Is there any credibility at all to this "discovery" of ancient Chinese petroglyphs in America?

by Saelyre

I was recently sent this article by a family member regarding John Ruskamp Jr.'s study of petroglyphs in the continental US that he suggests are of ancient Chinese origin.

Several things stand out to me, firstly that his field of specialty is biochemistry, not linguistics or archaeology; then there's the denigration of dogma and "accepted history"; and lastly he states some of the petroglyphs are Native American copies of Chinese ones which sounds like a thinly veiled cultural supremacy dogwhistle - perhaps suggesting that the Native Americans couldn't have come up with them otherwise?

The writer has an obvious bias towards this underdog lone researcher trying to overturn the accepted worldview.

So I'm pretty sure I'm right to be skeptical, but could anyone point me to more educated criticism or refutation?

SirDigbyChknSiezure

No there isn’t. I’m a archaeologist working in the US Southwest and have had to deal with the pseudoarchaeology that Ruskamp has been promoting for several years. He came and talked at a local archaeology society meeting on the request of one member who was a fan. I was later asked by the society to come in and correct the record afterward. His arguments are laughably sloppy and full of special pleading. In a language where changing a character even a bit alters the meaning or makes it illegible he allows for tons of variation and substitutions in his “identification “ and then abuses statistical tools to give his arguments a feeling of scientific rigor to those who don’t have a background on those subjects. In reality he just makes wild claims that very different imagery is the same and then designs a statistical test to “prove “ it using his already deeply flawed data. He has no knowledge of rock art traditions in the region and if he did, he would know that many of the images he uses in his arguments have long and well documented trajectories of change through time locally and certainly don’t appear out of nowhere as he claims. He combines things from all time periods and claims they are contemporary. He’s a big self promoter and offers to talk to avocational Archaeology groups and sell tours in China. He uses a lot of the same tools as other fringe archaeologists to get stories on his work picked up by fringe publications and then cites them elsewhere as proof that his ideas are accepted. Jason Covalito has a little bit of context on him on his blog here.

Edit: I just remembered that Angus Quinlan reviewed his book Asiatic Echos in American Antiquity (the journal of the Society for American Archaeology) for a special feature addressing pseudoscience. link here.

iamtheko

As a Chinese art historian with a focus on ancient script, I can say for sure these in no way resemble any form of ancient Chinese (Not to mention or get into the sailing trajectories of ancient Chinese who largely went West, and the fact they never made it to the Americas in any large numbers or even at all as far as most of us know). Rectangular squiggles aren’t enough to equate the scripts. And the author’s insistence that Chinese writers were happy to rotate their scripts is flat out false. The fact his photo evidence of script isn’t lined up into delineated into lines or distinct characters speaks to the inauthenticity of his claims. The earliest forms of Chinese text were written on oracle bones (link) and were already organized into rows of consecutive and distinct pictographs. While Chinese pictographs were eventually broken into quadrant areas of individual meaning (due to the need to express more complex meaning) there is in no way a time when Chinese language organized itself into distinct squares like on a playground, where each square housed an individual character. If anything, I’m much more sure that he falsified all of these images with chalk on some rocks across the US to garner acclaim and stir up controversy.