Volume 6, Issue 9, page 11
Red ilailds Ifi the Desert
visitor listens he'll nod his head over the
proof.
Mastodons? Mammoths? Elephants? Camels?
Giant sloths? Tapir? Yes. In North America?
Yes, in Florida yet. Anderson has unearthed
the bodies. He also had discovered that some
early Americans really loved one another to
pieces; they ate one another and tossed the
"pieces "they couldn't eat upon the middens.
Anderson has dug into disarticulated skeletons
in considerable numbers, which prove voracious
and somewhat scrambled feasting of people on
people. We're not shocked; there still are
cannibals alive in the world. I've talked with
some in the Amazon Valley; reformed now, but
cannibals in their youth. These were cannibals
in the youth of the race. But what race? Anderson expects to find out before he dies.
He's getting along, 65, and hopes to find
someone who'll take over where'he leaves off,
and will give to the world a vast secret lot
of its history as written in South Indian
Field "digs".
Anderson has thousands of monk seal teeth.
Monk seal, he says, are now found only along
the Mediterranean. Probably the cannibals ate
the last ones when their human food ran out.
I'm just guessing. Anderson doesn't guess.
Anderson dug up a girl in his "digs" and
sent her off to college. She was a girl of
parts, and Anderson found just one part, her
skull. It had been lying in the dark for somewhere between 11,000 and 12,000 years, but a
lot could be surmised from the skull. And the
girl was in college for a year before anybody
seemed to know it. Anderson has encountered a
lot of indifference to his finds on the part
of people who should be especially interested.
Maybe, like an aunt of mine, most people just
don't uxint to know their genealogy. This aunt
of mine started looking into our family history until she found an ancestor all mixed up
in the Wat Tyler Gunpowder Plot -- his name the
same as hers! -- whereupon she lost interest, or
lost nerve.
In any event, there are vast areas for
learning the past before the picks and shovels
of A.T.Anderson, and somebody -- maybe a lot of
somebodies -- are going to catch up his tools
one day and dig deeper and deeper. I might be
I told Anderson, "was part of Atlantis." one of them in spite of the fact that for age,
"I find no evidence of it," he said. I'm stepping right on Anderson's heels -- in
But I was given a lot about which to wonder fact, clear up to the insteps -- and maybe should
before the afternoon ended and Anderson's car be biding at home in an easy chair.
took him to Melbourne, literally. I don't feel But something keeps nagging at me. I'm althat he drives. He just climbs in, heads the most sure I heard Anderson say: "And below
car, and goes. The car does everything else, those three cemeteries are four more, carrying
including keeping itself out of ditches along so far back that..."
the road. Those ditches are some of the South Clovis man also wandered far from Clovis,
Indian Field "dig ", too, for their walls are N. Mex. Anderson has found him in his "digs ".
rich in the same material Anderson has found.
Anderson has been called "The Bone Digger
of Malabar" -- not too far from Melbourne -- and CREATIVE MAN -- AND HIS WH I RL I G I G
has earned the title by unearthing bones of In the Beginning, says the Bible, God creathuman beings dating back around 12,000 years, ed the world -- and found it good. He even crein themselves bearing promises of going a lot ated Man -- and since He created Man in His own
farther back than that. There were people in image, Man also must have been good, if God
what is now Florida before and during the var- was good. However, since Man was in the " Image
ious ice ages. We "seers " have known that for of God ", that gave Man powers to create, too --
a long time, but Anderson has proved it. He which is where the fun began. First, Man creathas found skulls of giants, but he won't ven- ed "sin ", then he created an Adam and Eve to
ture to say how tall they were. Some writer be responsible for it, and a Jesus to accept
(not this one) hazarded nine feet as a guess, punishment. Then, he created churches, preachand proportioned accordingly. I'd accept that, ers, and missionaries to force various verI think, but Anderson, self-taught archeolo- sions of these creations down the throats of
gist -- and for my money more of an expert than "heathens" who were doing much better on their
any who ever learned the rudiments from books own... 'Round and 'round she goes; where she
-- likes everything proved. He's proved every- stops -- ha! ha! -- NOBODY KNOWS! Which (the notthing he tells about his finds, and if the knowing) is the joke. Man created that, too.
JANUARY-FEBRUARY, 1960 T h e fl B E R R E E
jI ED HANDS" visited Melbourne, Fla., recently, and during the usual lectures and
studies-on-tape, made a kind of pilgrimage
to the South Indian Field "dig" of A, T.
Anderson (Box 252, Melbourne). I include
his address in event anyone would care to
check further into Anderson's work, which for
years he has carried out with little but his
bare hands. When I stepped out of the car and
met Anderson. he informed me that I was standing atop three cemeteries, which were in turn
atop one another, We stood in a grove of mixed
trees, vines, shrubs, plants -- some of which
had been planted by Anderson, some by Nature,
or by people long since vanished. Nearby was
Anderson' s two-story house, which Anderson
built of scrounged material as a place in which
to study and store his finds in his "digs".
"Its foundations," he told me, "are garbage! It's old garbage -- but garbage, just the
same."
I soon understood him. The cemeteries above
which I stood with him were dug in ancient
middens which had been built by the appetites
of many peoples down the centuries. They ate
meats a n d seafood a n d threw the bones and
shells over their shoulders, and the piles of
stuff grew high enough to serve as grave
mounds. The sea came in, several times in the
course of millenia, and things happened to the
garbage, some of it becoming the " stone " foundation of Anderson's house,
I began slowly to look into Anderson's
finds, which naturally I expect to investigate
a lot further, and became quite excited,
"My readings indicate that the east coast
of the United States, and pretty far inland,"
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