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Re: Atawallpa was no chicken (It was Re: chicken in America: from Asia? (cont.))

>Greg,Lots of things are there in the ground that have not yet been found.
>Arguments by omission are not valid. 

Yuri, this just isn't going to fly.  Some people claim extraterrestrials
visited the Maya, to such people I say where is the evidence (ie.
extraterrestrial skeletons, spaceships, etc.).  I say that no excavation
has ever found such remains.  Following your train of logic they can
counter with - "well maybe you haven't found them yet."  How can anyone
argue with that?

Sure you can always use the old "the absence of evidence isn't necessarily
the evidence of absence" argument, but that looks more and more pathetic
in the case of the chicken.  We find and identify ancient people's food 
and animals all the time, but we haven't found any Precolumbian chicken
bones in South America.  Without such direct archaeological evidence
Carter's argument will remain weak to non-existant in the eyes of any
archaeologist.

>Re: chickens: they may have arrived from Asia pre-contact, but not too
>early pre-contact. Thus they would be difficult to find, as the time
>frame of native tribes possessing them pre-contact would be narrow in
>such a case. As (and I said this before) they may not have been a food
>staple (but they _could have been_ _in some areas_), and this presents
>additional difficulties. 

If they arrived extremely close to contact then to me this would
indicate that until the last few centuries the Old and New Worlds
were isolated.  If a boat of Chinese came in 1480 A.D. and brought
chickens to South America I would respond big deal so they beat
Columbus by a couple of years.  Not very important IMO.

>Has someone mapped out the areas where precolumbian chicken bones are the
>most likely to be found? If not, why not? (Hint: because nobody knows
>much about the important evidence pro precolumbian chickens that Carter
>presented.) 

Utterly and completely WRONG! I am only a graduate student and I have
been aware of Carter's "arguments" for at least 5 years.  There are 
many others who have also read them.  Carter can make some linguistic
pro-chicken arguments (which can be rebuted by linguists) but he's stuck 
with the one big con-chicken argument - no archaeological support.

>_This_ would be the most valid and useful information for
>archaeologists to investigate further, if this discussion is to
>accomplish anything of substance. This is the direction to go if more
>progress is to be made towards finding those bones.

Given the vagaries of the archaeological record, it would be utterly
stupid to design a project simply to find chicken bones.  If you
didn't find such remains you will have accomplished nothing.  
Archaeologists don't design projects to find just one species of animal,
but when we recover animal remains we try to identify what we have
found.  Thousands upon thousands of animal bones have been recovered
from Precolumbian archaeological sites - yet no one reports finding
a Precolumbian chicken bone.

>Also, lots of things are found but not reported for various reasons. Are
>you going to tell me that archaeologists ALWAYS are quick to publish
>their excavation reports? And that all important evidence is ALWAYS
>reported and published?

Maybe not everything gets written up, but certainly a Precolumbian 
chicken bone would be published pretty quickly.  Unless of course
you want to claim that for some unfathomable reason archaeologists
are trying to cover it up.  As has been explained to you before we
actively seek the truth, we don't try to cover it up - there are a 
lot more lucrative fields for the cover-up types to pursue.

>Anyway, all these arguments are pretty basic. The main argument pro
>precolumbian chickens for me remains, Why would the chicken have arrived
>EVERYWHERE in the Pacific, including the Easter Island -- but failed to
>cross the last stretch of the ocean? You got the answer for this?
>
>Yuri.

Sure I got an answer for you - but you won't like it.  If the Chicken
arrived all over the Pacific but not in South America its because
no one brought them over until the 16th century.

The same question can be asked of Carter.  He says the chicken had
arrived in South America but never got to Mexico, why not?

Peter van Rossum
PMV100@PSU.EDU

Writing from a temporary lame-ass AOL account.
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