Barry Fell (born Howard Barraclough Fell June 6, 1917 in Lewes, Sussex, England and died on April 21, 1994, of heart failure in San Diego, California) was Professor of invertebrate zoology at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. His research was on starfish and sea urchins. Fell is also widely known for his controversial work in New World epigraphy.
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Biography
Fell moved to New Zealand with his mother in the early 1920s, after his father, who was a merchant seaman, died in a shipboard fire. He received his Ph.D. at the University of Edinburgh in 1941, after which he served in the British Army during World War II. In 1946 he returned to New Zealand where he resumed his academic career. In 1964 he joined the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, where he stayed until voluntary retirement in 1979.
Epigraphy
Though Fell was an accomplished and respected marine biologist, outside of his academic specialty he is best known for his work on epigraphy. This interest began early in his career with a study of Polynesian petroglyphs published in 1940. However, his most famous work came much later, starting in 1976 with the publication of the book America BC, in which he argued that Old World scripts can be found on rock surfaces and objects throughout North and South America. This was followed in 1980 by Saga America, and in 1982 by Bronze Age America. As an example of Fell's claims, he and his followers have speculated that Irish monks reached North America centuries before Columbus. This is based on Fell's interpretation, published in 1983, of rock-cut inscriptions located at archaeological sites in West Virginia. According to Fell, these inscriptions narrated the story of Christ's nativity and were written in an old Irish script called Celtic Ogham dating back to the 6th or 8th century AD. Within the academic community, Fell's claims on epigraphy are not cited in the professional literature and, if addressed at all, universally dismissed.[1] Critics charge him with violating scientific archaeological protocols in order to make fantastic claims of pre-Columbian discoveries to a nonspecialist audience. One example of his linguistic work is his translation of an inscription containing the word "PIA", found on a rockface on Turkey Mountain near Tulsa, Oklahoma. Fell interpreted it as a Punic word meaning "white", and a nearby marking as a line of Ogham reading "GUIN", also meaning white in P-Celtic, asserting that it was a bilingual inscription.[2]
References
- ^ Stephen Williams (1991) Fantastic Archaeology, Phila.: University of Pennsylvania Press, ISBN 0-8122-8238-8, p.264-273.
- ^ Gloria Farley, In Plain Sight: Old World Records in Ancient America, Chapter 3: They Signed their Names (archived by Jean Dupree and Bart Torbert)
