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 B.C.,[4] in which he proposed translations of inscriptions found on rock surfaces and artifacts in North and South America which he believed to be written in Old World scripts and languages.
[6][7] Critics of Fell's work routinely dismissed him as an amateur, pointing out his lack of formal training in ancient scripts and languages.
[8][full citation needed] A scholarly response to Fell's work was prepared by Ives Goddard and William W. Fitzhugh of the Department of Anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution.
The only accepted case of pre-Columbian European contact in North America remains the Norse site of L'Anse aux Meadows in northern Newfoundland.
According to Fell, these inscriptions narrate the story of Christ's nativity and are written in an old Irish script called Ogham, dating back to the 6th or 8th century AD.
[11] In 1989 lawyers Monroe Oppenheimer and Willard Wirtz wrote an article based on opinions of academic archaeologists and linguists to dispute that the inscription is written in Ogham script.
[12] David H. Kelley, an archaeologist at the University of Calgary who is credited with a major breakthrough in the decipherment of Mayan glyphs, complained about Fell in a 1990 essay: "Fell's work [contains] major academic sins, the three worst being distortion of data, inadequate acknowledgment of predecessors, and lack of presentation of alternative views."