I'm delighted to host a fellow writer of prehistory fiction today, Kathleen Rollins. Please join her journey back in time and across continents. She shares my idea that our ancestors were not dumb savages, but real people. It's so fun to find authors with similar views!
What
Lies at the Root of Your Stories
After retiring from teaching composition and
literature and doing freelance business and technical writing, I wanted to
write my own stories. Specifically, I
wanted to build a big adventure series around the idea that early explorers in
the Americas came from many different places at different times. I’ve always found it hard to believe the
Beringia/Land Bridge Theory, which holds that the first people in the Americas
arrived here by walking across the Land Bridge from Siberia to Alaska 13,000
years ago and from there populated the rest of the Americas (diagram). Instead, the explorers in my stories come
from West Africa, the South Pacific Islands, and northern Spain. This is not to say that some people didn’t
cross into the Americas through Beringia – just not all of them.
In the Misfits and Heroes stories, I wanted the
explorers finding the New World to be both heroic and flawed, capable of the
whole range of human emotion and possessed of a relatively sophisticated
language. Absolutely no grunting and
pointing dimwits allowed. It’s simply
not credible that people would build housing, make rope, tie knots, handle
boats on rivers and open sea, and amass a huge inventory of edible and
medicinal plants the way they did at the Monte Verde, Chile settlement, dated
to 14,800 years ago, if they had no language.
West
from Africa: A Controversial theory
The travelers in the
first book in the series, Misfits and
Heroes: West from Africa, cross the Atlantic from West Africa to the Gulf
of Mexico. Though archaeologists are
reluctant to admit travel across the Atlantic would have been possible 14,000
years ago, open water travel had been undertaken by the original inhabitants of
Australia at least 50,000 years earlier.
Wind and water currents would carry West African
travelers across the Atlantic right to the Americas. A young woman named Katie Spotz
rowed from West Africa to South America
in 70 days – solo – in 2010.
With the help of primitive sails, the travel time
for ancient seafarers could be cut in half.
A lot shorter than walking from Siberia, in any case.
Another find bolsters the West Africa thesis: Pedra
Furada, a cluster of archaeological sites in northeastern Brazil, which has
returned human habitation dates ranging from 32.000 to 48,000 years ago, twenty thousand years before the
ice-free corridor is supposed to have allowed humans to travel from Siberia to
Alaska and from there to the rest of the Americas. (Pedra Furada rock art,
photo)
The closest land mass
to northeastern Brazil is Africa, not Asia.
Academic resentment and entrenched thinking stands in the way of
accepting this route. But it drives the
plot in my first book.
More
controversy
The group in the second book, Past the Last Island, comes across the South Pacific (marked by the
dark line on the map) starting in what is now eastern Indonesia, which would
have a cross-roads of cultures from Asia, Australia, and the Pacific Islands).
Those banished from their island homes as well as those too restless to stay
put would have to set out into the unknown, forced by necessity to learn what
they could about new islands, boats, ropes, tools, ocean currents, kelp, shore
birds, navigation by stars, whatever anyone could teach them or they could
figure out on their own. Experimentation
wouldn’t be a luxury; it would be a necessity, especially as the Ice Age faded
and sea levels rose, drowning old coastal villages and the history they held. A clever misfit might well prove to be a hero
when the old ways failed.
Where the travelers in the first book are forced to
learn about the sea once they’re drawn out into open water and can’t get back
to shore, the expert seafarers in the second book purposely choose to see what
lies beyond the edge of the world. Not
as surprising as it might seem at first. These people were the greatest open water
navigators in the world, capable of sailing from island to island, even at
night and out of sight of land, charting positions by the stars and reading
them by lining up marks on their boats, reading changing currents by lying flat
on the floor of their boat. They sailed
from Polynesia to the Hawaiian Islands and Easter Island, both thousands of
miles away from the nearest land. Obviously,
they were drawn to attempt the supposedly impossible journey.
In the third book, A Meeting of Clans, members of the two very different groups meet
for the first time and change the world.
Animism
In all the books in the series, the people share
similar animist beliefs. They feel all
elements of the universe are possessed of a spirit and these spirits together
power the world and influence every action within it, including human lives. Spirits, when active, can take a variety of
forms, including human. Signs and omens are terribly important.
While all areas of the natural world possess a
spirit, that spirit energy is particularly concentrated in certain places, such
as specific mountains, very old trees, deep forest glens, caves, rivers,
waterfalls, even particular stones.
The measure of a person would be not just physical
stature or possessions but rather his or her connections with the spirit power
that flows throughout the universe.
(This basic animist belief is also “The Force” in Star Wars.)
By chance and by choice, some people embraced the spirit
connection more than others. Someone who
chose to develop this connection became the shaman, someone who enjoyed the
ability to cross between the three worlds (Underworld of the dead, Center World
of the living, and Otherworld of the spirits) at the cost of never fully
belonging to any of them. He or she
remained the person apart, revered, feared, sometimes resented. In my stories, shamans have magical powers
but they’re also isolated and thus less than fully human.
In rock art images, the shaman is often shown
accompanied by animal guides, especially snakes. Sometimes the shaman seems to be flying,
sometimes morphing into something more than human: a human with bird claws and
wings, a combination of human and mountain lion, human and stag, or others.
(Photo left: shaman, Panther Cave, Lower Pecos,
Texas; middle photo: entranced shaman figures with serpents, rock art panel,
Utah; right photo: winged shaman flying out of a hole, Texas)
Magical
realism vs. Realism
While the concept of the shaman morphing into some
other form in order to connect with the spirits may seems fantastic to us, it
probably seemed normal to many ancient people. For them, the magical spirit
world wasn’t unreal. Gabriel Garcia Marquez said his fictional
world, which many refer to as “magical realism” was simply the world his grandmother
spoke of, in which magic was an intrinsic part of the universe, a world that
included spirits as surely as it included people and insects, rivers and
clouds.
I find this view easy to understand. Ancient people saw their ancestors in the
mountains and their future in the stars.
We see only rocks and points of light. They saw the natural world as
their mother and father; we see it as our property to destroy as we wish. Perhaps we have the smaller, poorer view.
Kaye George asked if my views resulted from my
travels. Yes, definitely. When I was in Bolivia, I joined a celebration
that involved a lot of coca and home brew.
Everyone poured the first drink on the ground. “For Pacha Mama” one man said, “For Mother
Earth.” It took me a moment to realize,
“Yes, of course. She’s giving us this party.”
In a little town in Guatemala, I visited a local
cave called La Ventana (The Window).
Ancient Maya saw caves as entrances to the underworld. Modern Maya leave piles of fresh flowers and
rows of candles in La Ventana, some now bearing the images of Christ and the
Virgin Mary. The cave is still a portal – a window into the home of the spirits
and the dead.
Thank
you, Kaye George, for inviting me to talk about my stories!
Here’s the info on the books:
The Misfits and Heroes books are available on line
at Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.
Awards include 5-star reviews from Foreword Clarion
Reviews and Readers’ Favorite (all three). Kirkus Best of 2011 (the first
book), BRAG medallion (the second), Indie Reader 5-star reviews (first and
third), Pinnacle Book Award winner (third).
While the books are designed to be a series, you can
read and follow any one of them without reading the others. The books have their own website at www.misfitsandheroes.com
and their own blog at http://misfitsandheroes.wordpress.com
though I have to say the blog has morphed into a general discussion of all
things ancient and their echoes in the present rather than just a discussion of
the books. I hope you’ll check it out!
