Bat Creek Stone
[1] In the late nineteenth century, when the tablet was found, Cyrus Thomas, the director of the mound excavations, concluded the inscription presented letters from the Cherokee alphabet.
[1] The consensus among archaeologists is that the tablet is a hoax,[1][3] although some have argued that the ancient Hebrew text on the stone supports pre-Columbian transoceanic contact theories.
[4] Countering the notion of pre-Columbian transoceanic contact theories, archaeologists Robert Mainfort and Mary Kwas have concluded that the inscription is not a genuine paleo-Hebrew artifact but rather a 19th-century forgery.
An unknown party added two nearly parallel vertical strokes while the stone was stored in the National Museum of Natural History from 1894 and 1970.
[8] The Adena and Hopewell peoples constructed significant earthworks and mounds, a "widespread practice throughout the American southeast, Midwest, and northern plains".
[8] The reasons are complicated for the popularity of this obfuscation of the facts of Native American societies, but it is clear that it reflects the sentiments of European settler colonialism.
[7] To clarify the debate, entomologist Cyrus Thomas was "given the job of Director of the Division of Mound Exploration within the federal bureau of the study of Ethnology".
[3] With a budget of $60,000 provided by the U.S. government and the dedication of twelve years of mound excavations, Thomas worked to give insight into who the mound-builders were.
Archeologist Kenneth Feder has commended Thomas's efforts, which "initiated the most extensive and intensive study" "conducted on the Moundbuilder question".
[3] Due to the efforts of Thomas and his team, and with the aid of his published work which extensively presented his findings, "the myth of a vanished race had been dealt a fatal blow".
[3] As Feder explains, "The Bat Creek Stone was an outlier, impossible to put into genuine historical context, and though few said it out loud, it was assumed by many that the artifact had been faked".
[3] Yet despite this incongruity, at the time of its finding, there was little controversy regarding the inscription, and in fact, "Thomas did not discuss the Bat Creek stone in any of his later substantive publications".
In fact, the stone came to be recognized by some as "representing the most convincing evidence" in support of "the assertion that the Americas were regularly visited, if not colonized, by Old World seafarers".
[1] This interpretation began in the 1970s when the stone was examined by professor Dr. Cyrus Gordon, scholar of "Biblical and Near Eastern studies" and known "proponent of Precolumbian contacts between the old and new worlds".
[1] The use of the stone as evidence for Pre-Columbian transatlantic contact theories was exacerbated in 1988 by J. Huston McCulloch, Economics professor at Ohio State University.
[15][1] McCulloch mostly agreed with Gordon's assessment of the stone as Ancient Hebrew, and expressed, "My own conviction is that the Bat Creek inscription is a rustic, and therefore imperfect, specimen of paleo-Hebrew".
[1][3] Archaeologist Bradley T. Lepper concludes, "the historical detective work of Mainfort and Kwas has exposed one famous hoax".
