Adena Tablets Are the Effects of Austronesian Merchants in Ancient America

Syncretism Not Animism

Adena Tablet Whose Design Seems Austronesian

When I was last in Cherokee and visited the Qualla Arts shop I bought a pendant of carved agate in the shape of a paddle and on it an unfamiliar design. By unfamiliar I mean I had never seen anything like it among Cherokee artisans. This year as I was completing my next book, The Countercurrents of Prehistory, whose theme is the multiplicity of ancestries and ethnicities in all of us, it suddenly hit me.

The swirling design was Polynesian, or Austronesian. I began to connect the dots. In March of 2011, I had been invited to give a presentation on a subject of my choice to a packed crowd of Latter-Day-Saints (LDS) adherents in Sandy, Utah. My title was “Syncretism, Not Animism,” and with over 50 illustrations of artifacts that came mostly from Ohio Valley mounds I demonstrated that the Moundbuilders were not animists pure and simple with a medicine man in every tipi but rather followers of an organized religion, and that religion was the mother-goddess religion.

What I didn’t know then was that the mother-goddess religion was at one time universal and its proponents were spread around the world, “from Egypt and the Ethiopians of the West to the Ethiopians of the East,” as the Latin writer Apuleius has Queen Isis say in his novel The Golden Ass. Indeed, the Cherokee Origin-Narrative, which recounts the tribe’s coming from the Sunken continent of Sundaland, speaks of the “wise men who spoke the language of Seg.” Turns out Austronesians carried the flame of sun-religion and goddess worship to Mesopotamia, Egypt, North Africa and the Americas. Turns out their DNA has been identified in many of the descendants of American Indians, particularly Euchees. You’ll find all these arguments on the importance of Sundaland in the new book.

And now you’ll get to look at some art from Austronesia made in early America. Austronesian and Minoan merchants probably used them as identifying stamps (much like seals) to mark merchandise, then when they died the artifact was buried with them. It’s a theory anyway. Watch this space.

Allen Tablet

Cincinnati Tablet is oxhide shaped (currency,  money)

Gaskill Tablet with Seeing Hand and Goddess Tri-line

Larkin Tablet with Minoan “bulll flower” Design (must be turned right side up)

Minoan Bee Cutout from Ohio Mound. Would have been worn in hair probably in religious ceremony.

Snakehead Paddle Cutout Used for Qualla Arts Item’s Design in Agate. Polynesian paddles were often ornately carved.

What Do You See?

My Qualla Arts Pendant. Notice the tri-line.