By Joseph Sternberg
ABSTRACT
Many decades ago, several epigraphers claimed that numerous inscriptions on a large limestone rock near Peterborough, Canada, indicated that they were made during the Scandinavian Bronze Age by Scandinavian visitors and contained a Proto-Tifinagh (known in north africa) alphabet But while many continued to assert that all of the inscriptions were made by early Algonquian Indians, as far as I knew, no one published a pa-per showing that the claims of a Nordic presence were incorrect. I recently learned that such a paper, over-looked by archaeologists, and other scholars, was in fact published in 2004 by Joan Vastokas (who had mapped the inscriptions on the Peterborough rock) as a chapter in a book on North American Rock-Art . This paper provides a detailed examination of her chapter. Vastokas provides an extensive discussion of an-cient Indian culture and evidence that the Indians inscribed glyphs at Peterborough. But, as I will show, she presents no evidence that Indians could have been the source of the Bronze Age inscriptions and essentially ignores the presence of a Proto-Tifinagh alphabet.
