If the Stones Were True: How One Proven ‘Hoax’ Would Rewrite American Prehistory

TL;DR

• A cluster of famous “hoax” artifacts—the Newark Holy Stones, Bat Creek Stone, Tucson artifacts, Michigan Relics, Kensington Runestone—are currently treated as textbook pseudoarchaeology tied to 19th-century racism and biblical fantasies. ¹ For a comprehensive catalog of claimed Old World artifacts in the Americas, including detailed analysis of these items, see our article on A Catalog of Claimed Old‑World Artifacts in the Americas.
• “Proven authentic” in a serious sense would mean tight stratigraphy, hard dating, and convincing epigraphy/palaeography showing pre-Columbian Old World manufacture and local context. That bar is extremely high and currently unmet. ²
• If any one artifact cleared that bar, the entire class of “Bible-flavored hoax stones” would have to be re-audited. The default stance toward diffusionist evidence would move from “laugh it out of the room” to “painfully cautious.”
• American prehistory would pivot from “Beringia + a few Vikings + maybe Polynesians” to a more entangled picture that definitively includes at least one Jewish/Roman/Scandinavian/whatever presence with epigraphic proof. ³
• The narrative that these artifacts are only expressions of white-supremacist mound-builder mythology would take a hit—not because the racism evaporates, but because some 19th-century hoaxers (or their sources) would turn out to have accidentally pointed at a real contact episode. ¹
• The egg on archaeologists’ faces wouldn’t just be “you mis-dated a rock”; it would be “you built an entire pedagogy around ridiculing a category that contained at least one genuine smoking gun.”

What would “prove” transoceanic contact? Not speculation, not hearsay, but direct and unambiguous evidence.
— Kenneth L. Feder, Encyclopedia of Dubious Archaeology (2010) ¹

1. The Rogues’ Gallery: Stones Everyone “Knows” Are Fake#

Let’s define the cadre.

1.1 Newark Holy Stones / Decalogue Stone#

• Found 1860 near Newark, Ohio, by David Wyrick, in Hopewell mounds.
• Keystone and Decalogue Stone inscribed in Hebrew; Decalogue carries a condensed Ten Commandments and a little Moses. ¹
• Today: regarded as a 19th-century forgery, probably used to promote Lost Tribes / monogenist politics and the idea that a civilized, Israelite-adjacent people, not “savages,” built the earthworks. ¹

1.2 Bat Creek Stone#

• 1889 tablet from a mound in Tennessee, originally published by Cyrus Thomas as Cherokee.
• In the 1970s Cyrus Gordon flips it upside down, reads Paleo-Hebrew (“for the Jews”), and Bat Creek becomes a darling of transatlantic-contact fans. ⁴
• Mainfort & Kwas (2004) identify the specific 19th-century Masonic book from which the inscription was likely copied; archaeologists now treat it as a clear hoax. ²

1.3 Michigan Relics#

• Hundreds of slate/clay/copper tablets and toys “found” in Michigan mounds ca. 1890–1920, depicting Old Testament scenes in made-up scripts.
• Now classic hoax case: James Scotford and Daniel Soper manufactured and planted them, then “discovered” them for cash and religious clout. ⁵

1.4 Tucson artifacts (Calalus crosses)#

• Lead crosses, swords, and spears dug near Tucson in the 1920s, inscribed with weird Latin/Hebrew chronicling a Roman-Jewish colony “Calalus” fighting Toltecs in Arizona ca. 775–900.
• Mainstream: sophisticated hoax using type-metal alloy, caliche disturbance, and textbook Latin. Fringe: still arguing. ⁶ For a detailed analysis of the Tucson artifacts hoax and its archaeological context, see our article on The Tucson Lead Artifacts: A 20th-Century Forgery.

1.5 Kensington Runestone#

• Found 1898 in Minnesota; runic inscription dates a Scandinavian expedition in 1362.
• Linguistic and geological work puts it squarely in the 19th century; scholarly consensus: hoax by or near Olof Öhman. ³

Plus Dighton Rock, Grave Creek Stone, a dozen minor “runestones,” etc. Collectively, these are the canonical pseudoarchaeology set: inscribed stones used in the 19th–20th centuries to argue that Israelites, Vikings, Romans, or Atlanteans “really” built mounds and civilisations in North America, conveniently whitening the past. ⁷

Archaeologists don’t just dislike these because they’re wrong; they dislike them because they were weaponized in service of the “lost white race of mound builders” used to justify Native dispossession. Andrew Jackson literally cited the idea of a vanished civilized race superseded by “savage tribes” to rationalize removal. ⁷

2. What Would “Proven Authentic” Actually Mean?#

Before we go full counterfactual, we need a sane definition of “this one turned out to be real.”

2.1 The evidentiary bar#

For something like the Newark Decalogue or Bat Creek Stone to be proven authentic in a way that would move the field, you’d need, at minimum:

1. Secured context

   • Clear, undisturbed stratigraphy in a pre-Columbian layer, documented to modern standards: photographs, field notes, independent witnesses, good radiocarbon brackets.
   • Ideally, multiple finds of the same epigraphic tradition, not a single unicorn.

2. Chronometric dating

   • Direct dates on the material when possible (e.g., lead isotope signature + corrosion modeling; c14 on associated organics), consistent with pre-1492 deposition.

3. Epigraphy and palaeography

   • Script and language consistent with some Old World tradition at the period implied, not cribbed from 19th-century Bible atlases or Freemason handbooks. The current refutations hinge on exactly this kind of anachronism. ²

4. Cultural/ecological fit

   • Associated material culture in the same layer: Old World metalwork, pottery, food remains, ship hardware, something that makes a sustained presence plausible.

5. Independent replication

   • Multiple labs, multiple teams, hostile reviewers trying hard to break the case and failing.

Right now, none of the famous stones come close to that bar. The whole class is a case study in how 19th-century enthusiasts could fake their own fantasies.

But you asked: what if we hit that bar for any one of them?

So: pretend some future excavation produces locked-down context that proves, say, the Bat Creek Stone really is a 1st-century Judean inscription in a Hopewell mound. Or someone re-analyzes a Tucson cross and shows, beyond reasonable doubt, early-medieval alloy and patina, in sealed caliche, with no possibility of 19th-century intrusion.

Let’s play that out.

3. Immediate Fallout: Archaeology Eats Crow

3.1 The specific artifact is rehabilitated#

First, the obvious: the one artifact that passes the bar gets promoted from “hoax” to “type specimen of transoceanic contact.”

• The Bat Creek Stone becomes the earliest secure Hebrew inscription in the Americas, full stop, if its Paleo-Hebrew and 1st-century date are confirmed. ⁴
• The Newark Decalogue, if dated to, say, the late Hellenistic period in a sealed Hopewell layer, becomes a literal Ten Commandments stone in Ohio. ¹
• A proven-medieval Tucson cross becomes the smoking gun for some Romanized frontier group knocking around northern Mexico/Arizona centuries before Columbus. ⁶

The museum labels change, the textbooks get the “mea culpa” box, and every archaeology undergrad in America gets a lecture titled “How We Got This Spectacularly Wrong.”

3.2 The whole “hoax stone” category gets reopened#

You don’t get to say “OK, Bat Creek was real, but all the rest are still clownish nonsense” and walk away.

Methodologically, what’s happened is:

• A class of objects once dismissed wholesale as hoaxes, often with explicit moralizing about racism and pseudoarchaeology, contained at least one genuine datum.
• That means the heuristic “inscribed stone + Bible flavor + 19th-c discovery = hoax” is now suspect, even if it still applies most of the time.

In practice, you’d see:

• Renewed, serious re-testing of the best-documented “hoax” pieces (Newark, Bat Creek, Tucson, a few runestones).
• A cautious shift from “this is racist nonsense” to “these cases were racist hoaxes; this other one might be genuine contact that hoaxers and racists later latched onto.”

The egg-on-face part isn’t just being wrong; it’s having built entire pedagogical tropes (“every such stone is a fraud serving white supremacy”) that turn out to have at least one counterexample.

3.3 Trust dynamics flip a notch#

Right now, the social landscape is:

• Archaeologists are the sober adults.
• Diffusionist cranks are seen as annoying but mostly harmless; they feed History Channel content.
• Native communities (quite reasonably) distrust narratives that smuggle in “lost white builders.” ⁷

If one stone is proved real:

• Diffusionists don’t suddenly become right about everything, but their meta-critique (“you guys are too dogmatic about contact”) gets teeth.
• The next time a weird artifact shows up, the burden of proof shifts slightly away from “debunk or ignore” toward “test carefully, even if it smells like Glenn Beck.”
• Archaeologists have to do some public penance: explaining why they were right to be suspicious (because 90% were hoaxes) but wrong to universalize that suspicion as a moral certainty.

A lot of careers have been built on debunking this stuff. Some people will cope gracefully. Some will not.

4. How Prehistory Changes if Old World Stones Are Real#

Now the fun part: suppose our one proven artifact is genuinely Old World, pre-Columbian, in clear context. What changes in the underlying story?

4.1 Contact goes from “maybe” to “yes”#

We already have:

• Norse at L’Anse aux Meadows (~AD 1000).
• Serious evidence for Polynesian–South American contact (chickens, sweet potatoes, and now some genomic hints). ³

Those are still peripheral to the core North American narrative. A proven Hebrew/Latin/Phoenician inscription in the interior Eastern Woodlands or Southwest would:

• Cement at least one non-Norse, non-Polynesian Old World contact episode with epigraphic and contextual support.
• Force models of American cultural history to consider that 1–2% of the variance might be due to exotic contacts, not just shared human convergence.

You still don’t get “Romans built the mounds.” You do get “someone who wrote like a Roman ended up in a mound.”

4.2 Mound-builder mythology gets weirder, not simpler#

Right now, the story taught in respectable venues is:

1. 19th-c Americans, steeped in racial hierarchy, invented a “lost white mound builder race” to deny that real Native peoples built the mounds.
2. Hoax stones with Hebrew, runes, or made-up scripts were created to “prove” this myth.
3. Archaeology eventually demonstrated that mound builders were ancestors of modern Native Americans, and the stones were fake. ¹

If one stone turns out to be real:

• The myth is still racist—Jackson’s rhetoric doesn’t get redeemed. ⁸
• But the hoaxers and their audiences might have been parasitizing a real, older contact story without knowing it.

Think of it like this: medieval Norse sagas were half-mythic, half-historical. For centuries, scholars treated Vinland as essentially literary. Then L’Anse aux Meadows turned up and forced a recalibration: sagas suddenly had a hard archaeological anchor.

A genuine Bat Creek-type artifact would play a similar role for Biblical/“Lost Tribes” lore: most of the 19th-century edifice stays bogus, but now there’s a splinter of truth lodged inside it.

4.3 Indigenous history gains, not loses, complexity#

The paranoid fear is: if some Hebrew stone is real, white nationalists will scream “See, the land was Jewish/Roman/Nordic, so removal was justified.”

Reality check:

• We already know North America was full of migrations, displacements, and genocides before Europeans arrived. Indigenous societies are not morally fragile snowglobes that shatter if we discover one more messy contact.
• A proven Old World inscription doesn’t erase mound builders; it just adds a foreign episode to their history—trade, war, captivity, diplomacy, whatever.

In a sane world, the takeaway is:

“Native people built the mounds. Also, at least once, some Mediterranean or Scandinavian weirdos showed up, left a stone, and vanished into the long story of the continent.”

The racist “lost white race” story dies harder, because you can now say:
Yes, there was a small Old World presence; no, they didn’t build Cahokia; stop fantasizing about Aryan Atlanteans.

5. Epistemology After the Humbling#

The deeper shift is not historical but epistemic: how archaeology decides what counts as “too weird to take seriously.”

5.1 The “hoax heuristic” loses its absoluteness#

Right now the heuristic is:

Inscribed stone + Bible + 19th-c find in mounds → 99% hoax → treat as a teaching tool, not as data.

That heuristic is built on real work: radiocarbon dates on mound contexts, metallurgical analyses, identification of 19th-century source books for inscriptions, etc. ²

If one stone survives all that and still comes out authentic, scientists have to adjust:

• “99% hoax” becomes “high prior for hoax, but not absolute; you still need to do the work.”
• Debunking articles that leaned heavily on guilt-by-association (“these look like the Newark stones, therefore fake”) look lazy in retrospect.

The profession becomes marginally more open to anomaly hunting—while, ideally, keeping its skepticism sharp.

5.2 Pseudoarchaeology critique has to be more precise#

Current scholarship (Feder, Lepper, Bush/Kocher, Gill, etc.) rightly emphasizes how many of these artifacts grew out of racist or religious agendas. ¹

If one turns out genuine, you can’t just say “anyone interested in this cluster is a racist fantasist.” You have to:

• Separate motivation (why 19th-c people forged or promoted objects) from ontology (what the objects actually are).
• Acknowledge that fringe folks were, in at least one case, right that contact happened, even if they were wrong about everything else.

That doesn’t mean you hand the microphone to Ancient Aliens. It does mean the condescension dial has to be turned down a notch. Dismissing everything as “racist nonsense” starts to look like its own kind of dogma.

5.3 Funding and field practice#

This is the practical bit:

• Grants for re-excavation of old hoax sites become thinkable: “We know 90% was fake, but given X, we’re re-opening this mound with modern methods.”
• CRM (cultural resource management) firms might have to treat fringe claims more seriously in consultation with tribes and local stakeholders, because the probability of a real anomaly is no longer assumed to be zero.
• Training: archaeology programs will double down on teaching scientific humility alongside “how to spot a hoax.”

The world doesn’t flip into diffusionist utopia. But the Overton window for legitimate inquiry shifts.

6. Worlds Built from One Stone#

Let’s be concrete. Suppose each of the big stones were, individually, proven authentic. How does the world differ in each scenario?

Notice that in every scenario, Native agency and mound-builder cultures remain central. What changes is:

• The Old World isn’t just a one-off Norse cameo; it’s a recurring nuisance at the edge of the stage.
• Biblical and classical world historians have to admit that a few more of their people got catastrophically lost.

FAQ #

Q1. Would proving one of these stones authentic mean the whole diffusionist canon is vindicated? A. No. It would mean exactly one case met modern standards. Everything else in the canon would still have to be evaluated on its own merits, and most of it would still probably fail the sniff test. For a comprehensive survey of all credible and controversial pre-Columbian contact theories, see our article on Pre-Columbian Contacts and Peopling of the Americas: An Exhaustive Survey.

Q2. Would this undermine the consensus that Native Americans built the mounds?
A. Not remotely. The evidence for indigenous mound builders is overwhelming; a genuine Hebrew or Norse inscription would show contact with those societies, not replacement by a “lost white race.” ¹

Q3. Why are archaeologists so quick to call these artifacts racist?
A. Because many were created and promoted expressly to support theories that denied Native authorship and justified colonial land grabs; the Newark Holy Stones are a textbook example of “fake news” crafted to push 19th-c racial and religious agendas. ¹

Q4. Would proving one artifact real justify fringe TV shows and YouTube channels?
A. It would give them a new trophy, but it wouldn’t convert every crystal-skull claim into data. It would, however, force professionals to stop dismissing all anomaly claims with a smirk and a single PowerPoint slide.

Q5. Is there any realistic path to this happening?
A. It would almost certainly come not from re-arguing the old stones in blogs, but from new, tightly controlled excavations that accidentally uncover similar material in context—after which some poor grad student realizes, “This looks like that hoax we were told to laugh at.”

Sources#

1. Newark Holy Stones overview and context: “Newark Holy Stones”, plus Bush, Kocher & Lepper, “The Newark Holy Stones: Touchstones for the Truth.” The Public Historian 44(1) (2022). ¹
2. Bat Creek Stone: Mainfort & Kwas, “The Bat Creek Stone Revisited: A Fraud Exposed.” American Antiquity 69(4) (2004); plus Wikipedia summary. ²
3. Michigan Relics: Mark Ashurst-McGee, “Mormonism’s Encounter with the Michigan Relics.” BYU Studies Quarterly 40(3) (2001). ⁵
4. Kensington Runestone: “Kensington Runestone” and Scott F. Wolter, “The Kensington Runestone: Geological Evidence of a Hoax.” ³
5. Pseudoarchaeology, mound-builder myth, and racism: Brad Lepper and colleagues, “The Newark Holy Stones: The History of an Archaeological Comedy.”; “The Myth of a Lost Mound Builder Race” blog; and commentary on Andrew Jackson’s use of the “lost race” narrative. ¹⁰

Footnotes#