Dr. Wauchope has proven that solid historical and prehistorical facts may be presented as interestingly as fantasy. Yet, claims the author, this is hardly ever done, for honest scholars rarely write readable books. If they did there would be no mass market for the outpourings of mystics, opportunists, ignoramuses, and out-and-out charlatans. This group has, over the years, provided sufficient collective stimuli to stir Wauchope to respond. Lost Tribes and Sunken Continents is evidence of that response.
This is a small book, scholarly, witty, and ever-so-readable. It is undoubtedly for public consumption, but it is also a barb hurled at academia—that never-never land that is not the least bit concerned with the public that supports it.
Wauchope says his book is an analysis of myth and method in the study of the American Indians. He reviews the more popular beliefs and their sponsors, including Egyptians in America, Atlantis and Mu, the Lost Tribes of Israel, the Mormons, Kon-Tiki, Polynesians, and certain racist notions. The Asiatic origin of the Indians is fully surveyed.
There is no denial of trans-Pacific diffusion of culture and possibly even of a few people. Nor is Wauchope arguing against pre-Columbian Atlantic crossings by Vikings and perhaps other Europeans. His battle is with the dishonest myth peddlers.
For Dr. Wauchope, the factual story of man in America is “one of the greatest sagas of human history.” It is unfortunate that historians and prehistorians have “not competed seriously for the reading public.” Rather, they have “surrendered this function, usually somewhat condescendingly, to the journalist, the travel-book writer, the sensationalist, and the devoted mystic, all of whom will prefer, any day, a lost continent, a lost tribe, or a lost city, to Lo the Poor Indian plodding through the snow and the centuries to his cultural destiny.”
