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Archive 1Archive 2Archive 3

Lead again

I've revised the lead with a summary of the post-Cyrus Gordon controversy, taken from the body of the article. And that, I think, concludes my interest in this article. I hope I've improved it, but you never know. For what it's worth, it seems to me pretty clear that the inscription is a forgery - Gordon, Cross and McCarter all say it's Hebrew, and Cross and McCarter say it's fake Hebrew (and Gordon had a bee in his bonnet). The mystery is how it got in the mound. I somehow doubt that Emmert did it - if he planted a fake it would have been one that tended to prove the mound-builders were Cherokees, not Jews. The purpose seems to have been the opposite. But what exactly happened, we shall probably never know. This article by Chris Rollston is a fascinating study of what motivates forgers in these arcane areas.PiCo (talk) 01:17, 7 March 2013 (UTC)

Well thanks for sharing your opinions on this subject - but come on, do we all have to share the identical opinion? Or may we share different opinions? I may as well share mine as well then. My opinion is that the evidence of fraud is extraordinarily weak, he chirps about the 'string of letters' while ignoring that this particular string of letters is so common in Ancient Hebrew, you would practically expect to see it on most authentic inscriptions. The rarer and more unusual a sequence of letters is matched, the stronger indication of certain copying becomes; but inversely, the more common the sequence of letters, the more it weakens the evidence as anything meaningful, and that's what he ignores. It's comparable to finding the English string "...ing the ...", a very common string. Say an artifact 10,000 years from now has only the words "...ing the ...". That doesn't prove whoever found it necessarily forged it from the "Romancing the Stone" album cover on display in the local museum. Til Eulenspiegel /talk/ 02:07, 7 March 2013 (UTC)
PiCo -- This seems like an awful lot of detail for the lead section, particularly since it's all in the body. HuMcCulloch (talk) 02:17, 7 March 2013 (UTC)
I was trying to summarise the modern arguments - I don't mind if you revert, but see if you can reduce it further first. PiCo (talk) 07:13, 7 March 2013 (UTC)
I wouldn't revert it, but I'll try to pare it down some later today. You did a good job of just stating the various positions, without interjecting your own POV. HuMcCulloch (talk) 16:22, 7 March 2013 (UTC)
My "shortening" of the lead somehow added 42 bytes despite the fact that I took a lot of detail out! I did add mentions of Cyrus Thomas and the C-14 date, and expanded on M&K(2004) a little. — Preceding unsigned comment added by HuMcCulloch (talk • contribs) 05:27, 8 March 2013 (UTC)
Now I'm down 117 bytes from PiCo's version. This isn't much, but I think the information/byte ratio has increased. HuMcCulloch (talk) 14:39, 8 March 2013 (UTC)

Til -- Once again the POV-check tag you added 3/5 at 22:18, which appears as part of the lead, strikes me as overly general. If there are specific points you or others want to flag for their NPOV, they should be tagged individually. For the moment, the specific point you were objecting to is not even present. I'm inclined to remove the POV-check tag, but will wait to hear from you. HuMcCulloch (talk) 15:51, 8 March 2013 (UTC)

Sorry for not responding the first time, there's been too many other things going on all at once now! You said you would leave it to me to flag specific points and/or remove the generic tag. But actually I would rather leave it back to you again to tag any specific points if you see any, since I trust your judgement to identify any POV issues there may be left. And feel free to remove the generic tag too, if the specific issue seems to be resolved satisfactorily. I think that tag goes with a different version that keeps getting reverted to from time to time, but if that version gets reverted to any more, then of course the tag, or some tag, should return as well. Til Eulenspiegel /talk/ 16:57, 8 March 2013 (UTC)

POV tag still applicable

"Articles which cover controversial, disputed, or discounted ideas in detail should document (with reliable sources) the current level of their acceptance among the relevant academic community. If proper attribution cannot be found among reliable sources of an idea's standing, it should be assumed that the idea has not received consideration or acceptance; ideas should not be portrayed as accepted unless such claims can be documented in reliable sources." - The POV issues will not be considered addressed until the fringe/hoax-iness of the object is clearly covered by the end of the first paragraph although preferably the lead sentence. -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 01:52, 9 March 2013 (UTC)
Ironically, the POV-check tag originally posted by Til Eulenspiegel, but which he then allowed to be withdrawn, has now been restored by RedPen, so that this in effect is a new tag by RedPen, independent of the previous one. It is supposed to be discussed here in a section by itself, so I suggest that RedPen should up a new section for discussion of the new tag. (The above few paragraphs properly should have been in the earlier POV section that Til set up, but we got diverted.) HuMcCulloch (talk) 07:11, 9 March 2013 (UTC)
as you wish.
They are both much more experienced Wikipedians than you, you would do well to ask them actual questions rather than rhetorical ones seeking to advance your point of view. Guy (Help!) 22:09, 9 March 2013 (UTC)
I have added content to the lead "documenting (with reliable sources) the current level of their acceptance among the relevant academic community." and so I have also removed the POV tag. -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 19:54, 12 March 2013 (UTC)

Please note that RedPen has initiated a Conflict of Interest charge against me over at WP:Conflict of interest/Noticeboard, for recently reversing one of his edits. HuMcCulloch (talk) 18:53, 12 March 2013 (UTC)

They may have already noted it. It was announced in its own section at the time the discussion was opened: Talk:Bat_Creek_inscription#Conflict_of_interest_discussion. -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 19:12, 12 March 2013 (UTC)
Thanks, RedPen -- my oversight. HuMcCulloch (talk) 22:50, 12 March 2013 (UTC)

RedPen's Lead Section

In a series of posts on 3/12, 19:33-19:59, RedPen replaced the last sentence of the first paragraph of the lead section with the following: "The inscriptions were initially described as Cherokee, but in 2010, similarities to an inscription that was circulating in a Freemason book were discovered. Hoax expert Kenneth Feder says the peer reviewed work of Mary L. Kwas and Robert Mainfort has 'demolished' any claims of the stone's authenticity.[1] Mainfort and Kwas themselves state 'The Bat Creek stone is a fraud.'[2]" He also added the word "inaccurately" to Thomas's interpretation of the inscription as Cherokee in the second paragraph, and adds a footnote to the end of the third paragraph, attributing a quotation from McCarter (1993) to Mainfort and Kwas (1993). In one of the comment lines, he adds, "My concerns are now addressed." He had added this earlier, but I had cut it, so that we are now essentially back to where we were earlier.

As before, this addition duplicates material pertaining to Mainfort and Kwas (2004) that is already in the fourth paragraph of the lead section. There is no need to pack the entire story into the first paragraph. In fact, WP:lead calls for the first paragraph of the lead (out of as many as 4) to focus on bare facts like what, where, when, and who. It is therefore entirely unnecessary and counterproductive to add this material in the first paragraph.

RedPen starts off with the obvious error of placing Mainfort and Kwas (2004) in 2010. He evidently is conflating Mainfort and Kwas (2004) with Feder's 2010 Encyclopedia of Dubious Archaeology, even though these are in fact two separate sources, much as he had earlier repeatedly conflated Sequoyah (1821) with Cyrus Thomas (1894). He goes on to give Mainfort and Kwas (1993) as the source of a direct quote from McCarter (1993), even though the correct source is given in the body of the article. RedPen makes a point of emphasizing that M&K (1993) is peer-reviewed, but then gives as its bibliographical information as Doug Weller's archaeology website at www.ramtops.co.uk, rather than the journal Tennessee Anthropologist where it really was published, even though the correct bibliographical citation is in the Sources section.

RedPen goes on to add the word "incorrectly" to Thomas's identification of the letters as Cherokee, with a footnote to Feder (2010). While I am in full agreement (see McCulloch 1988) that the letters are not Cherokee, this is just Feder's and my opinion, and should not be asserted in the article as fact. RedPen qualifies Feder as a "hoax expert," but McKusick (The Davenport Conspiracy) has exactly the same qualification and should not be dismissed out of hand.

RedPen is obviously anxious to get M&K's 2004 assessment of the stone as a "fraud" into the lead section. This is already implicit in the fourth pargraph's summary of M&K(2004). However, I would have no objection if the last sentence of the fourth paragraph were modifed to read, "They conclude that the inscription is a fraud and that Emmert most likely copied the inscription from the Masonic illustration, ...." (proposed addition initalics).

RedPen also wants to include Feder's 2010 opinion of M&K's 2004 opinion of the stone. This is a bit much for the lead, though it could be appropriate for the final section of the article, where M&K 2004 is discussed, as an endorsement of their interpretation. I had added a reference to Feder 2010 earlier in a footnote, but Doug quickly deleted it.

If there is some endorsement from other editors (aside from Til, who usually agrees with me on these matters), I propose that we reverse RedPen's indicated changes to the lead, but with the indicated addition to the last sentence of the fourth paragraph, leaving it to RedPen to work Feder's 2010 endorsement of M&K 2004 into the last section. In particular, I would like to hear what Doug thinks of RedPen's changes. HuMcCulloch (talk) 03:41, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

Doug -- There has been no adjudication over on WP:Conflict of interest/Noticeboard of RedPen's COI complaint against me. Meanwhile, RedPen has made the changes I discuss above, and someone named "Stalwart111" has threatened me with Wikipedia's equivalent of a fatwa if I ever dare edit this page again. Should I just ignore this as an empty threat and make the changes I proposed above (and which no one has objected to), or can I expect some sort of resolution over there? I ask you since you are an Administrator and have long experience with Wikipedia proceedings. Thanks! HuMcCulloch (talk) 15:09, 17 March 2013 (UTC)
I've been trying to avoid all of this, but I guess I can't. Stalwart111 had made it clear that there's no fatwa, just a friendly warning. Resolution doesn't always happened at COIN. Could you start a new section here with your preferred lead? That would make it easier for me. Dougweller (talk) 09:43, 18 March 2013 (UTC)
Thanks, Doug. I'm in the middle of an interstate move right now, so it may be a few days before I can find the time. HuMcCulloch (talk) 11:20, 18 March 2013 (UTC)
You seem be be patently ignoring parts of WP:LEAD, except for your desire for "consise" which you wish to use to chop out or hide information. But to remind you yet again, "The first sentence should tell the nonspecialist reader what (or who) the subject is. ... If its subject is definable, then the first sentence should give a concise definition: where possible, one that puts the article in context for the nonspecialist. For topics notable for only one reason, this reason should usually be given in the first sentence. If the article is about a fictional character or place, say so." This article is about a faux artifact and that MUST be clear from the intro sentence. Additional information about its inauthenticity should then be expanded upon in more general manner in the rest of the lead. "summariz(ing) the most important points covered in an article in such a way that it can stand on its own as a concise version of the article. ..(With) emphasis given to material should reflect its relative importance to the subject, according to published reliable sources. "
I am open to wordsmithing and correcting content to reflect the sources, but I am not open to an introductory paragraph that does not reflect our MOS on lead and our policies on NPOV/UNDUE. Any opening paragraph that does not read as: It is a fake artifact. Claims have been made that it was A and B, but the scholarly consensus is that those claims were wrong. is not acceptable.
But, per HuMcCulloch's assertion that the first paragraph must only cover the "Who what where why when", for a fraud, the "Who what where why when" is the fact that it is a fraud.-- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 21:06, 18 March 2013 (UTC)
Red Pen, it seems you have made your mind up that it's a fake. However, not being content with that, you wish for wikipedia to endorse your decision as proven fact, to take an involved stand and declare the sources that call it a fake "right" and the others "wrong". I continue to object to this iverturning of wikipedia's cornerstone NPOV policy. There are more than one scholars on both sides of the question, and you have no right to play referee and determine on behalf of everybody else "who is right and who is wrong". It is an insult to everybody's intelligence. Clearly more RFCs are in order. Til Eulenspiegel /talk/ 21:32, 18 March 2013 (UTC)
WP:V WP:RS WP:UNDUE show me any peer reviewed content that suggests anything other than a fake, and we can include that as well. But based on the reliable sources' representation of the mainstream academic view, its a fake and we present it as such. and as you have been told numerous times, the NPOV policy does NOT mean represent all views neutrally. We present views in proportion that they are held by mainstream academia and we call out fringe theories as fringe theories and identify previously held views that are no longer accepted as being overturned by modern scholars. -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 21:35, 18 March 2013 (UTC)
Why, because you get to say who's mainstream and who's fringe in a controversy? None of those authors have proven a damn thing, and you certainly haven't proven a damn thing, it's all just a lot of hand waving, for real. And since YOU'RE the one who's been told numerous times this will be a neutral project and not one to push YOUR p.o.v. , and YOU still DIDNTHEARTHAT, I think YOU'RE the one beating the dead horse now. Til Eulenspiegel /talk/ 21:43, 18 March 2013 (UTC)
You obviously still have not read and / or understood WP:UNDUE / WP:RS / WP:FRINGE. I see no use in attempting to continue this discussion until you have. -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 21:47, 18 March 2013 (UTC)
Would it be helpful to say that "Feder asserts that Thomas inaccurately identified the characters" so that the voice is not Wikipedias? Theroadislong (talk) 22:27, 18 March 2013 (UTC)
If you balance out "more neutral" versus "less neutral", that would clearly be on the "more neutral" side, plus comply with WP:ATTRIB, but some here don't want "moreneutral", they want Feder 2010 to be declared the hands down winner in the debate (despite his not having proved anything at all) Til Eulenspiegel /talk/ 22:31, 18 March 2013 (UTC)
While I'm deeply flattered that RedPen and now IRWolfie both endorse my 1988 position that the inscription is not Cherokee, I am but a humble economist who can know nothing of these matters. Credentialed Archaeologist and Certified Hoax Buster Marshall McKusick (1979, 1994), on the other hand, insists that it is Cherokee. (Please read body of the article if you haven't already.) This is not Til's Original Research, but rather a validly and independently sourced opinion. There is no way my POV on this issue should be presented in Wikipedia's voice anywhere in the article. "Inaccurately" should go, per Til's edit.. HuMcCulloch (talk) 23:59, 18 March 2013 (UTC)
I don't endorse anything of yours, have not read anything you have written and have no intention to. My statement is based purely on the book of which you are not the author. Assessing it's reliability, and verifying cited text is the only thing I have done as is consistent with Wikipedia:No original research. IRWolfie- (talk) 01:07, 19 March 2013 (UTC)
IRWolfie, I must admit I stand in awe of your ignorance of the peer-reviewed literature of the topic on which you edit so confidently. HuMcCulloch (talk) 02:06, 19 March 2013 (UTC)
Ignorance is bliss; you are editing from the perspective of someone who "knows the truth", thus your edits reflect your own biases. I have no particular opinions as to whether the inscription is real or not, and I don't really care. We work from secondary and tertiary sources on wikipedia, and a summary of them dictates what we say. IRWolfie- (talk) 10:37, 19 March 2013 (UTC)
You have hit the nail on the head. That is my thought also.Theroadislong (talk) 10:48, 19 March 2013 (UTC)
No, I'm afraid you missed the nail by a country mile. This is one of those topics where you actually have to pay attention to know what is being talked about. The main reason is because the party of "scientists" who wave their arms all around and scream "FRINGE! FRINGE! nothing to see, look no further, please keep moving along" (it's their version of the 'scientific method!') actually have come full circle as new evidence comes out, and are now claiming the exact opposite of what they used to claim. A few short years ago, the "hoax busters" insisted the inscription WAS Cherokee, and tried their damned best to discourage any further inquiry. "It just simply IS Cherokee, that explains it, case closed, no further questions" was the line of all "hoax busters". Also: "Anyone who says these are Palaeo-Hebrew letters is clearly deluded with a mind full of ~FRINGE~, because we already TOLD you they are Cherokee".
This all changed a few years ago when one of the "hoax busters" revealed the Masonic book with some of the same letters. Now suddenly all of the hoax busters agree with what Gordon's been saying for years, that it represents Hebrew and not Cherokee after all, except they think they've got a smoking gun that shows it was forged from the Masonic inscription. What they don't want you to notice is that this hypothesis is held together with bandaids and chewing gum, mainly because any expert who looks at the rock and the Masonic inscription can immediately discern that they are A) not an exact copy B) the one sequence that does match, only happens to be one of the most common strings in Ancient Hebrew, LYHW- (comparable to finding a fragment "-ing the" in English as far as proving anything regarding copying) and C) Published studies have shown that where the rock letters and the Masonic letters do differ, it is because the rock letters are more authentic shape and better match for contemporary coin letters, than the Masonic ones. So not to belabor the point, but if the rock was copied from the Masonic book, that would still leave it to be explained how the forger ended up with something that was more authentic than the Masonic book.
Finally, if you will note, Hu does not think the letters are Cherokee, and that's not what I am saying either. It's just that our understanding of NPOV policy is that it doesn't matter what we as editors think, and as long as some of the sources and experts still want to think it's Cherokee, we are obliged to defend this POV by treating it neutrally, even though we don't share it. The attitude of some of the other editors toward NPOV on the other hand seems to be that they somehow KNOW the truth, and therefore anything else must be eradicated and not even mentioned, and readers must be TOLD what (according to these editors) the "TRUTH" is. Til Eulenspiegel /talk/ 12:37, 19 March 2013 (UTC)
We care only what the current academic consensus is and then place the previous beliefs in their order and then talk about the fringe theories. Period. Until you you can bring forth current academic sources showing anything otherwise, we are done discussing. -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 14:46, 19 March 2013 (UTC)

Proposed Lead revisions by HuMcCulloch

As requested by Dougweller in the previous talk section, here is my proposed lead section. It's basically the version of 3/9, 1:39, with concessions to RedPen as explained above, plus mention of Feder's 2010 opinion, relocated to the last paragraph which discusses M&K 2004:

The Bat Creek inscription (also called the Bat Creek stone or Bat Creek tablet) is an inscribed stone collected as part of a Native American burial mound excavation in Loudon County, Tennessee, in 1889 by the Smithsonian Bureau of Ethnology's Mound Survey, directed by entomologist Cyrus Thomas. The mound was located at the confluence of the Little Tennessee River and Bat Creek, in historical Overhill Cherokee territory a few miles north of modern Vonore.
Thomas himself identified the characters on the stone as "beyond question letters of the Cherokee alphabet," a writing system for the Cherokee language invented by Sequoyah in the early 19th century.[1] The stone became the subject of contention in 1970 when Semitist Cyrus H. Gordon proposed that the letters of inscription are Paleo-Hebrew of the 1st or 2nd century AD rather than Cherokee, and therefore evidence of pre-Columbian transatlantic contact.[2] According to Gordon, five of the eight letters could be read as "for Judea." Archaeologist Marshall McKusick countered that "Despite some difficulties, Cherokee script is a closer match to that on the tablet than the late-Canaanite proposed by Gordon,"[3] but gave no details.
In a 1988 article in Tennessee Anthropologist, economist J. Huston McCulloch compared the letters of the inscription to both Paleo-Hebrew and Cherokee and concluded that the fit as Paleo-Hebrew was substantially better than Cherokee. He also reported a radiocarbon date on associated wood fragments consistent with Gordon's dating of the script. In a 1991 reply, archaeologists Robert Mainfort and Mary Kwas, relying on a communication from Semitist Frank Moore Cross, concluded that the inscription is not genuine paleo-Hebrew but rather a 19th century forgery, with John W. Emmert, the Smithsonian agent who performed the excavation, the most likely responsible party. In a 1993 article in Biblical Archaeology Review, Semitist P. Kyle McCarter, Jr. stated that although the inscription "is not an authentic paleo-Hebrew inscription," it "clearly imitates one in certain features," and does contain "an intelligible sequence of five letters -- too much for coincidence." McCarter concluded, "It seems probable that we are dealing here not with a coincidental similarity but with a fraud."
Mainfort and Kwas published a further article in American Antiquity in 2004, reporting their discovery of an illustration in an 1870 Masonic reference book giving an artist's impression of how the Biblical phrase "holy to Yahweh" would have appeared in Paleo-Hebrew, which bears striking similarities to the Bat Creek inscription. They conclude that the inscription is a fraud and that Emmert most likely copied the inscription from the Masonic illustration, in order to please Thomas with an artifact that he would mistake for Cherokee. Hoax expert Kenneth Feder says that their work has "demolished" any claims of the stone's authenticity [Feder (2010: 39).]
(The last sentence of the first paragraph has been in the lead section since long before I became involved. RedPen wants to cut it, but it is factual "where" information that helps explain why Thomas would jump to the conclusion that it is Cherokee, so I favor keeping it. It used to be at the end of the lead section, along with another sentence about the 1970s salvage excavations which I cut as being too much detail for the lead. The first sentence of the proposed first paragraph, as originally written by PiCo, is a little run-on, but we can tinker with style later.) 76.232.35.218 (talk) 14:12, 19 March 2013 (UTC) (additions in italics) 76.232.35.218 (talk) 14:15, 19 March 2013 (UTC) (forgot to log in before sigging) HuMcCulloch (talk) 14:16, 19 March 2013 (UTC)

discussion on above proposal

Completely unacceptable. It fails numerous portions of WP:LEAD and WP:UNDUE. the lead sentence and the lead paragraph MUST identify the object as a hoax reflecting the current academic consensus. -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 14:43, 19 March 2013 (UTC)

It seems that your proposal, Red Pen, involves accepting you as the expert arbiter of which sources are acceptable and which sources are out to lunch, and it involves accepting your chosen sources as the authority that they themselves have the correct opinion, while those they are attacking are mistaken. All this in the absence of anything like conclusive proof one way or the other, only hypotheses. Til Eulenspiegel /talk/ 15:02, 19 March 2013 (UTC)
No, it involves accepting the sourced peer reviewed experts as experts and the lack of any academically published work to the contrary to be evidence that the peer reviewed work is accepted by the mainstream academics. It is up to you to show otherwise by providing academically published work showing otherwise. Your still seem not to have read or understood basic policies of WP:RS and WP:UNDUE. -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 17:33, 19 March 2013 (UTC)
Whoah, looking at our various sources in the article, it appears they are all "academically published". Is this some special rolling redefinition of "academically published" not found in any dictionary, but that Red Pen knows when he sees? Til Eulenspiegel /talk/ 17:43, 19 March 2013 (UTC)
RedPen, I think you've misunderstood the N in WP's policy of NPOV. In fact, it stands for Neutral, not Negative. It does not give you a license to put your own Negative POV anywhere in the article, let alone the first sentence of the lead section. I've accommodated you in my proposal by including the word "fraud" in the summary of M&K (2004), and even by including Feder's (2010) endorsement of M&K (2004) at the very end, thereby actually giving him the last word on the matter insofar as the lead section goes. HuMcCulloch (talk) 13:14, 21 March 2013 (UTC)
when "negative" is representative of the mainstream academic views, "negative" = "neutral" as far as our WP:NPOV policy is concerned. -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 13:28, 23 March 2013 (UTC)
I must find time (not today) to look at this. Hopefully now that Til has exploded (you probably missed his rather vicious attack on me and another Administrator on his talk page and the current discussion at WP:ANI it might be easier to have a serious conversation here without personal attacks. Dougweller (talk) 17:09, 21 March 2013 (UTC)

RedPen has removed Til's POV tag on the word "incorrectly" on Thomas's identification of the letters as Cherokee, with the explanation, "(there has been no evidence provided that there is any academic that doesnt believe that there is in fact significant doubt that the letters are beyond question Cherokee)". If RedPen had just read the remainder of the paragraph in question (instead of just Feder 2010 and M&K 1993 as seems to be the case), he or she would have discovered that veteran hoax-buster Marshall McKusick (1994) reaffirmed in BAR that it is Cherokee, as he had claimed in 1979, despite McCarter's 1993 statement there that it is clearly an imperfect (and therefore, according to McCarter, fraudulent) attempt to write Paleo-Hebrew. I think that most readers who compare the inscription to the Masonic illustration provided would conclude that McKusick is totally up a tree on that one, but WP should not decide that for them. HuMcCulloch (talk) 00:15, 23 March 2013 (UTC)

I think it is too long and detailed, as is the current lead - they aren't easy for a lay person to follow. I'm not convinced we need to mention any names in the lead. Two paragraphs are probably enough. I think the first sentence should include the word 'controversial' or some form of that to make it clear from the start there's a dispute. The second paragraph can briefly summarise the dispute. Somewhere in the lead we need to say that contemporary interested archaeologists consider it to be a fraud/hoax. Dougweller (talk) 12:27, 23 March 2013 (UTC)
As Dougweller says. The lead is a summary, and it doesn't need to mention every exchange between scholars. --Enric Naval (talk) 09:02, 24 March 2013 (UTC)
I agree with Doug that it is too detailed and doesn't need all the names. They were added by outside observer PiCo in a complete overhaul of the lead section after a protracted exchange between RedPen and myself, so I've been trying to adhere to PiCo's framework while shortening what he put together. Would something like the following be more like what you have in mind? (It's the version of 3/3, 13:06, minus its unnecessary last sentence.):
The Bat Creek inscription is a carved stone reportedly found in a Native American burial mound in Loudon County, Tennessee, by the Smithsonian Bureau of Ethnology's Mound Survey. The Mound Survey report identified the characters on the stone as "beyond question letters of the Cherokee alphabet" invented by Sequoyah in the early 19th century.[1]
In the early 1970s, the inscription became a source of controversy when linguist Cyrus Gordon argued it was actually a Paleo-Hebrew inscription, and thus provided evidence of Pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact.[2] However, a number of archaeologists and other experts reject Gordon's assertion, arguing instead that the inscription is a fraud typical of late-19th century archaeological hoaxes.
The stone was reported to have been found in 1889 by a burial mound survey team led by John W. Emmert of the Smithsonian Institution. The mound was located at the confluence of the Little Tennessee River and Bat Creek, in historical Overhill Cherokee territory a few miles north of modern Vonore. HuMcCulloch (talk) 04:46, 25 March 2013 (UTC)
Actually, shortly after this, RedPen in one of his first revisions added the useful synonyms Bat Creek stone and Bat Creek tablet to the first sentence, so this should stay in. — Preceding unsigned comment added by HuMcCulloch (talk • contribs) 04:51, 25 March 2013 (UTC) HuMcCulloch (talk) 04:54, 25 March 2013 (UTC)

Relocation and Smithsonian Statement

I've added a statement about the relocation of the stone from the McClung Museum to the Museum of the Cherokee Indian, per statements to me by Tim Baumann of McClung and Barbara Duncan of the Museum of the Cherokee. These facts are not controversial. I've also added the Smithsonian's new statement on the stone, citing an e-mail from Jake Homiak at the Smithsonian to Barbara Duncan that was widely circulated. Unfortunately, there is no press release to this effect on the Smithsonian's page at newsdesk.si.edu, but if someone could find one, that would be a better reference. The Smithsonian is basically now on record that the inscription is a Smithsonian hoax (!), and, following Mainfort and Kwas, that LYHWD and LYHWH are the same word (!). This is the same institution that assured the public it was genuine and Cherokee back in 1894. Perhaps this new statement will stimulate some more public discussion. In particular, does the Smithsonian now repudiate the entire Mound Survey, or just the substantial portion that was due to John Emmert? And if the latter, which sections and artifacts are now disavowed? HuMcCulloch (talk) 17:40, 25 March 2014 (UTC)

Photo from Masonic text

Can someone insert this image taken from the Masonic encyclopedia? Nice reference http://imgur.com/a/LO101 — Preceding unsigned comment added by Hippypink (talk • contribs) 08:42, 4 October 2016 (UTC)

McCulloch reply to Mainfort & Kwas in Pre-Columbiana now archived on Researchgate

I have now archived the published version of my reply to Mainfort & Kwas (2004) at Researchgate via

McCulloch, J. Huston. "The Bat Creek Stone Revisited: A Reply to Mainfort and Kwas in American Antiquity," Pre-Columbiana 5/6 (2011-2014): 142-153. archived

Pre-Columbiana is a small-circulation specialty geography journal edited by Stephen C. Jett, who is a retired professor of geography at U.C. Davis. The logical place for my reply to appear would have been American Antiquity, but it was rejected there as being "far outside the expertise and interests of the readership." Due to an illness, volumes 5-6, representing 2011-2014, were published together as a single issue. It did not actually come out until 2017.

The accepted MS was until recently referenced on the Bat Creek Inscription page, but it was expunged as unpublished by Doug Weller, on 31 May.

Should anyone want to include it (I shouldn't, since I'm the author), an appropriate place would be in the "Recent controversy" section, at the end of the paragraph on M&K 2004. Here's a very brief possible summary:

McCulloch (2014) replies that the word LYHWD (for Judea) on the Bat Creek stone could not have been copied verbatum from LYHWH (for Yahweh) in the Masonic illustration. HuMcCulloch (talk) 03:14, 20 August 2018 (UTC) (URL corrected) HuMcCulloch (talk) 11:28, 20 August 2018 (UTC)

That's not an accurate description of Pre-Columbiana. It's a diffusionist fringe journal run by by the Early Sites Research Society[1] specialising in " Pre-Columbian transoceanic contact between the old and new worlds". So far as I can tell it doesn't have peer review. I'm trying to get my website back up but will also try to get M&K to archive their material. Doug Weller talk 11:18, 20 August 2018 (UTC)
Pre-Columbiana certainly is not an orthodox anthropology journal that subscribes to the isolationist article of faith, expressed by Paul Pacheco in the Encyclopedia of Anthropology article cited above by PaleoNeonate, that the Smithsonian's authoritative Mound Survey settled once and for all that there were absolutely no contacts between the Old and New Worlds between the Ice Age and Columbus Erikson. But then professional geographers are not required to affirm that POV. You might be interested in Jett's 2017 book, Ancient Ocean Crossings: Reconsidering the Case for Contacts with the Pre-Columbian Americas (U. of Alabama Press).
The big commercial journal publishers are getting restless about their articles being distributed for free on Researchgate, Academia, etc. (See article on copyright compliance by Jamali in Scientometrics, a Springer journal, 2017, 112:241-54.) Tennessee Anthropologist has been moribund since 2000 and so has no current editor, but Charlie Faulker, who was the editor at UTK when our papers appeared, recently gave me his blessing to distribute my articles on the internet, so I'm sure he would say the same thing for Mainfort and Kwas.— Preceding unsigned comment added by HuMcCulloch (talk • contribs) 19:42, 20 August 2018 (UTC)
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