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Titolo: [ARCHEOLOGIA] Nuove ipotesi sui primi abitanti del Nord America

Rethinking the Story Of North America's First Inhabitants
Farley Mowat Offers a New Take on Prehistory
Dal Washington Post del 6 Novembre 1998
TORONTO—Farley Mowat, the diminutive raconteur with a hint of the devil
about him, has a good story to tell.
As usual, it is bound to ignite controversy, but that does not deter the
77-year-old Canadian environmentalist/author.
"I'm like any good storyteller. You tell a good story, you hope your
audience will be entertained, perhaps enlightened, and that's it. I'm not
going to beat anyone over the head with a blunt instrument and say, 'You
gotta believe what I say or, by God, I'll get ya,' " the white-bearded Mowat
told Reuters while in Toronto to promote his latest book, "The Farfarers."
Mowat, who lives half the year in the Atlantic province of Nova Scotia and
spends the other half grudgingly in Ontario, is best know for his books on
arctic life such as "People of the Deer," "The Desperate People" and "Never
Cry Wolf."
He is arguably Canada's most popular author, with more than 30 books in
print that have been translated into 52 languages and have sold more than 14
million copies worldwide.
"The Farfarers," written half in fictional prose, half as a personal
journal, presents his version of the first inhabitants to land on North
American soil. Calling them Albans, Mowat describes the travails of these
pre-Indo-Europeans from the British Isles and how they came to land on
American shores well before the year 1000, preceding even the Vikings.
Mowat began to have doubts about the Vikings being the first Europeans in
North America during a trip to Greenland.
"I was looking at some old Norse sites and something about them struck me as
being peculiar. They didn't seem Norse to me. They were not like any of the
Norse buildings I had seen in Iceland or Norway. They looked more like the
very early buildings I had seen in Northern Scotland," Mowat explained.
Then there was the question of some 45 mysterious stone longhouse
foundations littered along Quebec's Ungava Peninsula and in the High Arctic
that were nothing like Indian-built longhouses. The evidence forced Mowat to
return to Norse literary sources for answers.
"The reality was driven home, and it's definitely a reality, by a careful
reading of the IslendingabDok and the LandnDamabDok. Both specifically
mention people, called the Papae, living in Iceland when the Norse arrived
there," he said, interpreting the Papae to refer to European Christians.
From there, Mowat searched for nearly 30 years for clues that Norsemen were
not the first to land on American soil. It occurred to him that these
warlike Vikings would not have ventured to the New World on their own but
followed in the footsteps of the Albans in order to rob and enslave them.
Mowat goes so far as to suggest that remnants of these people still live on
the west coast of Newfoundland and he encourages DNA testing to determine
conclusively whether or not early European genes can be detected in that
region.
He admits he is not the first to surmise there were visitors to North
America before the Vikings but says it a very touchy subject for those
inside the scientific establishment.
"It's a can of worms. If you espouse this kind of a cause, and you are an
archaeologist, then the establishment will close the doors on you" he said.
"You're rocking the boat, you're threatening the established dictum, the
gospel. And they don't like that in any discipline."
But Mowat, always one to rock the boat himself, insists that established
history must be tested.
"To criticize people who question history is idiotic because history is
always in the process of change . . . new information comes along and
disrupts it. And the established structure crumbles, it has to put a new
patch on it, build a new wing, and then it settles down to a new form of
establishment until something else comes along and shakes its root," the
septuagenarian storyteller said.
Mowat can already hypothesize the scholastic reaction to his book. Although
he believes many will leave it alone, dismissing it as pure fiction, others
will not be as kind.
"Those who comment on it will say, 'Here's another amateur coming along,
inventing history, which of course is supposed to be the kiss of doom,' " he
said with a smile. "But I don't care. I didn't set out to disrupt the whole
historical structure. I set out to tell a story, to find out what probably
happened, to get as close as I can get. And to tell that as a story. Therein
lies my motive, my point and purpose and my pleasure."
Arguably, Mowat's motive lies not only in telling a story but in promoting
his staunch environmentalist views -- and this book does not shy away from
including his activist opinions.
"I see in this book the first seeds of the destructive element which will
take mankind to the grave. The first seeds are the abuse of life by
mankind," he said.
According to his book, the Albans traveled across the Atlantic in search of
walrus for ivory tusks after stocks in the North Sea were depleted.
Mowat's environmentalist leanings began during the Second World War, when he
served first as an infantryman in the Canadian 1st Division and later as an
intelligence officer.
Before that he was a hunter and "bought into the perception that the world
exists for man." He changed his mind after the war, coming home with a
"tremendous aversion to Homo sapiens."
"I had lost faith, conviction, belief in my own species. I suddenly realized
that we were a danger not only to ourselves but the world around us," he
admitted.
With more than 30 books to his name, Mowat feels his environmentalist works
have had a positive effect on the individual level but not on the course of
human conduct. Although he takes comfort in the fact that the world's
organisms will continue, he feels humankind is committed to a destructive
course that it is too late to turn back.
"We will go down not in flames but into darkness as a species and
disappear -- no great loss in my opinion," he said with a coy smile. "We got
a good run for our money."
© Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company
Questa notizia e molte altre le potete trovare nella sezione Scoperte
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http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Bistro/9145/scoperte.htm
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