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Fitzhugh of the Department of Anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution.

Critics of Fell's work routinely dismissed him as an amateur, pointing out his lack of formal training in ancient scripts and languages.Ī scholarly response to Fell's work was prepared by Ives Goddard and William W. He followed up this work in 1980 with Saga America and in 1982 with Bronze Age America.įell's epigraphic work was not well received in academia. His interest in inscriptions began early in his career with a study of Polynesian petroglyphs published in 1940, but his most famous work came much later, starting in 1976 with his publication of America BC, in which he proposed translations of alleged inscriptions found on rock surfaces and artifacts in North and South America which he believed to be written in Old World scripts and languages. Though Fell was an accomplished marine biologist at Harvard University, he is best known for three books which claim that many centuries before Christopher Columbus reached America, Celts, Basques, Phoenicians, Egyptians, and others were visiting North America.

He died of heart failure in San Diego, California, aged 77, while discussing a new book with his publisher. In 1946 he returned to New Zealand, where he resumed his academic career, and lectured in zoology at Victoria University of Wellington.Ī world authority on fossil sea urchins, he was recruited by Harvard University in 1964, and emigrated to the United States to join the staff of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard where he worked until retirement in 1979. Fell then served with the British Army during World War II. He returned to the British Isles for graduate work, receiving his Ph.D. He moved with his mother to New Zealand in the early 1920s after his father, who was a merchant seaman, died in a shipboard fire.

Fell was born in Lewes, Sussex, England, and was a grandson of the railway engineer and inventor John Barraclough Fell.