Strange Tablets

When wading through the historical accounts from the early days of the United States of the recovery of giant skeletons from burial mounds, especially those considered to be of Adena construction, a recurring theme presents itself—strange tablets inscribed with hieroglyphs were often found among the remains of the dead. This curious phenomenon opens up a Pandora’s box of questions about the ancient Mound Builders!

In Fauquier County, Virginia, two giant skeletons were unearthed from a mound in 1866. The excavators also recovered typical artifacts such as spearheads; however, a tablet containing “hieroglyphics of a very curious character” was also present.1

Mounds that held the remains of eleven-foot-tall men were opened in Michigan. One of the tombs contained a strange tablet inscribed with “curious characters.” The St. Joseph Weekly reported on the event in their September 21, 1847 issue:

A Carson City, Mich., correspondent of the Detroit News writes that the remains of a forgotten race were recently dug up from the mounds on the south side of Crystal Lake, Montcalm County. One contained five skeletons and the other three. In the first mound was an earthen tablet. 5 inches long, 4 inches wide and half an inch thick. It was divided into four quarters. On one of them were inscribed curious characters. The skeletons were arranged in the same relative positions, so far as the mound was concerned. In the other mound there was a casket of earthenware, ten and one-half inches wide. The cover bore various inscriptions. The characters found upon the tablet were also prominent upon the casket. Upon opening the casket, a copper coin about the size of a 2-cent piece was revealed, together with several stone types, with which the inscription or marks upon both tablet and casket had evidently been made. There were also two pipes, one of stone and the other of pottery, and apparently of the same material as the casket. Other pieces of pottery were found, but so badly broken as to furnish no clue as to what they might have been used for. Some of the bones of the skeletons were well preserved, showing that the dead men must have been persons of huge proportions. The lower jaw is immense. An ordinary jawbone fits inside with ease. By measurement the distance from the top of the skull to the upper end of the thigh bone of the largest skeleton was five feet five Indies. A doctor who was present stated that the man must have been at least eleven feet high. One of these mounds was partly covered by a pine stump three feet six inches in diameter and the ground showed no signs of ever having been disturbed. The digging had to be done among the roots, which had a large, spread. Much speculation is rife as to who these giants of a prehistoric race may have been.

Of course, the previous article might have been reporting on a find that was a hoax. There are over 3,000 artifacts from the late-1800s to early-1900s collectively known as the "Michigan Artifacts," many of which have been proven to be fraudulent. However, some still believe that at least some of those artifacts are indeed genuine, and moreover, the strange tablets and giant skeletal remains fit with a general pattern of similar discoveries found elsewhere.

The largest Adena mound in West Virginia is the Grave Creek Mound in Marshall County, just south of Wheeling. The mound was opened in the 1800s and it contained a number of curious relics. A tablet, aptly named the Grave Creek Stone, was also found inside the mound. The stone tablet contained inscriptions of strange characters resembling hieroglyphs. The picture below is a replica of the tablet on display at the Grave Creek Archaeological Complex museum:

A replica of the Grave Creek Tablet. Photo by the author.






Exhibit in the museum at the Grave Creek Archaeological Complex. Photo by author.








Famed ethnologist Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (1793–1864), examined the writing on the Grave Creek Tablet and said the following:

There are, strictly speaking, but two curved lines in the alphabet, and the rest being angular, and in this respect, resembling the Phoenician, Etruscan, and other cognate alphabets. Twenty-three of the characters are strictly arranged between parallel lines. The twenty-fourth, which is put below the inscription, is excluded from the linear arrangement. This final character has all the appearance of an idiographic sign, or hieroglyphic.2

Schoolcraft went on to address the strange alphabet further:

Of the twenty-two characters, which are confessedly alphabetic, ten correspond, with general exactness, with the Phoenician of Gesenius. Fifteen (including the closed cross X) coincide with the Celtiberic, as exhibited by Mr. Rafn in the Memoires de la Societe Royal des Antiquaires du Nordj Copenhagen, 1840-1843. Section Americaine.Fourteen correspond with the old British or Anglo Saxon, as exhibited by the same author. Five coincide with the old northern, or Runic proper, but four with the Etruscan, six with the ancient Gallic, four with the ancient Greek, and seven with the old Erse. This comparison is given from data not complete in all cases, and without attempting to have entered on a critical study of the inscription. It may, in the interest excited by this discovery, serve the purposes of popular comparison...Possibly equivalents for these characters may be found in the ancient Hebrew, but it is an inquiry which is entitled to a fuller consideration than can be given to it in the present paper.3

It should be noted that the authenticity of the Grave Creek Stone has been questioned by experts, and the tablet is widely considered to be a fraud. To complicate matters, the stone has passed through a variety of different collections and its current whereabouts are unknown.

A tablet with inscriptions very similar to those found on the Grave Creek Tablet was found about ninety miles to the south, as the crow flies, in Braxton County, West Virginia near the town of Gassaway. Known as the Wilson Stone, after its discoverer Blaine Wilson, and alternately called the Braxton County Rune Stone and the Braxton County Tablet, the enigmatic relic was found in 1931. The state of West Virginia purchased the tablet and it is owned by the West Virginia State Museum. Dr. Emerson F. Greenman of the university of Michigan analyzed the tablet and his conclusion regarding its authenticity is interesting and very telling: “It has not been demonstrated that the Wilson Tablet is a fraud, but the preponderance of the evidence points in that direction”4 (emphasis mine). The Doctor’s conclusion should not be surprising; when it comes to relics that do not fit the established paradigm regarding ancient American history, they are normally ruled to be fraudulent.

There are thirteen tablets that have been recovered in or near Adena burial mound sites. All of the finds come from either West Virginia, Ohio, or Kentucky. The thirteen inscribed tablets are known as the Adena Tablets. They are: the Lakin A and Lakin B tablets, both found in Mason, County, West Virginia; the Waverly-Hurst Tablet, found in Waverly, Ohio; the Gaitskill Stone Tablet and the Gaitskill Clay Tablet, both recovered from a mound in Mount Sterling, Kentucky; the Low Tablet, found in Parkersburg, West Virginia; the Wright Tablet, discovered in a Montgomery County, Kentucky mound; the Bainbridge Tablet, found in Ross County, Ohio; the McKensie Mound Tablet, from Pike County, Ohio; the Cincinnati Tablet, found in Cincinnati on the land where a UPS facility now sits; the Meigs County Tablet, from Ohio; the Berlin Tablet, found in southern Ohio; the Wilmington Tablet, discovered in a mound in Ohio.

There fragmentary pieces that are excluded from the Adena Tablets: the Kiefer Tablet, from Miami County, Ohio; the Cresap Turtle, a tablet carved in the shape of turtle found in the Cresap Mound in Marshall County, West Virginia; and a fragmentary rattlesnake from Paint Creek, Ohio. These specimens are considered too fragmentary and/or too atypical to shed further light on the Adena Tablets.5 

There are enigmatic tablets that could be considered in-betweens. These lie somewhere in between the fragmentary pieces and the Adena Tablets. The Grave Creek Tablet is considered among them; however, as stated earlier, the Grave Creek Tablet is lost. The other tablets are: the Allen Tablet and the Hale Tablet.6

Questions Arise

All of the tablets mentioned contain imagery and writing that is not fully understood and their purpose is not entirely clear. The Ohio History Center proposes a possible use for the Adena tablets:

Besides being made of sandstone, the Berlin, Wilmington, Keifer, Cincinnati, and Low tablets are grooved on the back side much like whetstones, which were used for sharpening bone needles. This suggests that the tablets could have been used for tattooing. The engraved surface, covered with paint, could be pressed against a person's body, stamping it with the image. Then the design could be tattooed into the skin using fine bone needles sharpened in the grooves on the back side of the tablet. The process may have been part of an initiation into a social group. The person thus would always be identified as a member of the group.7

This may be. What interests me, though, are the hieroglyphic characters found on the Grave Tablet and other strange tablets. If the characters on the tablets originated in the Old World, as Henry Rowe Schoolcraft believed, many questions come to mind!

These questions are explored in depth in my book Giants: Men of Renown . Check it out! Also, in my book Wild & Wonderful (and Paranormal) West Virginia, I spent a portion of a chapter discussing mounds, strange finds, and giant skeletons in the Mountain State.

End Notes

1. The Daily Journal(Wilmington, North Carolina), December 20, 1866.

2. Henry R. Schoolcraft, “Observations Respecting the Grave Creek Mound,” Transactions of the American Ethnological Society1 (1845), 390. PDF. Digitized by Google.

3. Ibid, 392.

4. “Braxton County Rune Stone,” The West Virginia Encyclopedia, accessed January 27, 2018, http://www.wvencyclopedia.org/print/Article/646.

5. Duncan Caldwell, “A new ordering of Adena tablets based on a deeper reading of the McKensie Tablet,” Res: Anthropology and aesthetics65-66 (2014/2015),105-127. accessed January 29, 2018, http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/691029

6. Ibid.

7. 5a.23 Tattooing, The Ohio History Connection, accessed January 28, 2018, http://ohsweb.ohiohistory.org/gallery2/main.php?g2_itemId=501.



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