[LINK] "Did ancient Polynesians visit California? Maybe so."

[rfmcdonald]

Thanks to Ivan from Facebook for pointing me to this interesting article about pre-Columbian Polynesian/Californian contact.

Scientists are taking a new look at an old and controversial idea: that ancient Polynesians sailed to Southern California a millennium before Christopher Columbus landed on the East Coast.

Key new evidence comes from two directions. The first involves revised carbon-dating of an ancient ceremonial headdress used by Southern California's Chumash Indians. The second involves research by two California scientists who suggest that a Chumash word for "sewn-plank canoe" is derived from a Polynesian word for the wood used to construct the same boat.

The scientists, linguist Kathryn A. Klar of UC Berkeley and archaeologist Terry L. Jones of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, had trouble getting their thesis of ancient contact between the Polynesians and Chumash published in scientific journals. The Chumash and their neighbors, the Gabrielino, were the only North American Indians to build sewn-plank boats, a technique used throughout the Polynesian islands.

But after grappling for two years with criticisms by peer reviewers, Klar and Jones' article will appear in the archaeological journal American Antiquity in July.

If they are right, their finding is a major blow to North American anthropologists' traditional hostility to the theory that non-Europeans visited this continent long before Columbus.

Until now, few scientists have dared to speculate that the ancient Polynesians visited Southern California between 500 and 700 A.D., that is to say, in the centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire. This is known as the "transpacific diffusion" hypothesis.

"The dominant paradigm in American archaeology for the past 60 or more years has been anti-diffusionist, and our findings are already stimulating a rethinking of that paradigm," Klar told The Chronicle.