Barry Fell facts for kids

Howard Barraclough Fell (born June 6, 1917 – died April 21, 1994) was a professor who studied animals without backbones, like starfish and sea urchins, at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. He was also known as Barry Fell. Even though he was a respected scientist, he became famous for his ideas about ancient writings. He believed that people from old civilizations like the Celts, Egyptians, and Phoenicians visited America long before Christopher Columbus. Most experts, however, do not agree with his ideas.

About Barry Fell

Barry Fell was born in Lewes, England, in 1917. His grandfather was a famous railway engineer. After his father died, Barry moved to New Zealand with his mother in the early 1920s.

He later returned to the British Isles for his advanced studies. He earned his Ph.D. (a high-level university degree) from the University of Edinburgh in 1941. During World War II, Fell served in the British Army.

In 1946, he went back to New Zealand. There, he taught zoology at Victoria University of Wellington. He became a world expert on ancient sea urchins (fossils). He taught many students and published studies on sea stars found in Antarctica.

In 1964, Harvard University asked him to join their team. He moved to the United States and worked at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard. He retired from Harvard in 1979. Barry Fell passed away in San Diego, California, in 1994, at age 77. He was talking about a new book with his publisher when he died.

His Work on Ancient Writings

Even though Barry Fell was a skilled marine biologist, he is most famous for three books. These books claimed that people from Europe and other parts of the Old World visited North America many centuries before Christopher Columbus. He suggested that Celts, Basques, Phoenicians, and Egyptians came to the Americas.

How His Interest Started

Fell's interest in ancient writings, called epigraphy, began early in his career. In 1940, he studied rock carvings (called petroglyphs) from Polynesia. His most well-known work on this topic started much later.

In 1976, he published America B.C.. In this book, he said he had translated writings found on rocks and artifacts in North and South America. He believed these writings were in ancient languages and scripts from the Old World. He then wrote Saga America in 1980 and Bronze Age America in 1982.

Why Experts Disagreed

Most experts in universities did not accept Fell's work on ancient writings. They often said he was an amateur. This meant he did not have formal training in ancient scripts and languages.

In 1978, two scholars from the Smithsonian Institution responded to Fell's book America B.C.. They said his arguments were "unconvincing." They explained that the only proven case of Europeans in North America before Columbus was the Norse site of L'Anse-aux-Meadows in Newfoundland. They added that Fell's book did not use the proper methods needed to convince experts.

One of Fell's claims was in his book Saga America. He suggested that an Irish monk named Brendan might have reached North America centuries before Columbus. This idea came from Fell's translation of two rock carvings in West Virginia. He published his translation in a magazine in 1983. According to Fell, these carvings told the story of Jesus's birth. He believed they were written in an old Irish script called Ogham, from the 6th or 8th century AD.

However, other articles in The West Virginia Archeologist strongly criticized Fell's ideas. In 1983, archaeologist W. Hunter Lesser called Fell's claims "pseudoscientific" and unreliable. This means they were presented as scientific but did not follow scientific rules. Later, in 1989, two lawyers wrote an article. They used opinions from expert archaeologists and linguists to argue that the carvings were not Ogham script. They even accused Fell of fraud.

David H. Kelley, an archaeologist, also criticized Fell in 1990. Kelley had helped understand Mayan glyphs. He said Fell's work had "major academic sins." These included changing information, not giving credit to others, and not showing other possible ideas. However, Kelley also said he believed some of the reported inscriptions were real Celtic Ogham. He concluded that without Fell's work, there would be no "Ogham problem" to think about in North America. He wondered why archaeologists had not noticed such a large European presence.

What Other Archaeologists Thought

In 1983, a survey asked 340 archaeology teachers what they thought of Barry Fell's claims.

• 95.7% had a "negative" view. They considered his claims to be pseudo-archaeology (false archaeology).
• 2.9% had a "neutral" view.
• Only 1.4% (5 teachers) had a "positive" view. They thought his claims were factual.