An inconvenient discovery
In February 1889, a Smithsonian-led excavation uncovered a small, inscribed stone in a burial mound in Loudon County, Tennessee. John W. Emmert, an assistant to the Bureau of Ethnology's mound survey project, found the 11.4 cm long siltstone tablet in Mound 3, the smallest of a group of three mounds at the confluence of the Little Tennessee River and Bat Creek. He reported that the stone was discovered under the skull of one of nine skeletons buried within the undisturbed mound. The project director, Cyrus Thomas, identified the eight characters on the stone as "beyond question letters of the Cherokee alphabet." The interpretation was published in the Smithsonian's 1894 annual report and, for decades, the artifact received little further attention. The stone itself is a piece of ferruginous siltstone, with the letters scratched through a dark iron oxide crust to reveal the lighter stone beneath.
The initial identification as Cherokee presented a problem. The Cherokee syllabary was invented around 1821, but archaeological evidence suggested the mound was much older. This inconsistency was largely ignored until the 1960s.
From Cherokee to Paleo-Hebrew
The modern controversy began in the 1970s when scholar Cyrus H. Gordon re-examined the stone. He proposed that the Smithsonian had published the inscription upside down. When inverted, Gordon argued, the script was not Cherokee but Paleo-Hebrew. His translation of the main line of five letters, LYHWD, was "for Judea." This interpretation implied contact between Old World and New World populations during the first or second century AD.
This claim energized proponents of pre-Columbian transoceanic contact. Further support came in 1988, when wood fragments found with the stone underwent radiocarbon dating. The results placed their age between 32 AD and 769 AD, a range consistent with the era of the Paleo-Hebrew script Gordon identified.
The majority of archaeologists today believe the Bat Creek Stone is a 19th-century forgery. Researchers Robert Mainfort and Mary Kwas have presented evidence that the inscription was copied from a specific illustration in a General History, Cyclopedia, and Dictionary of Freemasonry published in 1870. The illustration shows a Paleo-Hebrew rendering of a biblical phrase, and its characters look very similar to those on the stone. This suggests the forger—possibly the excavator John Emmert himself—used the widely available Masonic book as a template. Other inconsistencies, such as two brass bracelets found with the stone that are of 19th-century composition, also support the hoax theory.