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 Bosnian Pyramids at Visoko
In 2005 the businessman Semir Osmanagić announced that the hill of Visočica above the town of Visoko was the oldest pyramid in the world, 220 metres high and built twelve thousand years ago, and began excavating on donations and municipal money. In 2006 the European Association of Archaeologists issued a formal statement, signed by four leading European archaeologists, calling the project a cruel hoax and demanding a halt to work that was destroying genuine medieval and Roman layers on the hill. Geologists described Visočica as a flatiron — a natural landform of Miocene conglomerate, of which the valley has several; the paved slabs proved to be fractured sandstone.
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