I'm not going to go pointing fingers, but someone underperformed on the writing front this holiday long weekend. (In completely unrelated news, Captain Marvel was okay, but I --excuse me, someone-- was a bit disappointed by his first visit to Pineapple Hut on Burrard above Fifth Avenue Cinemas since Wonder Woman.) February technology postblogging comes next week. This week, I've practically been commissioned to put on the tinfoil hat and look at the Atlantic on the front porch of history --the phase in which Europeans might have crossed it early.
I know, I know, it's inconsequential in the long run. The most plausible explanation for the historic trajectory of Eastern Woodlands civilisation remains endogenous change. The appearance of the cross motif in the earliest phases of the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, about 900, has provoked wild speculation since the Nineteenth Century, which itself has tended to discredit the idea that known European activities on the western shore of the Atlantic in this period had any larger impact. The subsequent sequencing (1250--1450 for the mature "Southern Death Cult;" 1350--1450 for the attenuated Cult period; 1450--1550 for the post-Cult) is almost aggressively dissociated from the closing of the Atlantic gap.
And yet there are the gaps, the mysteries, the attenuations that the crackpot loves. And, surprisingly enough, when we turn to northern Britain, it seems that crackpottery is all but triumphant.