Davenport

The Davenport Tablets

In 1877 the Reverend Jacob Gass excavated a mound near Davenport, Iowa, and brought out slate tablets inscribed in several ancient alphabets at once, with a cremation scene. The Davenport Academy of Natural Sciences held them to be proof of contact between the Old World and the New. A century later the archaeologist Marshall McKusick went through the Academy's own archives: the slate matches roofing tiles from a demolished local brothel, and the alphabets on the tablet are copied, errors included, from a plate in the 1872 edition of Webster's dictionary. The correspondence suggests they were planted by members of the Academy itself, who resented the newcomer Gass.