MS 2014-03 Robert C. Mainfort, Jr. and Mary L. Kwas papers on the Bat Creek stone

Scope and Contents

This collection contains Robert C. Mainfort, Jr. and Mary L. Kwas' research files for their article "The Bat Creek Stone Revisited: A Fraud Exposed." The files include a copy of their article, correspondence, notes from archival and bibliographic research, and reference sources.

Biographical / Historical

The Bat Creek stone is a small inscribed rock that was reportedly excavated from an undisturbed burial mound at Bat Creek in Loudon County, Tennessee, by John W. Emmert, a Smithsonian field assistant for the Bureau of American Ethnology Mound Survey. Cyrus Thomas, director of the Mound Survey, claimed the marks resembled Cherokee syllabary in his publication, "Report on the Mound Explorations of the Bureau of Ethnology" (1894). In 1970, Cyrus Gordon, a Semitic languages scholar, identified the marks as Paleo-Hebrew. The tablet has since been cited (most notably by J. Huston McCulloch) as evidence of Precolumbian contacts between the Old World and New World. Robert C. Mainfort, Jr. and Mary L. Kwas refuted this claim in their 2004 article in American Antiquity 69(4), "The Bat Creek Stone Revisited: A Fraud Exposed." According to Mainfort and Kwas, evidence suggests that the inscription is a forgery, likely perpetrated by John W. Emmert.

Other Archival Materials

The Bat Creek stone (Accession A134902-0) and a cast (Accession A134902A-0) are held by the Department of Anthropology Collections, National Museum of Natural History. The records of the Mound Survey, MS 2400, are at the National Anthropological Archives.