Grave Creek Stone

The Grave Creek Stone is a small sandstone disk inscribed on one side with some twenty-five characters, discovered in 1838 at Grave Creek Mound in Moundsville, West Virginia. If genuine, it could provide evidence of a primitive alphabet, but the discovery that the characters can be found in a 1752 book suggests that it is probably a fraud. The only known image of the actual stone is a photograph of items in 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).

In 1838, an archaeological excavation of Grave Creek Mound, led by Jesse and Abelard Tomlinson, uncovered the ruins of two large vaults, one situated directly below the other. The vaults contained several human skeletons and a considerable amount of jewelry and other artifacts. According to Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, a renowned geologist who visited the site in 1843, the Grave Creek Stone was discovered in the upper vault, along with seventeen hundred beads, five hundred sea shells, five copper bracelets, and one hundred and fifty plates of mica. It was "a small flat stone, of an ovate shape, containing an inscription in unknown characters". Schoolcraft was the first to subject the stone to a critical examination, five years after its discovery; he found it "lying unprotected among broken implements of stone, pieces of antique pottery, and other like articles", suggesting that those who found it had not recognised the potential significance of the artifact.

The first published account of the find, along with a woodcut of the inscription, occupied the front page of the Cincinnati Chronicle of February 2, 1839, in an article written by Dr. Thomas Townsend. Another drawing of the stone, "differing essentially in its characters", was published in The American Pioneer in May 1843, accompanied by Abelard Tomlinson's eyewitness account of the stone's discovery. He says that the stone was discovered on June 9, 1838, about two feet from the skeleton in the upper vault. It had "no engraving on it, except for on one side". In a later statement, Tomlinson asserts that "I removed it with my own hands ... from its ancient bed". A letter dated April 10, 1839, written by Dr. James Clemens, who spent two weeks at the Grave Creek site collecting data in the summer of 1838, appears to corroborate Tomlinson's version of events. Clemens writes that "Abelard Tomlinson, Thomas Biggs, myself, and others were present when the stone was discovered with the copper bracelets and the shell necklace".

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