A 1917 slate from Massachusetts depicted mammoth hunters, but mammoths vanished 13,000 years ago. CC Willoughby of Harvard's Peabody Museum noted European-style perspective and unweathered surfaces — serious forgery red flags. The tablet copied the already-suspect Lenape Stone, and both have since vanished.
Hammond tablet and Lenape stone mammoth carvings likely forgeries
Key facts
- In 1917, railroad engineer Frank Hammond found a dark slate slab roughly 6.5 by 9.5 inches near the Three Mile River in Taton, Massachusetts, carved with stick-figure hunters, wigwams, celestial symbols, and a mammoth
- Mammoths vanished from North America approximately 13,000 years ago, long after the bow was introduced, making the carving either an anachronism or evidence of long oral transmission
- The Lenape Stone, found 45 years earlier in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, depicted a similar mammoth-hunting scene; archaeologists determined the carvings did not cross a natural crack splitting the stone, suggesting they were added after the break — declaring it a forgery
- CC Willoughby of Harvard's Peabody Museum found the Hammond stone's surface did not look weathered and that the mammoth was rendered in perspective — a technique that did not arrive in the Americas until European contact
- Lab historian Herbert Kraft stated the Hammond tablet had been plagiarized from the equally fake Lenape Stone
- The Lenape Stone survives in Doylestown, Pennsylvania; the Hammond tablet vanished after the 1920s, surviving only in Harvard photographs and tracings
- A 1921 engraved mastodon bone from Jacob's Cavern in Missouri has also been declared irretrievably lost
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