The Bat Creek Stone: The Little Tennessee Tablet That Divided Archaeology

Close-up photograph of the Bat Creek Stone, a dark siltstone slab bearing a short line of incised characters, resting on bubble wrap

About 6 min readDug from a burial mound in Tennessee in 1889, a small inscribed stone was first called Cherokee, then ancient Hebrew, then a nineteenth-century forgery copied from a book on Freemasonry. The evidence for forgery is strong — but the stone still has its defenders.