Remember Glenn Beck? Here’s that time in 2010 he thought he could prove the Lost Tribe of Israel built the mounds of Newark. This is revised version of a blog article I wrote in 2010. I had to change so much, from images and links that were broken to some information that was wrong on my part, and I added so much, I thought I’d re-post it. Much of it is fresh.
In the first few seconds of that video, Beck gets a few things wrong. He states that the little squares he drew in the Octagon section of the Newark Earthworks (Newark, Ohio) are “made up of stades,” each 606 feet long. He points to the four corners of these “stades” in his chalkboard diagram to illustrate precisely the four lengths he’s referring to.
So what the heck is a stade?
Before I dive into the actual data, let’s look a minute at what Beck is referring to by a stade. It comes from the Latin word stadium, which is from the Ancient Greek word ??????? (stádion). For the Greeks, one stadion was 600 podes (“podes” is the plural of “pous” which means “foot.” Think of the word podiatrist–a foot doctor).
The length of the pous, or foot, in the Greek world had regional variation, so, as you can imagine, historians and the like have been arguing about what the actual length of a stadion might be for years. It also might not surprise you that, depending on which measurement is assumed for the stadion, different results can be interpreted from ancient texts that use it.
But many scholars agree that 157.7 meters (517.3 feet) is a reasonable figure to assume. It was arrived at by Lev Vasilevich Firsov (Engels 1985:306), who applied modern measurements to 81 measurements provided by Eratosthenes and Strabo:
[H]is methodology is a simple one. He takes 81 measurements of distances recorded by Eratosthenes and preserved mainly in Strabo. For each one, he divides the straight-line distance by the number of stades recorded by Eratosthenes. Finally, he averages the 81 lengths of the stades he derives from this method and obtains 157.7 meters for the length of Eratosthenes’ stade.
Donald Engels (1985). The Length of Eratosthenes’ Stade. American Journal of Philology 106 (3), page 306.
Back to Glenn Beck’s Chalkboard
So, the stadion or stade in the ancient Greek world was roughly 600 Greek feet. Since there are at least a half-dozen versions of the stade-to-modern-foot (with the best scholarly version being the Eratosthenes Stade mentioned above), where does Beck get “606 feet” from?
Most likely, he’s using the Ptolemaic or Attic stade which is 187 meters (606.96 feet). He doesn’t say why he’s using this version. But then he doesn’t really say why he’s using a Greek unit of measure that was in use at around the 3rd century BCE for a North American structure probably built between 100-500 CE. And half the planet away. The connection, assuming the measurements are accurate, would be spurious at best.
Are the measurements accurate?
The short answer is no. And not even by a little. His measurements are way off. And not by just a few feet. The actual average length of each of his “stades” is 1,124.5 feet (Beck says 606 feet). To illustrate this in a diagram that’s a little more precise than his chalkboard drawing, I used QGIS to create the following graphic with GPS data collected by James Q. Jacobs, which is posted on the internet. His data, as far as I’m aware, are accurate to within a few feet. Let’s call it 5. Hell, let’s be generous and call it 10 feet.
You can see in the measurements window above that Beck probably would have been better off just claiming the 8 sides of the Octagon were his stades. At least they’re closer to the 606 feet (187 meter Ptolemaic) stade he favors. The west northwest side is about 622.1 feet. He also says they’re “exactly the same,” but there’s little reason to think so.
Next, Beck goes on to describe the vertical slope of the Great Pyramid and how it is somehow significant that this angle precisely matches the horizontal angle taken from the center of the circular formation when measured against the line bisecting the Octagon formation. These, he claims, are both 51.8 degrees.
Insert a dash of Pyramidiocy
Interestingly enough, they are both roughly 51.8 degrees. Holy cow! What are the odds?!
Well, roughly 1 in 360 if you’re willing to round to the nearest degree. I’d buy lotto tickets every day at those odds.
From here, if you draw a line due north (true), which is easy to do in Google Earth, you end up with an angle of about 52 degrees (+/- 0.5), which is consistent with Beck’s “51.8 degrees” Great Pyramid of Giza association. Beck calls this the “exact same calculation,” but it really isn’t. The calculation for the Great Pyramid was arrived at through trial and error. Earlier pyramids had different angles. The Bent Pyramid, for instance, has and angle of 55 degrees until the upper courses, which change to 43 and 44 degrees. 55 degrees was probably too steep and it was probably too costly in manpower and resources to totally scrap the pyramid. By the time Khufu and Khafre built theirs, many lessons had been learned. 51-52 degrees (we no longer have the casing stones to be exactly sure) was ideal since it went up without falling over.
To be the “exact same calculation,” the Native Americans that constructed the Newark Octagon between 100-500 CE would have had to be concerned with their non-existent pyramid being stable. Or would have at least needed the non-existent blueprints used by Kafre’s builders about 3,000 years earlier!
And there’s an important distinction between the “51.8 degrees” of the Giza pyramids and the Newark Earthworks. One is a structure’s angle going up. The other is an angle consistent with an alignment with an 18.6 year lunar cycle. The two have nothing to do with each other and Beck is creating a correlation that has no common causation.
Better Explanations for Newark Alignments
At least one good explanation for the Newark alignments is pure happenstance. Perhaps consciously or unconsciously the Hopewell builders were keeping to the lay of the land. This would assume that Native Americans occasionally incorporate the natural landscape into their worldviews, cosmologies, and traditions. Which they do. Supporting this idea is the fact that the geologic strike of the landscape is about 232°, which is consistent with the azimuth of the center line at 231.88°.
Another idea is that the Hopewell people were using the sides of the Octagon to align with moon rises. Ray Hively and Robert Horn (2006) found that the center line of the Octagon and Circle align to the north-most instance of a moon rise. In fact, they found that Moon appears to change the direction on the horizon for rise and set at least 8 times, and all 8 instances correspond to an alignment within the Newark earthworks. The most significant being the north-most moon rise which is aligned to the center line.
Moundbuilders Were A Lost Tribe From Israel?
Beck then moves on to moundbuilder pseudoscience, fakes, and forgery that has long been cast aside by scholars. He starts on about the “Newark Holy Stones,” one of which is often referred to as The Decalogue and was alleged to have been found by David Wyrick in 1860. It’s called the “Decalogue” because it depicts a bas relief of a man, ostensibly a priest, with a condensed version of the 10 Commandments inscribed in Hebrew. Another stone is the “Keystone,” named for its shape, which also has Hebrew script.
That these stones are fakes and frauds really isn’t in question. The only question is did Wyrick fake them himself or did he have help? Or was he duped by someone else entirely? The implication by Beck and 19th century believers, was that this was evidence of the so-called “Lost Tribes of Israel” -a motif that Beck, a Mormon, may have a lot of investment in. But, if this were evidence of such a “Lost Tribe,” then the script on the alleged artifacts would have been ancient Hebrew. Instead, the forger(s), probably being ignorant of this, used a modern script creating an error in transcription (Lepper and Gill, 2000).
In the 19th century, there was a prevailing myth of a “Moundbuilder society” that somehow vanished. This often became twisted into the agendas of certain religious and political causes since many thought the credit couldn’t possibly go to the existing Native Americans of the time. To recognize these people as the rightful designers and builders of such magnificent and detailed constructions would mean admitting that the Native Americans were something more than the “savages” and “heathens” they were characterized and marginalized as being. Such characterizations made it far easier to force them off their lands, displace them, and treat them as less than white.
Fortunately, such beliefs and agendas were forced out of academia early on by the likes of Cyrus Thomas, who had a Federal Government budget to find out the truth of the Moundbuilder mystery. His work was empirical and it concluded that the mounds “were built by the Indians.” In addition, he had the occasion to debunk some of the “tablets” that were cropping up here and there, including the Davenport tablet, for which he launched a full, empirical investigation that concluded that it was planted recently (to 1894) in a mound in Davenport, Iowa (Feder 1990).
The stones and tablets Beck presented are frauds. The spurious measurements and similarities he creates with the “looks-like” method are simply ignorant.
References and Further Reading
Engels, Donald (1985). The Length of Eratosthenes’ Stade. American Journal of Philology 106(3): 298–311.
Feder, Kenneth L. (1990) Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology. California City, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company.
Hively, Ray, & Robert Horn (2006). A Statistical Study of Lunar Alignments at the Newark Earthworks. Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology, 31(2), 281–321.
Lepper, Bradley T. and Jeff Gill (2000). “The Newark Holy Stones,” Timeline (a publication of the Ohio Historical Society), 17(3), 16-25.
Nice review, as if we needed yet more evidence of Beck’s sloppy method.
It’s hard to believe that Glenn Beck didn’t know those artifacts are widely considered to be frauds. So far as I know the upper echelons of the LDS also agree they are fakes.
What the Mormon leadership thinks is less damaging than what some Mormon archaeologists such as Wayne May do. He is on-board with the authenticity of the Newark stones and has rubbed elbows with the supporters of just about every crackpot theory about North American prehistory that you can imagine.
Yeah, Wayne May seems to be “all in” when it comes to archaeological proofs for The Book of Mormon; The Official Church however, not so much….
When I read articles from LDS members who are actual scientists and/or archaeologists, they don’t tend to lend to much credence to Wayne May, if mentioned at all. The latter seems to be popular in certain LDS circles, but not amongst their academics. That doesn’t mean May is wrong however….
Lendal and Gleaner63
May has made a career out of not being right. Zarahemla Temple, The Michigan Tablets and Burrows Cave are just some of the more recent examples. He is certainly wrong in his choice of associates. He has a longstanding affiliation with Frank Joseph a former Neo-Nazi and convicted pedophile and long-time editor of Ancient American magazine that is infamous for making claims that are demonstrably wrong. The magazine has been a primary outlet for the work of most people involved in questionable research related to North American prehistory.
When it comes to pseudoarchaeology, the more commonly known practitioners are a rather incestuous bunch in terms operating in the same small circles and sharing similar pursuits. An unsavory lot in general I have been led to believe. Lies and misrepresentations of educational backgrounds, qualifications, and experiences, criminal records, involvement in the receiving end of civil court cases, drug use, mental issues, and on and on. Nobody is perfect but there appears to be an unusually high concentration of less than perfect people engaged in pseudoarchaeology.
You’ve hit on a fundamental dynamic of those who believe things that really, really, really aren’t true: that “incestuous” feature. That is a symptom of a deeper element, the easy over-reliance on unchecked secondary sources. Beck is doing that in channeling the pseudoarchaeology of David Barton’s Christian America tropes, exactly as creationists do the sixty-odd fact claimant source base circulating in antievolutionism, and that is what flat earthers do, with a still smaller core set of largely video post claims. There is a Madness to their Method, even when the individual claimants have otherwise smarts (academic credentials, public success, etc)., and by their Source Methods shall ye know them (so to speak).
That ‘incestuous’ notion is definitely true. It’s also fascinating to watch some of these woo-figures go in and out of tight circles from the larger populations of their respective genres of woo. I don’t know a lot about the creationist circles, but in the pseudoarchaeology clicks you see people like Wayne May and Frank Joseph keep a tight circle of Mormon and LDS leaning people who entertain the pre-Columbian arrival of the “lost tribe” of Israel and Phoenicians, etc. Then there’s Brien Foerster who frequently teams up with the likes of Aaron Judd and L.A. Marzulli, both of whom are Christians and believe in the whole nephilim silliness as explanations for “elongated skulls” in Peru. They may even be creationists. Foerster, as far as I know, doesn’t promote any religious explanations and usually only suggests “aliens” and the like (he has so-called ufologists in his circle as well). Then from this circle there’s an overlap with the giantology-nutters (the ‘nephilim’ again).
Then you have the occasional falling outs. Jovan Hutton Pulitzer was once tight with Scott Wolter. Pulitzer seems eager to ride the coattails of anyone that’ll get him some public notoriety. His cosplay on Oak Island is an example. I’ve always wondered if the falling out these two had was due to Pulitzer’s apparent alt-right politics (see his tweets from 2015-2018) and Wolter’s apparent left-leaning politics. Now that I think of it, I’ve noticed that while most professional archaeologists tend to be generally centrist to liberal in their politics, the “enthusiasts” and wannabes tend to be right-leaning.
Overall, though, I see these circles as a bunch of tight, small ones that reside in larger, overlapping ones that, if drawn as a Venn diagram, would probably look like the art of Jackson Pollock.
Despite different religious and political orientations these folks tend to be joined at the hip in terms of attacking “mainstream” science to deflect from their own sloppy research and consistent failure at producing evidence for their assertions. Any seemingly successful attempt at showing where science has been wrong gets heralded as a victory for “their” team. Makes for some uneasy bedfellows at times, though. Reminds me a bit of various terrorist organizations of the 70s. You had European atheist anarchists celebrating the efforts of radical fundamentalist Muslims because any blow against western capitalist democratic societies was seen as a good thing. One reason why the whole Clovis First silliness and Smithsonian conspiracy theories get passed around within the fringe like a giant bong at a college party whether people are talking about Ancient Aliens or Atlantis-derived spiels or Nephilim or Bigfoot.
There is actually a recent exchange between Wolter and Pullitzer on the Scott Wolter Answers blog story on vandalism at “America’s Stonehenge”that reflects political difference.
Heh, yeah, I read that and was definitely entertained. It’s like watching two trekkies argue about which starship blueprints are more accurate and which Jeffries tube leads to Harry Potter’s quarters and which leads to Darth Vader’s.
James states: “You’ve hit on a fundamental dynamic of those who believe things that really, really, really aren’t true: that “incestuous” feature. That is a symptom of a deeper element, the easy over-reliance on unchecked secondary sources…”.
Do you apply this standard to everyone, or just those whom you happen to disagree with? For example, do you believe in CAGW (catastrophic anthropogenic global warming)? Why or why not? Also, the “incestuous” crowd, including well-known politicians who are not scientists, who latch on to that idea, are they guilty of “woo” also?
James: Name 5 things people believe that “really, really, really aren’t true”. Carl might disagree, but I wouldn’t hesitate to leave political science out in the cold, after all, there are folks who believe that JFK’s murder was a conspiracy…
It’s an archaeology blog and the discussion here is fake artifacts and the type of people who believe in them and promote them. Gleaner63 is just trying the usual routine of hijacking the discussion into tangents that discuss everything but fake artifacts and the people who believe in them and promote them. Don’t get lured down that rabbit hole or 100 posts from now nobody will even remember what the original topic was.
Sorry James, but politics is not allowed here, according to Carl, so I fully expect your post to be shortly deleted….but thanks for playing…..
Eddie…what “type” of people believe in and promote fake artifacts? I thought stereotyping people or groups was officially “out”….
The USS Enterprise vs. the Death Star is actually more entertaining…..
Carl,
I read that exchange in the Cider PressGate discussion as Pullitzer making a desperate grab for some publicity and relevance. But for all that I know it may have been a joint effort by those two idiots to generate some buzz. Part of that on again/off again incestuous angle.
Random poster: These pseudoscientists are wrong all the time and freely associate with a known Nazi and sex offender.
Gleaner63: Uh, let’s talk about JFK murder conspiracy.
Captain: I don’t believe the JFK murder was a conspiracy, do you?