Ivan Van Sertima - Reception

Reception

Van Sertima's work has been strongly criticized by opposing academics, who describe his claims to be ill-founded and false. Van Sertima's Journal of African Civilizations was not considered for inclusion in Journals of the Century. In 1997 academics in a Journal of Current Anthropology article criticized in detail many elements of They Came Before Columbus (1976). Except for a brief mention, the book had not previously been reviewed in an academic journal. The researchers wrote a systematic rebuttal of Van Sertima's claims, stating that Van Sertima's "proposal was without foundation" in claiming African diffusion as responsible for prehistoric Olmec culture (in present-day Mexico). They noted that no "genuine African artifact had been found in a controlled archaeological excavation in the New World." They noted that Olmec stone heads were carved hundreds of years prior to the claimed contact and only superficially appear to be African; the Nubians whom Van Sertima had claimed as their originators do not resemble these "portraits". They further noted that in the 1980s, Van Sertima had changed his timeline of African influence, suggesting that Africans made their way to the New World in the 10th century B.C., to account for more recent independent scholarship in the dating of Olmec culture.

They further called "fallacious" his claims that Africans had diffused the practices of pyramid building and mummification, and noted the independent rise of these in the Americas. Additionally, they wrote that Van Sertima of "diminishe the real achievements of Native American culture" by his claims of African origin for them.

Van Sertima wrote a response to be included in the article (as is standard academic practice) but withdrew it. The journal required that reprints must include the entire article and would have had to include the original authors' response (written but not published) to his response. Instead, Van Sertima replied to his critics in his journal volume published as Early America Revisited (1998).

In a New York Times 1977 review of Van Sertima's 1976 They Came Before Columbus, the archaeologist Glyn Daniel labeled Van Sertima's work as "ignorant rubbish", and concluded that the works of Van Sertima, and Barry Fell, whom he was also reviewing, "give us badly argued theories based on fantasies". In 1981 Dean R. Snow, a professor of anthropology, wrote that Van Sertima "uses the now familiar technique of stringing together bits of carefully selected evidence, each surgically removed from the context that would give it a rational explanation". Snow continued, "The findings of professional archaeologists and physical anthropologists are misrepresented so that they seem to support the hypothesis".

In response to Daniel's review, archeologist and engineer Dr. Clarence Weiant (1897-1986) wrote a letter to the New York Times supporting Van Sertima's work. Following his B.S. in anthropology in 1937 from Columbia University, Weiant worked in excavation of Olmec heads in Mexico in 1938, and then as an assistant archeologist in 1939 for the first National Geographic Society-Smithsonian Institution expedition to Tres Zapotes, Veracruz, where ceramics were discovered. Weiant's letter, published in May 1977 in the New York Times, asserted that Van Sertima's work was "a summary of six or seven years of meticulous research based upon archeology, egyptology, African history, oceanography, astronomy, botany, rare Arabic and Chinese manuscripts, the letters and journals of early American explorers and the observations of physical anthropologists...As one who has been immersed in Mexican archeology for some forty years, I am thoroughly convinced of the soundness of Van Sertima's conclusions."

In 1981, They Came Before Columbus received the "Clarence L. Holte Literary Prize". Sertima was inducted into the "Rutgers African-American Alumni Hall of Fame" in 2004.