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Several Buddhists I know are intrigued by the American snake mounds and Central American temples where the stairways have a serpent representation. Specifically, they go to the Indo-Aryan Naga as a beneficent creature / diety, which is counterintuitive as the reference is often to the python or cobra. The multiheaded serpent frequently depicted as protecting the Buddha is only one in a history of beneficial serpents going back 1,500 years earlier. Some Monks speculate that a disciple of the Buddha journied to America with this as one base. Be advised though that the Monks I talk to are at small country Wats and do in no way pretend to speculate for anyone but themselves.

Fascinating. I'd be interested to know if they're getting their ideas on that from anything that's been published among Buddhists over there. My Tibetan Buddhist friend has mentioned that he's heard there are some parallels between certain aspects of Buddhist belief and SW American Indian myth, which makes me wonder if perhaps Buddhist authors have also collected some data on the subjects we're considering.

This reminds me, while I was looking up stuff on this last night I found a quite interesting site looking at the topics we're discussing from a Hindu-centric perspective:

India on Pacific Waves?

If you browse around this site there's a lot of relevant information on the history of India's naval contact with other cultures--although I'll caution that the site's presentation is very influenced by an anti-Western agenda that in some places has to be weeded out to get at the raw data; still, there's some very important information here.

A lot of interesting comparisions between figures from India and those in South America.

"My Tibetan Buddhist friend has mentioned that he's heard there are some parallels between certain aspects of Buddhist belief and SW American Indian myth, which makes me wonder if perhaps Buddhist authors have also collected some data on the subjects we're considering"

I read this book a few years ago by Dr Nancy Yaw Davis, very interesting and maybe a source of Buddhism among the American Indians.

The Zuni Enigma

"In a book with groundbreaking implications, Dr. Nancy Yaw Davis examines the evidence underscoring the Zuni enigma, and suggests the circumstances that may have led Japanese on a religious quest-searching for the legendary "middle world" of Buddhism-across the Pacific and to the American Southwest more than seven hundred years ago."

Thailand is a developing country as opposed to a third world country and as such has a well developed University system which has just come into its own recently. The country is one big archaeological site with the Buddhist Sangha very involved. There are also several foreign Universities with people over there most of the time. Of course, Buddhists have specific interests but they are not really closed minded. It is a lot easier to dig in a wat coumpound than on an American Indian reservation. Kings Rama IV, Rama V, and Rama VI were particularly interested in Archaeology and invited American, French, Dutch and British archaeologists in. Now I know that the University of Penn. and U of Minn., are among the American schools working with Thammasat Univ. Fine Arts Department on both sites and restorations. A French group was working with Chiang Mai University near Lamphun on a Dravidian / Mon site going back about 1600 years. Additionally, there are neolithic and bronze age sites active when funds become available near Chaing Mai.

One of the people I talk to a lot is a retired Engineering professor from Chiang Mai University. If his wife were in better health, he would like to become a monk again at a temple near Nan. Others I have talked to are from Char Hae, near my wife's home in Phrae Province. These people are quite well read -- much more so than I. A lot of the temples are 600 to 700 years old and are built on earlier sites -- some going back to 300 AD. Signs of Buddhism are sparse going back that far but in the Northeast, Khmer Hindu temples (some later converted to Buddlist), are literally all over the place.

The very early periods of Ban Chiang pottery have designs similar to both Southwestern and Southeastern USA. However, most pottery of that period (5,000 to 8,000 years ago)worldwide can be said to be similar to the later Native American pottery.