Fossil Legends of the First Americans (Paperback)

by Adrienne Mayor (Author) "TOWARD dusk, the Indian hunting party returned with game to feed the army of French Canadians and Indians camped along the Ohio River in what..." (more)
Key Phrases: fossil legends, horned water monsters, fossil traditions, South Dakota, Big Bone Lick, Native Americans (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Mayor, a folklorist and historian of science, continues the project of understanding what premodern peoples made of fossils that she started in The First Fossil Hunters: Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times. Surveying accounts of Native American tradition from the earliest Spanish conquistador and missionary records of Aztec and Inca lore up through present-day Indian oral histories, she correlates Native American myths with the fossils they are known or presumed to have observed. The results are unsurprising: giant fossil mastodon and dinosaur bones engendered myths about giants—giant elk, bear, birds, centipedes, subhumanoids and mysterious "water monsters"—who populated the earth until, in a nearly universal motif, they were killed off with lightning strikes by sky spirits. Indian notions of "deep time," changing landforms and climates, and the descent of contemporary species from fossilized ancestors anticipate the insights of present-day geology and evolutionary theory, she contends, while Inca legends of extinction by "fire from heaven" prefigure modern theories of extinction by asteroid impact. Her research makes for a competent if dry study in comparative folklore, but her claim that these myths "evince the stirrings of scientific inquiry in pre-Darwinian cultures" downplays the elements of animism and supernaturalism that are so radically at odds with the materialist and mechanistic thrust of modern science. Photos. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist
Centuries before modern paleontologists began scouring the western badlands for dinosaur skeletons, a dozen Native American tribes had already discovered hundreds of ancient fossils. Through remarkably wide-ranging research, Mayor has recovered the fascinating story of how various tribes encountered and interpreted dinosaur bones and other remains of early life. As she did in her landmark study of Greek and Roman responses to fossils (The First Fossil Hunters, 2001), Mayor illuminates the surprisingly relevant views of early peoples confronting evidence of prehistoric life. But in this investigation, Mayor must also rescue these Native American musings from generations of neglect and derision. By interviewing numerous tribal folklorists and probing neglected chronicles of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century explorers, Mayor has reconstructed the way Native Americans converted fossils into the substrate for powerful myths. Though tribal myths actually anticipate key Darwinian concepts of species change, Native American traditions have too often been dismissed as mere superstition by orthodox scientists. This pioneering work replaces cultural estrangement with belated understanding. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 488 pages
• Publisher: Princeton University Press (February 26, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0691130493
• ISBN-13: 978-0691130491
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.7 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #468,666 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A second first step, August 11, 2005

By	Stephen A. Haines (Ottawa, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Fossil Legends of the First Americans (Hardcover)

Following her innovative and informative study of fossils as roots for myths in the Mediterranean, Mayor brings her investigative talents to the Western Hemisphere. Here, she follows the pattern set in her earlier book, "Ancient Paleontologists" by examining the myths and legends of Native Americans. Did they, like their Eurasian counterparts in Greece, find ancient bones protruding from creek beds and bluffs? Did they also weave legends of fabulous creatures, human giants or spiritual entites from these unusual artefacts? In this account of tales and myths, Mayor's fluid style enlivens the legends, their tellers and the artefacts that inspired them.

Dividing her quest into regional investigations, she surveys the East Coast of North America, skips South to the realm of the Incas, then returns to Great Plains and Pacific Slope. Mayor finds links from recorded stories to the bones of dinosaurs, pterosaurs and mammoths. She is hampered, of course, by the minimal direct information available. She must rely on those who recorded and interpreted the information often gathered from conquered peoples. And many of the earliest records were destroyed by the Christian conquerors. What remains of those records has been the subject of much dispute. In early New England, Puritan Cotton Mather rejected stories and fossils alike as the invalid heritage of the heathen "salvages". In modern times, renowned paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson rejected the notion of Native American fossil finds and the legends surrounding them as lacking scientific value.

Mayor, however, shows how narrow Simpson's view has proven. Taking the legends more seriously, she notes that even President Thomas Jefferson had enough faith in fossil finds to charge the Lewis and Clark expedition with searching for living specimens. It took one of the geniuses of the times, Georges Cuvier, to bestow validity on fossil bones by declaring them the remnants of actual ancient creatures. With so many of the artefacts representing large species, the underlying logic of Native American legends depicting giant people and creatures makes sense.

The tales Mayor recounts are those of huge, terrifying animals or human-like creatures. Some raid the human settlements, only defeated by divine beings or the occasional heroic figure. Many of the stories have these beings eliminated by lightning or "fire from the sky". The powers of the giants were immense, but some felt the strength and size might be imparted to people. It remains unclear how many peoples used the bones for medicinal purposes - reminiscent of the "dragon bones" of apothecary shops in China. From Atlantic to Pacific, on the Plains or in the Andes, the bones emerged, launching fireside stories. The tales show how innovative individuals acquired special powers in the community through knowledge of fossils. These people could give the artefacts meaning or make them useful in various ways. There is a great similarity among the many peoples of the Western Hemisphere on what the strange objects appearing from the ground meant. The theme of giants, great battles and contests with fiery ends recurs often. When recorded in images, whether on tipis or stelae, they are readily identifiable.

Fossils in "enterprising" North America became the subject of frauds and deceptions. To the credulous, artefacts take on a special role and there's money to be made in them. Mayor concludes her book with an account of many of these. Fossils have been used to support "Scripture", such as accounting for the Noachean Flood. A regular business arose in Mexico through a trove of clay figurines purporting to represent ancient Sumer or even Atlantis. Red-haired giants were "found" in Nevada and ceremonies are performed in northern Mexico by people claiming to have recent contact with dinosaurs.
Mayor's books on ancient paleontology are a call for further investigation of a new field of interest. She is a herald for a new, emerging science. Simply finding bones and other fossils is no longer sufficient evidence for assessing the past. Long-term historical and legendary records have much to contribute. Mayor's plea for more studies should be taken up by young [and not so young!] scholars who are open-minded enough to apply new ideas and approaches. Her clear prose style eases the way for anybody interested in these topics to delve into them and perceive the possibilities. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Pioneering and Fun, May 4, 2005

By	Inlet Rower - See all my reviews

This review is from: Fossil Legends of the First Americans (Hardcover)

Long before Europeans rediscovered the dinosaur, Native Americans knew about fossils. They collected and tried to explain them, and fossils remain part of the living legacy of Native culture today. Always fascinating and often passionate, this book traces the story of Amerindian fossil-collecting from the Aztecs to the Iroquois and from the pre-Columbian era to the politics of the American West. Adrienne Mayor has written a groundbreaking and scholarly book that is also a pleasure to read. The illustrations are beautiful. Mayor does for Native-American culture what she did for the Greeks and Romans in an earlier book about unknown fossil hunters. Her new volume has many strands, from paleontology to history to Hollywood, and they come together seamlessly.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars America's First Fossil Collectors, March 1, 2007

By	Neal Baxter (Michigan) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Fossil Legends of the First Americans (Hardcover)

I always wondered how Native Americans interpreted the huge fossil skeletons of extinct animals like giant sloths and mastodons, dinosaurs and Pterodactyls. Natural History Museums in the US never address this question, even though they often display dinosaur skeletons that were dug up on American Indian Reservations.

Mayors book is based on an obvious fact: centuries before Europeans arrived, way before scientists started studying fossils, people in the Americas created stories to try to explain the weird remains of creatures that died out millions of years ago. I was amazed that she found the oldest recorded fossil legends from the Inkas and Aztecs; the book is well-researched and I liked her writing style, as she presents fossil legends told by the Iroquois, Cheyenne, Sioux, Crow, Navaho,Apache, and many other tribes to account for the various kinds of fossils they found.

My favorite were the exciting Lakota Sioux stories about the fossils of giant marine reptiles (Mosasaurs) and huge pterasaurs in the badlands and chalk hills of the west: they attributed the bones to wars between giant water serpents and thunderbirds.

What really impressed me was the way Mayor shows how the Native American ideas about fossils were accurate about a lot of things that scientists would discover later. This is the idea behind geomythology, which has been in the news lately as scientists are beginning to see that the myths about fossils and volcanoes, earthquakes, etc, were based on real evidence and sometimes actually got some things right without modern scientific methods. The Native American tales of fossils talk about earth's first lifeforms in primeval times, changes of species, and extinctions.

In a section at the end of the book, Mayor chronicles some entertaining misinformed accounts and deliberate hoaxes, such as claims that dinos and human beings existed at the same time.