The friend who alerted me of this has sent me the following summary:

There is a new report out about the Bat Creek Stone allegedly recovered from Bat Creek Burial Mound 3 in Tennessee by John W. Emmert in 1889. The original report about the discovery was published by Cyrus Thomas in 1894 in Report on the Mound Explorations of the Bureau of Ethnology. Robert C. Mainfort, Jr. and Mary L. Kwas have investigated the various claims for the Bat Creek Stone and published their refutation of these claims in an article entitled, The Bat Creek Stone Revisited: a Fraud Exposed, American Antiquity Volume 69, Number 4, pp. 761-769. This is a summary of the article with copies of their figures.
Mainfort and Kwas summarize the information about the discovery and original publication of the Bat Creek Stone. They also describe later claims made about the stone that suggest it was inscribed with early Cherokee letters. Later examinations by Cyrus Gordon and J. Huston McCulloch resulted in claims that the inscription was Paleo-Hebrew. McCulloch also claimed the brass bracelets and radiocarbon date on wood supposedly found with the stone are consistent with this interpretation.
Mainfort and Kwas note that the context of the Bat Creek Stone find is suspect. Only Emmert was present when it was supposedly recovered and there are no excavation maps or independent evidence showing just where the Bat Creek Stone, bracelets, etc., were recovered. However, they have found an inscription that appears in General History, Cyclopedia, and Dictionary of Freemasonry by Robert Macoy, Masonic Publishing Co., New York, 1870 on page 169 greatly resembles the Bat Creek Stone inscription and is the likely source of it. Mainfort and Kwas's Figures 1 and 2 which are of the Bat Creek Stone and the Freemasonry inscription follow:





These two figures show there is great similarity between them and at least as much, if not more, than the claims that the Bat Creek inscription is Cherokee or Paleo-Hebrew. The Freemasonry inscription would also be available to Emmert or a cohort at the time the Bat Creek Stone was "discovered."
Mainfort and Kwas discuss why Emmert, perhaps with the assistance of someone to actually make the inscription, would have made the Bat Creek Stone. Emmert was in need of a job and the discovery of an early Cherokee inscription, which is what it was first claimed to be, would have assured his continued employment by the Smithsonian Institution. The brass bracelets that supposedly were recovered with the Bat Creek inscription also are of European origin and date to the 18th or ealry19th century A.D. They are not, as McCulloch claims, earlier Mediterranean ornaments. Mainfort and Kwas conclude the Bat Creek Stone is a copy of the Freemasonry inscription.
Article summary by Mark A. McConaughy

Doug Weller

Doug Weller

Director The Hall of Ma'at
Doug's Skeptical Archaeology site::
[www.ramtops.co.uk]