History and Provenance

David Wyrick, a county surveyor and antiquarian, reported the finds in 1860: first the Keystone, pulled from a pit near the Newark earthworks, and then the Decalogue Stone, said to have come from within a burial mound, enclosed in a fitted sandstone box. The discoveries were quickly publicised and drew both enthusiasm and suspicion. They landed in the middle of the mound-builder debate, in which some argued the earthworks were the work of a lost Old World people rather than the ancestors of Native Americans, a position often bound up with biblical and racial theorising.

The stones seemed to supply physical evidence for an ancient Hebrew presence, and interested parties took them up accordingly. Their provenance, however, rested on Wyrick's reports, and doubts about how and by whom they had been placed attended them from the beginning; a local associate of Wyrick was later implicated in a related planting of "holy stones."