Lenape Stone

The Lenape Stone is a slate found in two pieces in Bucks County, Pennsylvania in 1872, which appears to depict Native Americans hunting a woolly mammoth.

Once the two pieces were joined, they were examined by members of the Bucks County Historical Society, including archaeologist and historian Henry Chapman Mercer.

However, even Mercer acknowledged that the stone's unique nature and a lack of physical evidence (such as soil samples) made scientific certainty impossible.

The stone comprises two fragments, each of which is decorated with clear engravings on both sides; they form a complete picture when the two halves are joined.

The reverse side shows an elephant-like creature, apparently a mammoth, along with humanoid figures, a forest, some teepees, and other markings.

[4] Mercer went to great lengths detailing his analysis in his 1885 book, The Lenape Stone, or the Indian and the Mammoth, which he personally paid to have published.

In addition, other artifacts found in the same farm as the Lenape Stone bore stylistically similar carvings, and these were all dated to around 2,000 years ago.

The whereabouts of the Hammond Tablet are unknown, but pictures and tracings of the stone made by Professor Edmund Burke Delabarre are stored at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University.

An article in the Boston Post from 1921 chronicled multiple experts who had varying theories, ranging from the stone being authentic to a fraud perpetrated by Mormons.

[8] In the 1920s, Professor Delabarre and C. C. Willoughby, Director of the Peabody Museum at Harvard, both argued the Hammond Tablet was most likely a deliberate fake.