Update on the Bilbo Mound

For those of you following the Bilbo Mound story we covered in last week's post "Rain Goddess," we've just found a detailed report of excavations of the site in 2009 by the University of South Carolina.  It looks like the test pits were dug in the area directly to the South of the "temple."

There is fascinating information here.

Highlights:

* Discussion of "blue clay" ...Maya Blue/ Haint Blue connection anyone?

* Discussion of pile-driven houses in marshlands and estuaries circa 8000 - 10,000 B.C. in the "Discussion and Conclusion" sections.  This is classic Nusantao cultural behavior! The "Sea Gypsies" and "Sea Dayaks" of South-East Asia still practice pile driving midden culture today...you know those expert Sea-Farers with all the Microcephalin D and Y Haplogroup T?

*This culture used "Swamp Cane" like the Southeast Asians use bamboo in order to build walkways and dwellings over the middens. 
The paper also says that the Native Americans were storing the blue clay in pits lined with a ceramic for later trade, like rectangular coolers embedded in the middens.
The first episode of cable T.V.'s "America Unearthed" centered around Georgian polygorskite in Mexican "Maya Blue," as well as the mesoamerican terraces of N.E. Georgia and a Native American skeleton with an elongated skull in south-central Georgia. 

My main area of research has been the Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic, and this site is of great interest to me because of its possible ties with the findings of Stephen Oppenheimer. In his book "Eden in the East" the doctor describes three phases of mass flooding at the end of the Younger Dryas prompting three separate waves of Nusantao cultural diffusion. 

He's already linked the SE Asian continent of Sundaland to Mesoamerican cultures and the world-wide distribution of the blowgun, fish poisons, bird shamans, dragon mythos, megaliths,the "two soul" religions, shell middens, bolas, agriculture, Frazer's corn god, and many other cultural traits shared by far-flung civilizations. 

Many fringe theorists have made speculative claims about the similarities between advanced "dawn"civilizations, but everything from the banana to the pig seems to have its genetic roots in South East Asia.

I think it's safe to add artificial cranial deformation (credit Paul Kekai Manansala), Microcephalin D, Y Haplogroup T, human sacrifice, headhunting, belief in "Ki," "Mana," or "Oro" energy, and some really large stone balls to certain  waves of Nusantao diffusion.

I can't find anything on the early use of bolas other than China, South America, and possibly Australia...but eastern neanderthal and homo erectus soloensis in Java used them before homo sapien ever did, and they were once called Ngangdog balls when found by archeologists in Java.

There's been a lot of hoopla about elongated skulls, and the main-stream scholars make it worse by their claim that the practice happened independently all over the world at roughly the same time with no central underlying cause whatever.

Obviously people didn't wake up all over the world's coastlines one day around 3,500 B.C. and say, "Hey! Let's warp our babies' heads today!"
Only a cloistered scientist without any street-smarts could propose such a notion. It requires a belief in a Universal Mind, Rupert Sheldrake's 'Morphic Field," or a particularly psychic and timely sort of cultural convergent evolution in order to even entertain the idea.

These people were obviously emulating something, and the practice obviously spread from one location to the coasts via a maritime culture.

The Teshik-Tash Neanderthals threw me off of the answer for quite some time, because scientists actually thought that they were practicing artificial cranial deformation 30 thousand years ago.  

Now we know that they were not practicing any form of head-binding at all; their heads actually grew that way naturally!
  

Come to think of it, homo erectus soloensis had a dolicephalic skull as well. The same ones who shared the neanderthal cultural trait of "Ngangdong Balls"... or Oppenheimer's Nusantao Bolas.

We know why mainstream scientists won't address these questions; "diffusion" is a dirty word when used to describe prehistoric cultures, even when it provides a common sense answer to a problem that needs and has an obvious answer.

But why are the "fringe scientists" looking for a source in little green men? We don't have the skeleton of a little green man... but we have the skeleton of a Shanidar Neanderthal.
We have the skulls of Nusantao priests and sailors. We find them wherever we find megaliths, Y Haplogroup T, high concentrations of Microcephalin D and ASPM D, as well as cranial deformation, non-tonal languages,and Denisovan introgression. 

And sure enough, cranial deformation is a practice known from the coastal areas of Georgia within the "Mesoamerican-influenced" early shell-ring cultures and related tribes in Florida.

Update:  The good news- Though there is a map of several vandal pits contained in the paper, the Bilbo Mound is at least 70% intact!  A barbed wire fence has been built around it, and pictures of the inside show that it is largely unaffected by the outer litter.  Good job, archeologists dudes!  I still think the outside should be cleaned up for pest control reasons, however.

Update II: Archeologists from Georgia Southern university have confirmed to me that though the culture of the Woodland and Archaic periods in the South-East was unlike any other in North America, there are other examples of stilt-house midden-dwellings in Florida's related Native American cultures.

Update III: The City of Savannah is now proposing a widening of the "Bilbo Canal," an act which might endanger the Bilbo Mound. We have been working with archeologists at several universities to ensure that this doesn't happen and that the site and effigy are recognized.

2009 Bilbo delta report

Note: Richard Thornton says that "Haint Blue" is made from buttermilk, fermented lime, and indigo and is lighter than haint blue.  I would still like to test some, as there are a few really dark examples here in Savannah.


Joe Lyon Layden is a prehistoric fiction author and primitive musician. To receive a free copy of this entire novella "The Man from Parkho Khatune Bears Favor," as well as three free songs and monthly updates, freebies, and discounts on Joe's ongoing work, please sign up for the newsletter below.

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Update on the Bilbo Mound