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.
The Dare Stones
In 1937 a stranger brought a quartz boulder to Emory University in Atlanta with an inscription signed by Eleanor Dare — mother of Virginia Dare of the lost colony of Roanoke. The stone explained what had become of the colonists. Over four years another forty-odd turned up, scattered across Georgia and the Carolinas, and together they traced a coherent route. In 1941 the reporter Boyden Sparkes followed the chain for the Saturday Evening Post and arrived at a stonecutter, Bill Eberhardt, who was selling the finds and eventually admitted carving them. The first stone, the Atlanta one, is still argued over; the other forty are closed.
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