The Discovery of an American Brig: Fieldwork Involving Applied Remote Viewing Including a Comparison with Electronic Remote Sensing

In the fall of 1987 Mobius began fieldwork, under a license from the Bahamian Government, to carry out an archaeological survey in an area of the Grand Bahama Banks encompassing some 579.15 square miles (1500 sq. km). This report compares the Remote Viewing, electronic remote sensing, and visual search process used to locate the wreck site of a previously undiscovered armed American merchantman believed to be the Brig Leander, which was found in a sub-section of the License Area known as Consensus Zone C; an area of 11.81 sq. miles (30.59 sq. km) of water. It concludes that Remote Viewing was the source of information which led to the site’s location, and that electronic remote sensing was not useful in this instance. Leander was under the Command of Captain William Johnson when she sank for unknown reasons near Beaks Cay on 6 April 1834, while returning from Manzanilla, Cuba to her homeport in Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to location information, a total of 193 conceptual descriptive concepts concerning the site were proffered by twelve Remote Viewers. Of this, 148 concepts, or 75% of the total, could be evaluated through direct field observations, or historical research. An evaluation of this material reveals 84% Correct, 12% Partially Correct, 4% Incorrect. There is little accuracy variation across the sequence of material from the Los Angeles interviews (84% Corr., 13% Part. Co rr. ,3% Incorr.), to the on-site data (81% Corr., 11% Part. Corr., 8% Incorr.). Approximately 300 notable wrecks went down, not just in the License Area but across the entire Banks, from 1500 to 1876 as determined by a thorough search of historical records and archival material in the U.S., the U.K., Spain and the Bahamas. To make a conservative assessment of this location occurring by chance, assume the wrecks are evenly distributed not throughout the Banks, but only within the License Area. That said, we should expect to see 6.12 boats in Consensus Zone C (11.81/579.15 x 300 =6.12). The brig site is 5000 square feet (464.5 sq. m), equaling 0.00018 of a square mile. Within Consensus Zone C 65,849 sites of this size could be placed, thus yielding a grid of 65,849 cells.. If the probability of selecting this particular cell in the grid by chance exceeds p≥ 0.05 then Remote Viewing can be considered a determinative factor. The probability of finding this one 5,000 square feet area is then 6.12/65,849 = p 0.00009, which strongly suggests that chance is not an explanation for the location of Leander.History: “The Discovery of an American Brig: Fieldwork Involving Applied Archaeological Remote Viewing,” Parapsychological Association Conference 1988. Also, The Discovery of an American Brig: Fieldwork Involving Applied Archaeological Remote Viewing, Including a Comparison with Electronic Remote Sensing,” Conference on Underwater Archaeology/Society of Historic Archaeology Annual Meetings. 1989.

Hierarchical or Egalitarian?

The model of social structure in British prehistory still owes much to the legacy of Gordon Childe, for whom economic competition was the catalyst of social inequalities. Even from the Neolithic, however, control of land or stock would have conveyed status, and the construction of major works such as tombs or henges implies authority over labour and resources, even if it was religious rather than temporal. Classical sources indicated that late pre-Roman Iron Age society was stratified, but recent opinion has questioned how far back this extended into earlier prehistory. Using grave goods as a proxy for social status may be simplistic, though whether explained as possessions of the dead, debts repaid by dependents, dedications to deities or ancestors, or displays of communal wealth consumption, they surely indicate social complexity. Settlements in British prehistory or early historic archaeology seldom display clear evidence of social hierarchy, since social status was evidently not expressed in the same terms as in contemporary materialistic and capitalistic societies. Anthropological models of social development from simple communities to chiefdoms and state societies can now be seen as neither consistent nor uniform in progression.

Historic Caddo Archaeological Sites in Cherokee County, Texas

The historic archaeology of the Caddo Indian peoples in East Texas has been the subject of considerable interest by Caddo archaeologists for a number of years. Much of that interest has been focused on the investigation of the effects of European contact on Caddo cultural traditions and practices, particularly the impact of introduced European epidemic diseases, and the impact of Spanish, French, and American colonization efforts. In recent years, another focus of Historic Caddo archaeological investigations has been on characterizing the material culture record of the different clusters of Caddo Indian sites in East Texas, most notably the study of the diversity in the decorative styles and technologies of their hand-made ceramic vessels as clues to identifying clusters of ethnically and socially related communities in the Angelina and Neches River basins that were living in the region after the mid-17th century A.D. Herein, we discuss the archaeological findings from four Historic Caddo sites in the Bowles Creek basin in Cherokee County, Texas, that have ceramic assemblages that help to better characterize the nature of what has been defined as Neche cluster sites; “a cluster is strictly a group of possibly related sites in close geographic proximity to each other” suggests that certain sites in the middle Neches River basin (and the Bowles Creek valley) are affiliated with the Neche Caddo groups, and the sites described in this article may well belong to the Neche cluster.

Os Tembé/Tenetehara de Santa Maria do Pará: entre representações e diálogos antropológicos

Desde o início do século XX, Antropologia tem se dedicado a estudar a trajetória dos Tembé/Tenetehara. Em consonância com os contextos acadêmicos e políticos, historicamente localizados, essa disciplina tem contribuído com diferentes imagens sobre o povo, muitas das quais se ligam imediatamente às demandas políticas da própria etnia. De maneira geral, os antropólogos estão entre os intermediadores de processos de legitimação e/ou inserção desse grupo no quadro das etnias indígenas brasileira. Assim, este trabalho propõe apresentar um percurso nesses variados discursos antropológicos, considerando a minha inserção no diversificado grupo desses pesquisadores e em diálogo com a Arqueologia. Trata-se de evidenciar como imagens acerca dos Tembé/Tenetehara são erigidas e derrubadas, cristalizadas e abrandadas, considerando as premissas dos antropólogos. A literatura especializada e o exercício do trabalho de campo são as fontes privilegiadas no artigo. Assim, o que pretendo é fomentar o debate sobre a produção do conhecimento antropológico, no qual a voz do interlocutor soa com diferentes tons.Palavras-chave: Povos indígenas. Amazônia. Discurso antropológico. Etnografia. Arqueologia Histórica.The Tembé/Tenetehara from Santa Maria do Pará: among anthropological representations and dialoguesAbstractSince the beginning of the 20th century, there have been anthropological studies focusing on the Tembé/Tenetehara’s trajectory. Along with the academic and political contexts, this theme has contributed with different representations of this population, many of which are associated to their own political demands. Usually, anthropologists are among the mediators of the legitimizing processes and/or the inclusion of this group into the board of Brazilian indigenous ethnicities. Thus, this research proposes a path amongst these many anthropological discussions, considering my insertion into this diverse group of researchers, also in dialogue with archaeology. It indicates how the representations of the Tembé/Tenetehara are built and dismantled, established and disproved, considering anthropologists’ premises. The specialized literature and field work are privileged sources in the article. Therefore, I intend to stimulate the discussion around the construction of anthropological knowledge, in which the sound of the interlocutor’s voice has different tones.Key words: Indigenous peoples. Amazonia. Anthropological discussion. Ethnography. Historic archaeology.