Archaelogical

Archaeological Evidence

Menzie’s Claim

The most interesting claim made by Menzies is that the Newport Tower (in Newport Rhode Island) was actually built by the Chinese as it “resembled” a lighthouse built in China during the 1200s…

Reality:

"The Newport Tower in Newport, Rhode Island, has been proposed as an ancient Viking construction… It is singular in appearance, at least in the New World, and has been the focus of both inquiry and speculation.

There is a significant problem, however, with the hypothesis that the tower is Viking and predates the accepted period of European settlement of the region. The English settled the area around Newport in A.D. 1639, and there is no mention made by these settlers of a mysterious and already existing stone tower. They almost certainly would have noted it had there been one.

However, there was enough controversy about the possibility of a pre-Columbus Viking connection to the tower that an archaeological investigation was conducted around and under the tower (Godfrey 1951). Most of the artifacts were pieces of pottery, iron nails, clay tobacco pipes, buttons, and buckles. All of these items can be traced to Scotland, England, or the English colonies in America and were manufactured between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries (Hattendorf 1997). The investigators even found the preserved impression of a colonial bootprint in the soil beneath the stone foundation of the tower. For a seventeenth-century bootprint to have been left under the tower, the tower must have been built either sometime during or sometime after the seventeenth century.

Finally, the lime mortar bonding the stones used to build the tower has been radiocarbon-dated. The carbon date matches quite precisely the historical record and the artifacts recovered, A.D. 1665 (Hertz 1997). The mysterious tower turns out to be, in actual fact, a windmill likely built by the then governor of Rhode Island, Benedict Arnold, the grandfather and namesake of the famous traitor (it is even mentioned in his will, dated to 1677). The architecture of the tower turns out not to be unique after all; it is a close match for a windmill built in A.D. 1632 in Chesterton, England (Hertz 1997). The senior Benedict Arnold was brought up within just a few kilometers of Chesterton; perhaps he liked the unique design and decided to have a copy built on his property in Rhode Island."

“Frauds, Myths and Mysteries Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology”, Feder, K.L., McGraw-Hill, 2002 (4th edition), pp 139-40.

References
Godfrey, W. 1951 “The Archaeology of the Old Stone Mill in Newport, Rhode Island”. American Antiquity, 17:120-129.

Hattendorf, I. 1997 “From the collection: William S. Godfrey’s Old Stone Mill archaeological collection”, Newport History 68(2):109-111.

Hertz, J. 1997 “Round church or windmill? New light on the Newport Tower”. Newport History 68(2):55-91.