The Bat Creek Stone is a stone tablet with writing on it. It is now believed to be a fake, or a hoax. John W. Emmert found the tablet on February 14, 1889, in Tipton Mound 3 during an excavation of Hopewell mounds in Loudon County, Tennessee. This excavation was part of a larger effort to learn more about who built the mounds found in the Eastern United States.
In the late 1800s, Cyrus Thomas, who led the mound excavations, thought the writing on the tablet used letters from the Cherokee alphabet. This idea was widely accepted at the time. However, about 100 years later, Cyrus H. Gordon, a scholar who studied ancient languages, examined the tablet again in the 1970s. He believed the writing was in Paleo-Hebrew, a language used around the 1st or 2nd century. Today, most archaeologists agree the tablet is a fake.
Economist J. Huston McCulloch once argued that the Hebrew writing on the stone supported theories about contact between ancient people across oceans before Columbus arrived in the Americas. However, archaeologists Robert Mainfort and Mary Kwas studied the tablet and concluded that the writing was not real Paleo-Hebrew but a forgery made in the 19th century. Their findings have been accepted by other archaeologists and scholars.
Although the source used to create the writing on the tablet has been identified, the identity of the person who made the tablet and the reason it was created remain unknown.
Physical description of the tablet
The stone is 11.4 centimeters (4.5 inches) long and 5.1 centimeters (2.0 inches) wide. The inscription includes at least eight separate characters. When the straighter edge is placed at the bottom, seven characters form a single row, and the eighth is positioned below the main inscription. These eight characters are, on average, 2–3 millimeters deep. The marks have smooth, curved lines. This shape suggests the stone’s creator used a rounded tool to make the carvings. The entire surface of the stone is polished, which helps create the smooth, rounded edges of the markings. Between 1894 and 1970, while the stone was stored at the National Museum of Natural History, an unknown person added two nearly parallel vertical strokes. This is shown by the absence of these markings in the first photograph of the stone, published in the 1890–1891 annual report of the Bureau of Ethnology, and their presence in photos taken after 1970. These added markings have V-shaped carvings, which indicate they were made with a sharper tool than the original eight characters.
Context of excavation
North America has a long and varied history that spans thousands of years. Native American civilizations existed for many centuries before European settlers arrived. Some parts of this history are shown through the complex earthworks and mounds built by the Adena and Hopewell peoples, who lived in the eastern and midwestern regions of North America. These groups, along with others, created large and meaningful structures.
Archaeological discoveries have shown that these civilizations, not the idea of a lost, single group known as the Mound Builders, built the mounds. Many scholars, such as Kenneth Feder and Sarah E. Baires, believe that the Mound Builders myth is harmful because it suggests Native Americans were not responsible for the mounds. Instead, it claims that a different group, often called the "Vanished Race," built them. This belief was common in the United States before the twentieth century and reflected the views of European settlers. Baires explains that believing the mounds were built by anyone other than Native Americans shows how European scholars often ignored the connection between Native peoples and their lands. The destruction of mounds and the forced removal of Native peoples from their homes, along with the Mound Builders theory, helped erase Native heritage. These actions were part of a larger effort by European colonizers to take over Native lands.
The discovery of the Bat Creek Inscription became part of the debate about who built the mounds. Today, it is clear that the mounds were built by various Native American groups for different purposes. However, in the early 1800s, people were unsure about who built them. To address this, the Federal Bureau of Ethnology assigned entomologist Cyrus Thomas to lead a new Division of Mound Exploration. With a $60,000 budget from the U.S. government and twelve years of research, Thomas studied the mounds to learn more about their builders. He focused on connecting the mound builders to the Indigenous groups living in the area during European colonization. Archaeologist Kenneth Feder praised Thomas’s work, calling it the most detailed study of the mounds and the Mound Builders theory. Thomas’s findings proved that Native Americans built the mounds, which helped end the belief in a "Vanished Race." Through his research and published work, Thomas and his team showed that the myth of the Mound Builders was false.
Geographic context
The Little Tennessee River flows into Tennessee from the Appalachian Mountains to the south and moves north for more than 50 miles (80 km) before joining the Tennessee River near Lenoir City. The building of Tellico Dam at the mouth of the Little Tennessee River in 1979 formed a reservoir that covers the lower 33 miles (53 km) of the river. Bat Creek flows into the southwest side of the Little Tennessee River 12 miles (19 km) above where the river meets the Tennessee River. Although much of the original place where Bat Creek and the Little Tennessee River meet was covered by the lake, the mound where the Bat Creek Stone was discovered is located above the water level of the reservoir.
Archaeological excavations
Thomas did not dig up the mounds himself. Instead, he gave the field work to assistants. John Emmert excavated Bat Creek Mound 3, doing so "alone and in isolation." According to Emmert, the site had one large mound (Mound 1) on the east bank of the creek and two smaller mounds (Mound 2 and Mound 3) on the west bank. Mound 1 had a diameter of 108 feet (33 m) and a height of 8 feet (2.4 m). It was located on the first terrace above the river. Today, this mound is underwater due to a reservoir. Mound 2 had a diameter of 44 feet (13 m) and a height of 10 feet (3.0 m). Mound 3 had a diameter of 28 feet (8.5 m) and a height of 5 feet (1.5 m). Both Mound 2 and Mound 3 were located higher than Mound 1. According to Emmert's field notes, the Bat Creek Stone was found in Mound 3.
In Mound 3, Emmert reported finding "two copper bracelets, an engraved stone, a small drilled fossil, a copper bead, a bone implement, and some small pieces of polished wood soft and colored green by contact with the copper bracelet." His excavation also revealed nine skeletons. Seven of these were arranged in a row with their heads facing north, and two more skeletons were found nearby. One of these had its head facing north, and the other had its head facing south. He noted that the Bat Creek Stone was found under the skull of the south-facing skeleton. The two bracelets found in the mound were first identified by Emmert and Thomas as "copper." However, a 1970 analysis by the Smithsonian concluded that the bracelets were actually heavily leaded yellow brass.
In 1967, the Tennessee Valley Authority announced plans to build Tellico Dam at the mouth of the Little Tennessee River. They asked the University of Tennessee Department of Anthropology to conduct salvage excavations in the Little Tennessee Valley. Legal issues and environmental concerns delayed the dam's completion until 1979, allowing extensive excavations at multiple sites in the valley. Between the late 1960s and 1970s, the Tellico Archaeological Project, led by the University of Tennessee Department of Anthropology, studied over two dozen sites. Evidence showed that people lived in the valley during the Archaic (8000–1000 BC), Woodland (1000 BC–1000 AD), Mississippian (900–1600 AD), and Cherokee (c. 1600–1838) periods. Mound 1 of the Bat Creek Site was excavated in 1975. Researchers concluded that the mound was a "platform" mound typical of the Mississippian period. Artifacts from earlier periods, including the Archaic and Woodland eras, were also found. The University of Tennessee excavators did not study Mound 2 or Mound 3, as both no longer existed. Neither the University of Tennessee's excavation of the Bat Creek Site nor any other excavations in the Little Tennessee Valley found evidence of contact between Pre-Columbian cultures and Old World civilizations.
Analysis and debate
In 1894, a report about the Bat Creek Mound excavations first officially described the inscription found on a stone. Cyrus Thomas, who studied the artifacts, said the symbols on the stone were from the Cherokee writing system. He used this to support his idea that the Cherokee people built many of the mounds and enclosures in eastern North America. However, this claim was later shown to be incorrect. The Cherokee writing system was created in 1819, and if the stone had Cherokee writing, it would mean the mound was much younger than evidence suggests. As Feder explains, the Bat Creek Stone was unusual and hard to place in history. Many people quietly believed it was fake, even though there was little public debate about it at the time. Thomas did not mention the stone in any of his later major writings.
In the 1970s, the Bat Creek Inscription was used by people who studied theories about early contact between the Old World and the Americas. Some believed the stone was strong evidence that people from Europe or the Middle East visited the Americas before Columbus. This idea began in the 1970s when Professor Cyrus Gordon, a scholar of ancient Near Eastern studies, examined the stone. He said Thomas had looked at the inscription upside down. When read correctly, Gordon claimed the symbols looked like ancient Hebrew and might mean "For the Jews." In 1988, J. Huston McCulloch, an economics professor, agreed with Gordon. He said the stone was an imperfect example of ancient Hebrew and suggested only a few Hebrew sailors might have visited the Americas.
However, archaeologists later rejected these claims. Robert Mainfort and Mary Kwas concluded the inscription is not real ancient Hebrew but a 19th-century forgery. They found the symbols were likely copied from a book called The General History, Cyclopedia, and Dictionary of Freemasonry, which was widely printed in the 19th century. Archaeologist Bradley T. Lepper said the work by Mainfort and Kwas proved the stone was a famous hoax. Kyle McCarter, a professor of Biblical Studies, said the stone does not belong to any known Hebrew inscriptions from the time of the First Jewish Revolt against Rome and is more of a dramatic story from 19th-century American archaeology. He concluded the stone was likely a fake.
Current location
The Bat Creek Stone is owned by the Smithsonian Institution and is listed in the collections of the Department of Anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History with the catalog number A134902-0. From August 2002 to November 2013, it was borrowed by the Frank H. McClung Museum at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. After that, it was lent to the Museum of the Cherokee Indian in Cherokee, N.C., where it was displayed from 2015 to 2021.