The Davenport conspiracy revisited /

Originally issued in 1970 (CH, Nov'70) and long out of print, McKusick's extensively revised work focuses on an archaeological fraud involving faked artifacts planted in a burial mound near Davenport, Iowa, and excavated by the Davenport Academy of Natural Sciences. The excavators accepted these forgeries as genuine and that event precipitated a long controversy between the Academy members and the scientists at the Smithsonian Institution and other places. This new edition explores the acceptance of these fakes and their use in recent attempts to argue for the presence of prehistoric Europeans or Near Eastern peoples in the New World prior to the arrival of Columbus 500 years ago. It will appeal to historians of science as well as archaeologists concerned with the beginnings of anthropological archaeology 100 years ago. It also alerts the general reader to the use of fraudulent artifactual "evidence" in some of the recent occult and "new age" revisionist prehistory ideas of the New World. All levels of readers.-W. A. Longacre, University of Arizona