The Newark Holy Stones: The Social Context of an Enduring Scientific Forgery

Bradley Lepper and Jeff Gill's article in Timeline, the magazine of the Ohio Historical Society, published in 2000, is the standard account of the Newark Holy Stones, examined by Lepper, the Society's curator of archaeology, and placing the inscribed stones as a mid-nineteenth century forgery tied to local disputes over the mound-building past. Its strength is that it is written by the specialist directly responsible for the artifacts' institutional custody and study, working from the documentary record of their 1860 discovery. Its limit is that it is a single institutional analysis rather than an independent peer-reviewed monograph, so a claim resting on a disputed point of the stones' fabrication history should be checked against the wider literature on nineteenth century American antiquarian forgeries as well.