A Find That Served a Nineteenth Century Argument

David Wyrick, the Licking County surveyor who reported finding first the Keystone and then the Decalogue Stone in separate mounds near Newark in 1860, was working within a wider mid-nineteenth century American argument over who had built the region's impressive earthworks, a debate charged with contemporary racial and religious assumptions about Native American capability that most modern historians and archaeologists find deeply troubling in retrospect. Stones inscribed with paleo-Hebrew script and biblical content offered a ready-made answer favoured by many at the time, that a lost tribe of ancient Israel, not the ancestors of local Native peoples, had built the mounds.

Modern archaeological and epigraphic analysis has found the stones' Hebrew script anachronistic for any period consistent with genuine ancient American contact, and their manufacture inconsistent with authenticated Adena and Hopewell material culture recovered from undisturbed contexts at the same and nearby mounds, leading the great majority of specialists to treat the stones as a deliberate nineteenth century fabrication rather than a genuine find. A small number of researchers, mostly outside mainstream archaeology, continue to argue for authenticity, but this represents a distinct minority position rather than an open scholarly question, and the museum's modern presentation of the stones generally reflects the mainstream consensus rather than treating the matter as unresolved.