New England Antiquities Research Association

The New England Antiquities Research Association (NEARA) is a non-profit organization founded 1964.

According to its website, it "is dedicated to a better understanding of our historic and prehistoric past through the study and preservation of New England's stone sites in their cultural context.

"[1] The membership of NEARA consists for the most part of amateurs, and the organization was in 2003 described as a 'hotbed of "Diffusionist" thought, the belief that the Americas were widely visited by European and Asiatic cultures before Columbus'.

[2] Writing about NEARA's interest in lithic sites, archaeologist Kenneth Feder has said that "For many in NEARA, these lithic sites represent a wealth of remarkable evidence of the ancient occupation of New England by ancient Celts and other western Europeans long before the arrival of the Pilgrims in Massachusetts or even Christopher Columbus in the Caribbean.

Orthodox archaeology and history reject this claim, ascribing most of the lithic sites to more recent migrants to New England, namely, seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century settlers and farmers.