Footnote: What we mean, when we say Gallic/Gaelic immigrants.

by Richard L. Thornton, Architect and City Planner

Preparing you for being shocked in “The Peopling of the Southeast.” Creek, Chickasaw and Uchee descendants will be surprised as to who they really are. Over the past 18 years, I have just followed the evidence, wherever it led . . . and certainly never intended to prove partial European ancestry for Southeastern Native Americans. In fact, for five decades I was extremely hostile to Caucasian authors and self-styled anthropologists, who attempted to do so.

The artistic, linguistic and genetic legacy is irrefutable. There is substantial evidence that the Muskogee Creeks (but not my Itsate/Apalache Creek ancestors) are the direct descendants of the people, who carved the concentric circle petroglyphs in the Etowah River Basin in Georgia, such as you see above. In contrast, my Apalache Creek ancestors, plus the Miccosukee in Florida and the Thlophlocco Tribal Town Creeks in Oklahoma are the direct descendants of the people from near Nyköping, Sweden, who carved the Track Rock petroglyphs around 2000 BC. The Nyköping writing system evolved into the Maya writing system. That is plausible, because the Maya Migration Legend says that their ancestors once lived in a land of ice and snow, northeast of North America. They did not come across the Bering Strait.

The problem is that identical petroglyphic boulders may be found in Galacia and Asturia in Spain . . . County Kerry, Ireland and near Tepoztlan, Morelos, Mexico. From eyewitness accounts, we know that the Galicians in NW Iberia and SW Ireland originally had black hair, pronounced cheek bones and bronzetone skin. They would have not looked terribly different than mixed-blood Muskogeans or even some full-bloods. Thousands of years of intermarriage with American Indians would have produced people, who looked like “pure” American Indians, but who carried both genes and words from northwestern and northern Europe. The Muskogee words for water (akwa and ue) come from either Latin and Illyrian, respectively.

There is more to this story, however. I have identified at least four periods of immigration into Georgia and South Carolina by Galicians or Gaelic People. Only the third and fourth was definitely from Ireland. The first two could well have been from the Iberian Peninsula. Some Galicians went all the way across the Atlantic to the Georgia Gold Belt and Great Lakes Copper Belt. Others went to the gold-bearing mountains of southwestern Ireland.

Now don’t get too upset!