Grave Creek Stone
Encyclopedia
The Grave Creek Stone is an object of archaeological debate. It was discovered in 1838 in Moundsville, West Virginia
. The small sandstone
disk is inscribed on one side with some twenty-five characters; it has been described as both an artifact
and a hoax
. The only known image of the actual stone is a photograph of items of the E.H. Davis collection (circa 1878) before the majority of the collection was sold to the Blackmore Museum (now part of the British Museum
).
H. R. Schoolcraft discovery (1843) as written by Stephen Williams:
On page 82 of Fantastic Archaeology, Williams writes “about five years after the excavations, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, a noteworthy scholar, visited the site and ‘found this curious relic lying unprotected among broken implements of stone, pieces of antique pottery
, and other like articles."[From page 387 of Transactions of American Ethnological Society, vol. 1 which contains Schoolcraft’s article “Observations Respecting the Grave Creek Mound”] This same account by Schoolcraft is referenced by Matthew Canfield (M.C.) Reid (also seen spelled "Read") in his article entitled “Inscribed Stone of Grave Creek Mound” found in The American Antiquarian Vol. 1 No. 3 which was read at the meeting of the State Archaeology Society, held at Wooster, Ohio, September 25, 1878. Reid’s article mentions that this pile of broken implements was in “the chamber erected for exhibition of the articles found in the mound,” whereas Williams refers to the context of the pile as being “in the building that had been erected to house the artifacts from the excavations.” The difference in wording shows that there is some disagreement as to just how “undiscovered” the Grave Creek stone was when found by Schoolcraft. Williams sides with Catlett and Wharton, who claim that the stone was not discovered by Abelard Tomlinson as Tomlinson had claimed (discussed in more detail below). Williams writes that Tomlinson was 70 years old by then and living in California
. He also explains "Tomlinson's description of the way the shaft and drift were dug does not accord with any of the statements made by any of the observers of the excavations." Williams sees no reason to consider Tomlinson's claim to discovery to be credible.
Abelard Tomlinson discovery (1838) as written by David H. Kelley:
Abelard Tomlinson is credited with the discovery of the Grave Creek Stone in 1838 at the Grave Creek site (which he owned) in what is now Moundsville, West Virginia
. The first published account of the find occupied the front page of the Cincinnati Chronicle of February 2, 1839 in an article written by Dr. Thomas Townsend. His account explains that in the upper (or second) of two vaults at the Grave Creek mound a skeleton was discovered with many artifacts. “With this skeleton, we found a small thin flat stone of common fine grey sand stone. This stone has some hieroglyphics engraved upon it.” A drawing of Townsend’s version of the stone accompanied the article.
Abelard Tomlinson published his own eyewitness account of the find in May 1843. According to this, the stone was discovered on June 9, 1938 in the upper vault, described much in that same way as Townsend described it. He described the stone as having “no engraving on it, except for on one side…The stone with the characters on it was found about 2 feet from the skeleton…”
A letter dated 10 April 1839 written by Dr. James Clemens (who spent two weeks at the Grave Creek site collecting data in the summer of 1838) was discovered by his son, Sherrard Collins, and published in 1877 by P.P. Cherry. His account of the skeleton, artifacts, and the stone itself coincide with the other accounts. He writes that “Abelard Tomlinson, Thomas Biggs, myself, and others were present when the stone was discovered with the copper bracelets and the shell necklace…”
Shortly after Clemens’ account was published, Cherry was contacted by Col. Wharton and Peter B. Catlett, who had both worked at the Grave Creek site. Catlett claimed that he had been that original discoverer of the stone. He described it as having “one side filled with engraving and about half filled on the other” and being found outside the mound, rather than inside—further contrasting the earlier accounts.
disk is about 1⅞" (4.8 cm) wide, and 1½" (3.6 cm) high. One side of the stone is inscribed with 23 alphabetical / pseudo-alphabetical characters arranged in three lines with a final non-alphabetical symbol on the lower portion. There are no inscriptions on the reverse side. The stone had passed through various collections, but its current location is unknown. While it was in E.H. Davis's collection in the late 1800s, he made a cast of it which he deposited to the Smithsonian
's National Museum of Natural History
. The Smithsonian now has 4 casts of the stone. The National Anthropological Association also has a wax
impression of the stone made by Davis.
; four Etruscan; five Runic; six ancient Gallic
; seven old Erse
; ten Phoenician
; fourteen old British; sixteen Celtiberic, with some resemblance to the Hebrew.” However, he “…is inclined to regard the whole inscription as Celtiberic.”
M.C. Reid (also found as “Read”) performed an experiment in the late 1870s in which he asked four people: a teacher and law student, a school girl, a druggist, and a college
professor
to create for him “twenty or more arbitrary characters not resembling any figures or alphabetical characters known to them.” Since the Grave Creek Stone was inscribed using only straight lines (which is quite common, since straight lines are much easier to inscribe than those with curve), Reid instructed the four participants to only use “straight lines or combinations of straight lines.” To further simulate the actual inscribing of the stone, the individuals were not allowed to improve upon their first attempt (since one cannot erase all or part of a symbol once it is inscribed). All of this can be found in Reid's article "Inscribed Stone of Grave Creek Mound" published in The American Antiquarian Vol 1. No. 3 in January 1879.
Just like the inscription in the Grave Creek Stone, these symbols resemble characters found in alphabet
s of the old world. The fabricated inscriptions produced recognized characters found in the Punic
, Pelasgian, Oscan
, Gaulish
, Phoenician
, Etruscan, Greek
, Syriac
, Servian
, Ethiopic
, Coptic
, Gothic
, Cypriotic, Old British
, and Runic
alphabets. This leads Reid to be “compelled to conclude that there is nothing in the form of the characters of the Grave Creek Stone which require us to decide that they are old, that they are alphabetical, or if alphabetical that they are derived from any known alphabet.”
Moundsville, West Virginia
Moundsville is a city in Marshall County, West Virginia, along the Ohio River. It is part of the Wheeling Metropolitan Statistical Area. The population was 9,998 at the 2000 census. It is the county seat of Marshall County. The city was named for the Grave Creek Mound. Moundsville was settled in...
. The small sandstone
Sandstone
Sandstone is a sedimentary rock composed mainly of sand-sized minerals or rock grains.Most sandstone is composed of quartz and/or feldspar because these are the most common minerals in the Earth's crust. Like sand, sandstone may be any colour, but the most common colours are tan, brown, yellow,...
disk is inscribed on one side with some twenty-five characters; it has been described as both an artifact
Artifact (archaeology)
An artifact or artefact is "something made or given shape by man, such as a tool or a work of art, esp an object of archaeological interest"...
and a hoax
Hoax
A hoax is a deliberately fabricated falsehood made to masquerade as truth. It is distinguishable from errors in observation or judgment, or rumors, urban legends, pseudosciences or April Fools' Day events that are passed along in good faith by believers or as jokes.-Definition:The British...
. The only known image of the actual stone is a photograph of items of the E.H. Davis collection (circa 1878) before the majority of the collection was sold to the Blackmore Museum (now part of the British Museum
British Museum
The British Museum is a museum of human history and culture in London. Its collections, which number more than seven million objects, are amongst the largest and most comprehensive in the world and originate from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its...
).
Discovery
A search through modern archaeological texts reveals two different stories of discovery. Here is a synopsis of the discoveries outlined in Stephen Williams’ Fantastic Archaeology: The Wild Side of North American Prehistory and David H. Kelley’s “Epigraphy and Other Fantasies" found in The Review of Archaeology Vol. 15, No. 2 (1994), a response to Williams.H. R. Schoolcraft discovery (1843) as written by Stephen Williams:
Pottery
Pottery is the material from which the potteryware is made, of which major types include earthenware, stoneware and porcelain. The place where such wares are made is also called a pottery . Pottery also refers to the art or craft of the potter or the manufacture of pottery...
, and other like articles."[From page 387 of Transactions of American Ethnological Society, vol. 1 which contains Schoolcraft’s article “Observations Respecting the Grave Creek Mound”] This same account by Schoolcraft is referenced by Matthew Canfield (M.C.) Reid (also seen spelled "Read") in his article entitled “Inscribed Stone of Grave Creek Mound” found in The American Antiquarian Vol. 1 No. 3 which was read at the meeting of the State Archaeology Society, held at Wooster, Ohio, September 25, 1878. Reid’s article mentions that this pile of broken implements was in “the chamber erected for exhibition of the articles found in the mound,” whereas Williams refers to the context of the pile as being “in the building that had been erected to house the artifacts from the excavations.” The difference in wording shows that there is some disagreement as to just how “undiscovered” the Grave Creek stone was when found by Schoolcraft. Williams sides with Catlett and Wharton, who claim that the stone was not discovered by Abelard Tomlinson as Tomlinson had claimed (discussed in more detail below). Williams writes that Tomlinson was 70 years old by then and living in California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
. He also explains "Tomlinson's description of the way the shaft and drift were dug does not accord with any of the statements made by any of the observers of the excavations." Williams sees no reason to consider Tomlinson's claim to discovery to be credible.
Abelard Tomlinson discovery (1838) as written by David H. Kelley:
Abelard Tomlinson is credited with the discovery of the Grave Creek Stone in 1838 at the Grave Creek site (which he owned) in what is now Moundsville, West Virginia
Moundsville, West Virginia
Moundsville is a city in Marshall County, West Virginia, along the Ohio River. It is part of the Wheeling Metropolitan Statistical Area. The population was 9,998 at the 2000 census. It is the county seat of Marshall County. The city was named for the Grave Creek Mound. Moundsville was settled in...
. The first published account of the find occupied the front page of the Cincinnati Chronicle of February 2, 1839 in an article written by Dr. Thomas Townsend. His account explains that in the upper (or second) of two vaults at the Grave Creek mound a skeleton was discovered with many artifacts. “With this skeleton, we found a small thin flat stone of common fine grey sand stone. This stone has some hieroglyphics engraved upon it.” A drawing of Townsend’s version of the stone accompanied the article.
Abelard Tomlinson published his own eyewitness account of the find in May 1843. According to this, the stone was discovered on June 9, 1938 in the upper vault, described much in that same way as Townsend described it. He described the stone as having “no engraving on it, except for on one side…The stone with the characters on it was found about 2 feet from the skeleton…”
A letter dated 10 April 1839 written by Dr. James Clemens (who spent two weeks at the Grave Creek site collecting data in the summer of 1838) was discovered by his son, Sherrard Collins, and published in 1877 by P.P. Cherry. His account of the skeleton, artifacts, and the stone itself coincide with the other accounts. He writes that “Abelard Tomlinson, Thomas Biggs, myself, and others were present when the stone was discovered with the copper bracelets and the shell necklace…”
Shortly after Clemens’ account was published, Cherry was contacted by Col. Wharton and Peter B. Catlett, who had both worked at the Grave Creek site. Catlett claimed that he had been that original discoverer of the stone. He described it as having “one side filled with engraving and about half filled on the other” and being found outside the mound, rather than inside—further contrasting the earlier accounts.
Artifact
The sandstoneSandstone
Sandstone is a sedimentary rock composed mainly of sand-sized minerals or rock grains.Most sandstone is composed of quartz and/or feldspar because these are the most common minerals in the Earth's crust. Like sand, sandstone may be any colour, but the most common colours are tan, brown, yellow,...
disk is about 1⅞" (4.8 cm) wide, and 1½" (3.6 cm) high. One side of the stone is inscribed with 23 alphabetical / pseudo-alphabetical characters arranged in three lines with a final non-alphabetical symbol on the lower portion. There are no inscriptions on the reverse side. The stone had passed through various collections, but its current location is unknown. While it was in E.H. Davis's collection in the late 1800s, he made a cast of it which he deposited to the Smithsonian
Smithsonian Institution
The Smithsonian Institution is an educational and research institute and associated museum complex, administered and funded by the government of the United States and by funds from its endowment, contributions, and profits from its retail operations, concessions, licensing activities, and magazines...
's National Museum of Natural History
National Museum of Natural History
The National Museum of Natural History is a natural history museum administered by the Smithsonian Institution, located on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., United States. Admission is free and the museum is open 364 days a year....
. The Smithsonian now has 4 casts of the stone. The National Anthropological Association also has a wax
Wax
thumb|right|[[Cetyl palmitate]], a typical wax ester.Wax refers to a class of chemical compounds that are plastic near ambient temperatures. Characteristically, they melt above 45 °C to give a low viscosity liquid. Waxes are insoluble in water but soluble in organic, nonpolar solvents...
impression of the stone made by Davis.
Inscription
The 23 alphabetical / pseudo-alphabetical symbols inscribed on the Grave Creek Stone have been the object of much controversy. Henry Rowe Schoolcraft was the first to study this aspect of the stone. He strove to determine whether or not the symbols were alphabetical by consulting experts on the subject (it is said that he had already believed the symbols to be alphabetical and that he simply wished to prove it). His correspondence with “noted antiquarians” leads him to the conclusion that inscription contains “four characters corresponding to the Ancient GreekAncient Greek
Ancient Greek is the stage of the Greek language in the periods spanning the times c. 9th–6th centuries BC, , c. 5th–4th centuries BC , and the c. 3rd century BC – 6th century AD of ancient Greece and the ancient world; being predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek...
; four Etruscan; five Runic; six ancient Gallic
Gauls
The Gauls were a Celtic people living in Gaul, the region roughly corresponding to what is now France, Belgium, Switzerland and Northern Italy, from the Iron Age through the Roman period. They mostly spoke the Continental Celtic language called Gaulish....
; seven old Erse
Erse
Erse can be:*an alternative name for any Goidelic language, especially Irish, from Erische.*a 16th-19th Century Scots name for Scottish Gaelic...
; ten Phoenician
Phoenician alphabet
The Phoenician alphabet, called by convention the Proto-Canaanite alphabet for inscriptions older than around 1050 BC, was a non-pictographic consonantal alphabet, or abjad. It was used for the writing of Phoenician, a Northern Semitic language, used by the civilization of Phoenicia...
; fourteen old British; sixteen Celtiberic, with some resemblance to the Hebrew.” However, he “…is inclined to regard the whole inscription as Celtiberic.”
M.C. Reid (also found as “Read”) performed an experiment in the late 1870s in which he asked four people: a teacher and law student, a school girl, a druggist, and a college
College
A college is an educational institution or a constituent part of an educational institution. Usage varies in English-speaking nations...
professor
Professor
A professor is a scholarly teacher; the precise meaning of the term varies by country. Literally, professor derives from Latin as a "person who professes" being usually an expert in arts or sciences; a teacher of high rank...
to create for him “twenty or more arbitrary characters not resembling any figures or alphabetical characters known to them.” Since the Grave Creek Stone was inscribed using only straight lines (which is quite common, since straight lines are much easier to inscribe than those with curve), Reid instructed the four participants to only use “straight lines or combinations of straight lines.” To further simulate the actual inscribing of the stone, the individuals were not allowed to improve upon their first attempt (since one cannot erase all or part of a symbol once it is inscribed). All of this can be found in Reid's article "Inscribed Stone of Grave Creek Mound" published in The American Antiquarian Vol 1. No. 3 in January 1879.
Just like the inscription in the Grave Creek Stone, these symbols resemble characters found in alphabet
Alphabet
An alphabet is a standard set of letters—basic written symbols or graphemes—each of which represents a phoneme in a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past. There are other systems, such as logographies, in which each character represents a word, morpheme, or semantic...
s of the old world. The fabricated inscriptions produced recognized characters found in the Punic
Punic language
The Punic language or Carthagian language is an extinct Semitic language formerly spoken in the Mediterranean region of North Africa and several Mediterranean islands, by people of the Punic culture.- Description :...
, Pelasgian, Oscan
Oscan language
Oscan is a term used to describe both an extinct language of southern Italy and the language group to which it belonged.The Oscan language was spoken by a number of tribes, including the Samnites, the Aurunci, the Sidicini, and the Ausones. The latter three tribes were often grouped under the name...
, Gaulish
Gaulish language
The Gaulish language is an extinct Celtic language that was spoken by the Gauls, a people who inhabited the region known as Gaul from the Iron Age through the Roman period...
, Phoenician
Phoenician alphabet
The Phoenician alphabet, called by convention the Proto-Canaanite alphabet for inscriptions older than around 1050 BC, was a non-pictographic consonantal alphabet, or abjad. It was used for the writing of Phoenician, a Northern Semitic language, used by the civilization of Phoenicia...
, Etruscan, Greek
Greek alphabet
The Greek alphabet is the script that has been used to write the Greek language since at least 730 BC . The alphabet in its classical and modern form consists of 24 letters ordered in sequence from alpha to omega...
, Syriac
Syriac alphabet
The Syriac alphabet is a writing system primarily used to write the Syriac language from around the 2nd century BC . It is one of the Semitic abjads directly descending from the Aramaic alphabet and shares similarities with the Phoenician, Hebrew, Arabic, and the traditional Mongolian alphabets.-...
, Servian
Serbian language
Serbian is a form of Serbo-Croatian, a South Slavic language, spoken by Serbs in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia and neighbouring countries....
, Ethiopic
Ge'ez alphabet
Ge'ez , also called Ethiopic, is a script used as an abugida for several languages of Ethiopia and Eritrea but originated in an abjad used to write Ge'ez, now the liturgical language of the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Church...
, Coptic
Coptic alphabet
The Coptic alphabet is the script used for writing the Coptic language. The repertoire of glyphs is based on the Greek alphabet augmented by letters borrowed from the Demotic and is the first alphabetic script used for the Egyptian language...
, Gothic
Gothic alphabet
The Gothic alphabet is an alphabet for writing the Gothic language, created in the 4th century by Ulfilas for the purpose of translating the Christian Bible....
, Cypriotic, Old British
Brythonic languages
The Brythonic or Brittonic languages form one of the two branches of the Insular Celtic language family, the other being Goidelic. The name Brythonic was derived by Welsh Celticist John Rhys from the Welsh word Brython, meaning an indigenous Briton as opposed to an Anglo-Saxon or Gael...
, and Runic
Runic alphabet
The runic alphabets are a set of related alphabets using letters known as runes to write various Germanic languages before the adoption of the Latin alphabet and for specialized purposes thereafter...
alphabets. This leads Reid to be “compelled to conclude that there is nothing in the form of the characters of the Grave Creek Stone which require us to decide that they are old, that they are alphabetical, or if alphabetical that they are derived from any known alphabet.”