In the archaeological community, Anzick Boy’s skeletal remains and associated arti-facts are relics from the distant past that bolster the archaeological doctrine called Clovis First, the meaning of which is that the first humans in America were of the Clovis Culture (discovered at Clovis, New Mexico), to which Anzick Boy undoubtedly belonged, and, as the first “Americans,” their descendants remained isolated until the time of Columbus.Ĭlovis First is a logical belief. We can start close to home, in our own backyard, with Anzick Boy, the 12,000 year old toddler accidentally unearthed near Wilsall, Mont., in 1968. The issue we are about to explore is that control of prehistory, too, appears coveted by powers that be, not the real life events of prehistory, of course, which exist unto themselves as the truth we seek to know, but the way we are told to think about prehistory. Power, as Orwell warned, has everything to do with controlling the historical narrative, as people and institutions secure and maintain control (and money) by telling us how to think about, or deny, the foundations of the present-history.Ĭonsider then pre history, a subject that, while not at the forefront of our minds on a daily basis, has everything to do with how we perceive ourselves in the present. That strategy, hardly unique to Kremlin hardliners, remains common to fields of human endeavor where power politics are involved.

Think of the effect of such tactics, dictating how people must think about the past so that they haven’t a clue about events that shaped the present-the program-ming of a generation.

School children never learned of their existence, as the new bosses took over, molded minds, and exerted control. The more egregious examples of such power plays were evident in the old USSR, where rival leaders conveniently accused of ideological impurities were exiled or liquidated, then airbrushed from history. Who controls the present controls the past.” In his political novel 1984, George Orwell wrote, “Who controls the past controls the future.

The forbidden archaeology