Book Report: Ancient Mines of Kitchi-Gummi: Cypriot/Minoan Traders in North America by Richard Jewell (2000, 2015)

As I mentioned when I bought this book on June 20, I fully expected to read it fairly quickly as its premise matches that of the Bucky and the Lukefahr Ladies books I’ve read recently (Walking the Labyrinth and Songs of Three)–that is, that a Hittite travelled with Minoans to the Americas a couple millennia B.C.

Also, I actually read an academic book about the copper mining ancient peoples in Michigan back around 2008. I got the book through Inter-Library Loan at the Old Trees library from something I’d read in a History or Renaissance magazine; the volume I got was a numbered book out of a thousand published, and I forget from how far away it came. I pored through my book report archives here and did a quick search of the old Blogspot blog, but I cannot find a book report for it. Which is odd; I thought I did them all, but perhaps I did not do this one because it is not or was not available on Amazon, and there was a time when I thought I could monetize this blog (spoiler alert: no, and it hasn’t served as much of a spring board to book sales, either).

At any rate, that previous book was an academic work by a university professor, but this book is an amateur work, a labor of love, by a guy who’s had numerous jobs including working for the United States Forestry Service in the upper midwest which sparked his interest in this topic. He wonders where all the copper that the natives mined went and why they seemingly stopped mining it and regressed to hunters and gatherers about 1200 BC.

He lays out reasons why he believes the Minoans were able to sail beyond the Mediterranean, up the coast of Europe, to Britain and then Greenland and Iceland and beyond where they established trading posts and helped the natives to mine the copper which they then brought back to the Mediterranean. He refers to something called the Newberry Tablet, a stone tablet found under an uprooted tree (which also happens in Walking the Labyrinth) with cuniform writing as well as similarities between Algonquin written language and Cypro-Minoan script.

The book is not very well written; it repeats itself and is a bit stilted in spots, not like academic speak though. It’s a bit informed by cable television history, but you know what? This guy has done some research, and he has traveled to Europe and the Mediterranean to view artifacts in various museums. He says that the establishment does not take his theory seriously, and I believe that’s true whether his theory is true or not: The academy selects for people who will not rock the boat and will parrot the established narratives to ensure continued funding and employment.

So the book presents an interesting theory, one worth considering, even if it’s just to use the concept for a series of fantasy books that I’ll get back to by and by.