Strange Relics from the Depths of the Earth -

“By the 1880s, the governing establishments of Christendom were dreading the very word ‘archaeologist’. And so, archaeological digs were brought under strict control, and their funding and undertakings had to be approved by newly designated authorities.”

“One of these, the Egypt Exploration Fund, was established in Britain in 1891, and on the very first page of its Memorandum and Articles of Association it is stated that the Fund’s objective is to promote excavation work ”for the purpose of elucidating or illustrating the Old Testament narrative”.

“In short, this meant that if something was found which could be used to support the scriptural teaching, then we (the public) would be informed. Anything which did not support the Church interpretation of the Bible was not destined to see the light in the public domain.”

Buried Medallion or Coin recovered at 114 ft in Illinois ]

From Ancient American Issue #43, Strange Relics from the Depths of the Earth, by J.R. Jochmans, Forgotten Ages Research Society, Lincoln Nebraska, 1979 ).

“At Lawn Ridge, 20 miles north of Peoria, Illinois, in August of 1870, three men were dulling an artesian well, when (from a depth of over a hundred feet) the pump brought up a small metal medallion to the surface. One of the workmen, Jacob W. Moffit, from Chillicothe, was the first to discover it in the drill residue.

A noted scholar of the time, Professor Alexander Winchell, reported in his book Sparks From a Geologist’s Hammer, that he received from another eye-witness, W.H. Wilmot, a detailed statement, dated December 4, 1871, of the deposits and depths of materials made during the boring, and the position where the metal “coin” was uncovered.

The stratification took this form:

Soil – 3 feet; yellow clay – 17 feet; blue clay – 44 feet; dark vegetable matter -4 feet; hard purplish clay – 18 feet; bright green clay – 8 feet; mottled clay - 18 feet; paleosol (ancient soils) – 2 feet; coin location; yellowish clay – 1 foot; sand, clay and water – 11 feet.

The strange “coin-medallion” was composed of an unidentified copper alloy, about the size and thickness of a U.S. quarter of that period. It was remarkably uniform in thickness, round, and the edges appeared to have been cut. Researcher William E. Dubois, who presented his investigation of the medallion to the American Philosophical Society, was convinced that the object had in fact passed through a rolling mill, the edges showed ‘further evidence of the machine shop.’ Despite .its ‘modern characteristics,’ however, Dubois plainly saw that, upon the object, ‘the tooth of time is plainly visible.’

Both sides of the medallion were marked with artwork and hieroglyphs, but these had not been metal-engraved or stamped. Rather, the figures had somehow been etched in acid, to a remarkable degree of intricacy. One side showed the figure of a woman wearing a crown or headdress; her left arm is raised as if in benediction, and her right arm holds a small child, also crowned. The woman appears to be speaking. On the opposite side is another central figure, that looks like a crouching animal: it has long, pointed ears, large eyes and mouth, claw-like arms, and a long tail frayed at the very end. Below and to the left of it is another animal, which bears a strong resemblance to a horse. Around the outer edges of both sides of the coin are undecipherable glyphs; they are of very definite character, and show all the signs of a form of alphabetic writing.

In 1876, the medallion was presented by Professor Winchell to a meeting of the Geological Section of the American Association in Buffalo. There was much speculation, but few answers. One participant, a conservative historian, Professor J.R. Lesley, tried to explain the object as a “practical joke” dropped into a hole by a passing French or Spanish explorer. The professor even claimed to see the coin’s figures as the astrological signs of Pisces and Leo, and read into the glyphs the date 1572.

However, Winchell countered with these arguments against such an interpretation: 1. By no stretch of the imagination were the figures and glyphs decipherable in terms of any known symbology or script. 2. Who, as a practical joke, would have dropped a metal object into a hole and known that someone several hundred years later would happen to dull at that precise spot (within a 4-inch tolerance) and find it? The odds would be phenomenal. And 3. There is the very real problem of explaining the accumulation of 114 feet of deposit over the buried coin. Having examined all the evidence, Winchell was convinced the coin had indeed come from this depth. It had not fallen into a hole in the past, the sediments drilled through were uniform and undisturbed. And the amount of sedimentation was not what would have settled in only a few centuries. In fact, recent calculations based on uniform rates of alluvium deposition and radioisotope dates for this region estimate an age for materials from just below a depth of 100 feet to be between 100,000 and 150,000 years.

What conclusions can we draw about the mystery coin? A lost civilization once existed on the North American continent which worked in copper and other metals; possessed art and writing; attired themselves with crowns and other clothing; knew of and perhaps domesticated several animals including the horse; utilized acids for etching in a manner that is still not understood today; and perhaps the most disturbing, possessed forms of machinery for the cutting, rolling and processing of metal pieces.

As a sidelight, the enigmatic coin was not the only item that came from deep levels in Illinois. In 1851, in Whiteside County, another well-drilling bit brought up from a sand stratum 120 feet deep two copper artifacts: What appears to be a hook, and a ring. Their age is thought to be the same as that of the coin – about 150,000 years old.”

EXTRACT FROM badarchaeology.com

“…….It is difficult to know what to make of this curious object when we have only descriptions and an inadequate sketch. It was clearly not a coin of recent date, but there are problems in accepting it as being ancient or pre-Columbian in date. There are good reasons for this. Firstly, coinage is an historically specific development, beginning in the first millennium BCE in the eastern Mediterranean region: all coins and coin-like medallions derive from these original models. Secondly, copper alloy production was unknown in pre-Columbian North America. If it was not a hoax, which is possible, it may have been a curio or souvenir of nineteenth-century date.”

Peru 1572 (six-inch nail)

Archives in Madrid dated 1572, records the account of the Spanish Viceroy in Peru and a strange artefact which came into his possession.

That year, Indian miners removed from a layer of gravel, a large boulder, and broke it into pieces for disposal.

As it shattered, out of the center fell a perfect six-inch nail?

The nail was later given to the Viceroy as a souvenir, who had it examined, and verified it’s finding.

The first mystery is that iron was unknown to the Peruvian Indian, the second is that the rock the nail was 75,000 to 100,000 years old.

Ohio River in north Cincinnati USA

In 1826, a well dug near the Ohio River in north Cincinnati produced the unexpected.

From a level 94 feet down, a buried tree stump was brought to the surface showing the marks of an axe. The marks were well cut, indicating the use of a sharp blade.

The axe had been made of metal, as, in the top of the stump, a wedge of iron was found.

The stump came was estimated to be between 50,000 and 75,000 years old.

Artifacts From Under Table Mountain in California

As early as1863 Dr Snell of Sonora began a systematic collection of animal and human remains from the mines in his vicinity. In his collection were several objects marked as ‘from under Table Mountain’, among which was a human jaw…

In 1857 Hon Paul Hubbs, of Vallejo… picked a portion of a human skull out of the dirt as it was brought from the Valentine Shaft, under Table Mountain, rear Shaw’s Flat…

Ten years after, Mr Hubbs more fully detailed the circumstances of the discovery, and Professor Whitney and Gorham Blake Esq, made special examination of the locality and careful enquiries of the owners of the mine, and satisfied themselves that the bone really came from under the basaltic covering of Table Mountain… All this is preliminary to the famous Calaveras skull..

The Calaveras skull was found by a certain Mr Mattison during February 1866 next to a petrified conifer 60-80ft (18-25m) long within gravel in a mine tunnel underlying 40ft (l2m) of basalt capping Table Mountain near Altaville. It was originally mistaken for a petrified treestump as it was so encrusted with earth and stony matter.

However, the appearance of the skull in every way corroborated his (Mattison’s) statement. The original incrustation shows that it was not taken from a cave… Fragments of bones and gravel and shells, were so wedged into the cavities of the skull… that there could be no mistake as to the character of the situation in which it was found. Chemical analysis showed that organic matter was nearly absent, and… (that the skull) was in a fossilized condition.

Wright also observed:

The Calaveras skull, which, if genuine, far antedates anything human which has been discovered in Europe, is not of a particularly inferior order. Earlier scholars dated the skull as Pliocene because among other finds made under Table Mountain were the remnants of the typical Pliocene horse Hipparion, not recognized as having survived into late Pleistocene times until much later. Today, the Table Mountain gravels are usually regarded as Pleistocene, while in some quarters the Calaveras skull has, despite much evidence to the contrary, been interpreted as that of a modern rather than a fossil man. Other human remains reportedly found in another mine tunneled under Table Mountain, were certainly fossil, being associated with late ‘Pleistocene’ plants and the bones of mastodons and its contemporaries believedly deposited by “tumultuous waters”.

The altitude of the mountain is nearly 6200 feet. The mountain is capped with a layer of volcanic basalt a few hundred feet thick. Under this layer of basalt is a layer of gravel as if it had been an ancient river bed. This layer stretches through the entire mountain. In the 1850′s miners recognized this as a sight for gold diggings. Shafts were drilled in from the exposed sides and down from the top into the gravel layers. Gold was discovered but that was not all.

Fossil bones of extinct animals of the North American continent were found in large numbers. Among them were great mastodons, mammoths, bison, tapirs, horses, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, and camels. The vegetation indicated a lush green foliage. Among these fossils were found artifacts of man and even a human skull. Dr. James Wright writes of these finds, “In 1863 Dr. Snell, of Sonora, began a systematic collection of animal and human remains from the mines.

A stone utensil, apparently used for grinding, was the only one which Dr. Snell claims to have taken with his own hands from the dirt as it came from the tunnel under the mountain. In 1857 Hon. Paul Hubbs, of Vallejo, California (subsequently a State Superintendent of Public Instruction), picked a portion of a human skull out of the dirt as it was brought from the Valentine shaft, under Table Mountain. Mr. Oliver W. Stevens made an affidavit that he picked with his own hands in 1853 a large stone bowl from a load of dirt which came from a tunnel under Table Mountain. Mr. Llewellyn Pierce also makes affidavit that a certain stone mortar was taken in 1862 from under Table Mountain, 200 feet in from the mouth of the tunnel. In February 1866, Mr. Mattison, one of the owners of the claim, says he took from a tunnel under the basaltic capping of the mountain an object which on account of incrusted earthy and stony material, he thought at first to be a petrified root of a tree but which he discovered to be a human skull (modern type)….

The skull was forwarded to the office of the State Survey on the following June (1866). Mr. Mattison has been repeatedly interviewed, and his testimony is uniformly coherent and explicit, to the effect that he took the skull with his own hands from the grave underneath a capping of forty feet of black lava and in connection with drift wood. The appearance of the skull in every way corroborates his statement. The late Dr. Wyman, of Harvard College, and Professor Whitney, together carefully removed the in- cru stations from the skull. Fragments of bones and gravel and shells were so wedged into the cavities of the skull that there could be no mistake as to the character of the situation in which it is found?