Adena/Andaste/Giants

arrow86

Silver Member
May 6, 2014
3,374
4,072
Eastern Shore Maryland
Primary Interest:
All Treasure Hunting
Very cool , iv read a lot about the Susquehannocks the area I grew up in was dominated by them and I’m sure many of the artifacts I found as a kid were from them. It must have been quite a sight to see them approaching almost 7ft tall and draped with bear skins I bet the English we’re shaking in their boots
 

smokeythecat

Gold Member
Nov 22, 2012
20,684
40,651
Maryland
🥇 Banner finds
10
🏆 Honorable Mentions:
1
Detector(s) used
XP Deus II
Primary Interest:
All Treasure Hunting
2 plus 2 = 100

The Susquehannock Indians, now extinct as an individual tribe, but whose genetics is widely held to be still extant in both Native American and European peoples still living in the US. were a tribe estimated about 5,000 to 7,000 people in 1600 AD. The lived (near me) mainly in Pennsylvania and Maryland. They are part of the Algonquin peoples of the East Coast of the US. The were closely related the the 5 nations of the Iroquois. In 1677 they joined that group, but due to their warlike tendencies, especially with the Delaware Indians in NJ, their population had been greatly reduced. John Smith on his voyage up the Susquehanna River (1608) to where it is no longer navigable near present Port Deposit, Maryland, noted these people. In 1642 they went to war with the province of Maryland, and that further reduced their populations. Some of the Susquehannocks moved to Virginia, and trouble followed with murders, further decimating the tribe. In the early 18th century the remaining population moved to Ohio, and a few were left in Maryland/Pennsylvania. In 1763 the colony of Pennsylvania sheltered the remaining 14 FOURTEEN Susquehannocks, but while in their custody, they were all murdered by local settlers, i.e. The Paxton Boys.

In over 150 years of recorded history there is no mention of them being giants. I have collected at their villages. The tools and artifacts are normal size.

FURTHERMORE, the Adena artifacts were produced more by the Hopewell cultures in Ohio. A lot of these are made of the highly prized "Flint Ridge, Ohio" flint, from Licking County, Ohio. I was there last week. "Adena" is a point style and refers to a culture similar to nearby cultures. The lines blur. These prized points were traded for hundreds of miles and I have one that was found here in Maryland.

Nap time.
 

Last edited:

joshuaream

Silver Member
Jun 25, 2009
3,170
4,481
Florida & Hong Kong
I don't believe in giants, but it was still an interesting video.

I have taken a lot of physical anthropology classes, and rearticulated a lot of skeletons from professional digs in Latin America where handling bones wasn't taboo. I was also in school when university labs still had thousands of skeletons accumulated before many were returned for reburial.

It all starts when you lay out the bones approximating anatomical position. You immediately pick up 6-10 inches depending on how you articulate the feet & toes, most people recognize that and don't count them (but think how tall you would be if you could stand perfectly on your tippy toes.) You get about an inch extra in the knees because of they way they sit anatomically vs on a flat table with the patella between the long bones. Depending on how you place the pelvis and the lumbar vertebrae you pick up an inch. Lay all of the vertebrae flat because your table isn't curved like our spine is and you get some inches. Add just an extra 1/4 inch between the vertebrae you get 8 inches, and if you don't want all of the processes on the verts and the ribs to rub together you are going to have even more of a gap. Set the skull down so it doesn't roll and you get a couple of inches. If you look at the spacing in the bones of Lucy the famous fossil lady you see what I mean.

All told without doing anything incorrect you can easily make a normal skeleton of someone 5'5" look like an NBA center. If you are looking for giants, like unfortunately many of these researchers were, you start to see funny things. Add just a bit more of a gap in the joints of the feet, knees, legs, spine, mandible, skull, and maybe some extra verts to the skeleton of a tall, robust/thick boned person and you can make 6 feet go to 8 feet+ very easily. Replace some of the bones in the hand with those of the feet and you end up with some giant looking hands.
Put a man's mandible paired with a woman's skull and it looks like Thanos from the Avengers.
 

Apr 11, 2013
251
329
Wyoming Valley. PA
Detector(s) used
Whites V3i and Coinmaster GT
Primary Interest:
All Treasure Hunting
They are part of the Algonquin peoples of the East Coast of the US. The were closely related the the 5 nations of the Iroquois. In 1677 they joined that group

when John Smith met the Susquehannocks it was noted they did not speak Algonquin. Even the name Susquehannock is the name there Algonquin neighbors gave to them, what they called themselves is lost to history. The Iroquois being the only other major tribe that didn't speak some form of Algonquin coupled with the Susquehannocks migration from new york state to Lancaster county i'd say it's possible they were a tribe of Iroquois that had a falling out of some sort. The only connection to the Algonquins i've ever read about is that they all hated the Iroquois. According the "The Jesuit Relations" the Susquehannocks were militarily defeated by the Iroquois

I believe the idea of them being giants comes straight from John Smiths writings about them
 

Last edited:

ToddsPoint

Gold Member
Mar 2, 2018
5,205
12,167
Todds Point, IL
Primary Interest:
Metal Detecting
FURTHERMORE, the Adena artifacts were produced more by the Hopewell cultures in Ohio. A lot of these are made of the highly prized "Flint Ridge, Ohio" flint, from Licking County, Ohio. I was there last week. "Adena" is a point style. These prized points were traded for hundreds of miles and I have one that was found here in Maryland.

Nap time.

Whoa! Adena was most definitely a culture, not just a point style. Adena ran from 800 BCE–100 AD. Hopewell came later from 200 BCE–500 AD. Gary
 

Older The Better

Silver Member
Apr 24, 2017
3,088
5,695
south east kansas
Detector(s) used
Whites Eagle Spectrum
Primary Interest:
All Treasure Hunting
Joshuaream. That’s an interesting observation. I took human osteology and it was one of my favorite classes. I also had a museum type class/study hours where I glued someone’s skull back together from a tub of pieces.
 

OP
OP
uniface

uniface

Silver Member
Jun 4, 2009
3,216
2,895
Central Pennsylvania
Primary Interest:
Other
Sometimes I don't know whether to laugh, cry, get angry, or throw up. Talking nonsense at slow speed and in great detail might make it seem more persuasive, but doesn't make it stop being nonsense.

Sure. If someone trained in anatomy made incomprehensible mistakes so basic as to render him completely incompetent, then, yes, an idiot could misconstrue a normal skeleton as that of a seeming giant.

But no archaeologist, by making those same mistakes, ever reported that the average size of Adena people was over six feet. Do you know why ? I do. It's because they reconstructed the remains of the average sized people accurately. Which, in turn, makes the contention that they only became clueless idiots in special cases an absurdity that refutes itself without having to disturb Dr. Ockham's slumber.

Nor does it explain how scores of archaeologists and medical doctors over the spans of 150 years and thousands of square miles could all have been identically incompetent in selected, special cases. (Doubling down in the initial claim).

Nor does it account for the ability of normal sized excavators to wear the giant skulls over their own heads like football helmets.

Nor is it any more credible to allege that, because there were liars and hoaxers then (there always are), that every otherwise credible writer reporting first-hand knowledge of giants was a liar and a hoaxer. Need that modeled ? One of my inmate clerks was doing fifteen to thirty years for murder. He was a Steelers fan. My neighbors are Steelers fans. So they must be murderers too, and belong in prison with him.

Spaghetti logic crap like this passes for reasoned arguments only to True Believers, to whom (as to all Believers) facts, logic and even personal experience are irrelevant if these call their Belief into question.

In over 150 years of recorded history there is no mention of them being giants.

Try paying ordinary attention before mounting the pulpit. Even ignoring their skeletal remains, John Smith saw them at Jamestown, live and in the flesh, and reported that some of them were, indeed, giants. You have the whole picture completely screwed up.
 

joshuaream

Silver Member
Jun 25, 2009
3,170
4,481
Florida & Hong Kong
Darn, Uni add a little fibre to your diet, you are going to get bound up.

You are absolutely correct on all accounts. We should simply believe all of the detailed first hand accounts and ignore the fact that no remains exist outside of the World Weekly News. Heck not a single picture even. But the excavators wore those skulls like helmets and then they all just disappeared. And those massive giant bones that were so common back in the day are still found, but luckily by people who believe in the new world order and destroy them before anyone can see them.

Nor does it account for the ability of normal sized excavators to wear the giant skulls over their own heads like football helmets.

Try paying ordinary attention before mounting the pulpit. Even ignoring their skeletal remains, John Smith saw them at Jamestown, live and in the flesh, and reported that some of them were, indeed, giants. You have the whole picture completely screwed up.
 

Last edited:

arrow86

Silver Member
May 6, 2014
3,374
4,072
Eastern Shore Maryland
Primary Interest:
All Treasure Hunting
I don’t believe they were giants in the sense of being 10ft tall but I believe they were much taller , and more muscular than the English. I believe they did find some burials along the Susquehanna river and the bones were from men all over 6 ft tall
 

newnan man

Gold Member
Aug 8, 2005
5,093
15,627
Beautiful Florida
Primary Interest:
Relic Hunting
This is all very interesting. I have read old newspaper accounts of what were thought to be giant skeletons. Most of them seemed credibel to a degree. What was lacking in most was an expert or any definitive proof. Of course papers didn't have photos or means to contact experts quickly. Still, articles from papers hundreds of miles apart report almost identical features. Some said the femurs were 3' long?! I won't dismiss the old reports out of hand but Joshureem makes very valid and believable points. Why in this time period have'nt any been found or at least ones stored somewhere brought forward? Then again the Windover site here in Florida for all its fanfare has little to gleen online in comparision to what was discovered, why?
Also one has to bring context into the picture. The average size of Europeans was much smaller in stature than todays standards. Their diets were primarily grain based and low in protein. They were short & many had rickets. Conversely Native Americans had in many cases a much more balanced diet. Here in Florida the Spaniards reported natives routinely over 6' even some women. Their diet was rich in seafood, mollusks, plant & meats. So while not giants they were much larger on average than the invaders. Would have kicked their asses too except they couldn't overcome the old world diseases. Jyst my 2 cents.
 

IMAUDIGGER

Silver Member
Mar 16, 2016
3,400
5,194
Primary Interest:
All Treasure Hunting
If you spend much time reading old news papers, you soon see they are absolutely filled with "reality news".
Fascinating stories based on a true event. Sometimes embellished to the extreme.

It was common practice for a local story to get run and re-run in each town...embellished each time.
Makes for good entertainment, which probably sold well.

I'm 6'-2" and occasionally see people that make me feel small.
It's a weird feeling looking up at someone.
 

Quartzite Keith

Full Member
Dec 17, 2018
179
405
Primary Interest:
All Treasure Hunting
I dug around in my copy of Jamestown Narratives: Eyewitness Accounts of the Virginia Colony The most detailed account I could find was from William Stachey:

002.JPG

The next page picks up with, "--the calf of whose leg was 3 quarters of a yard about, and all the rest of his limbs so answereable to that proportion that he seemed the goodliest man ever beheld."

The only John Smith reference I could find is where he calls them a "giant-like people".

Throughout the narratives the native people are noted to be tall (men 6ft plus) and very muscular," like the Greek statues of the gods." Drawings often depict both men and women as very well muscled, which, I suppose makes sense since they were reported to have excellent diets and lacking draft animals, had to do all manual labor by hand. I also recall reading in one of the accounts how even when the two groups were together and eating the same food, the native men ate twice as much as the Europeans.
 

OP
OP
uniface

uniface

Silver Member
Jun 4, 2009
3,216
2,895
Central Pennsylvania
Primary Interest:
Other
should simply . . . ignore the fact that no remains exist outside of the World Weekly News. Heck not a single picture even.

False.

I ended up finding a lot of accounts in New England in the documents that talked about stone ruins existing before the colonists showed up and by virtue of that search I started to look through town and county histories and I started to tangentially run into these bizarre giant skeleton accounts all around New England and I found they were often mentioned by professionals of the time, scientists, doctors and antiquarians, giving matter-of-fact descriptions of enormous skeletons often obscurely buried in these documents like town and county history.

So, I would delve into this and I would share my information with different people, with professionals and I'd often get responses like "Those are exaggerations and hoaxes. It was the folklore of the time" or "they were mastodon bones" or whatever. I didn't find that. I found that these were human burials uniquely and well-described human burials, like seating postures and anatomic anomalies like the jaw bone would fit over the face.

So, I just gathered steam and I met Hugh and we got together with Ross Hamilton, Micah Ewers, other researchers, and just compiled essentially a thousand of these accounts in ancient America of 7-foot-tall skeletons and then about 500 more worldwide, especially in Britain, Ireland, Italy and France.

1 hr., 30 minute video for anyone interested :

https://www.sott.net/article/339012...nts-on-Record-with-Jim-Vieira-and-Hugh-Newman
 

OP
OP
uniface

uniface

Silver Member
Jun 4, 2009
3,216
2,895
Central Pennsylvania
Primary Interest:
Other
For me personally, I engage sceptics who are reasonable, who aren't A-holes. I spoke at Andy White's anthropology class a couple of months ago. I work with professionals . . .

Hugh, myself, these people we work with like Ross Hamilton, Andrew Collins, Greg Little, objective, reasonable people, who are looking at a very controversial topic. To address what was reported and found I'll say it's really stunning. Heads of anthropology and archaeology in the '20s, '30s, '40s and '50s along with the Smithsonian ethnologists at the turn of the century, are reporting 7-foot tall skeletons routinely, 7'6", 7'8", over 8-foot tall, giving dimensions in femur measurements, 28" inches, circumferences of skulls like 36" in the Smithsonian ethnology report. 1873 is a really interesting one

When we did the research, we looked through all the old Smithsonian journals, we do find little bits of evidence of that and it's worrying that these high level, influential academic institutions don't mention the giants even though they discovered them in their own annual reports and write about them in their reports and in their mail and other such things.

We've got 17 accounts from the Smithsonian themselves, between 7 and 8 feet tall and then at the end of the book that most of them are in, in the conclusion there's not one mention of them. So, this is something we talked about recently with some other people and it really is glaring. It really does make you question why they don't mention it when it's such an amazing discovery they're finding over and over again.

op. cit.
 

OP
OP
uniface

uniface

Silver Member
Jun 4, 2009
3,216
2,895
Central Pennsylvania
Primary Interest:
Other
One other thing quickly, in 1990 the NAGPRA, the Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act came into force and that removed any grave goods, giant skeletons, bones, anything, mummies they found in the southwest, from public display. So all evidence is gone. So, that was another level of removing all the evidence as well. There's more to it than meets the eye, let's just say it like that

I would say all of the earlier explorers, the famous ones, Coronado, Magellan, John Smith in Virginia, Vespucci, from Patagonia to Virginia, they all encountered enormous native peoples, described between 7 and 9 feet, if you can believe it. Tuscaloosa in Alabama was almost 8-foot-tall and his son the same size. These trained observers kept encountering giants and tribes of natives that were particularly tall.

ibid.
 

Last edited:

smokeythecat

Gold Member
Nov 22, 2012
20,684
40,651
Maryland
🥇 Banner finds
10
🏆 Honorable Mentions:
1
Detector(s) used
XP Deus II
Primary Interest:
All Treasure Hunting
Last year I found out all the family legends were true. DNA testing proved the legends, first that one of my ancestors in Austria was a red haired Viking. True. And although the story was supposed to be made up, that story being we had a native American named "Mayhar" marry into the family in the 18th century. Well, don't know about the name, but 4% American Indian by DNA testing. The Amerindian DNA puzzled me as it showed just one genetic group covering both north and south America! One group!

I was watching a NOVA special on Netflix and they had a documentary on about the first Americans. It was interesting. My DNA report showed ONE genome covering all of North and South America, as if everyone came over and was at least remotely related to everyone else. So no room for a race of giants. The DNA and TV series reported one migration with related peoples. No room for "giants" but of course room for a few really tall folks.
 

Top Member Reactions

Users who are viewing this thread

Latest Discussions

Top