Article 95 of 118
  
Subject:      Re: chicken in America: from Asia? (cont.)
From:         yuku@io.org (Yuri Kuchinsky)
Date:         1996/12/20
Newsgroups:   sci.archaeology.mesoamerican,sci.archaeology,sci.agriculture


Jeffrey L Baker ([jbaker@gas.uug.arizona.edu) wrote:
: On 16 Dec 1996, Yuri Kuchinsky wrote:

[someone else:]
: > : His sources for asiatic chickens in South America are all 19th and 20th
: > : century sources (writers talking about the types of chickens present in
: > : 19th and 20th century).

[Yuri:]
: > Wrong. I have no idea why people rush to criticise the article that they
: > haven't even read carefully. Is this the methodology to follow?

[Jeff:]
: Who does he cite that is writing earlier than the 19th century (who
: specifically mentions Asiatic chickens in South America)?

Jeffrey,

This matter, whether or not Asian chickens are documented in America _by
early observers_ is quite curious.

1. We know that Asian chickens are widely documented.

2. We have early witnesses widely mentioning chickens.

3. More importantly, we have numerous accounts of Asian chickens among
remote tribal groups (p. 210 in Cater).

When you put the three together, the conclusion seems obvious, i.e. Asian
chickens were very early.

When I read Carter I assumed that this will be accepted, and I had no idea
that this part of his hypothesis would be questioned. But perhaps we do
need to investigate this further and to find more supporting evidence...

To answer your questions specifically. Carter cites the observations of a
buccaneer L. Wafer who wrote about Asian chickens in the Caribbean (!) in
1680-1700 (p. 205). So you (and another poster) are wrong after all.

Carter also cites Capa, a scholar of early American agriculture. His
opinion -- and he had access to original sources -- was clearly that the
chickens were not "like our own" very early post-Columbus. (Now, the
meaning of his words _may have been_ translated inexactly, but this is a
separate question.)

: > The real question is, Why the Spanish borrowed the name "maize" while the
: > British did not borrow the native name! Can you understand it now?

: I understood it the first time. It is still a completely and totally
: irrelevant argument.

Oh, well... We cannot always be relevant. This is a minor argument,
anyway.

: Maize was not used in the Andes prior to the
: arrival of the Spaniards. It is now used their, because the Spanish
: incorporated it into their language. Why the British did not utilize a
: native word, and the Spanish did is something I don't know. But Carter's
: hypothesis is wrong.

Now, to address the point that has been brought up umpteen times already.
Namely, why we have no bones? Could archaeologists miss or disregard or
(heaven forbid!) cover up some important evidence such as this?

Indeed! You may have followed the discussion we had earlier, months ago,
about the Amazing Vanishing Amazonian pottery. (Details available on my
webpage, or from old posts. See John Hoopes, ed, THE EMERGENCE OF POTTERY,
1995, re: the work of Anna Roosevelt.) Some amazingly early _solid_
pottery evidence has "vanished" unaccountably for nearly 20 years -- until
very recently! Yes, strange things like this can happen in archaeology,
it seems...

So how possible is it for some important evidence to be disregarded, or
"to vanish"? I dunno...

BTW, we do have _some_ bones, as Carter already mentioned. Where are the
carbon datings of those chicken bones? (This is what I referred to as
"falsifiable evidence", before Peter launched again into his discourses on
method.)

Best,

Yuri.


            =O=    Yuri Kuchinsky in Toronto    =O=
  --- a webpage like any other...  http://www.io.org/~yuku ---

We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they
contained nothing in which there were not the be seen superstition and
lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they regretted to an amazing
degree   ===   Bishop Diego de Landa on his dealings with the Mayans.