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Alternate Perceptions Magazine, February 2021


Corroborating Collins and Little on Denisovan Origins of the Path of Souls

by: Bill Branch, January 2022





In their 2019 book Denisovan Origins, Andrew Collins and Greg Little argue that the legends, symbolism, ritualistic ceremonies, and burial practices that anthropologists and archaeologists call the Southeastern Cult, or sometimes as the Southern Death Cult or Path of Souls, originated in North America from Denisovan populations who crossed onto the continent during the transition from the Pleistocene (“ice age”) to the current Holocene geological era and effectively initiated the pre-Clovis and Clovis cultures. This time period translates into the beginning of the Paleoindian period in North American archaeology, when vegetation and animals were just beginning to reappear across the landscape behind retreating glaciers, and the Clovis people quickly spread across the continent hunting these scarce resources.

In researching Native American archaeology for a book on Virginia’s history and prehistory, I found corroborating evidence for Collins’s and Little’s argument. Specifically, even according to mainstream, professional archaeological sources, many of these same ceremonial traditions of the Southeast (which are generally regarded as relatively late Mississippian developments) appear outside of the Mississippian southeast, most clearly upon the Ohio River and in surrounding watersheds in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast. This is significant because archaeologists interpret the northeastern “Woodland” cultures to have been in North America before the arrival of the later Mississippian populations. This means that the cultures practicing the “Path of Souls” customs in the southeast likely either inherited at least some of those customs from older cultures to their north, or otherwise shared a common origin with them. Upon further inspection, those “Hopewellian” and “Woodland” cultures were already manifesting signs of their death cult at some of their very earliest earthwork sites of the Archaic era, meaning their peculiar religious customs already existed in some form essentially as soon as these people appear in the archaeological record at all. While this is not proof of a Paleoindian or Clovis origin of these customs, it is evidence that the prehistoric chronology and patterns of cultural development conform to such a hypothesis.

The later Mississippian cultures had their own distinctions and peculiarities, but the traditions they shared with the Woodland cultures to their north include the ceremonial use of astronomically-significant sites and related mortuary practices, including ceremonial, secondary burials of bundles of bones after the flesh had been removed. In fact, even sites as far south as Watson Brake and Poverty Point on the lower Mississippi were built upon earlier cultural occupations which archaeologists consider “Hopewellian,” related to the Adena-Hopewell complex of the Ohio Valley. This means that the “Adena-Hopewell” people most commonly associated with Ohio and the Midwest were actually spread all down the Mississippi River and across the eastern half of North America at one time. That culture or cultures was or were the first apparent cultural development following the Paleoindians, and covered much of the same territory as their predecessors. These people preceded the later, intrusive arrivals of Mississippian peoples upon that section of the Gulf of Mexico, who seem to have adopted the use of the same ceremonial sites, and apparently some of the same ritualistic customs and religious practices, even if perhaps bringing some of their own previous culture with them from elsewhere along the Gulf. The later Mississippian societies were much more populous and built much larger mounds on top of the older Hopewellian ones, and the Mississippian societies (whose descendants included the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Natchez) became the central focus of the Southeastern archaeologists and anthropologists who reconstructed the Southeastern Cult.

Because key elements of the Southeastern Cult appear among the earlier Woodlands cultures who retained dominance of the Northeast until the historic period, these ceremonial and religious practices must have originated before the Mississippian period, and during the Late Archaic and Early Woodland periods at the very latest. When the earliest ceremonial earthworks were constructed, it is very likely that the basic framework of the cult, albeit in some early form, was already in practice for some unknown time previously. Since the earliest Woodland earthwork sites appear to date to the Middle and Late Archaic periods, this is the very latest that these religious ideas and practices could have developed. Whether the Paleoindians and Archaic cultures were two separate “ethno-cultures,” as archaeologists such as Kenneth Sassaman argue, or simply two different developmental stages of the same people as in the conventional 20th century model of prehistory, it is highly likely in either case that the earliest mound-building cultures of the Archaic period had inherited some ideas or traditions from their Paleoindian predecessors on the same land.

Sassaman has also highlighted archaeological evidence that Paleoindian toolmaking traditions survived at least down into late prehistory and the proto-historic era, if not into the historic era, and these traditions include the ceremonial use of “hypertrophic” or oversized points, such as those of the Benton culture of the Mississippi Valley. The points Sassaman cites as examples of this do appear to have been ceremonial and never actually used in hunting or combat, as they show no signs of damage. The significance of this type of ceremonial object is very suggestive nonetheless, considering, for example, its “ethno-cultural” and ancestral association with people (Paleoindians) who existed alongside giant Pleistocene mammals such as mammoths, mastodons, saber-toothed tigers, giant sloths, and giant bears. The first European to historically discover the Mississippi was Alonzo Alvarez de Pineda in 1519, and not De Soto in 1541 as many sources claim. The surviving record of De Pineda’s voyage reported that the lower section of the Mississippi River was inhabited by giants who were rich in gold. The four surviving primary accounts of De Soto’s campaign also describe giant natives, and a giant native “king” or “emperor” ruling over a large chiefdom somewhere in the vicinity of modern-day Atlanta, Georgia, possibly at Etowah. Archaeologists recovered a set of artifacts similar to the Benton culture from the Susquehanna Valley, the same valley at whose mouth, at the head of the Chesapeake Bay, John Smith reported the occupation of a tribe of “giants” in 1608. Smith used the literal English word “giant” in describing these people, some of whom he stated that he captured by means of deception, though he never describes what eventually happened to these natives or where they were sent. Given bits and pieces of suggestive data such as this, it becomes rather suspect that so few human remains have ever been associated with the Paleoindian period compared with even the subsequent Archaic period, for example. The usual explanation of the passage of such a great period of time, decaying the bones that much more, seems more of an excuse than a scientifically-justified argument considering that human remains, flesh and all, have been recovered and dated to time periods ostensibly spanning as much as about ten to twelve thousand years (see the Kennewick Man as perhaps the most famous example from North America). In my view, many of these extraordinarily tall tribes, ruling families, and individuals had not only survived into the historic era but were, as Denisovan Origins also argues, made the chiefs of great chiefdoms, or became a ruling class or ruling families over separate populations of people. This seems the most likely conduit for the prehistoric transmission of related religious and cultural traditions.

To offer some informed speculation as to the origin of the “Woodland” people ancestral to the historic Algonquians, Siouans, and Iroquoians, these three are all distinct ethno-cultural and linguistic groups, though they all mixed together on the fringes or frontiers of their respective territories (which of course shifted over time). The ultimate origins of the Algonquians, Siouans, and Iroquoians are all likely therefore to be distinct. The Iroquoians are the most recent group to enter eastern North America, and archaeologists estimate that they first intruded into Siouan and Algonquian territory some time between 500 and 1000 AD, and that they became a heavy influence upon the other two groups after 1000 AD through both domineering warfare and the introduction of maize which they are likely to have brought with them from Mississippian territory.

The origins of the Siouans and Algonquians are much more mysterious, though prehistoric Algonquian territory more or less confined them to the Great Lakes and Atlantic seaboard from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to as far south as Savannah, Georgia, where the Shawnee may have been displaced from the Georgia coast during the Spanish colonization era. The Algonquians therefore being a sea-oriented people with no apparent ancestral ties to the interior South or West (where archaeologists find them to have been intrusive, migrating to the interior only after displacement from their traditional homelands), they are the most likely candidate to be descended from a mixed crew of Bronze Age sea traders involved in copper mining upon the Great Lakes, as argued by Roger Jewell in Ancient Mines of Kitchi-Gummi, for example. Any prehistoric, seafaring merchants whose livelihoods depended upon facilitating long-distance trade between disparate peoples could be expected to inevitably develop a pidgin language and take on crewmen from the various places they ported, a circumstance which would explain a plethora of historical oddities in the North Atlantic regions of North America and Europe alike.

The Siouan tribes living in the interior, on the other hand, seem to be the most likely source of the rounded Adena-style mounds similar to those of the British Isles, and both their territory and Siouan tribes themselves were the most common recipients of accusations of building houses and dressing like Europeans or even speaking Welsh. One Welsh-speaking Virginia colonist claimed upon the first meeting of the Monacans in 1608, for example, that he could understand the Monacan language, a report included in Edward Wright Haile’s edition of Virginia’s early primary sources, Jamestown Narratives. This does not mean that the Siouans were Celtic or Welsh, but in my opinion it is very suggestive of an older prehistoric connection between the groups that has often been suggested but never definitively proven, and would explain why there are similar rounded mounds with surrounding ditches on both sides of the Atlantic, a resemblance that even Thomas Jefferson implied in his Notes on the State of Virginia when he called them “barrows” after the British feature. It must be noted that the prehistoric Siouans and Algonquians were neighbors and that their populations mixed repeatedly and heavily in both the prehistoric and historic eras, though they seem to have typically been enemies of one another, and this will complicate any efforts to distinguish the origins of their respective cultures.

One entirely speculative possibility is that the core population undertaking the Bronze Age copper mining and trading was the mound-building people ancestral to both the Siouans and the Celts, and that it was perhaps centuries after these people had gained a strong foothold on the interior of both continents that another seafaring nation displaced them from the Great Lakes and Atlantic seaboard. Archaeologists of the 19th century who first studied the Lake Superior mines such as N. H. Winchell and Henry Gillman found what seemed to be a strange, relatively short race of people buried in the mounds there, whose tibiae they diagnosed as “platycnemic,” meaning very thin and flattened, and their arm bones had perforations in them like the hole in the eye of a needle, described in Gillman’s The Mound-Builders and Platycnemism in Michigan (1875). The same type of skeleton was found in Wales during the same time period by archaeologists such as William Boyd Dawkins (as reported in the Journal of the Ethnological Society of London in 1871), and Busk and Falconer who discovered a platycnemic skeleton on Gibraltar in 1863, and a Mr. Broca who found the same type of remains in France (reported in Mémoires sur les ossemens des Eyzies, 1868). All of these areas were also occupied by people engaged in a Celtic sea trade spanning from the Mediterranean to the British Isles, a topic discussed by Oxford’s Barry Cunliffe.

Considering that there are far more rounded mounds or barrows documented in Ohio and the wider Midwest than on the British Isles, there is no particular reason to assume that these people originated in Europe. It could very well have been the opposite case that the Adena-Hopewell mound-building people made it across the North Atlantic to Ireland and Britain, even if only after contact with the copper-seeking seamen from across the Atlantic who showed them the way back. Either case would make it highly likely that prehistoric “Celtic” sites will one day be discovered on the intermediary islands of the North Atlantic, namely Greenland and Iceland. The seagoing vessels of the Chalcolithic and Bronze Age were much smaller than more primitive than later vessels, stored less supplies and would be required to stop to resupply more often. Navigation was possible using careful astronomical observations, which would provide another explanation as to why both the Adena-Hopewell and the prehistoric Celts were so focused upon astronomical cycles and measuring the sky at their ceremonial sites. Ancient European and Middle Eastern sources also testify to the existence of tribes and families of giants who ruled over other nations of people, including several references in the Old Testament. All of these similarities and resemblances suggest connected activity across the Atlantic.

In summary, the “Path of Souls” cult practiced by Native Americans existed in some form before the Mississippian peoples began arriving in prehistory, and was practiced first by the Woodland tribes (ancestors of Algonquians and Siouans) who remained dominant in the Northeast until the colonial period. These Woodland tribes were practicing astronomical ceremonialism with earthworks by the Middle or Late Archaic at the very latest (the Early Archaic being only very thinly attested in virtually all regions), and likely inherited their astro-ceremonial religious knowledge and beliefs from earlier Paleoindian tribes. Despite a marked absence of recovered remains, circumstantial evidence suggests that these Paleoindians were also very large individuals, which further supports the hypothesis of their ancestry from Solutrean and Denisovan populations.


Thursday, March 28, 2024