Posted on 05/20/2016 10:12:43 AM PDT by BenLurkin
6. The Davenport Tablets
The Davenport Academy was a major force in early American amateur archeology. Unfortunately, the organization ended up lending its name to one of the most ridiculous hoaxes in American history. In 1877, Reverend Jacob Gass claimed to have found a set of four inscribed tablets buried in an ancient mound in Iowa. Gass was quickly invited to join the Davenport Academy, which contained many supporters of the “Mound Builders” myth.
This theory, now entirely discredited, argued that Native Americans were too primitive to have built the giant earthworks that dot the American countryside. Instead, 19th century historians believed that a “lost white race” must have built the mounds. The Davenport Tablets seemed to support this hypothesis, since the writing was clearly influenced by early European languages. Historians across America quickly set to work to decipher the baffling text.
After eight years of studying the tablets, the ethnologist Cyrus Thomas sensationally concluded that the tablets were complete frauds. Experts had been unable to decipher the text because it was actually a random collection of letters and symbols from a variety of different languages. Even musical notation was mixed in. To make matters worse, many of the symbols were simply pulled straight from page 1,766 of the 1872 edition of Webster’s Dictionary.
This was a huge blow to the Davenport Academy and president Charles Putnam made matters worse by furiously trying to defend the tablets as authentic. However, the best argument he could muster involved nitpicking minor details in Thomas’s article. For example, he pointed out that Thomas had described an inscription surrounded by four lines, when it fact it was only surrounded by three. Unsurprisingly, most people were unconvinced and the Davenport Academy and the Mound Builders theory both underwent a rapid decline.
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That one had me going for a second.
Don’t try to say it five times fast.
lim f(x) = L iff ∀ ε > 0 Ǝ δ > 0 s.t. 0 < |x – a| < δ --> |f(x) – L| < ε
x -> a
Better keep that to yourself ... somebody might alert Homeland Security.
That looks chaotic.
I sure as hell wouldn’t.
You ain’t a-tellin’ me the James Ossuary is a fake. It has “23 BC” stamped right on it.
what? no cardiff giant?
GGG?
I'll check it out (and welcome back)... Sure, okay.
42..
good movie.
I don’t trust any artifact that doesn’t come with a certificate of authenticity.
I have seen the elephant pipe and the Davenport tablets.
One thing that made me wonder. The pipe shows an “elephant”, but there were Mammoths in the area. I grew up in Nebraska, and they occasionaly find them with spear points. The locals could have had contact with Mammoths or Mastodons.
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