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The Bat Creek Stone is an artifact excavated in 1889 by the Smithsonian Institution [see Figure 1], and was also found with brass bracelets.
The stone was described in a 1894 publication by the same group.[1] The author of the report, Cyrus Thomas, claimed that the marks were Cherokee. A review of Thomas' subsequent publications demonstrates that he likely concluded that the items were forged, but he did not make a more public point of this because he and the Smithsonian "had placed themselves in a position such that they really could not afford to pronounce the Bat Creek stone a forgery after publishing it."[2]
After Thomas, little attention was paid to the Bat Creek stone until 1970--as noted above, Thomas had probably recognized that it was fraudulent by 1898. In 1970, Cyrus Gordon of Brandeis university argued that the stone had been oriented improperly in the original publication. If it was inverted, Gordon claimed, it became clear that the text was Paleo-Hebrew, and read "for the Jews."[3] Other scholars joined the debate, and the positions are well summarized by Mainfort and Kwas:
Although there were questions about the Bat Creek stone's origins, these seem to have been definitively settled as of a 2004 paper by Mainfort and Kwas. In it, they demonstrate that the text for the stone was copied from an 1870 book on Freemasonry: Robert Macoy, General History, Cyclopedia, and Dictionary of Freemasonry (New York, Masonic Publishing Co., 1870), 169. [See Figure 2.] The Masonic use of the inscription comes from a Jewish coin, reading "Holiness to the Lord," or "Holy to Yahweh."[5]
The man who discovered the Bat Creek Stone did so alone, and was not a professional archaeologist in the modern sense. He also seems to have "discovered" other artifacts that are clearly forgeries.[6] His problems with alcohol led to him being fired for a period; political pressure was necessary for him to regain his job, and his forgery may have been motivated by a desire to ensure his continued employment.[7]
The Bat Creek Stone was also found with two bracelets, but these were dated to the eighteenth or nineteenth century.[8] This heightens the evidence of fraud still further.
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Some LDS people have fallen prey to those who push these artifacts as genuine. A forged item can tell us nothing about ancient America in general, or the Book of Mormon in particular.
== Notes ==
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