User:Doug Weller/Burrows Cave

Burrows Cave is the name given to an alleged cave site in Southern Illinois by Russell E. Burrows. According to the now defunct official website, "In 1982, Russell E. Burrows reported finding several thousand carved and inscribed pieces of polished dark rock in a cave along waters of the Little Wabash River." The cave and its contents are considered a hoax by mainstream archaeologists and some fringe archaeologists.

Two stories of discovery
Burrows wrote(or is this Joseph saying this?) that he discovered the cave while pothunting in north-east Richland County, Illinois, near the Embarras River. He fell into a pit after stepping on a flat rock which was designed as a pivot to drop victims into the pit and trapped them. Instead it slipped to the side, leaving the pit open. He immediately saw on a wall a face with thick lips, a flat nose and wide-set eyes. He then discovered a skeleton on a block of stone accompanied by ax heads of marble, stone and bronze as well as bronze spears. The skeleton itself was wearing gold armbands and headbands (plural?). Further exploration uncovered 13 (or was it 12 -I've found different figures) burial crypts, a library of stone tables, many other inscriptions and thousands of artifacts, many made of gold. These include full-size statues, some made of gold and others of black stone, thousands of gold coins, diamonds, parchment scrolls, weapons of various types and more skeletons. The scrolls were written in a variety of languages including Egyptian, Etruscan, Sumerian, and Greek. The statues and other portraits were what were described as ‘an impossible mix of apparent Romans, Phoenicians, Hebrews, Christians, American Indians, and even Black Africans’ (Joseph, 2003: 74).

Phoenician ship
Up until about 1993 the predominant Burrows Cave scenario involved Eygptian and Phoenician colonists. Part of the evidence for this involved a stone table supposedly depicting a Phoenician vessel. Frank Joseph, one of the key figures involved with the cave, reproduced this in his book The Lost Treasure of King Juba: The Evidence of Africans in America before Columbus alongside an image of an actual Phoenician vessel that had been used by an associate of Burrows who had originally identified it as Phoenician. In doing so he cropped the image from the Burrows stone making the paddle end of a steering oar unidentifiable but leaving the steering oars that are shown on what he calls (and the artist depicts) as the prow of the boat. The anthropologist and geographer George F. Carter, a supporter of the concept of trans-cultural diffusion, commented on the image saying "The 'author' did not recognize the paired oars, and hung an 'impossible' oar over the bow. All others equally botched up. Fanciful stern pieces...Oar over bow - crude fakery by an ignoramus in the world of ships."

The image used to identify the ship as Phoenician actually is dated to around 700 BCE, but Joseph described it as dated 170 BCE, possibly because around this time Burrows Cave was being portrayed as the destination of Mauretanians, including "exiled Romans, Africans, Celts, Christians and Jews" fleeing the Romans taking with them an alleged treasure belong to King Juba II.

A shift in time period
(clunky section heading, needs a better one)