say that early American “archaeology” was just grave-robbing and think “there’s no way they’d just go around robbing graves!” but actually, during this time period in both America and Europe, plenty of people had no issue robbing or even stealing the corpses of even contemporary graves (with the aim to sell them to unscrupulous scientists or suppliers of bodies/skeletons to scientists for research purposes). And those were graves of people the robbers thought of as people, so rest assured they’d defile the graves of any beings they viewed as subhuman without so much as a thought
Exactly!!! There were cases of people in Victorian era Britain who intentionally committed murder in order to donate the bodies to scientists for money. People would absolutely grave Rob in order to steal jewellery or the body to sell, even in specially marked Christian style grave sites. So no doubt a mound of dirt would be robbed relentlessly for clout
@@noctisocculta4820 exactly, like how Egyptian mummies were supposedly far more common before the Victorians and Georgians started shipping them to England for vanity displays.
I think it’s funny how my driver’s test used this Mound™️as a location marker for where I would turn back around to the DMV. Like “ah yes, and make a left at the ancient burial ground”
The State Police had the Marshall County barracks right across the street running along side the south end of the prison. Drivers testing was done right there. There was a girl taking their test and the examiner asked her to back out of the space. She did, straight across the street and smacked the prison.
I'm japanese so I'm used to both reading horizontally (left to right) and vertically (top to bottom, right to left) At the first time you showed the stone, I turned my head to the right because the symbol on the ''bottom'' looks more like a drawing of man, a flower or a torch to me than a letter Even if the stone might be fake, the scientific racism discourse was very interesting This video really made me want to read up on mounds, maybe it's because pretty similar to something that's around me (kofun) but they are exciting to me You are a really compelling speaker and it's exiting to see how many subjects are left on your wheel, I'm looking forwards to it!
I live in Illinois so I have easy access to the Mississippian civilization. I’ve seen the mounds and the culture is fascinating. I really want to go to Japan to see a kofun. I love how many are preserved in Japan.
I live in Uppsala, Sweden, and we have a bunch of burial mounds around here (and also in the rest of the nordic countries). The idea seem to have been very widespread, to say the least... Thinking about it, isn't a pyramid also a kind of burial mound? Made neat with straight lines and geometry, but at its essence a mound.
@@misanthropicservitorofmars2116 just be mindful that because kōfun are the tombs of Japanese Emperors, they are sacred. That’s why so many of them are preserved!
As a Tsimshian who has spent hours defending my own and other first nations from the assumption of being "primitive" the end segment of your video meant so much to me. Thank you.
Before you act high and mighty remember your own tribe was not the first people there (that means you took the land from somebody else) also every single native tribe has history of destroying the burial sites of the tribes that they defeat in combat (so stop being a hypocrite)
"Moundsville, WV. You just can't make this up" Me, A West Virginian: I've been to a town called Duck and live outside a community called Wahoo... It could be worse. Fun Fact, my 6th grade field trip was actually a joint field trip to the Penitentiary and The mound. Unsurprisingly we were forced to spend much more time in the Penitentiary than at the mound.
@@Trekki200 it was a decommissioned site and had been for years. It was one of the last/only places in the state to use the electric chair. They had it on display as well as all the different shivs they has confiscated then showed us different cells and stuff. They still had all the inmates drawings on them. We had lunch in the prison cafeteria and then they has inmates from the new state pen come in and talk to us, scared straight style. It was a very odd experience for a normal public school to say the least and they had done it for years. This was back in 2003 so I'm sorry I don't remember all of it.
Interesting thing to note is how many "characters" are just flipped versions of other characters on the stone while there's almost 0 repeated characters. This looks like a conlang made by someone who wasn't very aware of conlangs tbh
they could just have bad handwriting since there are a few similar characters that may have been the same one just written poorly, plus it might be a complex language system where flipping a character could mean different type of ennunciation or that there are very many characters
@@xiphactinusaudax1045 agreed! Maybe it's like chinese and the characters represent WORDS and not letters. Which would mean a LOT of information can be transmitted through minimal space.
@@myheartismadeofstars I'd rule that out. To convey entire words the symbols need to have high average complexity. But they absolutely don't, if you compare them with a script that does like chinese.
@@ehtuanK I wouldn’t completely rule it out! Chinese has evolved majorly over thousands of years. If you look at oracle bone script which is the ancestor of modern Chinese, many characters are extremely simple!
I don't think that immediately disqualifies it as an alphabet, I mean, there are plenty of examples of that in other languages. Do agree that the fact that no characters repeat is kinda sus tho.
Ex-mormon here ... the moment I heard "artifact with unknown writing, found in mound in 1830's, with confliting origin stories" ... my mind immediately jumped to "hoax"
your ex-profit made your entire ex-faith possible by robbing indigenous grave sites, your opinion doesn't matter--even if you didn't drink the Flavor-Aid. LOL.
Fellow archaeologist here! Loved the video - I had a chance to do a CRM project in moundsville a couple years ago, which is how I first learned of this dubious stone. One thing I wish you had mentioned about it - not only was the stone found by "archaeologists" digging through the lense of scientific racism, the stone (and the idea that the stone was a European language) was used by other quack archaeologists to push the "White Moundbuilder" myth - the idea that the Adena mounds and other mounds from Indigenous cultures from the same Era were not built by Native Americans, but rather a Civilization of lost white people that had been "destroyed" by the native Americans. This belief was then used as a justification for the systemic violence white settlers inflicted on Native Americans - it is also theorized that this psuedoarchaeolgical trash directly went on to inspire the works of a certain Joseph Smith. Truly a dark history.
Grave robbing is an interesting issue in Ireland. A lot of countryside and small village cemeteries still have signs saying "grave robbing is frowned upon by society. Please don't do that."
@@josephwilliam9124 I would love to, but the closest one to me turned into a drug hive after I moved away, so I'm not going back😂 The trainer from "Gladiator" is buried in that graveyard as well, so makes sense😂
it was such a huge problem for such a long time, i’m not at all surprised. the things people did to try and keep grave robbers out were quite interesting. but those living in rural areas probably didn’t have the money to pay for that kind of thing, so i guess a sign and a guilt trip was the next best thing 😂
@@chiefofthesky Ya I'd say that's it. People are insane. Historical sites are being destroyed regularly now, and two weeks ago someone broke into a church that had mummies being stored, and they let them on fire. Between the flames and the fire extinguishers, a few 800 year old mummies got entirely obliterated.
As a conlanger one of the things I learned was that writing systems are constrained by their materials. If your writing is based on cutting into stone then your writing is going to resemble other cut into stone systems (lots of stight lines) since that is what works for stone.
Ok this is mine months later but I truly do appreciate this prospective as a fiction writer that has made plenty of conlings. Writing in wax, leaves, limestone, papyrus, wood, etc can easily narrow down your letter shapes, writing direction, and even have some cultural reflections.
@@dooplets._.5776 yes! Another example is the nordic futhark alphabet, which comes from a time when basically all writing was done by wood-carving or stone-carving. :)
Here's my crackpot no evidence theory: it was an attempt at creating a written language that didn't catch on. Some guy (probably named Dave) was like "hey guys, I just carved words into a rock! Now we can communicate without-" and all the other people in his village were like "shut up, Dave "
@@orwellboy1958 I highly doubt that you personally carved this into the rock tens of thousands of years ago, but based on your name I must assume that you are his direct ancestor, and to that I must say that your greatX10^56 grandfather should have tried harder. If we'd had written writing since then we might be leaving the solar system by now. He really did us dirty.
My son recently found your channel and really likes it. He's smart and pro-science, but he's also 11 and has imagination and uses tik-tok. So it's nice for him to have a good source of info that he actually likes to help him separate bullshit from reality. So thank you for your content and the work you do.
@@rakino4418 he's 11. Not 5. And yeah, he can watch tik-tok.... here in my home where he's safe. You know what he don't do? Run around the neighborhood unsupervised where he could get ran over by a reckless driver or snatched up by a pedophile. My son is fine. Worry about your own kids, I'm perfectly capable of parenting mine. That's why he's an honor roll student. A multiple time jiu-jitsu tournament gold medalist. On the wrestling team at school. Trains muay thai as well. I got this.
@@themonsterbabyi loved running around the neighborhood and woods and only getting screen time for 2 hrs if im lucky…poor guy should go run around til the streetlights come on😢
Like what? It was a rock. Most dating techniques require the test object to have once been alive. You could date the age of the stone but that wouldn’t tell you when the inscription was made.
@@MegCazalet Never! LOL There's nothing wrong with asking questions and wondering "What if...?". That's how we make progress in any field. You get into Tinhat Territory when you ignore objective facts and legit criticisms/questions, choosing to explain them away and dismiss them in order to justify your own hypothesis, rather than acknowledge the weaknesses in, or total lack of support for, what you've been pursuing.
Your ending speech on scientific racism made me feel physically uneasy and unwell, but in a good, educational way! Thank you, thank you, thank you for your work and your words. This message is so so so so important.
"The prints were done with limestone wich gave them texture…" Me, an illustration and design student: oh wow that’s so amazing! The textures look to smooth and gorgeous! Omg I want to own/do prints like those! "…so Europeans thought their skulls were softer and therefore underdeveloped" Oh…sounds like quite the soft skull way of thinking to me but ok [paraphrasing obviously]
When I was researching about Neanderthals, I was SHOCKED at the amount of racism and eugenics that went into discoveries of skeletal remains. I was writing about the extinction of Neanderthals but I added a section about the racism and misinformation in the field.
As an anthropologist, a huge chunk of our historical work was dedicated to validating racism and colonialism. It's an disgusting trend I've seen across other fields as well.
@@morley364 Something I've seen just as a person from day to day life is that we never want to perceive ourselves as possibly the worst, so we try to find reasons others are worse so we can validate ourselves to think of ourselves as the best, no matter the cost.
@@morley364 oh i know the vibes not only am i a huge fan of cultural anthropology and history. im also norse pagan. having things you love irrefutably tied to blatant racism is very...sad
I still can't believe there are people in this country who don't see that cultural bias and racism still exists today. The trail of tears wasn't even that many generations ago, and SLAVERY was so recent that we still have direct descendants from actual slaves. Sometimes the human brain amazes me with its ability to filter out what it deems unnecessary information, but the fact that it also happens at a cultural level when it comes to ignoring great atrocities is downright abhorrent to me.
@@heckingbamboozled8097 on the slavery point. It was at that point a worldwide institution. And still exists. So pretty much 80% of people on earth can trace an enslaved ancestor within the last 300 years. Before america stopped the slave trade britain outlawed it and sent ships to the colonies to enforce it. As well as to the coasts of africa to stop slave ships going to the atlantic and muslim slavers across the red sea. But even thougj they outlawed it before america. It took generations to fully stamp out. Saudi arabia only made it illegak in the 60s. And they deffinetely still have slaves in saudi arabia today. Not that long ago a saudi was offering a "castrated african slave" on facebook. The real lie is that slavery ever truly ended though. While it was forcibly stamped out of many cultures. Even the natives who used to have slaver tribes. It still persists, mostly in east and south east asia. Current estimates are that there is around 40 million slaves in the world today.
@Hecking Bamboozled I'm a descendant from the tsalagi old settlers and TOT, and when I was in high school, IN OKLAHOMA, they taught the TOT was basically nothing more than a long voluntary walk and chattel slavery was fairly tame and most slave owners treated them like family. Not kidding, and that was in 1992-1996.
@@heckingbamboozled8097 thank god slavery and racism didn't happen anywhere else, so we can constantly hear people self fallacio over their fake moral superiority.
If you're still confused why Reed pointed out the "Capital D with an Arrow" as a recognizable or inate character, it may have to do with the capital form of Edh Ð, a letter that most european historical linguists are familiar with.
@@hiitsaria Sorta. That's used in Serbo-Croatian for an africate, rather than a fricative. Both letters are derived from D, but i believe it is a coincidence.
@@popular_dollars Dang that's a good catch. Makes a lot of sense for a linguist with an Anglo background who'd be very aware of older forms of English. I also had no idea that 'eth' (Ðð) used in Icelandic, Faroese and Old/Middle English is a totally different letter to the 'D with stroke' (Đđ) that's used in Serbo-Croatian and Sami languages. I'd also love to know why, when adopting the Latin alphabet, Vietnamese went with the 'D with stroke' while Khmer went with 'Eth'. Neighbouring language groups taking two almost identical letters and splitting on which one to use. I need to talk to a South-East Asian Linguist about this some time.
@@Pumbli Thank you! I probably know even less than you about Austroasiatic languages, but from what i know the stories are very different. The vietnamese alphabet and the romanization of the khmer script were created at very different points in time. One has become the primary way of writing vietnamese, whereas and the other is a supplement of the native khmer script. Also i cant find anything about Khmer using ð, and i don't see any reason why it would anyway. All it has is /d~ɗ/ and no voiced coronal consonant otherwise.
Fun fact, "capital D with arrow" is a great way to describe the symbol for capital eth, which was used in written Old English (and probably some other Germanic languages) to represent the voiced "th" sound in "the." Could be why Ried pointed it out
A lot of early "archaeologists" all over the world destroyed or repurposed more priceless heritage than the relatively small amount of shiny trinkets that were salvaged.
Yeah he is very American focused but this kind of pseudo archeology has gone on around the world for a much longer time and before that grave robbing was sometimes profitable why you think the Egyptians had to hide things so thoroughly they had to hid it from other Egyptians who lived at the same time
@@beartankoperator7950 mainly the only way to hide something in Egypt is making a death trap tomb that’s too dangerous for anyone to travel through or hide it by traveling so far out of the way that it’s right next to a mountain that can’t be discovered easily even by satellite…
I’m Lenni Lenape. We lost our mother tongue, Unami, when our great tribes were broken up and pushed out and the schools beat our children when they dare spoke it. The last Elder that could speak it fluently died in the early 2000’s. So the language is mostly forgotten now. 😔 So there is no way we would lose a secret written language if we had one. I believe this was a fake. No way a written language didn’t proliferate across Tribes.
I started trying to learn the original Hebrew pictographs this year and of course the modern Hebrew, got busy and lost my impetus, but I recognize some of the letters as Hebrew. My church believes there were Hebrews who settled here looong ago & that the “Hopewell” were one tribe (I saw something that said they now believe the Adena “became” the Hopewell… they were not ever actually Hopewell that’s just who owned the land when the ruins were found🤦🏻♀️). I believe the Yuchi, who were supposedly nearly wiped out, (and supposedly joined with the Cherokee were another tribe) were also Israelites. I’m not any kind of expert, so don’t take any of this as gospel; it’s an interesting subject and you might enjoy checking into for yourself. I know that the Hopi were recognized by Israel as a lost tribe, because they were found to have the lost part of one of their ceremonial dances, and were given land in Israel.
@@rhondasisco-cleveland2665 ... No. First of all, Hebrew the written language is not pictographic- its in fact (in the paleo form) part of the complex of earliest alphabets (though an abjad). The letters represent sounds... that's it. Second, none of the indigenous peoples of the Americas are "lost tribes", and the belief that they are is a deeply racist/white-supremacist portion of conspiracies that has been used to destroy the actual cultures of indigenous peoples across these continents.
@@rhondasisco-cleveland2665 Here's the thing about conspiracies: All of them devolve into antisemitism. There is absolutely no evidence that any of the tribes of Israel ended up in North America, just claims by antisemitic assholes and charlatans. Eg: The Book Of Mormon. As for the Hopi, the lost ceremonial dance and Israel: [citation needed]. I couldn't find anything in google. Closest I could find was a tribe of Native Americans doing a dance in the Israeli Parliament. The video clip had no details, but it was said in the comments that they were there to acknowledge that Jews and Native Americans have many common aggressors.
I’m so sorry that this happened to you in history. As a colonizer I know my apology is absolutely dwarfed in comparison to the hardship you were facing at that time as a people but I hope that by being better and acknowledging the past I could even start to make it up to all of you.
Most history/archaeology channels I’ve found are either: 1. To boring and have a bland voice with no jokes. Or 2. almost no detail on the history/archaeology and with so much “humour” it should be for 8 year olds. You are the perfect mixed of informative and funny
I have found the exact same thing. It was a goal of mine to make something funny, digestible and informative. It means the world to hear I am achieving that.
There's a massive Adena Mound outside of Dayton, OH. The nearby Mound Laboratories (now closed) that did nuclear weapon R&D/production were named for the mound. There was a MASSIVE site cleanup that included removing several feet of top soil. I imagine the mound is likely now contaminated, but that doesn't stop visitors from climbing the MODERN STAIRCASE BUILT INTO THE MOUND. There's a staircase. That we built on a burial mound. That may be contaminated with radiation. You can't make this stuff up. Edit for clarification: I cannot say with full certainty that the mound IS contaminated. However, given the activities at Mound, the heavy contamination of soil on the site, and the fact that the site's groundwater is (still!!!) contaminated, I imagine that the Miamisburg Mound COULD be contaminated as well.
@@KB4QAA It's a 2,000-3,000 year-old Adena burial mound. From the Historical Marker Database (historical marker transcription about Mound Laboratory): "The facilities once here propelled the United States through the Nuclear and Space Ages and were named for the nearby pre-historic Miamisburg Mound." From the Ohio History Connection: "Excavations [of the Miamisburg Mound] conducted in 1869 revealed details of construction suggesting the Adena culture (800 B.C. to A.D. 100) built the mound in several stages. The excavators found a layer of flat stones overlapping like shingles on a roof at a depth of 24 feet below the surface. At one point in its history, therefore, the mound may have had a stone facing. Monuments like Miamisburg Mound served as cemeteries for several generations of ancient Ohioans. They also may have marked the boundaries of tribal territories." Also from the Historical Marker Database (historical marker transcription about the Miamisburg Mound): "Miamisburg Mound, the largest conical earthwork in Ohio, originally was sixty-eight feet high with a diameter of three hundred feet. One excavating attempt in 1869 reduced the height to its present sixty-five feet. The mound was then partially investigated by means of a vertical shaft which extended from the top to the base and connected with two horizontal tunnels. The exploration revealed one burial eight feet from the top containing a bark covered skeleton and a vault twenty-eight feet lower that was surrounded by logs but without a burial... The conical shape, the type of burials, and the absence of associate earthworks indicate that the Miamisburg Mound was the work of Adena Indians, a prehistoric group that lived in the Ohio valley between 1000 B.C. and 400 A.D... An important part of their way of life was the proper burial of the dead in graves that were covered with earth mounds, such as this one." Let me repeat: it's a burial mound. Sources: www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=105819 www.ohiohistory.org/visit/browse-historical-sites/miamisburg-mound/ www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=166080
@@emileeweir7773 YOU need to be more precise in your descriptions "a nearby mound" is not helpful. You are apparently speaking of the Miamisburg Mound. Further you conflate cleanup at the Mound Laboratory and its disposal site in the same paragraph. To inform you, the Mound Laboratory disposal site is also formed in a mound with stairs, and an observation point at the top. It is NOT a danger to visitors.
@@KB4QAA The "storage mound" you refer to IS the Miamisburg Mound. There is no on-site storage, not even for low-level radioactive wastes. Even during operations, all of Mound's radioactive wastes were shipped for off-site storage. If there was any on-site material, it would be included in cleanup and site usage documentation, just as documentation for the Fernald Feed Materials Production Site (now Fernald Preserve) has those details. From the DOE about on-site operations (Envoronmental Impact Statement, Pgs. 3-86 and 3-87, repeated on 10-37 and 10-38): "Mound Facility currently ships its radioactive wastes to four offsite burial/storage grounds... Mound neither stores nor buries any radioactive wastes onsite." From the EPA: "Landfill materials were excavated and disposed of off site to facilitate future reuse of the site property, after congressional legislation and economic stimulus funding provided $50 million to DOE for the work." From the DOE Legacy Management Office: "DOE completed [Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act] soil and building remediation of the site, demolished or transferred buildings and infrastructure, and implemented the remedies in the RODs. All wastes were shipped off-site and disposed of in accordance with applicable regulatory requirements. Groundwater remediation continues at several areas of the site." Sources: energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2014/12/f19/EIS-0014-FEIS-1979.pdf cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/SiteProfiles/index.cfm?fuseaction=second.cleanup&id=0504935 www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2021-08/MoundFactSheet.pdf
It's sad that so many mounds were lost. Back in college I took an Intro to Archeology class and learned that I grew up not even 5 miles from an effigy mound. By time archeologists discovered it in the 1920s, there was already a road dividing the mound in half.
as a west virginian, i can tell you that most of us in our daily lives speak phoenician, though sometimes in formal contexts we will break out some partridge in a pear tree grammatical structures.
The Vikings had a way around that, they kept the message short, and then filled out the rest of the stone with nonsense. "I am Bjorn the conqueror of Men and Women. Jagagagagagagagaaga".
Ho...ly...shit. I had a funny comment all typed up about how I'm from Ohio and what did we ever do to Milo, but I had to delete it and write this one instead. Jesus Christ, Milo. I'm a big fan of you and your channel, and I know that you're not just passionate, you're also incredibly intelligent, insanely well informed and very well spoken and eloquent. But...even knowing all of those things, the end of this video still caught me off guard. I'm not an archaeologist or historian, I'm a writer. Looking through that lens, with the eyes and ears of a writer, I needed to acknowledge how _unbelievably_ well thought out and perfectly delivered your final point was. The things you said about scientific racism are obviously accurate, but they're also impressively presented. Very well done, sir.
Just for the record, the museum says it’s almost definitely a hoax. They just list some of the “theories”. It’s honestly a great museum, one of the best focused on mounds that I’ve seen
Wikipedia has some of the claims supporting it as a hoax, including it may have been crafted as a fraud to promote the excavation site to academia (probably for profit), with some of the "letters" copied from earlier literature. Not having the original to test the age of the inscription is pretty sus, but events happened before chemical dating.
Hey, as somebody with multiple Native people in my family, I just have to say thank you for """injecting""" """politics""" into this video. (By which I mean "accurately discussing history, its contexts, and real-world implications.")
@@RoemDaug you misunderstand, your both on the same side and are making the same point that it's not injecting politics, that's what the quotation marks were for and he clarifies that later in the comment
AS a native American who loves Archeology and Philosophy, people like you give me hope for the future. You see the things for what they are and you also have proof to back up what you say. Your videos give me so much information and you tell things how they are and give more questions that are needed!
its sad to think this happened to mass graves as well. I grew up in the south where a bunch of major civil and revolutionary war battles happened. One of my classmates in 5th grade had a collection of army buttons they had taken from a field. I knew people who collected beads or tools from protected sites, even as a kid it made me sick.
@OutsiderLabs No, because taking buttons randomly strewn across the ground near a grave site is not the same as taking objects that were deliberately interred alongside human remains. Buttons found in a human grave are part of the grave. Buttons found on a battlefield are battlefield debris - still artifacts that probably should be treated with respect, but taking them isn't as bad as grave-robbing. EDIT: To be clear I assumed you were commenting on the idea of collecting buttons from battlefields. For some reason my brain glossed over the sentence about taking objects from protected sites...
Absolutely wild to me that across all these theories, none of them seemed to consider consulting Native Americans on the stone, much less Adena people. A complete disregard of their knowledge and expertise on their own culture and history.
The Adena culture specifically hasn't been in existence for nigh 2000 years at this point, and the last mound building culture in central North America, referred to as the Hopewell culture, stopped building mounds c 500 CE. This is knowledge and expertise that was gone for a millennium before Columbus even got to the Americas. This said, it is stunning that they didn't even consider asking around to see if the indigenous people knew like, literally anything.
@@hiimme101 No, I am certain that is not accurate. The Hurons, who are native to the general area of Ontario (and beyond, AFAIK) built mounds too. There are several mounds in High Park in Toronto that I beleive are only about 300 years old,, and there is one in Toronto that is legally protected as a cemetary called Taber Hill, dated to 14th century CE. So the Iroquois Nations were mound-builders...
@@hiimme101 NP. Honestly, the only reason I knew it was wrong was because last fall, I did a walking tour of High Park led by a local First Nations group and they talked about a burial mound in the park.
Im east coast native american and honestly i used to love learning history till it came to learning about how absolutely abhorently my people we treated not just in life, but in death. I had to step away. But hearing a white guy who dose not hide the history of how white people treated my people and being geniuinely disgusted by their actions almost made me cry. Thank you
Hey bro hope you also don't hide from the history of natives enslaving/murdering and killing other members of tribes- how they treated others and doing horrific things as well. :)
@@matthewspringer1369 Dude you cannot even begin to compare the level of atrocities. If you think native americans were genociding each other constantly you're on some John Locke "State of Nature" bullshit. The harm they did to each other absolutely pales in comparison to the state sponsored genocide they suffered at the hands of the american empire.
@@Cibershadow2 Humans, always looking to exploit their fellow beings for their own gain - it is a tale as old as time. Consider the Chippewa. In what could be dubbed the original “trail of tears,” they forced the Sioux from their land in present-day Minnesota. In turn, the Sioux massacred the Omaha, the Kiowa, and the Pawnee, lusting for their resources and territory. Consider the Aztecs. Schools teach the story of Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes conquering the Aztecs, but they omit the two centuries of Aztec ruthlessness that preceded this and convinced many other tribes to fight alongside Cortes. The Aztecs had an enormous empire with a long history of raping women, pillaging, and enslaving neighboring tribes to build their empire. Historical accounts of the Aztecs alone reveal an “industry of human sacrifice unlike any other in the world.” They punished homosexuality with the death penalty and habitually murdered women. Would you like to talk about the Native American custom of scalping? :)
@@morzemus1805 Sorry I was too busy in thought of human sacrifies... You know like children? You know like using razor-sharp obsidian blades, slicing open the chests of sacrificial victims and offered their still-beating hearts to the gods. Then tossing victims' lifeless bodies down the steps of the towering Templo Mayor? Stuff like that... But im sorry... what were you arguing??
I grew up in Mexico, where Precolumbian history is regularly taught (very idealized and underfunded, but it's something). You can find pyramids downtown Mexico City where colonizers built on top of, charmingly. Given how the Maya have their writing and how diverse cultures would write down codices, I find it baffling that the first thing these people do is theorize about European languages and not ask the natives or linguists about local languages Awesome works, been loving your videos!
That's a real common effect of that arguably racist sense of superiority people often have toward past cultures. The notion that people are far more different than they actually are may lead one to a very inaccurate "us & them" set of assumptions.
Just one little fact check: The Mi'kmaq of Canada's Altlantic region claim a pre-columbian written pictographic language. The irony is that Mi'kmaq territory used to include Boston. I'd love to hear more about the Mi'kmaq claim in a future video. This writing looks very little like whats on the stone, though. I'm not saying the two are connected.
I can't help be feel so angry that my people keep destroying these sacred things and graves. Honestly, I bet they'd throw a fit if someone burned their churches and graveyards. It's so saddening and always hard to hear about all of the loss we've put others in due to our own greed and ignorance.
Fun fact to double on the nagpra thing: despite nagpra being a thing, a metric ton of museums and academic institutions have categorized a vast majority of their artifacts as belonging to no identifiable tribe and thus not being repatriable. Now for some to even a decent amount, thats probably plausible but this applies into some artifacts known to be at least from the time after Europeans arrived and where tribes have very good reason to think at least a few artifacts definitely belong to them. Even without that, I've seen academics estimates that about 117,000 out of 132,000 or so and thats a suspiciously large amount to be exempt from nagpra.
I can't get over how funny the sudden transition from frantic and excited speech to a black and white slide with calm guitar music is. Love your videos, comedic and informative!
This was so much fun! As a retired archaeologist in Arizona, its so refreshing to see someone do a very good debunking of pseudoscience, that didn't involve smacking someone upside the head (even if it might have been intrinsically satisfying). So looking forward to you next episode!
Thanks for mentioning NAGPRA! Legit, I've wanted to bring it up on a few different videos of yours. I took a Forensic Anthropology class from George Gill (he is one of the major supporters of NAGPRA and has repatriated many Indigi people), and it's so important for people to understand why remains and burial artifacts need to return to their people... as well as the context for *why* that legislation had to be passed.
Really appreciate the discussion of the ethics of archaeology. My introduction to archaeology was a Bronze Age Mediterranean class. And guys like Schliemann were simultaneously founders of the field as we know it today and also destroyed so much and violated everything we would consider ethical today
@@Cheepchipsable Exactly. Too often our society loves to look down our noses at those that came before us, but quickly forget without them we wouldn't be here. I'm tired of hearing about how x person didnt follow the standards we have today, and it makes them a bad person.
@@randomusername5242 You can be a pioneer, and an asshole. We are entirely justified in looking down our noses at people in the past. It was still known that people were people, and had emotions. But aristocrats and moneymakers still treated nonlanded people as disposable units. We can absolutely look down at people. The future will judge us as we are due.
@@gabriellavedier9650 What's the justification? Are we really so morally superior, especially when our politicians and business leaders treat the citizenry even worse than our ancestors were?
@@randomusername5242 How our business leaders and politicians treat citizenry now has no relevance on the many old archaeologists lacked any respect for the cultures they investigated. And as was said before, they knew the places they investigated were of human beings. Humans beings deserve respect.
The sad thing is, NAGPRA wasn't/isn't enforced in a lot of cases. Institutions have dragged out the process of repatriating remains and artifacts. Some people have outright stolen them to avoid giving then back, though that's way less common. The implementation of NAGPRA is still very much a work in progress
Fun fact: The prison that's across from the mound is considered haunted, but not from the burial mound right next to it, but because the prison itself had a lot of inmates die in it... It's also used as a haunted house attraction each Halloween.
@@Melbeezo I try not to imagine the historic tours of 2120 that recap our time period. I assume it will mirror the creepy way we imagine the frontier/invasion-era west as romantic & symbolic of freedom, as opposed to anything resembling the truth.
While not endorsing the validity of the stone, I wanted to point out that if it had a European origin, it doesn't mean Europeans were in Ohio, but rather it is indicative of trade, probably from the East. (Was this mentioned? I may have missed it)
God this was such a good video. I was asking myself "what if its the native peoples languge" the whole vid and when you brought up that no one actually studying this said that I was shocked.
Im a linguist! And genuinely, I think this stone is probably real. There's just too much missing and destroyed parts of their culture that we'll never see for me to write it off in good faith. Granted my focus is comparative linguistics, and I'm not a native speaker of any of the native languages of turtle island. That said I'm in the park that it's in columns, personally.
@@slithra227 As others have pointed out, admittedly it's *extrmemely* suspicious, no matter how you read it, that no characters really repeat. If it were Alphabetical, we'd certainly see repeats of their AEIOU counterpart in nearly any situation, and it's a bit simple for a Chinese-style system (though not out of the question) Real? Decent chance, this IS the only piece we have, and most others would already be destroyed or buried. Doubtful? Kinda likely...
Southern Illinois was called "Little Egypt" with towns named things like Cairo because of the number of Mississippian mounds. In Ohio we have at least one Moundville, AND a town called Circleville named after the Hopewell-Adena circular earthwork the town was built around. Sadly, the people of Circleville decided they were tired of living a town of circular roads, leveled the mound and imposed a street grid.
Literally that never fails to make my blood boil. In Hilliard/Columbus, we have Shrum Mound, and it's right across the street from a massive housing complex. It's so upsetting because there's absolutely no parking or anything so you can go up and see it, so despite it being a historical landmark, it goes neglected and forgotten about. It sounds morbid, but I don't put it past the city or the state to eventually get sick of it being there and take the status away so they can flatten it.
Yeah it really sucks seeing how they're treated down here I remember going to one I think in Kentucky or Southern Illinois near the border around there and they were talking about how people still would come and drive four wheelers all over the mounds despite knowing what they were. There was a small archaeology day there that was really cool I think it was called Mound City or something as well.
We have the Ocmulgee Indian Mounds in Macon, GA that has been preserved since they were rediscovered by the railroad in the 1800's. Got federal status a few years ago.
West Virginians speak a dialect of english known as "Western Virginia" its hard to understand but when you give them a car to work on and a chilled doctor pepper, they tend to be just a tad more coherent. You know the phrase "All roads lead to Rome" Well all conversations lead to some sort of "Anti-Federalist Mothman hullabaloo."
That's what I like about Fallout 76, is you get to murder the Mothman, AND his lunatic follower cultists too! (Generally, they carry flamers, and Handmades, [The AKs that are built in a shed by some fucking idiot that is missing parts and has no idea how to build a gun. Also, shovel stock. its the Shovel AK.] so they generally give me back the ammo I spent turning them to mist.)
"I'm an awful lot like grass. I do best in direct sunlight and I'm in your front yard right now.".....these are the true words of a CRM archaeologist. At which point the land owner says, are you looking for dino bones? You are my type of weird. If you are not an actual archaeologist, you missed your true calling. We need you in the field. :)
Just saw the two most recent videos. Well done! I really appreciate mentioning the dark history of Native American archeology. Or as you so aptly put it, grave robbing. Acknowledging practices like this were seen as normal once and why people did it is an important part of preventing it from happening again. Most of all, thank you for the effort you put in these videos. The research, writing, presentation and editing are all on point. I wish there were more videos to watch because they’re all wildly entertaining and I feel like I learn something every time. You and the people you make this with can be proud of yourselves. It’s commendable and it truly shows.
Its already been two years, and I just watched this now. I dont think it ended on a sour note. I actually reminded on my responsibility to educate people and pull them out of misinformation. But of course, it starts from knowing the true information. So thank you, archaeology guy from the internet, I do hope you keep making these kinds of videos, because people deserve to know the truth, and we will help you spread it out further.
As an enjoyer of these videos and an avid player of TTRPGs, the description of "weird, niche information that you'll never need, and the illusion of choice" perfectly sums up two of my favorite hobbies.
Me too, actually! I get an extra area of study this coming year and I'm thinking of doing archeology- this channel is sort of the last deciding factor. All the luck to you, hope it goes well for us both!
I have seen your videos before (don't have a TikTok, just UA-cam) and it wasn't until I just saw this video recently that I became very intrigued. I am an artist and I've been inventing my own language for many years (and a corresponding cosmology/theology, I'm fascinated by folklore). I noticed, by pure coincidence that in the position the stone is generally believed to be oriented, four of the "characters" are identical to ones I developed on my own, and a number of others have similarities, but are not necessarily the same. If this is fake, and maybe this is something others have hypothesized already, but the way I achieved my own alphabet was pulling inspiration from Celtic and Nordic runes, and then I guess you could say "simplified English" letters. Also when I was little, I would make up symbols all the time pretending it was some mystical/unknown language. So, if it is a "fake," it may be that even if it is some kind of made up language, it could pulled from many different sources of inspiration, resulting in some kind of Frankenstein script that the guys thought was cool™. Of, course, if this is a real language that we simply do not have any further documentation of, we could just be using our pattern recognition brains to see characters we think we know. I know this video is a bit old, but I thought it was interesting seeing the exact same symbols I use in my art practice in a controversial/conspiratorial piece of history. I made a blog page I sometimes update for my art that has the alphabet and some of the language on it at iaaian.blogspot.com if you would like to see the similarities! (Also if you see this comment)
It's great to see a history-based channel that talks about the weird, unusual, and sometimes stupid parts of archeology through the lens of critique and deduction rather than taking the most exciting ideas as fact.
Whoa this is so nuts to see as someone from moundsville. Fun fact: the prison (closed in the 90s for being hella violent) is a pretty cool historical place and sort of a museum of its own. You can go there and try to hunt ghosts, too. Also we do still use some of it for just regular community things, haunted houses, etc, so they literally have signs warning you not to piss in random places in there. That's just what Moundsville is like unfortunately. The much more grievous crime is that ALSO across the street from the mound is the grade school I attended, and kids are annoying. There's also a guy that steals a fuckton of bicycles nearby, which is moundsville's greatest past time other than drugs. Srsly tho, love your videos and was pleasantly surprised to see this!
Very much agree with especially the last chapter. I highly recommend "The Mismeasure of Man" by Stephen Jay Gould. It's from the 80s/90s, so his statements shouldn't be directly transferred onto the state of science today, but I still found it a very interesting (and horrifying) read, and its statements about the history of scientific racism are still as important today as they were upon first publication.
Seeing the results of your experiment is so interesting. The fact that multiple people came up with the exact same symbols is so cool and interesting and I with I could see the entire data set!!
Cool adjacent piece of history from your local literary history nerd: Henry Schoolcraft’s wife, Bamewawagezhikaquay (aka Jane Johnston Schoolcraft), was a biracial Ojibwa woman who is regarded as the first known Native woman poet. She wrote in both English and Ojibwe.
As soon as you said "white supremacy" and showed the impression of a skull, I knew where that was going immediately. There's a reason the Nazis liked to measure the heads of their victims at the concentration camps, and just like the Nazis it was batshit insane.
The measurments because she doesn't have racial history papers was where I had to stop "The Man in The High Castle". Not the weird timeline swapping, the racist measurement thing.
@@-Ghostess No, you poor brainwashed simpleton, skull measurements are one of the most reliable tools of determining the differences between racial types. Regardless of what people may use the information for, it is an absolute fact that different major genetic groups have differently shaped skulls.
Phrenology and social darwinism my old enemy. My beloathed. I know this video is like a year old but I’ve been binging this series since I stumbled across it and I absolutely love your method of presentation, reminds me of some of my anthro professors LOL. The only issue I have is I can only watch so many episodes in one sitting before I get so frustrated with the conspiracies that I need a very strong drink.
I’d never heard of the Grave Creek Stone before this, but once you showed the map of where it had been found, I immediately knew there was going to be scientific racism involved. I don’t quite know what to think about this yet, I’ll have to watch the video again and do more research, but it was a very interesting topic.
That is a great reaction to have. Learn, question, draw your own conclusion. I have a lot of respect for that and would encourage everyone to do their own research if they are so inclined so as to eliminate any bias I bring to the table.'
@@miniminuteman773 10 minutes in and there are marks on the stone that match the old Russian siriliza language that is on the Roseau stone journaled by the U of M, and now back in Roseau. Some Letters match up as does the "#4"...The Grave Creek stone is 1.8 inches and the Roseau Stone is 1.5 inches. The way Futhark runes can differ among regions and time lead me to believe more study is warranted.
This is one of the few "awful archaeology" subjects I hadn't already heard of before, so this should be extra interesting! Also, Milo looks like he is wearing a giant bandana as a shirt.
10:45 I like how you specify that he closed his eyes before reading the book instead of just saying he read the book instead of looking at the Rock implying he didn't even do a good job at reading the book
Thank you so much for addressing the mound cultures of America. They don't get touched on enough and there's a lot of misconceptions regarding them. Our ancestors built great structures and earthworks that need to be better understood so we can appreciate them for what they were.
When the Miamisburg Mound was mentioned, I got excited! My mom lived in that area, and she even had a conspiracy about it. Her great grandma died of breast cancer, and she told my mom that she had got it from working around the Miamisburg Mound. According to my mom, a bunch of her Great Grandma's coworkers also got cancer. She said that there used to be some nuclear stuff going on around the site, which was probably the cause. She also said that kids used to take field trips there, but because of the radiation, it was deemed unsafe and the schools don't take kids there anymore. There actually was a laboratory for nuclear energy, called the Mound Labratory, and there's a Dayton Daily News article about the harm it did. It's tilted, How Was the Mound Labratory Allowed to do so much harm? It was written by Sally Dunn. She said, "Beginning in 1960, the Mound released radioactive tritium into the air and contaminated the soil with plutonium-238." She also told of multiple family members being diagnosed with cancer, and estimated that 90% of the houses in her old neighborhood had cancer occur in them. So... yeah. It's insane how that laboratory was allowed to poison the town like that. If you want more info, you'll find plenty of stuff if you search up Miamisburg Mound radiation.
In my reading up on the Mound Builders, it greatly saddened me to learn that much of the mounds that use to exist are all gone now. I love history, even the more darker sides too, but there's loads of times when you just facepalm and shake your head.
I go to an university that has 2 native american mounds right next to each other. For DECADES, people would walk, drive, etc over it. Only recently has it been fenced off to protect the mounds once it was discovered that they are slowly sinking because of the soil composition and foot traffic. And they now have signs explaining the mounds and talking about the people who built them and their descendants today.
I don't know if it'd be too niche to cover on this channel, but I'd love to see you debunk David Rohl's New Chronology. My mother used to work as an Egyptologist and independent researcher specialising in the Third Intermediate Period, and she would frequently debate with him in various Facebook groups and pages about how ridiculous his proposals were and how he's clearly just trying to shuffle dates around in a sad attempt to legitimise the Biblical account of Egypt. Having a handy UA-cam video to send people so that they understand what I'm even talking about would be handy, and it seems like a perfect fit for this series, but like I said, I'm not sure if it's crazy enough to cover considering you're also having to deal with conspiracy theorists, or "pyramidiots" as my mom used to call them. Cheers!
26:45 even when interpreting it as an european script, reading it from left to right isn't scientific. Take germanic and norse runes for example. They can be written from left to right and right to left, sometimes alternating with every line. Edit: A lot of early greek and phonecian scripts were also written right to left.
I can’t help wonder if one of the reasons a lot of the smaller mounds wasn’t preserved, also had to do with the fact that the people who settled the area and made farms there where completely "disconnected" to the cultures that build these mounds. Where I live, in Scandinavia, the mounds are part of our shared history, and we can read about some of the legendary Kings and Heroes who might be buried in them in the old Chronicles and Sagas - so there has been an interest in preserving a lot of these, so it’s almost impossible to go for a ride in the rural areas and not see mounds….
No, that's pretty much spot on imo. Why preserve something if you have no real connection to it if you don't already appreciate historical significance of a thing
@@gregenglisch632 Not to mention, it's not only a disconnect, but even outright antagonism towards in some cases... They aren't People, they're "subhuman savages butchering God's Children" and such, and the Mounds are their Pagan Altars... or whatever the fuck to justify their views.
The second you said "an ancient relic of an unknown language that they lost before anyone could see." I started getting Joseph Smith and his golden plates vibes.
As someone who lives 10 minutes from Moundsville and has spent 100s of hours doing research on The Grave Creek Mound and many other ancient sites located in the Ohio Valley I didn't expect much from this video. I can tell your research is done really well with the items that you've referenced. I am probably the only viewer of this video that has actually viewed some casts and photo in person at the Smithsonian, I have also had the privilege of reading the original diaries of Delf Norona. The potential for Phoenician being on the stone was one of the interesting things I looked into, a mound about 20 minutes north of Moundsville in Ohio was destroyed in 1893 for road fill. The local university came to excavate and found some interesting artifacts there as well, one of which was an item that had Phoenician looking symbols. (Was never able to find out what happened to the items.) There is also the Braxton County Rune Stone that looks very very similar to The Grave Creek Stone. Just because no one is able to identify the writing(Could have a been an important member of the Adena) that just happened to inscribe a few things into a stone doesnt mean it is a hoax. West Virginia is full of mysteries and very interesting findings. Moundsville is an incredible place of history and sites along with other less known items found that are extremely interesting.
26:14 You seriously didn't come across anything assuming it was their own language!? That was literally my FIRST thought, and I thought it was wild you weren't bringing that up because 'surely it is a super popular theory'
I’m a Native American who works for my tribe’s historic preservation office, a department that only exists because of policies like NAGPRA being in place. Our entire job is to document and protect cultural sites, including graves. I just have to say how much I appreciate that you voice your stances on things like scientific racism and the dark history behind American archeology. As someone who works very closely with archeologists and anthropologists, this is a very real problem I have to deal with in my day to day life. It’s nice to hear this being talked about, and brought up with a bigger audience. These are the kinds of discussions that need to happen, and it gives me hope to see you dive into it in your videos. I also have to say that I’ve heard a lot of horrific stories of the things that have been done against indigenous people in the name of science. That being said most of the archeologists that I’ve personally met share a genuine concern and respect for indigenous cultures and their rights. The struggle for indigenous nations to have a say in what happens to their cultural and sacred sites is ongoing, but we’re leaps and bounds ahead of where we were not that long ago. NAGPRA wasn’t passed until 1990 after all.
NAGPRA WASV ONLY PASSED IN 1990??
@@fourleafclover2064 Yep. Imagine how much cultural heritage and how many artifacts were destroyed by these pseudo-archeologists effectively grave robbing and destroying sacred sites. I shudder at the thought.
The text is written in the Coelbren alphabet (ancient welsh or Khumric) its well documented and evidenced by Wilson and Blackett. It can also easily be matched to it. Its not Native american, there were many migrations of Europeans pre columbus, including King Arthur and the Welsh. But academia lies about this fact.
I'm glad there are people like you doing this work, it's just shameful it took so long to happen and still receives resistance.
@@Hero_Of_Old too much of that pipe weed man lol
As a Native American who loves archeology and anthropology, thank you so so so much for talking about some of the horrific ideals that helped shape the field. When I hear people talk about "gravesites" in early American archeology, what they're talking about is the equivalent of digging up someone's great grandma from the town cemetery. You calling it out as grave robbing was amazing. Keep being awesome.
Additionally, foresight is a bitch. People only care about genocide when it's too late.
Yeah unfortunately this stuff is ongoing too in many ways. Kudos to you for seeing what the field needs to become and giving it a chance
But they literally do this all the time in Europe and the United States to make space I’ve literally seen a video of hundreds of gravestones thrown off a cliff an entire graveyard cleared to build like a football field
@@charlesmcgill2974 Again, people only care by the time it's too late. America is even more selfish, since they throw away the remains of natives like they may as well have never existed. Additionally, America has SO much more space than many European countries, they could EASILY just make buildings around grave sites instead of destroying them.
luckily the idea of native ameeicans not being litteral cavemen for 20000 years until white dudes showed up is gaining SOME traction finally lol
I know, most people are here to listen to you debunking and talking shit about conspiracy theories (me too, don’t worry), but I’d love if you’d make another series called Awesome Archeology and start sharing the great stuff that is going on in the field. You could even make a second wheel with interesting theories
YES
THIS
such a good idea!!
Agreed but these are great. More please!
Yes
I was born and raised in Moundsville and have spent all my 21 years here. Wish you would have mentioned in the part where you talk about how destructive settlers and archaeologists were, that they literally built a bar on top of the mound, because why the hell not, as well as a museum INSIDE the mound.
Goes to show how little respect they had for the Native Americans and their sacred places.
Awesome video!
To them it was just land. The Adena Culture wasn’t around fifteen hundred years by the time settlers got there. How were they to know?
Imagine building a museum in a fucking graveyard... the disrespect is insane
@@BalroomBlitz715that makes no sense. If you're building on a burial ground, it's going to be very obvious to the people building
@@pennyw2226 wasn’t sacred to them or anyone for a thousand and a half years. Morality was different then.
@@BalroomBlitz715And morality was different in Nazi Germany, or tribes that still practice FGM.
Just because "they didn’t know better," doesn't mean that it's a blank check to ignore and silence the horrors done to both the dead and living.
When we stop talking about how what was done was horrible, we start thinking that those things might be good ideas.
"What do you think that mound is for"
"There's a guy in it"
This is way too simple of a joke to make me lose it
clearly that makes it a house.
It's the exact amount of slapstick humor that just makes me *wheeeeze*
@@Friddow That's pretty much the complete opposite of slapstick humour. Did you mean deadpan maybe?
@@thespankmyfrank Yeah I think you're right
@@wyattroncin941 No no no no no! This is ARCHEOLOGY we are talking about!!!! It is OBVIOUSLY a RELIGIOUS SITE!!!!
When I was a kid, I said to my brother "these two stars make a line when you connect them." He looked at me disappointedly and said "any two points make a line..." I'm thinking my brother should have been there when that guy suggest ley lines.
Ironically that‘s the whole point of a line
@@jackback70 actually, a line has infinitely many points ... 😆
@@danielbarnes3406 That's the pont :D
Even Alfred Watkins wanted four points for a Ley line.
@@danielbarnes3406 when we talk about lines in a non-mathematical setting, assume "line segments" unless evidence suggests otherwise.
Here’s an idea. Some dude in Spain was a legend at skipping stones, he even managed to reach America.
The legendary "Piedras Lanzador" of spain! so skilled he could throw a stone across the atlantic an more!
And shoot through 300 miles of forest? Quite a fine arm.
As a Spaniard, this is true.
There’s a hilarious Seneca myth about a lazy man who loved skipping stones, ran into a man-eating giant, and defeated it with cunning. His name is Skunny-Wundy.
@@MunchKING depending on where he was in Spain, he also managed to throw it over portugal before it reached the ocean
That arm was not human
I simply cannot get over how they allegedly found this object clutched in the hands of a dead Native American, deep inside of a Native American mound, within territory that had been only recently been purged of its Native American population who had lived there for thousands of years, and their first thought (and, seemingly, every one thereafter) was that it had to be a European language. It's so dumb in so many ways that I simply cannot wrap my mind around it without collapsing into a black hole of stupid.
The answer, is racism
What you said!
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Sometimes people will hear folks say that early American “archaeology” was just grave-robbing and think “there’s no way they’d just go around robbing graves!” but actually, during this time period in both America and Europe, plenty of people had no issue robbing or even stealing the corpses of even contemporary graves (with the aim to sell them to unscrupulous scientists or suppliers of bodies/skeletons to scientists for research purposes). And those were graves of people the robbers thought of as people, so rest assured they’d defile the graves of any beings they viewed as subhuman without so much as a thought
Exactly!!! There were cases of people in Victorian era Britain who intentionally committed murder in order to donate the bodies to scientists for money. People would absolutely grave Rob in order to steal jewellery or the body to sell, even in specially marked Christian style grave sites. So no doubt a mound of dirt would be robbed relentlessly for clout
More bizarrely, people even ate the dead they found in these graves, or made them into paint pigment.
@@noctisocculta4820 exactly, like how Egyptian mummies were supposedly far more common before the Victorians and Georgians started shipping them to England for vanity displays.
Aye the practice of reducing mummies into a powder for digestion was truly bizarre.
@@Klaaism It's like people seeing a Corpse and think "Gentleman, i maybe have found the Fountain of Youth" like what in the Chinese Mercury is this?
I think it’s funny how my driver’s test used this Mound™️as a location marker for where I would turn back around to the DMV. Like “ah yes, and make a left at the ancient burial ground”
The State Police had the Marshall County barracks right across the street running along side the south end of the prison. Drivers testing was done right there. There was a girl taking their test and the examiner asked her to back out of the space. She did, straight across the street and smacked the prison.
I'm japanese so I'm used to both reading horizontally (left to right) and vertically (top to bottom, right to left)
At the first time you showed the stone, I turned my head to the right because the symbol on the ''bottom'' looks more like a drawing of man, a flower or a torch to me than a letter
Even if the stone might be fake, the scientific racism discourse was very interesting
This video really made me want to read up on mounds, maybe it's because pretty similar to something that's around me (kofun) but they are exciting to me
You are a really compelling speaker and it's exiting to see how many subjects are left on your wheel, I'm looking forwards to it!
I live in Illinois so I have easy access to the Mississippian civilization. I’ve seen the mounds and the culture is fascinating. I really want to go to Japan to see a kofun. I love how many are preserved in Japan.
If you wanna check out a very large mound with a lot of mystery surrounding it and the area it’s in look at Silbury Hill in the UK
@@chrish7543 I liver near there it’s pretty cool
I live in Uppsala, Sweden, and we have a bunch of burial mounds around here (and also in the rest of the nordic countries). The idea seem to have been very widespread, to say the least...
Thinking about it, isn't a pyramid also a kind of burial mound? Made neat with straight lines and geometry, but at its essence a mound.
@@misanthropicservitorofmars2116 just be mindful that because kōfun are the tombs of Japanese Emperors, they are sacred. That’s why so many of them are preserved!
As a Tsimshian who has spent hours defending my own and other first nations from the assumption of being "primitive" the end segment of your video meant so much to me. Thank you.
Before you act high and mighty remember your own tribe was not the first people there (that means you took the land from somebody else) also every single native tribe has history of destroying the burial sites of the tribes that they defeat in combat (so stop being a hypocrite)
@@GeathsrighthandDoes that make them "primitive" in your eyes?
"Moundsville, WV. You just can't make this up"
Me, A West Virginian: I've been to a town called Duck and live outside a community called Wahoo... It could be worse.
Fun Fact, my 6th grade field trip was actually a joint field trip to the Penitentiary and The mound. Unsurprisingly we were forced to spend much more time in the Penitentiary than at the mound.
Also I'm pretty sure we speak English but it is a horribly odd accent. Mix of southern, Midwestern and whatever you call a Pittsburgh accent.
What do you do on a field trip to a prison?
@@Trekki200 it was a decommissioned site and had been for years. It was one of the last/only places in the state to use the electric chair. They had it on display as well as all the different shivs they has confiscated then showed us different cells and stuff. They still had all the inmates drawings on them. We had lunch in the prison cafeteria and then they has inmates from the new state pen come in and talk to us, scared straight style. It was a very odd experience for a normal public school to say the least and they had done it for years. This was back in 2003 so I'm sorry I don't remember all of it.
@@LyndsianaJones so how many in your class turned out to be criminals? More or less than average? Lol
@@CHloE748 only 2 I think that would have been on that trip. Drug related. Once we get into my High School class that is a different story.
Interesting thing to note is how many "characters" are just flipped versions of other characters on the stone while there's almost 0 repeated characters. This looks like a conlang made by someone who wasn't very aware of conlangs tbh
they could just have bad handwriting since there are a few similar characters that may have been the same one just written poorly, plus it might be a complex language system where flipping a character could mean different type of ennunciation or that there are very many characters
@@xiphactinusaudax1045 agreed! Maybe it's like chinese and the characters represent WORDS and not letters. Which would mean a LOT of information can be transmitted through minimal space.
@@myheartismadeofstars I'd rule that out. To convey entire words the symbols need to have high average complexity. But they absolutely don't, if you compare them with a script that does like chinese.
@@ehtuanK I wouldn’t completely rule it out! Chinese has evolved majorly over thousands of years. If you look at oracle bone script which is the ancestor of modern Chinese, many characters are extremely simple!
I don't think that immediately disqualifies it as an alphabet, I mean, there are plenty of examples of that in other languages. Do agree that the fact that no characters repeat is kinda sus tho.
Ex-mormon here ... the moment I heard "artifact with unknown writing, found in mound in 1830's, with confliting origin stories" ... my mind immediately jumped to "hoax"
“Oh look, a page of coupons. I mean, It’s a new Testament of Jesus Christ, and you all have to have s3x with me!”
It's written in reformed Egyptian hur dur dur
Heh
your ex-profit made your entire ex-faith possible by robbing indigenous grave sites, your opinion doesn't matter--even if you didn't drink the Flavor-Aid. LOL.
"dumb da-da-dumb"
Fellow archaeologist here! Loved the video - I had a chance to do a CRM project in moundsville a couple years ago, which is how I first learned of this dubious stone. One thing I wish you had mentioned about it - not only was the stone found by "archaeologists" digging through the lense of scientific racism, the stone (and the idea that the stone was a European language) was used by other quack archaeologists to push the "White Moundbuilder" myth - the idea that the Adena mounds and other mounds from Indigenous cultures from the same Era were not built by Native Americans, but rather a Civilization of lost white people that had been "destroyed" by the native Americans. This belief was then used as a justification for the systemic violence white settlers inflicted on Native Americans - it is also theorized that this psuedoarchaeolgical trash directly went on to inspire the works of a certain Joseph Smith. Truly a dark history.
How did I figure that this shit was tied to Mormons and it doesn't surprise me
Grave robbing is an interesting issue in Ireland. A lot of countryside and small village cemeteries still have signs saying "grave robbing is frowned upon by society. Please don't do that."
@@josephwilliam9124 I would love to, but the closest one to me turned into a drug hive after I moved away, so I'm not going back😂
The trainer from "Gladiator" is buried in that graveyard as well, so makes sense😂
i love how polite that is 😂
it was such a huge problem for such a long time, i’m not at all surprised. the things people did to try and keep grave robbers out were quite interesting. but those living in rural areas probably didn’t have the money to pay for that kind of thing, so i guess a sign and a guilt trip was the next best thing 😂
@@chiefofthesky Ya I'd say that's it. People are insane. Historical sites are being destroyed regularly now, and two weeks ago someone broke into a church that had mummies being stored, and they let them on fire. Between the flames and the fire extinguishers, a few 800 year old mummies got entirely obliterated.
"Bollox, someone asked nicely."
As a conlanger one of the things I learned was that writing systems are constrained by their materials. If your writing is based on cutting into stone then your writing is going to resemble other cut into stone systems (lots of stight lines) since that is what works for stone.
Exactly
Ok this is mine months later but I truly do appreciate this prospective as a fiction writer that has made plenty of conlings.
Writing in wax, leaves, limestone, papyrus, wood, etc can easily narrow down your letter shapes, writing direction, and even have some cultural reflections.
That’s why the Balinese script is so loopy-you can’t write straight lines on palm leaves without tearing them.
@@dooplets._.5776 yes! Another example is the nordic futhark alphabet, which comes from a time when basically all writing was done by wood-carving or stone-carving. :)
@@atlander4204
Yoo that’s really cool to learn!!
Here's my crackpot no evidence theory: it was an attempt at creating a written language that didn't catch on. Some guy (probably named Dave) was like "hey guys, I just carved words into a rock! Now we can communicate without-" and all the other people in his village were like "shut up, Dave "
Hey, don't bring me in to this. It's not my fault it didn't catch on.😁
@@orwellboy1958 I highly doubt that you personally carved this into the rock tens of thousands of years ago, but based on your name I must assume that you are his direct ancestor, and to that I must say that your greatX10^56 grandfather should have tried harder. If we'd had written writing since then we might be leaving the solar system by now. He really did us dirty.
i like to think that maybe it was some sort of game they invented lol
It's always Dave, huh. Effen Dave.
@@talbotbluechel2102 descendant*
My son recently found your channel and really likes it. He's smart and pro-science, but he's also 11 and has imagination and uses tik-tok. So it's nice for him to have a good source of info that he actually likes to help him separate bullshit from reality. So thank you for your content and the work you do.
You let an 11 year old have access to Tiktok?
@@rakino4418 he's 11. Not 5. And yeah, he can watch tik-tok.... here in my home where he's safe. You know what he don't do? Run around the neighborhood unsupervised where he could get ran over by a reckless driver or snatched up by a pedophile. My son is fine. Worry about your own kids, I'm perfectly capable of parenting mine. That's why he's an honor roll student. A multiple time jiu-jitsu tournament gold medalist. On the wrestling team at school. Trains muay thai as well. I got this.
@@themonsterbabyi loved running around the neighborhood and woods and only getting screen time for 2 hrs if im lucky…poor guy should go run around til the streetlights come on😢
@@mynameisnotcory found the kidnapper/J
oh I love that!! :) When I was 11, I didn't care about anything other than World of Warcraft lol
Hope y'all are doing good! He sounds like a good kid.
It’s really unfortunate that the stone didn’t stick around to be dated with modern techniques. Couldve avoided so much needless conspiracy
Like what? It was a rock. Most dating techniques require the test object to have once been alive. You could date the age of the stone but that wouldn’t tell you when the inscription was made.
The wonderful thing about True Believers is they *always* find a way to explain away the truth to keep believin'.
*Nothing* stops needless conspiracy. Or should I say, nothing stops needless conspiracy theorists.
@@MegCazalet Never! LOL There's nothing wrong with asking questions and wondering "What if...?". That's how we make progress in any field. You get into Tinhat Territory when you ignore objective facts and legit criticisms/questions, choosing to explain them away and dismiss them in order to justify your own hypothesis, rather than acknowledge the weaknesses in, or total lack of support for, what you've been pursuing.
You can't date carving on a stone. Stone could be millions of years old, but it was carved yesterday. Doesn't help at all
Your ending speech on scientific racism made me feel physically uneasy and unwell, but in a good, educational way! Thank you, thank you, thank you for your work and your words. This message is so so so so important.
For real, puts it to perspective, makes you want to do something, I believe I might take my fossils back to where I found them.
"The prints were done with limestone wich gave them texture…"
Me, an illustration and design student: oh wow that’s so amazing! The textures look to smooth and gorgeous! Omg I want to own/do prints like those!
"…so Europeans thought their skulls were softer and therefore underdeveloped"
Oh…sounds like quite the soft skull way of thinking to me but ok
[paraphrasing obviously]
You didn't end this video on a downer. You ended this video on a strong resolve and a truthful, important statement. You should bee proud of that.
Absolutely agree!
When I was researching about Neanderthals, I was SHOCKED at the amount of racism and eugenics that went into discoveries of skeletal remains. I was writing about the extinction of Neanderthals but I added a section about the racism and misinformation in the field.
Sounds very interesting! Is there a way I could read your writing? Or maybe you could reccomend some other sources?
They were just jealous of the neanderthals giga Chad forehead and jawline.
As an anthropologist, a huge chunk of our historical work was dedicated to validating racism and colonialism. It's an disgusting trend I've seen across other fields as well.
@@morley364 Something I've seen just as a person from day to day life is that we never want to perceive ourselves as possibly the worst, so we try to find reasons others are worse so we can validate ourselves to think of ourselves as the best, no matter the cost.
@@morley364 oh i know the vibes not only am i a huge fan of cultural anthropology and history. im also norse pagan.
having things you love irrefutably tied to blatant racism is very...sad
As someone who's relatives survived the Trail of Tears, Thank you for covering just how badly Natives were treated.
I still can't believe there are people in this country who don't see that cultural bias and racism still exists today. The trail of tears wasn't even that many generations ago, and SLAVERY was so recent that we still have direct descendants from actual slaves. Sometimes the human brain amazes me with its ability to filter out what it deems unnecessary information, but the fact that it also happens at a cultural level when it comes to ignoring great atrocities is downright abhorrent to me.
@@heckingbamboozled8097 on the slavery point. It was at that point a worldwide institution. And still exists.
So pretty much 80% of people on earth can trace an enslaved ancestor within the last 300 years.
Before america stopped the slave trade britain outlawed it and sent ships to the colonies to enforce it. As well as to the coasts of africa to stop slave ships going to the atlantic and muslim slavers across the red sea.
But even thougj they outlawed it before america. It took generations to fully stamp out.
Saudi arabia only made it illegak in the 60s. And they deffinetely still have slaves in saudi arabia today.
Not that long ago a saudi was offering a "castrated african slave" on facebook.
The real lie is that slavery ever truly ended though.
While it was forcibly stamped out of many cultures. Even the natives who used to have slaver tribes.
It still persists, mostly in east and south east asia.
Current estimates are that there is around 40 million slaves in the world today.
@Hecking Bamboozled I'm a descendant from the tsalagi old settlers and TOT, and when I was in high school, IN OKLAHOMA, they taught the TOT was basically nothing more than a long voluntary walk and chattel slavery was fairly tame and most slave owners treated them like family. Not kidding, and that was in 1992-1996.
@@heckingbamboozled8097 thank god slavery and racism didn't happen anywhere else, so we can constantly hear people self fallacio over their fake moral superiority.
@@brendonpitcher5611 Just because it happened in other parts of the world doesn't mean it isn't worth remembering.
If you're still confused why Reed pointed out the "Capital D with an Arrow" as a recognizable or inate character, it may have to do with the capital form of Edh Ð, a letter that most european historical linguists are familiar with.
My thoughts exactly. That character is still used in some Slavic languages, I believe
@@hiitsaria Sorta. That's used in Serbo-Croatian for an africate, rather than a fricative. Both letters are derived from D, but i believe it is a coincidence.
the
@@popular_dollars Dang that's a good catch. Makes a lot of sense for a linguist with an Anglo background who'd be very aware of older forms of English.
I also had no idea that 'eth' (Ðð) used in Icelandic, Faroese and Old/Middle English is a totally different letter to the 'D with stroke' (Đđ) that's used in Serbo-Croatian and Sami languages.
I'd also love to know why, when adopting the Latin alphabet, Vietnamese went with the 'D with stroke' while Khmer went with 'Eth'. Neighbouring language groups taking two almost identical letters and splitting on which one to use. I need to talk to a South-East Asian Linguist about this some time.
@@Pumbli Thank you! I probably know even less than you about Austroasiatic languages, but from what i know the stories are very different. The vietnamese alphabet and the romanization of the khmer script were created at very different points in time. One has become the primary way of writing vietnamese, whereas and the other is a supplement of the native khmer script.
Also i cant find anything about Khmer using ð, and i don't see any reason why it would anyway. All it has is /d~ɗ/ and no voiced coronal consonant otherwise.
Fun fact, "capital D with arrow" is a great way to describe the symbol for capital eth, which was used in written Old English (and probably some other Germanic languages) to represent the voiced "th" sound in "the." Could be why Ried pointed it out
Eth is actually still used in modern Icelandic (and so is thorn).
A lot of Egyptian influenced scripts have a "capital D with an arrow" through letters influenced by the hieroglyph of a bow and arrow.
A lot of early "archaeologists" all over the world destroyed or repurposed more priceless heritage than the relatively small amount of shiny trinkets that were salvaged.
Schliemann 😕
It's a luxury to find something valuable and not use it.
Yeah he is very American focused but this kind of pseudo archeology has gone on around the world for a much longer time and before that grave robbing was sometimes profitable why you think the Egyptians had to hide things so thoroughly they had to hid it from other Egyptians who lived at the same time
@@beartankoperator7950 mainly the only way to hide something in Egypt is making a death trap tomb that’s too dangerous for anyone to travel through or hide it by traveling so far out of the way that it’s right next to a mountain that can’t be discovered easily even by satellite…
Wow, just like every civilization in history.
I’m Lenni Lenape. We lost our mother tongue, Unami, when our great tribes were broken up and pushed out and the schools beat our children when they dare spoke it. The last Elder that could speak it fluently died in the early 2000’s. So the language is mostly forgotten now. 😔 So there is no way we would lose a secret written language if we had one. I believe this was a fake. No way a written language didn’t proliferate across Tribes.
I started trying to learn the original Hebrew pictographs this year and of course the modern Hebrew, got busy and lost my impetus, but I recognize some of the letters as Hebrew. My church believes there were Hebrews who settled here looong ago & that the “Hopewell” were one tribe (I saw something that said they now believe the Adena “became” the Hopewell… they were not ever actually Hopewell that’s just who owned the land when the ruins were found🤦🏻♀️). I believe the Yuchi, who were supposedly nearly wiped out, (and supposedly joined with the Cherokee were another tribe) were also Israelites. I’m not any kind of expert, so don’t take any of this as gospel; it’s an interesting subject and you might enjoy checking into for yourself.
I know that the Hopi were recognized by Israel as a lost tribe, because they were found to have the lost part of one of their ceremonial dances, and were given land in Israel.
@@rhondasisco-cleveland2665 isn't this just morman bullshit?
the dude that started that (Joseph Smith?) was so obviously lying.
@@rhondasisco-cleveland2665
... No.
First of all, Hebrew the written language is not pictographic- its in fact (in the paleo form) part of the complex of earliest alphabets (though an abjad). The letters represent sounds... that's it.
Second, none of the indigenous peoples of the Americas are "lost tribes", and the belief that they are is a deeply racist/white-supremacist portion of conspiracies that has been used to destroy the actual cultures of indigenous peoples across these continents.
@@rhondasisco-cleveland2665 Here's the thing about conspiracies: All of them devolve into antisemitism. There is absolutely no evidence that any of the tribes of Israel ended up in North America, just claims by antisemitic assholes and charlatans. Eg: The Book Of Mormon.
As for the Hopi, the lost ceremonial dance and Israel: [citation needed]. I couldn't find anything in google. Closest I could find was a tribe of Native Americans doing a dance in the Israeli Parliament. The video clip had no details, but it was said in the comments that they were there to acknowledge that Jews and Native Americans have many common aggressors.
I’m so sorry that this happened to you in history.
As a colonizer I know my apology is absolutely dwarfed in comparison to the hardship you were facing at that time as a people but I hope that by being better and acknowledging the past I could even start to make it up to all of you.
Most history/archaeology channels I’ve found are either: 1. To boring and have a bland voice with no jokes. Or 2. almost no detail on the history/archaeology and with so much “humour” it should be for 8 year olds. You are the perfect mixed of informative and funny
I have found the exact same thing. It was a goal of mine to make something funny, digestible and informative. It means the world to hear I am achieving that.
Trey the explainer can have a boring voice at times but really good content
@@miniminuteman773 you and trey the explainer are some of the only tolerable ones
@@Godzilla0936 honestly trey and him are the two faves
@@Godzilla0936 wtf is your username?
8:44 the fact you slightly misquoted a quote about how things get copied and lose value is accidental comedic gold
There's a massive Adena Mound outside of Dayton, OH. The nearby Mound Laboratories (now closed) that did nuclear weapon R&D/production were named for the mound. There was a MASSIVE site cleanup that included removing several feet of top soil. I imagine the mound is likely now contaminated, but that doesn't stop visitors from climbing the MODERN STAIRCASE BUILT INTO THE MOUND. There's a staircase. That we built on a burial mound. That may be contaminated with radiation. You can't make this stuff up.
Edit for clarification: I cannot say with full certainty that the mound IS contaminated. However, given the activities at Mound, the heavy contamination of soil on the site, and the fact that the site's groundwater is (still!!!) contaminated, I imagine that the Miamisburg Mound COULD be contaminated as well.
This is the most American thing I've ever read
It's not a Indian burial mound. It's an engineered disposal site. More conspiracy theories and blaming whites/Europeans for non existent 'abuse".
@@KB4QAA It's a 2,000-3,000 year-old Adena burial mound.
From the Historical Marker Database (historical marker transcription about Mound Laboratory): "The facilities once here propelled the United States through the Nuclear and Space Ages and were named for the nearby pre-historic Miamisburg Mound."
From the Ohio History Connection: "Excavations [of the Miamisburg Mound] conducted in 1869 revealed details of construction suggesting the Adena culture (800 B.C. to A.D. 100) built the mound in several stages. The excavators found a layer of flat stones overlapping like shingles on a roof at a depth of 24 feet below the surface. At one point in its history, therefore, the mound may have had a stone facing. Monuments like Miamisburg Mound served as cemeteries for several generations of ancient Ohioans. They also may have marked the boundaries of tribal territories."
Also from the Historical Marker Database (historical marker transcription about the Miamisburg Mound): "Miamisburg Mound, the largest conical earthwork in Ohio, originally was sixty-eight feet high with a diameter of three hundred feet. One excavating attempt in 1869 reduced the height to its present sixty-five feet. The mound was then partially investigated by means of a vertical shaft which extended from the top to the base and connected with two horizontal tunnels. The exploration revealed one burial eight feet from the top containing a bark covered skeleton and a vault twenty-eight feet lower that was surrounded by logs but without a burial... The conical shape, the type of burials, and the absence of associate earthworks indicate that the Miamisburg Mound was the work of Adena Indians, a prehistoric group that lived in the Ohio valley between 1000 B.C. and 400 A.D... An important part of their way of life was the proper burial of the dead in graves that were covered with earth mounds, such as this one."
Let me repeat: it's a burial mound.
Sources:
www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=105819 www.ohiohistory.org/visit/browse-historical-sites/miamisburg-mound/
www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=166080
@@emileeweir7773 YOU need to be more precise in your descriptions "a nearby mound" is not helpful. You are apparently speaking of the Miamisburg Mound. Further you conflate cleanup at the Mound Laboratory and its disposal site in the same paragraph. To inform you, the Mound Laboratory disposal site is also formed in a mound with stairs, and an observation point at the top. It is NOT a danger to visitors.
@@KB4QAA The "storage mound" you refer to IS the Miamisburg Mound. There is no on-site storage, not even for low-level radioactive wastes. Even during operations, all of Mound's radioactive wastes were shipped for off-site storage. If there was any on-site material, it would be included in cleanup and site usage documentation, just as documentation for the Fernald Feed Materials Production Site (now Fernald Preserve) has those details.
From the DOE about on-site operations (Envoronmental Impact Statement, Pgs. 3-86 and 3-87, repeated on 10-37 and 10-38): "Mound Facility currently ships its radioactive wastes to four offsite burial/storage grounds... Mound neither stores nor buries any radioactive wastes onsite."
From the EPA: "Landfill materials were excavated and disposed of off site to facilitate future reuse of the site property, after congressional legislation and economic stimulus funding provided $50 million to DOE for the work."
From the DOE Legacy Management Office: "DOE completed [Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act] soil and building remediation of the site, demolished or transferred buildings and infrastructure, and implemented the remedies in the RODs. All wastes were shipped off-site and disposed of in accordance with applicable regulatory requirements. Groundwater remediation continues at several areas of the site."
Sources:
energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2014/12/f19/EIS-0014-FEIS-1979.pdf
cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/SiteProfiles/index.cfm?fuseaction=second.cleanup&id=0504935
www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2021-08/MoundFactSheet.pdf
It's sad that so many mounds were lost. Back in college I took an Intro to Archeology class and learned that I grew up not even 5 miles from an effigy mound. By time archeologists discovered it in the 1920s, there was already a road dividing the mound in half.
I love when UA-camrs talk about their audience like an exhausted teacher/parent. It brings me joy.
as a west virginian, i can tell you that most of us in our daily lives speak phoenician, though sometimes in formal contexts we will break out some partridge in a pear tree grammatical structures.
Oh shit, a new channel that talks about history and isn't fucking insane
God im horrified that that is the bench mark for History vids.
*yet, give him few months in insane history space
Isn't fucking insane yet*
@@miniminuteman773 As am I, but sadly... that is what it has come to.
like a shiny pokémon
The stone looks like it was written by someone who thought they had enough room to fit everything, but they really didn't.
It looks just like the stones I carve and leave for idiots in the middle of nowhere
The Vikings had a way around that, they kept the message short, and then filled out the rest of the stone with nonsense. "I am Bjorn the conqueror of Men and Women. Jagagagagagagagaaga".
@@Carewolf The origin of bullshitting to hit the word count?
I think it might be an early version of the diy plaque, ‘Measure twice, cut once. Curse, buy more, cut again.’
It's probably inspired by the look of cuneiform tablets, which tend to be cluttered with symbols and are sometimes the size of little rocks.
This series is filling the void that Sam o' nella's disappearance left in my heart
We're both chasing a high that can never be truly replicated
He is in college so maybe another 2 years
I JUST - I LOVE THIS COMMENT
YEAH BASICALLY
Considering his videos are pretty much just reading wikipedia articles... go read wikipedia articles.
Ho...ly...shit.
I had a funny comment all typed up about how I'm from Ohio and what did we ever do to Milo, but I had to delete it and write this one instead.
Jesus Christ, Milo. I'm a big fan of you and your channel, and I know that you're not just passionate, you're also incredibly intelligent, insanely well informed and very well spoken and eloquent. But...even knowing all of those things, the end of this video still caught me off guard. I'm not an archaeologist or historian, I'm a writer.
Looking through that lens, with the eyes and ears of a writer, I needed to acknowledge how _unbelievably_ well thought out and perfectly delivered your final point was. The things you said about scientific racism are obviously accurate, but they're also impressively presented. Very well done, sir.
Just for the record, the museum says it’s almost definitely a hoax. They just list some of the “theories”. It’s honestly a great museum, one of the best focused on mounds that I’ve seen
Wikipedia has some of the claims supporting it as a hoax, including it may have been crafted as a fraud to promote the excavation site to academia (probably for profit), with some of the "letters" copied from earlier literature. Not having the original to test the age of the inscription is pretty sus, but events happened before chemical dating.
Hey, as somebody with multiple Native people in my family, I just have to say thank you for """injecting""" """politics""" into this video.
(By which I mean "accurately discussing history, its contexts, and real-world implications.")
Exactly
Gotta love when acknowledging the existence of the non-majority is considered "politicalization" lol
That rlly stuck out to me too, it doesn't happen often enough.
Zzizi
@@RoemDaug you misunderstand, your both on the same side and are making the same point that it's not injecting politics, that's what the quotation marks were for and he clarifies that later in the comment
AS a native American who loves Archeology and Philosophy, people like you give me hope for the future. You see the things for what they are and you also have proof to back up what you say. Your videos give me so much information and you tell things how they are and give more questions that are needed!
its sad to think this happened to mass graves as well. I grew up in the south where a bunch of major civil and revolutionary war battles happened. One of my classmates in 5th grade had a collection of army buttons they had taken from a field. I knew people who collected beads or tools from protected sites, even as a kid it made me sick.
In that case it's not as bad
@@Lumberjack_kingWhy? Is grave robbing fine as long as you only do it to certain groups?
@@OutsiderLabs uh no obviously not
@@OutsiderLabsAt least we know who the graves belonged to in that case. We don't even have that for most native mass graves
@OutsiderLabs No, because taking buttons randomly strewn across the ground near a grave site is not the same as taking objects that were deliberately interred alongside human remains. Buttons found in a human grave are part of the grave. Buttons found on a battlefield are battlefield debris - still artifacts that probably should be treated with respect, but taking them isn't as bad as grave-robbing.
EDIT: To be clear I assumed you were commenting on the idea of collecting buttons from battlefields. For some reason my brain glossed over the sentence about taking objects from protected sites...
Absolutely wild to me that across all these theories, none of them seemed to consider consulting Native Americans on the stone, much less Adena people. A complete disregard of their knowledge and expertise on their own culture and history.
The Adena culture specifically hasn't been in existence for nigh 2000 years at this point, and the last mound building culture in central North America, referred to as the Hopewell culture, stopped building mounds c 500 CE. This is knowledge and expertise that was gone for a millennium before Columbus even got to the Americas. This said, it is stunning that they didn't even consider asking around to see if the indigenous people knew like, literally anything.
The Adena would be wonderful to consult....
...If they hadn't been extinct for over 2,000 years.
@@hiimme101 No, I am certain that is not accurate. The Hurons, who are native to the general area of Ontario (and beyond, AFAIK) built mounds too. There are several mounds in High Park in Toronto that I beleive are only about 300 years old,, and there is one in Toronto that is legally protected as a cemetary called Taber Hill, dated to 14th century CE. So the Iroquois Nations were mound-builders...
Oh huh, I was unaware of that, thanks for the information, I'll have to look into those. Thanks again!
@@hiimme101 NP. Honestly, the only reason I knew it was wrong was because last fall, I did a walking tour of High Park led by a local First Nations group and they talked about a burial mound in the park.
Im east coast native american and honestly i used to love learning history till it came to learning about how absolutely abhorently my people we treated not just in life, but in death. I had to step away. But hearing a white guy who dose not hide the history of how white people treated my people and being geniuinely disgusted by their actions almost made me cry. Thank you
Hey bro hope you also don't hide from the history of natives enslaving/murdering and killing other members of tribes- how they treated others and doing horrific things as well. :)
@@matthewspringer1369 "BUT MOOOM! THEY DID IT TOO!"
@@matthewspringer1369 Dude you cannot even begin to compare the level of atrocities.
If you think native americans were genociding each other constantly you're on some John Locke "State of Nature" bullshit.
The harm they did to each other absolutely pales in comparison to the state sponsored genocide they suffered at the hands of the american empire.
@@Cibershadow2 Humans, always looking to exploit their fellow beings for their own gain - it is a tale as old as time.
Consider the Chippewa. In what could be dubbed the original “trail of tears,” they forced the Sioux from their land in present-day Minnesota. In turn, the Sioux massacred the Omaha, the Kiowa, and the Pawnee, lusting for their resources and territory.
Consider the Aztecs. Schools teach the story of Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes conquering the Aztecs, but they omit the two centuries of Aztec ruthlessness that preceded this and convinced many other tribes to fight alongside Cortes. The Aztecs had an enormous empire with a long history of raping women, pillaging, and enslaving neighboring tribes to build their empire. Historical accounts of the Aztecs alone reveal an “industry of human sacrifice unlike any other in the world.” They punished homosexuality with the death penalty and habitually murdered women.
Would you like to talk about the Native American custom of scalping? :)
@@morzemus1805 Sorry I was too busy in thought of human sacrifies... You know like children? You know like using razor-sharp obsidian blades, slicing open the chests of sacrificial victims and offered their still-beating hearts to the gods. Then tossing victims' lifeless bodies down the steps of the towering Templo Mayor? Stuff like that... But im sorry... what were you arguing??
I grew up in Mexico, where Precolumbian history is regularly taught (very idealized and underfunded, but it's something). You can find pyramids downtown Mexico City where colonizers built on top of, charmingly.
Given how the Maya have their writing and how diverse cultures would write down codices, I find it baffling that the first thing these people do is theorize about European languages and not ask the natives or linguists about local languages
Awesome works, been loving your videos!
That's a real common effect of that arguably racist sense of superiority people often have toward past cultures. The notion that people are far more different than they actually are may lead one to a very inaccurate "us & them" set of assumptions.
It’s not that baffling. Have you actually met white people?
@@Jrez
No it’s not arguably racist it is racist.
@@Toneill029?
@@Toneill029Racist
I just discovered this channel today. It is an absolute gem.
The constant Ohio slander has me both slowly nodding and going "HEY WAIT THAT'S WHERE I LIVE-"
EXACTLY SAME. Ohio isnt..THAT bad...
The constant Ohio slander warms my heart, as someone from Michigan
@@thedyingmeme6 Whether you live in a big mitten, or a giant cornfield, the Midwest is hell.
Bros from Ohio 💀💀💀💀
I feel bad that you live in ohio
Just one little fact check: The Mi'kmaq of Canada's Altlantic region claim a pre-columbian written pictographic language. The irony is that Mi'kmaq territory used to include Boston. I'd love to hear more about the Mi'kmaq claim in a future video. This writing looks very little like whats on the stone, though. I'm not saying the two are connected.
I can't help be feel so angry that my people keep destroying these sacred things and graves. Honestly, I bet they'd throw a fit if someone burned their churches and graveyards. It's so saddening and always hard to hear about all of the loss we've put others in due to our own greed and ignorance.
Based, I agree with every atom of my body with this
This was 150 years ago, archaeology is VERY different today.
True that, still sucks though.
*clicks lighter* i wanna see someone throw a fit >:)
Like- in a seizure? Epilepsy break dance?
Arson?
Fun fact to double on the nagpra thing: despite nagpra being a thing, a metric ton of museums and academic institutions have categorized a vast majority of their artifacts as belonging to no identifiable tribe and thus not being repatriable. Now for some to even a decent amount, thats probably plausible but this applies into some artifacts known to be at least from the time after Europeans arrived and where tribes have very good reason to think at least a few artifacts definitely belong to them. Even without that, I've seen academics estimates that about 117,000 out of 132,000 or so and thats a suspiciously large amount to be exempt from nagpra.
I can't get over how funny the sudden transition from frantic and excited speech to a black and white slide with calm guitar music is. Love your videos, comedic and informative!
You: "The Adena were a moundbuilding civilization."
Me, softly, and with my eyes closed: "I love archeological mounds."
This was so much fun! As a retired archaeologist in Arizona, its so refreshing to see someone do a very good debunking of pseudoscience, that didn't involve smacking someone upside the head (even if it might have been intrinsically satisfying). So looking forward to you next episode!
Thanks for mentioning NAGPRA!
Legit, I've wanted to bring it up on a few different videos of yours. I took a Forensic Anthropology class from George Gill (he is one of the major supporters of NAGPRA and has repatriated many Indigi people), and it's so important for people to understand why remains and burial artifacts need to return to their people... as well as the context for *why* that legislation had to be passed.
Really appreciate the discussion of the ethics of archaeology. My introduction to archaeology was a Bronze Age Mediterranean class. And guys like Schliemann were simultaneously founders of the field as we know it today and also destroyed so much and violated everything we would consider ethical today
Well someone has to discover these things before agreement on how to handle such situation can be established.
@@Cheepchipsable
Exactly. Too often our society loves to look down our noses at those that came before us, but quickly forget without them we wouldn't be here.
I'm tired of hearing about how x person didnt follow the standards we have today, and it makes them a bad person.
@@randomusername5242
You can be a pioneer, and an asshole. We are entirely justified in looking down our noses at people in the past. It was still known that people were people, and had emotions. But aristocrats and moneymakers still treated nonlanded people as disposable units. We can absolutely look down at people. The future will judge us as we are due.
@@gabriellavedier9650
What's the justification? Are we really so morally superior, especially when our politicians and business leaders treat the citizenry even worse than our ancestors were?
@@randomusername5242 How our business leaders and politicians treat citizenry now has no relevance on the many old archaeologists lacked any respect for the cultures they investigated.
And as was said before, they knew the places they investigated were of human beings. Humans beings deserve respect.
The sad thing is, NAGPRA wasn't/isn't enforced in a lot of cases. Institutions have dragged out the process of repatriating remains and artifacts. Some people have outright stolen them to avoid giving then back, though that's way less common. The implementation of NAGPRA is still very much a work in progress
Fun fact: The prison that's across from the mound is considered haunted, but not from the burial mound right next to it, but because the prison itself had a lot of inmates die in it... It's also used as a haunted house attraction each Halloween.
The prison industrial complex is scary enough they don't need decorations to make it a haunted house
@@Melbeezo I try not to imagine the historic tours of 2120 that recap our time period. I assume it will mirror the creepy way we imagine the frontier/invasion-era west as romantic & symbolic of freedom, as opposed to anything resembling the truth.
I did a private ghost hunt at the prison and it was awesome!
Wild
13:31 Imagine a conspiracy theorist years in the future talking about the secret language "partridge in a pear tree" because of this video.
While not endorsing the validity of the stone, I wanted to point out that if it had a European origin, it doesn't mean Europeans were in Ohio, but rather it is indicative of trade, probably from the East.
(Was this mentioned? I may have missed it)
Thats my thoughts as well, if that was the case it must have had an interesting journey
Didn't some vikings show up around the northeastern coast before America was "officially" discovered?
@@tinycervid7679 That would've been about 500 years later. But if it happened once maybe it happened more times than we know about.
But still, if there was actual trade going on between the continents, we would have more examples of similar items.
God this was such a good video. I was asking myself "what if its the native peoples languge" the whole vid and when you brought up that no one actually studying this said that I was shocked.
Im a linguist! And genuinely, I think this stone is probably real. There's just too much missing and destroyed parts of their culture that we'll never see for me to write it off in good faith. Granted my focus is comparative linguistics, and I'm not a native speaker of any of the native languages of turtle island. That said I'm in the park that it's in columns, personally.
@@slithra227 As others have pointed out, admittedly it's *extrmemely* suspicious, no matter how you read it, that no characters really repeat.
If it were Alphabetical, we'd certainly see repeats of their AEIOU counterpart in nearly any situation, and it's a bit simple for a Chinese-style system (though not out of the question)
Real? Decent chance, this IS the only piece we have, and most others would already be destroyed or buried.
Doubtful? Kinda likely...
Southern Illinois was called "Little Egypt" with towns named things like Cairo because of the number of Mississippian mounds. In Ohio we have at least one Moundville, AND a town called Circleville named after the Hopewell-Adena circular earthwork the town was built around. Sadly, the people of Circleville decided they were tired of living a town of circular roads, leveled the mound and imposed a street grid.
Literally that never fails to make my blood boil. In Hilliard/Columbus, we have Shrum Mound, and it's right across the street from a massive housing complex. It's so upsetting because there's absolutely no parking or anything so you can go up and see it, so despite it being a historical landmark, it goes neglected and forgotten about.
It sounds morbid, but I don't put it past the city or the state to eventually get sick of it being there and take the status away so they can flatten it.
Yeah it really sucks seeing how they're treated down here I remember going to one I think in Kentucky or Southern Illinois near the border around there and they were talking about how people still would come and drive four wheelers all over the mounds despite knowing what they were. There was a small archaeology day there that was really cool I think it was called Mound City or something as well.
So they changed Circleville into Gridville?
We have the Ocmulgee Indian Mounds in Macon, GA that has been preserved since they were rediscovered by the railroad in the 1800's. Got federal status a few years ago.
@@KatieeBug445 I’ve driven past shrum mound so many times as a kid and never realized what it was, I’m gonna go visit it now thank you!!!!
I don't catch your long form videos often, but you are absolutely a delight.
Love the shirt.
Thank you so much for this. You rock
West Virginians speak a dialect of english known as "Western Virginia" its hard to understand but when you give them a car to work on and a chilled doctor pepper, they tend to be just a tad more coherent.
You know the phrase "All roads lead to Rome" Well all conversations lead to some sort of "Anti-Federalist Mothman hullabaloo."
That's what I like about Fallout 76, is you get to murder the Mothman, AND his lunatic follower cultists too!
(Generally, they carry flamers, and Handmades, [The AKs that are built in a shed by some fucking idiot that is missing parts and has no idea how to build a gun. Also, shovel stock. its the Shovel AK.] so they generally give me back the ammo I spent turning them to mist.)
"I'm an awful lot like grass. I do best in direct sunlight and I'm in your front yard right now.".....these are the true words of a CRM archaeologist. At which point the land owner says, are you looking for dino bones? You are my type of weird. If you are not an actual archaeologist, you missed your true calling. We need you in the field. :)
Just saw the two most recent videos. Well done!
I really appreciate mentioning the dark history of Native American archeology. Or as you so aptly put it, grave robbing. Acknowledging practices like this were seen as normal once and why people did it is an important part of preventing it from happening again.
Most of all, thank you for the effort you put in these videos. The research, writing, presentation and editing are all on point. I wish there were more videos to watch because they’re all wildly entertaining and I feel like I learn something every time. You and the people you make this with can be proud of yourselves. It’s commendable and it truly shows.
Its already been two years, and I just watched this now. I dont think it ended on a sour note. I actually reminded on my responsibility to educate people and pull them out of misinformation. But of course, it starts from knowing the true information.
So thank you, archaeology guy from the internet, I do hope you keep making these kinds of videos, because people deserve to know the truth, and we will help you spread it out further.
As an enjoyer of these videos and an avid player of TTRPGs, the description of "weird, niche information that you'll never need, and the illusion of choice" perfectly sums up two of my favorite hobbies.
I feel personally attacked. 😊
"i am a lot like grass. I do best in direct sunlight and I am in *your* front yard right now."
love your content dude! keep up the good work! :>
Your picrew pfp is really cute btw
This channel inspired me to pick up an archeology seminar for my university history mayor
Me too, actually! I get an extra area of study this coming year and I'm thinking of doing archeology- this channel is sort of the last deciding factor. All the luck to you, hope it goes well for us both!
I have seen your videos before (don't have a TikTok, just UA-cam) and it wasn't until I just saw this video recently that I became very intrigued. I am an artist and I've been inventing my own language for many years (and a corresponding cosmology/theology, I'm fascinated by folklore). I noticed, by pure coincidence that in the position the stone is generally believed to be oriented, four of the "characters" are identical to ones I developed on my own, and a number of others have similarities, but are not necessarily the same. If this is fake, and maybe this is something others have hypothesized already, but the way I achieved my own alphabet was pulling inspiration from Celtic and Nordic runes, and then I guess you could say "simplified English" letters. Also when I was little, I would make up symbols all the time pretending it was some mystical/unknown language. So, if it is a "fake," it may be that even if it is some kind of made up language, it could pulled from many different sources of inspiration, resulting in some kind of Frankenstein script that the guys thought was cool™. Of, course, if this is a real language that we simply do not have any further documentation of, we could just be using our pattern recognition brains to see characters we think we know.
I know this video is a bit old, but I thought it was interesting seeing the exact same symbols I use in my art practice in a controversial/conspiratorial piece of history. I made a blog page I sometimes update for my art that has the alphabet and some of the language on it at iaaian.blogspot.com if you would like to see the similarities! (Also if you see this comment)
It's great to see a history-based channel that talks about the weird, unusual, and sometimes stupid parts of archeology through the lens of critique and deduction rather than taking the most exciting ideas as fact.
Whoa this is so nuts to see as someone from moundsville. Fun fact: the prison (closed in the 90s for being hella violent) is a pretty cool historical place and sort of a museum of its own. You can go there and try to hunt ghosts, too. Also we do still use some of it for just regular community things, haunted houses, etc, so they literally have signs warning you not to piss in random places in there. That's just what Moundsville is like unfortunately.
The much more grievous crime is that ALSO across the street from the mound is the grade school I attended, and kids are annoying. There's also a guy that steals a fuckton of bicycles nearby, which is moundsville's greatest past time other than drugs.
Srsly tho, love your videos and was pleasantly surprised to see this!
Uh the school can't be that bad and all kids are annoying
Typical America. A total shithole. Thank god I don't live there!
I really appreciated this little window into Moundsville
@@Lumberjack_kingI doubt you have ever been to a school in the U.S.
@@qbertking1910 uh I have
Very much agree with especially the last chapter. I highly recommend "The Mismeasure of Man" by Stephen Jay Gould. It's from the 80s/90s, so his statements shouldn't be directly transferred onto the state of science today, but I still found it a very interesting (and horrifying) read, and its statements about the history of scientific racism are still as important today as they were upon first publication.
Strongly seconding this.
An excellent book suggestion.
That book is brilliant
Seeing the results of your experiment is so interesting. The fact that multiple people came up with the exact same symbols is so cool and interesting and I with I could see the entire data set!!
I already loved this channel. "There's a guy in it" was worth the asthma attack from laughing.
Cool adjacent piece of history from your local literary history nerd: Henry Schoolcraft’s wife, Bamewawagezhikaquay (aka Jane Johnston Schoolcraft), was a biracial Ojibwa woman who is regarded as the first known Native woman poet. She wrote in both English and Ojibwe.
As soon as you said "white supremacy" and showed the impression of a skull, I knew where that was going immediately. There's a reason the Nazis liked to measure the heads of their victims at the concentration camps, and just like the Nazis it was batshit insane.
The measurments because she doesn't have racial history papers was where I had to stop "The Man in The High Castle". Not the weird timeline swapping, the racist measurement thing.
@@-Ghostess I stopped as soon as I heard Nazis calling themselves Nazis. The plot was already bad by then from other reasons
What's insane about measuring heads?
@@MrCmon113 it's Nazi racist pseudo science
@@-Ghostess No, you poor brainwashed simpleton, skull measurements are one of the most reliable tools of determining the differences between racial types. Regardless of what people may use the information for, it is an absolute fact that different major genetic groups have differently shaped skulls.
An astonishing and much-needed conclusion, one that I did not anticipate, but one whose lessons will linger. Thank you.
Phrenology and social darwinism my old enemy. My beloathed. I know this video is like a year old but I’ve been binging this series since I stumbled across it and I absolutely love your method of presentation, reminds me of some of my anthro professors LOL. The only issue I have is I can only watch so many episodes in one sitting before I get so frustrated with the conspiracies that I need a very strong drink.
Ikr! They affect me that way too! The only way to seetle the murderous rage they instill is a drink or 5, and a whole pile of hashish!
I’d never heard of the Grave Creek Stone before this, but once you showed the map of where it had been found, I immediately knew there was going to be scientific racism involved. I don’t quite know what to think about this yet, I’ll have to watch the video again and do more research, but it was a very interesting topic.
That is a great reaction to have. Learn, question, draw your own conclusion. I have a lot of respect for that and would encourage everyone to do their own research if they are so inclined so as to eliminate any bias I bring to the table.'
@@miniminuteman773 10 minutes in and there are marks on the stone that match the old Russian siriliza language that is on the Roseau stone journaled by the U of M, and now back in Roseau. Some Letters match up as does the "#4"...The Grave Creek stone is 1.8 inches and the Roseau Stone is 1.5 inches. The way Futhark runes can differ among regions and time lead me to believe more study is warranted.
I have a feeling 'The Stupid State' will end up being the collective title of this guy's audience purely because of the map he made as a kid.
This is one of the few "awful archaeology" subjects I hadn't already heard of before, so this should be extra interesting! Also, Milo looks like he is wearing a giant bandana as a shirt.
As a West Virginian, "Good Ol' West Virginian," is the closest you're gonna get to describing some of our more particular dialects.
10:45 I like how you specify that he closed his eyes before reading the book instead of just saying he read the book instead of looking at the Rock implying he didn't even do a good job at reading the book
Thank you so much for addressing the mound cultures of America. They don't get touched on enough and there's a lot of misconceptions regarding them. Our ancestors built great structures and earthworks that need to be better understood so we can appreciate them for what they were.
When the Miamisburg Mound was mentioned, I got excited! My mom lived in that area, and she even had a conspiracy about it.
Her great grandma died of breast cancer, and she told my mom that she had got it from working around the Miamisburg Mound. According to my mom, a bunch of her Great Grandma's coworkers also got cancer. She said that there used to be some nuclear stuff going on around the site, which was probably the cause. She also said that kids used to take field trips there, but because of the radiation, it was deemed unsafe and the schools don't take kids there anymore.
There actually was a laboratory for nuclear energy, called the Mound Labratory, and there's a Dayton Daily News article about the harm it did. It's tilted, How Was the Mound Labratory Allowed to do so much harm? It was written by Sally Dunn. She said, "Beginning in 1960, the Mound released radioactive tritium into the air and contaminated the soil with plutonium-238." She also told of multiple family members being diagnosed with cancer, and estimated that 90% of the houses in her old neighborhood had cancer occur in them.
So... yeah. It's insane how that laboratory was allowed to poison the town like that. If you want more info, you'll find plenty of stuff if you search up Miamisburg Mound radiation.
THANK YOU for not sweeping the blatant racism of early (and some modern) archeology under the rug
In my reading up on the Mound Builders, it greatly saddened me to learn that much of the mounds that use to exist are all gone now. I love history, even the more darker sides too, but there's loads of times when you just facepalm and shake your head.
The transitions between sections interrupting you always catches me off guard and makes me smile.
I go to an university that has 2 native american mounds right next to each other. For DECADES, people would walk, drive, etc over it. Only recently has it been fenced off to protect the mounds once it was discovered that they are slowly sinking because of the soil composition and foot traffic.
And they now have signs explaining the mounds and talking about the people who built them and their descendants today.
I don't know if it'd be too niche to cover on this channel, but I'd love to see you debunk David Rohl's New Chronology.
My mother used to work as an Egyptologist and independent researcher specialising in the Third Intermediate Period, and she would frequently debate with him in various Facebook groups and pages about how ridiculous his proposals were and how he's clearly just trying to shuffle dates around in a sad attempt to legitimise the Biblical account of Egypt. Having a handy UA-cam video to send people so that they understand what I'm even talking about would be handy, and it seems like a perfect fit for this series, but like I said, I'm not sure if it's crazy enough to cover considering you're also having to deal with conspiracy theorists, or "pyramidiots" as my mom used to call them.
Cheers!
I'm calling the egypt conspiracy theorists pyramidiots now, thank your mom for me (or if she's gone get her some nice wildflowers)!
Imagine a child just left a bunch of marks on a cool stone they found and people are still trying to decipher it like it's something important LMAO
26:45 even when interpreting it as an european script, reading it from left to right isn't scientific. Take germanic and norse runes for example. They can be written from left to right and right to left, sometimes alternating with every line.
Edit: A lot of early greek and phonecian scripts were also written right to left.
The technical term for alternating writing direction is "boustrophedon" which essentially means "like the ox turns [while ploughing]".
@@ragnkja ...I love this. I'm imagining somebody carving words, wiping their forehead, and thinking, "Wow, I'm working like an ox!"
I really hope you return to this series sometime because I really love it
I can’t help wonder if one of the reasons a lot of the smaller mounds wasn’t preserved, also had to do with the fact that the people who settled the area and made farms there where completely "disconnected" to the cultures that build these mounds.
Where I live, in Scandinavia, the mounds are part of our shared history, and we can read about some of the legendary Kings and Heroes who might be buried in them in the old Chronicles and Sagas - so there has been an interest in preserving a lot of these, so it’s almost impossible to go for a ride in the rural areas and not see mounds….
No, that's pretty much spot on imo. Why preserve something if you have no real connection to it if you don't already appreciate historical significance of a thing
@@gregenglisch632 Not to mention, it's not only a disconnect, but even outright antagonism towards in some cases...
They aren't People, they're "subhuman savages butchering God's Children" and such, and the Mounds are their Pagan Altars... or whatever the fuck to justify their views.
The second you said "an ancient relic of an unknown language that they lost before anyone could see."
I started getting Joseph Smith and his golden plates vibes.
As someone who lives 10 minutes from Moundsville and has spent 100s of hours doing research on The Grave Creek Mound and many other ancient sites located in the Ohio Valley I didn't expect much from this video. I can tell your research is done really well with the items that you've referenced.
I am probably the only viewer of this video that has actually viewed some casts and photo in person at the Smithsonian, I have also had the privilege of reading the original diaries of Delf Norona.
The potential for Phoenician being on the stone was one of the interesting things I looked into, a mound about 20 minutes north of Moundsville in Ohio was destroyed in 1893 for road fill. The local university came to excavate and found some interesting artifacts there as well, one of which was an item that had Phoenician looking symbols. (Was never able to find out what happened to the items.) There is also the Braxton County Rune Stone that looks very very similar to The Grave Creek Stone. Just because no one is able to identify the writing(Could have a been an important member of the Adena) that just happened to inscribe a few things into a stone doesnt mean it is a hoax.
West Virginia is full of mysteries and very interesting findings. Moundsville is an incredible place of history and sites along with other less known items found that are extremely interesting.
It's a good thing, then, that the inability to identify the writing wasn't his only argument.
You truly sound like an exhausting person to be near.
26:14
You seriously didn't come across anything assuming it was their own language!?
That was literally my FIRST thought, and I thought it was wild you weren't bringing that up because 'surely it is a super popular theory'