Hebrew Voices #195 – Ancient Hebrew in America?

You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

Nehemia: Shalom and welcome to Hebrew Voices in a joint episode with Mormon Book Reviews. Steven Pynakker is here with me hosting, and we are going to be speaking today to Scott Wolter. Hello Steven and hello Scott.

Scott: How are you doing?

Nehemia: I’m really excited! We’ll be talking about the Bat Creek inscription, which is a Paleo-Hebrew inscription that was discovered in a Smithsonian Institute archeological excavation in 1889. Steven, I’m going to hand it off to you now.

Steven: Okay. Well, welcome to Mormon Book Reviews, where an Evangelical encounters the Restoration. I’m your host, Steven Pynakker, and I’m honored and privileged to do this joint collaboration with Nehemia. By the way, Nehemia, it’s Pynakker!

Nehemia: Pynakker, okay!

Steven: I’m not calling you Nehemiah anymore!

Nehemia: I don’t mind you calling me Neheemiah, Nehemia. Just don’t call me baldy, that’s very sensitive!

Steven: Okay! So, I just want to welcome Scott onto the program as well, and I’m really excited to be doing this collaboration. And it’s really nice, because Nehemia, you’re an expert. You’re a scholar, and we’re both very interested in the subject of Mormonism. Of course, you’ve been doing this epic interview recently with my good friend Dan Vogel…

Nehemia: That was a seven plus hour interview, so we ended up breaking it up into multiple episodes. We’re about to broadcast the last episode.

Steven: That’s great, I love it! And I want people to check out Nehemia’s channel. For those of you who are interested in Mormon studies and history, it’s really a fascinating conversation that he’s having with Dan. And actually, it was my interview with Dan that kind of got you down that rabbit trail.

Nehemia: Absolutely.

Steven: It’s how we ended up becoming friends and collaborators. And I think to an audience, specifically to a Latter-Day Saint audience, who believe that the Book of Mormon is an ancient record of an ancient people that inhabited the American continent… And there’s this idea… people don’t realize, they think it’s just a story about one people. In the Book of Mormon there’s actually three transoceanic… I miss pronounced that, migrations to the New World. We had the Jaredites around the fall of the Tower of Babel, then we had what would become the Nephites and the Lamanites coming around 589 BC, and then we had the Mulekites also coming. So, in the Book of Mormon there’s three that are talked about.

So, if we find something, whether it is a relic that is from Book of Mormon times or not, it just makes the book more plausible that there have been groups throughout history that have been coming across.

And not only that, but my friend Hannah Stoddard of the Joseph Smith Foundation believes that the Nephites were also diffusing across the continent as well to the Old World. She believes specifically that the Dutch people are Nephites, so she thinks that I’m a Nephite.

So, it’s really interesting just to hear these stories. The Book of Mormon also talks about shipbuilding and sending things out away from the New World into the Old World, so it’s fascinating stuff. And honestly, I’m a big fan of our guest Scott, because you and the work that you’ve done with your show, America Unearthed on the History Channel… I’ve probably watched a vast majority of the episodes. And last night I got to reacquaint myself with your Bat Creek Stone episode that was ten years ago. I can’t believe it!

It’s amazing! I think it’s really fascinating because you’re not a Latter Day Saint, you don’t have skin in this game in that you have some kind of ideological reasoning about why you would want this to be a relic that might make the Book of Mormon plausible, or that this could be possibly from the lost ten tribes of Israel, one of those possibilities. You’re just open to the facts, studying the rocks and letting the rocks speak. So, I want to thank you.

Nehemia, why don’t you start off?

Nehemia: I appreciate you joining us, Scott. My perspective, and I’m sure there’s some LDS and Mormons who watch my program and listen to the program, but probably the majority of them are interested more generally in Hebrew studies, which is my background. My PhD is in biblical studies, and I deal with the manuscripts.

I actually examined the Bat Creek inscription. Not in the way that you did, but I got to see it for myself at the end of 2014. So, that was after the work that you had done.

Scott: Yeah, right after, yeah. Not long after.

Nehemia: Actually, then it was in this glass enclosure. It wasn’t on display. They brought me into the back room and opened up a box, but it was mounted by the Smithsonian Institute, they told me… This was at the Museum of the Cherokee Indian, where I saw it.

Scott: Yep, yep.

Nehemia: And it was mounted, it had glass on top and the bottom was like a mirror.

Scott: Yep.

Nehemia: So, you actually got to examine it directly without the intervening glass, which is pretty cool.

Scott: Yep.

Nehemia: This is a heavy lift of what we’re doing here. You’re claiming that there is a pre-Columbian Paleo-Hebrew inscription, or authentic inscription, whatever language it is. For most archaeologists it’s prima facie, just the starting assumption is this is a fake. So, let’s start with, what is the Bat Creek inscription? And then tell us why it’s not a fake.

Scott: Well, you know, I sent you guys a PDF of a PowerPoint that I put together and presented, actually, at a Masonic Red Room presentation several years ago. It was 2018, and I just went through it again, and it brought back all these interesting memories about that work.

But when I was doing America Unearthed, one of the things we were trying to do was find these different out of place artifacts and sites that we could investigate in a scientific manner and let the chips fall where they may. And the Bat Creek Stone was one that came up fairly early, and I remember reading about it, and I actually have a list of the Smithsonian reports going all the way back to the late 1800’s, and the 1894 volume is the Bat Creek report. It’s really interesting because, when you read it from the standpoint of an archeological context, we’re talking about something that was discovered by a professional, an agent with the Smithsonian Institution, who had no reason to question the veracity of this dig, certainly not at the time.

And what was interesting is, when you study the history of it, it wasn’t until the 1960’s when a Chicago patent attorney, a woman by the name of Henriette Mertz, took interest in the Bat Creek Stone. She went to the Smithsonian, she studied it… she actually turned it around because in the 1894 publication it’s displayed upside down if you want to read it as Paleo-Hebrew. And correct me or jump in if I make a mistake because I’m certainly not an expert on Hebrew or Paleo-Hebrew, but this is my understanding. So, once she turned it around, apparently, she thought she recognized what she thought were Pheonician characters. And then it was brought to the attention of Cyrus Gordon, who was a Semitic scholar, supposedly the top Semitic scholar around the time of 1970-71, and he published a report that said it wasn’t Paleo-Cherokee, as what they originally thought, and that it was actually Paleo-Hebrew. Of course, this caused a huge controversy. And what I find so interesting and disappointing, and I’ve experienced this many times, is that academics, immediately upon realizing something doesn’t fit the expected narrative, that nobody in the Old World was here before Chris Columbus in 1492, it has to be fake.

And so, the immediate reaction by academia and the Smithsonian was that the Bat Creek Stone was a fake. And they went a step further, and I think they really stepped in it, when they made the accusation that John Emmert, who had already been dead for who knows how long, was the perpetrator.

And as I began to understand the history of this artifact, it became more and more interesting, and I felt compelled that I wanted to get to the bottom of this story. And so, I dug in, and I didn’t just do it on America Unearthed, I actually did it before we did that episode, in real life.

And let me tell you, it was a journey to say the least because the Smithsonian Institute did everything they could to try to keep me from doing my examination. Because you’ve got to remember, I’m the guy that validated the Kensington Runestone. They came up with all kinds of names for me, but this is their technique, this is what they do. If they can’t attack the evidence, they attack the person.

So yeah, this is just one more example of academia trying to distort the real history of what happened here. And the Bat Creek Stone, in my opinion, is one of the “Mount Rushmore” of artifacts of pre-Columbian contact in North America.

I’m not sure where you want to go at this point.

Nehemia: Let me ask you a couple of follow up questions on what you just said.

Scott: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: Alright, so you talked about how the academics, or let’s say mainstream archeologists… I hope that’s not an offensive term, mainstream archeologists; that’s what they would consider themselves for sure. Maybe let’s even go back further than that. What is your background to study this artifact?

Scott: Okay.

Nehemia: Because basically the way you’re presented, if I’m understanding you and from what I’ve read, is you’re presented as someone who doesn’t have the credentials to study this, and you’re obviously not part of mainstream archeology by their definition of it. I think they call you a cult archeologist or something like that. You quote that…

Scott: Oh, that’s one of many names, okay.

Nehemia: What is that? I don’t even know what that means. But basically, that’s an ad hominem attack. I’m interested in the evidence, not…

Scott: Yeah.

Nehemia: But what are your qualifications?

Scott: Okay. Well, let me just tell you my background. I founded a laboratory in 1990 called American Petrographic Services, which is a sister company to American Engineering and Testing, and that’s when we started our operations. Basically, what I do is, in our laboratory we do material forensics, essentially autopsies, if you will, on concrete and rock. And so, the bulk of our business is looking at problematic concrete. If you place a slab and it cracks or it has low strength, or the top peels off, or there’s some kind of catastrophic failure, they will take samples of the concrete, send it to us in our lab; we will perform the “autopsy”, if you will. It’s called a petrographic analysis, and we will diagnose what caused the problem. And of course, at that point they want to know who’s responsible, who’s going to pay. So, we get involved in a lot of litigation, and I’ve testified as an expert witness many times.

But I work in the professional field. I’m a licensed geologist. It’s interesting, because when we start talking about the academic world, they come after me like I’m some type of donkey that has no qualifications for looking at these things. I’m a geologist, okay? I was formally trained in the scientific method. And I have to tell you, one of the things that I’ve concluded after all of this is that the people that are accusing me of not understanding scientific method are the ones that are the soft scientists, the social scientists which includes archeology, anthropology, history, language, runes, dialect and grammar. These are not hard science fields. And so, when I look at the work that has been done on these various artifacts by these academics in the past, it’s terrible! It’s not scientific, and basically, in my view, and I’m being a little bit hard on them, but essentially this is what I see in academia that I’ve worked with, they basically reach truth by consensus. In other words, they sit around and talk about it until they all agree.

Now, there may or may not be good hard scientific factual evidence to support the conclusion that they’ve drawn. In some cases, there is but, in many cases, there isn’t. The Bat Creek Stone is a good example of one that isn’t, from the standpoint of the conclusion they’ve reached that it’s not authentic.

Now, going back to my history. I was minding my own business, running my laboratory, doing my thing, until July of 2000, when a strange artifact… I was approached to study a strange artifact called the Kensington Runestone, something that I had never heard of before. I didn’t know what it was. Frankly I didn’t care, because in my business I can’t become personally involved in the projects that we work on.

So, I did a weathering study. I compared the weathering of tombstones of known age, the dates are right there, with the weathering of the Runestone. And I concluded that the weathering was older than 200 years, and that was from the date it was pulled out of the ground, because it hasn’t been in a weathering environment since, and that was 1898. So, if you go back 200 years from that standpoint, the claim of a late 19th century hoax is impossible.

So, what else do you have? There’s only one thing left; it must be genuine. And that’s what I wrote in my report. I published it and I thought, “Well good for them, they got one.” And I was ready to move on and continue on with my life.

But then the backlash came. And it was hard, it was brutal, and it was personal, and I just sort of went, “Wait a minute, people, let’s take a time out here.” I said, “Look, I’m a human being, I make mistakes. Point out where I screwed up in my report and I’ll fix it.”

I didn’t screw up in my report, they just didn’t like the results. Well tough hop; sometimes life doesn’t go your way. And it was confusing at first, and then it got personal, and then I got pissed. And so, what I decided was, I was going to try to get to the bottom of this. Why is it that these people, these academics that you would think would be thrilled to have this incredible artifact that I now know everything about… it’s 24 years later of course, but at the time, I’m like, what is it that bothers them so much? Why are they so adamantly against it?

So, what I decided to do was to dig deeper and look into the questions of, who carved it? Where did they come from? And why did they come here to North America, to the center of the continent, and place this long inscription carved in Scandinavian runes? And so, what I did was I trusted the rock. I trust rocks, I don’t trust some people. And I knew that if the geology… if the rock told me it was authentic, then everything in that inscription must be consistent with the 14th century, because it’s dated 1362.

So, starting in 2003 through to 2005, I took five trips to Scandinavia looking at the runes, the dialect, the grammar, the dating, and I found everything. And of course…

Nehemia: Let me back up. I don’t know anything about the Kensington Runestone.

Scott: Oh, okay!

Nehemia: My background is biblical studies and ancient Hebrew manuscripts. Where was the Kensington Runestone found? And you’re saying it’s from the 14th century?

Scott: Well, it was found in central Minnesota…

Nehemia: Okay.

Scott: … by a Swedish immigrant farmer who was clearing trees in preparation for farming. And there it is. It was pulled out of the ground; it was tightly wrapped in the roots of a tree. When they tipped the tree down the stone was pulled out of the ground, and they’ve been trying to figure out what this thing is ever since. Now, I don’t want to jump ahead and get into the details right now.

Nehemia: Let’s focus on the Hebrew stuff if we can.

Scott: Yeah. Well, the reason it’s important is because it dovetails with the Hebrew history of North America. Because the people that carved the Kensington Runestone were the ideological and biological descendants of the Knights Templar.

Nehemia: The Knights Templar?

Scott: Yeah. And I’m not kidding. And just in the interest of full disclosure, I am a Freemason. I am also a Knights Templar. I’m a member of three different orders; some are Masonic, some are not Masonic.

Nehemia: Is that what that ring is on your hand? Does that have something to do with that?

Scott: Yeah.

Nehemia: What is that ring? I’ve never seen that before.

Scott: This is just a cheap ring of the one version of the Templar Cross. We have different versions that appear at different times throughout history, and I’m not going to get into all those details.

Nehemia: I know very little about the Freemasons or Knight Templar, and we probably don’t want to go into that too much. But is part of their ideology, or one of those groups’ ideologies, is that there was pre-Columbian contact with the New World?

Scott: Absolutely.

Nehemia: Okay.

Scott: At some point, when you understand the depth of the research I’ve done, the books that I’ve published, and the books I’m going to publish about this subject matter, you are going to be all over it, my friend, as a Hebrew scholar.

Nehemia: I want to identify this. So, one of the criticisms against you is going to be, and this is completely an ad hominem attack…

Scott: Fire away, brother!

Nehemia: Oh, I’m not making it.

Scott: I’m okay, it’s okay.

Nehemia: Rather than attacking the evidence, you attack the person. I just did a seven-plus hour interview with Dan Vogel, who is one of the great historians of early Mormon history, and he’s accused by… particularly by Mormon apologists, not so much Mormon scholars, that, “Well, you’re saying that because you’re not a Mormon.” Well, his point is, “I just looked at the evidence. I just want to know what happened and this is what I found.”

So, the ad hominem attack, guys, look it up, is considered a logical fallacy. It’s a way of not dealing with the evidence. I just want to put that out there because the attack is going to be, “Well, of course he says that; he is a Freemason,” or “a Knights Templar.” Which one of those groups believes in the pre-Columbian contact? Is it both groups? Because I literally know very little about it.

Scott: First of all, let me put that into context. I did not become a Freemason until November of 2015. I wasn’t knighted in the first order that I was in until May of 2016. I joined the Freemasons, I became a Freemason, I was initiated into Templarism because of the research, because of what I found.

And so, I did that because I wanted to learn more. I wanted to become initiated and understand allegory, symbolism, and code because that’s what was turning up in the research, and I wanted to further understand it. And it was the best thing I could have ever done, because it added additional context to a lot of the stuff that I already knew and really opened doors to new avenues of knowledge and understanding that I didn’t even know were there.

Nehemia: So, this is a really important thing I want to emphasize, because what you just said is that you became a Freemason as a result of this research, not, “I believe this because I’m a Freemason. Let’s go prove my pre-existing preconceptions.”

Scott: Exactly.

Nehemia: And now in the terms of the Book of Mormon, you’re part of a secret combination. Am I right about that?

Scott: Well, let’s put it this way! I don’t know how far we want to get into the Mormon history.

Nehemia: Let’s focus on Hebrew stuff. The Kensington Runestone; the academics said it couldn’t be real, and you’re saying it is because of weathering. Can we pull up your PowerPoint that you sent us? And maybe you can go through that.

Scott: You mean Bat Creek?

Nehemia: Yeah, and Bat Creek. Because Bat Creek is what I’m interested in.

Scott: Yeah, okay, well…

Nehemia: You have a Paleo-Hebrew inscription was found…

Scott: First off, let me share the screen. I’ll hit that.

Nehemia: And maybe you’ll say this, but I want to say it from my perspective; there’s a lot of Hebrew inscriptions that were found in America, but they’re all pretty much surface finds or they were dug up by someone who wasn’t an archeologist. Bat Creek is the one that actually came from an archeological excavation.

Scott: Correct.

Nehemia: So, if it’s not authentic, that’s because it’s an intentional hoax by somebody who was working for the Smithsonian Institute.

Scott: Yeah! Well, it’s funny; if you go on my blog, this is going back to the time that we did this work, and I put out a blog after the episode. The Smithsonian, for the one and only time, actually went on my blog and made a statement about the Bat Creek Stone, saying that it was a fake, and John Emmert, the Smithsonian Institution agent that conducted the dig, was the one that perpetrated it.

Now, this might be a little bit early to go into that, but I don’t think people quite understand, so I’m not quite sure how you want to go through this.

Nehemia: Well, actually, if you could click that little X where it says, “Try it now” so we don’t have to advertise for Adobe.

Scott: Let’s see, where is it?

Nehemia: There’s a little X there in the upper right. Not the main X, but the second X. Go down a little bit and to your right. A little bit more down to your right where it says, “Try it now”.

Scott: Oh, you guys, I’ve got to move you over here. You’re covering things.

Nehemia: Okay.

Scott: Okay, that X right there?

Nehemia: Yeah, click that. And is there a full-screen button on this version of Adobe? Do you know about that? This is fine. So, I’m going to turn this over to you, and you tell us… because you’ve got here… Look guys, this is really valuable. You could say this whole thing is a hoax and it’s a fake or whatever you want to say, but here we have the man who is, I think, making the strongest claim for authenticity and is willing to spend time with us and present his best evidence.

I’ve read a bunch of articles on this, and I can see from your PowerPoint that there’s stuff that isn’t in those articles. So, in Judaism, we say there’s the Written Law and the Oral Law. You’re about to share the Oral Law with us.

Scott: Okay.

Nehemia: I’m excited… I’m going to let you talk. I’ll probably jump in, because I’m Israeli and that’s what we do, but go ahead.

Scott: Pardon me, I’ll take you through this, and I’ll try to keep it short…

Nehemia: Don’t keep it short, give us all the details. That’s what we want.

Scott: Alright! You asked, you got it brother! So, when you look at this inscription… and before I get started, I want to ask you a question. Being a Hebrew scholar, is this Paleo-Hebrew? What is this text?

Nehemia: Obviously it’s Paleo-Hebrew.

Scott: Okay.

Nehemia: Look, now Mertz, I think it was Mertz…

Scott: Henrietta Mertz.

Nehemia: …who said it was Phoenician. The difference between Phoenician and Paleo-Hebrew, that’s what doctors call a differential diagnosis.

Scott: Okay, alright.

Nehemia: Like, in this case you would have to say, “According to Cyrus Gordon, who is the great scholar of Ugaritic, but that includes Semitic languages, what makes this Hebrew and not Phoenician is the mater lectionis, which is basically a letter that functions as a vowel, Vav, in the inscription.

Now, I’m not saying whether it’s real or whether it’s fake, but whether it’s real Phoenician or fake Phoenician or real Hebrew or fake Hebrew, it’s clearly Paleo-Hebrew and not Phoenician based on the mater lectionis.

Scott: Okay.

Nehemia: And that’s a pretty definitive argument, I think, that he brings. So yes, it’s Paleo-Hebrew. Whether it’s authentic Paleo-Hebrew, that’s a separate question. And that’s an archeological question.

Scott: Yeah. I will talk about the archeology here in a second, but I just want to come out and state categorically; this is an ancient inscription. Exactly how old it is, we’ll talk about that too. But this is not a fake. This is not modern, this is old. You can take that for what you will.

Now, just to give you an idea, this is a drawing that was done by John Emmert in 1889 of Mound #3 of the Bat Creek complex that was found on… I can’t remember the river name, but I’ve been to the site.

Nehemia: On the Little Tennessee River.

Scott: Little Tennessee, that’s right!

Nehemia: And I know that from reading other people’s stuff. I’ve never been there.

Scott: I have been there, and it’s underwater now, but you can get pretty close to where it was. They backed up the Little Tennessee with a reservoir, and so this is now underwater. But this is what he found. There were seven bodies that were aligned with their heads… let’s see, yeah, seven, with their heads to the north, and in the southwest quadrant we had two more bodies, one with the head to the north, and the ninth body, or in this case the first body, with its head to the south.

Now, I’ve read some things in the past about the Essenic tradition. Are you familiar with the Essenes? You must be.

Nehemia: I am, yes.

Scott: Okay. Is it true that their tradition is that they bury their dead with their heads to the south?

Nehemia: That’s a bit complicated, because there are… I don’t want to go too much into this, but there are cemeteries adjacent to Qumran, which is the main site that we have that we attribute to the Essenes, and it’s not entirely certain which of those graves were from Bedouin in the 12th century, let’s say, or maybe more recently, and which there were by the Essenes. So, it’s a bit complicated.

Scott: Okay. In any case, that was something I remember hearing or read back in the day, but I wanted to ask you about that. Anyway, these are the bodies, and it was under the skull of the one with its head to the south that they found the sacred bundle that contained the Bat Creek artifacts.

Now, this is an interesting quote from the report that I devoured in the Smithsonian publications report that was published in 1894, but this is what he wrote in his field notes: “In the one with nine, a large pair of copper bracelets and a polished stone with letters or characters cut on it unlike anything I have ever seen.” And I thought it was interesting that he used the words “polished stone”, and that is an interesting fact that he interpreted the surface of the stone as having been polished, presumably after the inscription was carved.

Now, there’s something from a geological standpoint that’s very important about this drawing. If you look in the lower right corner, right down here… let me see, where’s my mouse? Right down here, this area.

Nehemia: Yep.

Scott: You don’t see anything.

Nehemia: Right.

Scott: Now, this is a photograph that was taken and published in 1894. And Cyrus Thomas was in charge of the Bureau of Ethnology’s reports, and you’ll see in that lower right quadrant there is nothing there. Okay? That will become important in a second.

And here’s Henriette Mertz. In her book, The Wine Dark Sea, you see that she has her interpretation. When she flipped the stone around, she thought she saw some Phoenician characters.

And then eventually it was brought to the attention of Cyrus Gordon, and he published in Argosy Magazine that it was actually Paleo-Hebrew. Now, what I want to point out, this is the stone after it’s been turned 180 degrees, and you’ll notice that lower right quadrant that had nothing on there before, when it was found, when it was pulled out of the ground, has since… two scratches have been added to the stone. Now, we don’t know when this happened, but it had to have happened when it was in the custody of the Smithsonian Institution. So, I’m going to put that on them, okay? But somebody added these scratches sometime after the stone was found. Are you in agreement with that?

Steven: Yes.

Nehemia: It’s not in the photo from 1894, or sometime between 1889 and 1894, so yeah, it seems to… And look, this happens in museums and libraries. Damage happens. So, that’s actually really important. By the way guys, in my study of Hebrew manuscripts this is huge, because you may have a really bad grainy photo from the 1920’s and then you compare it to the manuscript today, and I’ve seen this, where there are parts of the manuscript that are no longer there. And you think, “Oh, that’s how it was preserved through the Middle Ages.” No, that was lost in the last hundred years!

Scott: Yeah exactly, exactly!

Nehemia: So, that definitely happens.

Scott: My interpretation of these scratches is that they were test scratches, maybe just to see what it would take to carve an inscription like this. It’s a relatively soft rock; it’s an ironstone concretion. And one of the reasons I went to the site was to see if the local geology was consistent with this stone, because one of the questions I often get from people when I look at artifacts like this is, “The stone that it was carved in, is it indigenous to the area? Did it come from the Old World? Is it from the New World?” And in this particular case, these ironstone concretions in the sedimentary rock are quite common in the area of the Little Tennessee River where Mound #3 was, so presumably this stone was from the local area. And it may or may not be important, but it’s a conclusion that I drew.

Okay, moving on.

Nehemia: Can you explain before you go on… could you go back to that picture? What is an ironstone concretion? I know very little about geology.

Scott: Basically, it’s a sedimentary rock that is comprised of essentially sandstone or mudstone that contains iron oxide in it; iron. And what happens is, as it weathers in the ground it will form a crust, or a rind, if you will, a coating around the surface of the stone. Now, when we look at later photographs, this will make more sense to you. I’m just telling you now, the geology of the stone is the first thing that we need to do anytime we look at any stones, because then you can get some idea of how it’s going to weather. What’s going to happen to that rock over geological time?

Steven: Scott, I just have a quick question. These other items that are in the photograph…

Scott: Yes, I was going to address those.

Steven: Okay, like the bracelets. These were also found with it, is that correct?

Scott: They were all found within the bundle. So, by association, when you do Carbon-14 dating on anything organic… there are particles of wood, there’s a bone all there; that’s between the two bracelets. Anytime you date something that is found together with something else, by association, whatever the age of that organic material is, the rest of the stuff is the same age. Does that make sense? Because it was all found together.

Nehemia: It actually doesn’t really make sense to me, but that’s a bigger issue. In other words, this is something that they’ll do in prehistoric sites, in particular. They’ll take a stalagmite, and they’ll do some sort of radiometric dating on that, and they’ll say, “Well, the bones that were found next to it were 100,000 years old…”

Scott: No, that’s different. It’s a different context situation.

Nehemia: Oh, for sure, but…

Scott: What you’ve got here is a burial that had a bundle that was placed under the skull that was placed there at the time of the burial. Unless you can prove there was intrusion and that it was added later, which John Emmert did not document. So, I think we have to take it at face value that this bundle, that contained all these artifacts, were placed there at the time of burial. We have no reason to believe otherwise. So, everything in that bundle was placed there at the same time.

Nehemia: But Carbon-14 tells you when the tree died, or when the bone died. And we don’t have to go too much into this but…

Scott: Well, no, you make a good point, because, could it be that the artifacts that were found under that bundle are actually older than…

Nehemia: They could be from different periods. I’m not saying I believe this, but the piece of wood could have been 500 years old, from when the bones died. Whenever it was, I don’t know. And then maybe the stone was 1,000 years old when the person died, that it was a relic that was handed down father to son through his family. So, you can’t date the stone directly, not using Carbon-14, because it doesn’t have organic material, so you’re making some assumptions there. But let’s not get bogged down by that. I’ll let you…

Scott: No, you make a good point that there are other possibilities. However, there’s an archeological term that I’ve heard tossed about. The most parsimonious explanation, the likelihood, the most plausible explanation, is that these things all came from roughly the same time, which would be close to the time of burial. Now is it possible? Sure, it’s possible these things could be much older, but unless you can provide factual evidence to support that argument, you really have to, I think, go with the most parsimonious or most likely explanation is that they were…

Nehemia: And parsimonious means something like cheap, thrifty, am I right about that?

Scott: I don’t know who thrifty is. Who’s that?

Nehemia: No, thrifty, like, I Googled it. It’s “excessively unwilling to spend”, parsimonious, thrift, is their example. Stingy is another word for it. So, in other words, the simplest explanation without introducing a whole bunch of different assumptions is that it’s from the same date as the things found in the context of it. I know archeologists say that, but it’s a bit lazy, but okay.

Scott: Well, I happen to agree with that. Unless you have evidence to go somewhere else, I think you have to go with what you’ve found, and it was in that burial mound. There was no evidence of intrusion, so it dates to that time period, or older.

Nehemia: Do we have Carbon-14 tests on the wood?

Scott: We’ll get there. Yes, there was.

Okay, now, this was a guest I had on my show. That’s Dr. Hugh McCulloch, who was actually a professor of economics at Ohio State University. This was a picture we took while we were filming, but he was the one in… I believe it was late 1970’s, early 1980’s, you’ll have to look it up, I don’t recall. But he was the one that initiated a testing program on the Bat Creek artifacts. And one of the things they did was they tested some of the wood that was found inside the bundle. And as I recall, I think they got a date of… yes, the polished… Sorry about that, the barking is of a dog next door. We’ll just have to work with it.

Nehemia: We are dog people… I am a dog person. I love dogs.

Scott: I love dogs too, but when I’m trying to do a Zoom call…

Nehemia: Right.

Scott: But if you look at the top of this slide, you’ll see that the C-14 testing yielded dates between 32 AD to 769 AD. Regardless, it’s old!

Nehemia: Wait a minute, wait a minute. Did each one have that range or among them?

Scott: No, that was the test result. That was the range. Now, this was done in 1987.

Nehemia: I’m pretty sure that’s… well, I’m not an expert in Carbon-14, but my understanding is if you have a range… what is that range? I’m bad at math but that’s…

Steven: About 730 years.

Nehemia: What’s that?

Steven: About 730 years.

Nehemia: Right, but we have to look at for Carbon-14 if I understand, and if some Carbon-14 expert can correct me in the comments, but I believe if you have such a large range that’s basically saying it’s inconclusive and doesn’t say anything. I mean, I could be wrong about that. So, in other words, it’s about 1,300 years ago, with a 700-year range. So, 700 divided by 1,300 is a 50% margin of error. That basically means something was wrong with our sample or our test.

Scott: No, no, it doesn’t. Because this was technology that dates to 1987. If we had those samples and tested them again today, I’m sure we would get a much tighter range. And I think that’s work that needs to be done. In any case, I think we can reliably say that this is not a modern forgery; that this thing is at least a thousand years old, and probably much older.

Nehemia: So, you’ve got a Carbon-14 test here, it has a 730-something year range…

Scott: Anyway, again, by association, if the wood dates to that period, then all the other artifacts date to that period, or older. So, that would be the conclusion that I would draw.

Now, the copper bracelets are also very interesting, because they weren’t copper. They were tested and they turned out to be brass. And if you look below, you can see the test data for the elemental composition of copper and zinc, which is what brass is primarily comprised of, and in this case about a little over 3% lead.

But what’s really interesting is, if you look over on the far right, a 1st century Egyptian statue that was made out of brass has a very similar composition. So, the suggestion is that maybe this was Old World brass works that was done here, presumably in the New World, or they were brass bracelets that were brought over from the Old World. You can speculate all you want, but the presumption, for a long time, was that they were copper, and it turns out they’re not copper. They have been metal-worked. So, there was actually a forge that was used to create this alloy of brass. And that begs some very interesting questions; where did that come from? Native Americans were not believed to have understood metallurgy, so could it have been somebody that came from the Old World? I mean, all these things are pointing to an explanation that doesn’t fit with what archeologists are saying is Native American.

Steven: So, it’s really interesting, because from my understanding, and correct me if I’m wrong here, Scott, but my understanding is that they can’t date metals, but they can tell you their origin. Now, of course there was copper mining going on in the upper peninsula of Michigan that we know was ancient. Do you know if they’ve done any tests that they’ve been able to find out the… Could we go and retest them to see if we can know the origin of where these metals were mined?

Scott: I think you can, yeah. What you’re talking about is trace element analysis, in which you can actually fingerprint the site, the origin, if you will, of where that particular metal came from. And yes, you can do that with upper peninsula, Lake Superior region copper. And I live in Minnesota. I went to school in Duluth, in northern Minnesota. I actually worked as a field geologist after I graduated, in northern Minnesota, so I understand the copper deposits very well, and they’re very extensive. And so, yes, they do contain trace element signature that is unique to the location, so yeah, you can source these things. And nowadays we can do it pretty reliably.

Look, there’s all kinds of testing that should be done on these artifacts, and getting the Smithsonian to cooperate is the issue, but we’ll get to that question here in a little bit. Are we ready to move on from this?

Nehemia: No, I have a question about that.

Scott: Yeah?

Nehemia: So, what Steven is describing would only work… in other words, if you took some kind of ore and you made it into a bracelet without adding lead or adding zinc, then that would work. But if you took copper and if you added… and they didn’t have zinc isolated until the 17th century, but they had zinc that was naturally occurring in different ores.

Scott: Well, this suggests otherwise.

Nehemia: That what?

Scott: Well, that zinc was understood, and that it appears…

Nehemia: Are you saying that the ancient Egyptians understood zinc?

Scott: Well, what I’m saying…

Nehemia: The 1st century Egyptians?

Scott: Hold on. What I’m saying is, this data suggests that people did understand how to work with copper and zinc to make brass.

Nehemia: Right, but you might have had some ore that you took from a mine, let’s say in 1st century Egypt, and you didn’t know what the elements were because you didn’t know there were 92 naturally occurring elements. You knew that the ore from this particular mine had these properties and the ore from a different mine had other properties, and maybe you were able to somehow refine it, but you weren’t isolating zinc, if I understand correctly. You might have been isolating copper actually, but you didn’t know that 31% of the 1st century Egyptian statue, according to what you said here, is not copper. They didn’t know what that 31% was, they knew though that there was this… we would call it a mineral, that had certain properties, and when you mix that with pure copper you get…

So, here’s an important point. In the ancient world there is no intentional brass, there’s only bronze, which is where you take pure copper, and you’ll correct me here; from my understanding is you took pure copper, and you mixed in with pure tin. And if you ended up with brass it was kind of by accident, because they didn’t know what zinc was. They knew what lead was for sure. So, am I wrong about that?

Scott: Let’s just say I strongly disagree.

Nehemia: Okay.

Scott: I think what we do is we make assumptions about what the ancients did and did not understand, and I think we’d be making a huge mistake to underestimate them.

Nehemia: So, my assumptions in this case… 100% I’m making assumptions, but it’s based on what’s written by Pliny the Elder, who died in the Vesuvius. He wrote a book called The Natural History, and Dioscorides, who was sort of like a doctor in the 1st century, and they both talk about different ores and things like that, and minerals, and they don’t seem aware of zinc. They don’t even fully understand the minerals they have, that actually might have the same elemental composition, but they have… I’m probably mispronouncing this word; cations. In other words, you have minerals that end up with the same elemental composition but maybe have different acidity, or different pH, or they’re made under different conditions, so they end up having different properties. They knew about the properties. They didn’t have a machine to determine what the elemental composition was.

Scott: Well, they made…

Nehemia: How did you determine it was 27.5% zinc, or, whoever did that? How did they find that out? They used X-ray fluorescence? Or maybe a synchrotron?

Scott: Like I said, this is the data that was presented by Hugh McCulloch. He was the one that initiated this testing program, and these were the results. So, I’m interpreting these results. If we want to talk about what the ancients knew and didn’t know, I’m sure they didn’t call whatever that particular mineral was that was working for them to make this, what we now call brass, maybe they called it something else.

Nehemia: In the Bible, for example, there’s reference to “yellow copper”, which is probably what we call brass.

Scott: Right, right.

Nehemia: Because bronze has more of a red hue.

Scott: In any case, this is the data. And I think the point that’s most important is that it was a surprise that this clearly indicates that these bracelets were manufactured using a metallurgical process, and not just taking natural copper and pounding it into bracelets. We have evidence that the same thing was taking place in the Old World, in this case in Egypt, so I just find that very compelling. The data, if you look at the numbers, statistically they’re right on.

Nehemia: I’m going to go ahead here and quote from an article by Mainfort and Kwas, who, I know have been some, at least in the archeological word, your critics. And you can respond and tell me why they’re wrong or…

Scott: Well, in my view, their work is terrible. They were a hit job that was hired by the Smithsonian to try to put down any talk that these things are connected to ancient Hebrews and pre-Columbian contact. So, I don’t respect anything that they’ve done.

Nehemia: Okay. So, just as they accuse you of being a… what was the term? A cult archeologist, or something like that, you’re accusing them of having…

Scott: Let’s not talk about who I am, let’s talk about the data.

Nehemia: And I agree with that, but you’re talking about…

Scott: Let’s stop calling people names and let’s get after it. I mean…

Nehemia: I’m going to quote what they said on page 767 of their article from 2004. And I don’t know if this is correct or not, I’m asking you.

Scott: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, they said, “The brass bracelets appear to be of European origin dating to the 18th or early 19th century.” And I love that they quote their own previous article from 1991 as proof of that. Which I would need…

Scott: What evidence do they have that it’s 18th, 19th century?

Nehemia: Yeah, so I’d have to pull up the 1991 article.

Scott: They don’t have any.

Nehemia: Well, what’s your response? So, they have no evidence, they’re just making that assertion?

Scott: Of course they are. Because this thing can’t be old, and they were hired guns, and it’s just BS. It’s not scientific, and frankly, to give it any oxygen is a waste of time.

Nehemia: But everyone’s one Google click away from this, so we’re going to present this and someone’s going to say, “This was already disproved by Mainfort and Kwas.”

Scott: No, it’s not proven. Show us the evidence.

Nehemia: So, you’re saying it was asserted and not proven.

Scott: Exactly, exactly.

Nehemia: Okay, okay. Alright. And by the way, I’ve invited them to come on the program, and they haven’t responded yet.

Scott: They won’t, they won’t.

Nehemia: Maybe they will after they see this, I’d love to hear their perspective.

Scott: Okay. So, in any case, what happened next was, I made a plea to the Smithsonian Institution to have access to the Bat Creek Stone, and they denied my request. So, I thought, how else can I possibly get assistance to get this artifact?

Well, the fact that it came out of what is now determined to be a Cherokee burial mound, I decided to approach the Eastern Band of Cherokee and their Tribal Council to make a formal request to get their help. And this is a picture of myself, on the far right is Leslie Kalen, her maiden name is Rose, and standing between us is her father Donald Rose and another member of the Tribal Council on the left, I forget his name right now, I apologize for that. But this is at the Tribal Council, and I had talked to Leslie about, “How do I make a request to get help from your tribe?” And she said, “I’ll help you set it up, and you make a formal request, and we’ll see what happens.” So, this was the day we did that. I made the formal request, and they chose to support me. And they wrote a letter and asked the Smithsonian to make the stone available. Now, the Smithsonian would not send the artifact to my lab, so I took my lab to them. And we went to the McClung Museum…

Nehemia: Where’s that?

Scott: It’s in Knoxville. It’s at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. The McClung Museum is on campus there. And so, here I am setting up my microscope. I shipped all this stuff out, I paid for it all, and I’m getting ready to examine the stone. You see I’ve got the gloves on, and I’ve got the stone.

But I do have to tell you a quick story because this was interesting. When I was getting set up… these are the archeologists, and I think the head of the museum was standing in the middle. I can’t remember his name now but anyway, there were three representatives that came from the Eastern Band, and here they are, three women. Sharon Littlejohn on the left, Barbara Duncan in the middle, who is an actual professional archeologist, and then there’s Leslie Kalen, who was representing Don Rose, who was then the chief of the Eastern Band of Cherokee at the time. So, they’re holding the Bat Creek Stone.

But if you look at this photograph… I had Leslie take this picture, because these three clowns were standing on that side of the room, the women that were representing the tribe were on the other side of the room and I was in the middle. And I remember, I looked at these three people and I said, “Really, people? You’re going to do this?” I said, “This is Barbara Duncan, this is Sharon, this is Leslie. Come over and introduce yourselves.” The tension in the room was just palpable. This is the environment that we’re dealing with. They did not want us there.

Steven: Where were these people from? What group were they with?

Scott: They were with the museum, the McClung Museum.

Steven: Okay, they…

Scott: The director is in the middle.

Nehemia: Do you know their names?

Scott: I can’t remember, but I can probably find them if I look.

Nehemia: You’re saying they’re archeologists?

Scott: Yeah, they were archeologists.

Nehemia: Okay.

Scott: Yeah.

Nehemia: Can I put something out there? I want to let you talk, but… So, one of the reasons I think… and let’s just put the cards on the table. One of the reasons I think a lot of mainstream archeologists are so opposed to this has to do with what’s called the Mound Builder Myth, which I’m sure you’re aware of. It was this idea that… and here’s it’s interesting that the Cherokee are here. So, the Mound Builder Myth was this idea in the 19th century that the Native Americans, what they called Indians back then, weren’t sophisticated enough to make all of these mounds east of the Mississippi. So, there must have been this white race that the Native Americans wiped out, and they were the ones who built the mounds. And then you have all these artifacts pop up, seemingly confirming that there were Europeans before Columbus came over, let’s say before the Vikings, and that was brought as confirmation of the Mound Builder Myth. But by the end of the 19th century the Mound Builder Myth had been completely rejected, some would say discredited. It was rejected by mainstream archeology.

And so, I think maybe there’s… I wonder if… I’m thinking out loud here, I wonder if they’re protective of the Native Americans, thinking that there’s this racist undertone to the Mound Builder Myth. And look, I’m not part of American archeology, that’s not where I come from. To me, I’d just like to know. Nobody has a problem, I think, saying that there were Polynesians who made it to Chile. I don’t know if it’s correct or not, but it wouldn’t be a controversial thing. But saying that the Europeans who made it to the New World before, let’s say, the Vikings for sure, because Columbus wasn’t the first. There’s a site in Newfoundland that I can’t pronounce, something Meadows.

Scott: L’Anse aux Meadows.

Nehemia: Exactly, the French name there. So, there were people before Columbus, the Vikings in Vinland, or whatever. I wonder if they’re defensive to say, “Well no, the mounds were built by the ancestors of the Native Americans. We don’t need to introduce Europeans to explain them.” Do you think there’s something to that?

Scott: Well, I think the whole notion that the indigenous people were not sophisticated enough to create these complex mounds that have connection to the heavens, and “as above, so below” and all that, that’s nonsense. Of course they had the ability and the knowledge and the cosmology, there’s no question about it. In fact, if you just give me one second, I’m going to show you a brand-new book that was just published that deals with this exact subject matter. Hold on.

Steven: This is great.

Scott: Hold on.

Nehemia: I’m just putting this out for people, Cahokia Mound. I’m from Illinois originally.

Steven: Oh, yeah!

Nehemia: Cahokia is an astounding work of engineering.

Steven: Yeah.

Nehemia: And how do we know the Native Americans had the technology to do it? Because it’s there.

Steven: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, obviously they were able to do it. It’s a bit of a circular argument, I admit that.

Steven: I think it’s interesting because… Yeah, okay, Scott, share the book.

Scott: Okay. So, this book was published by a very good friend of mine who’s also indigenous. He’s also a Freemason, a Rosicrucian, a Knight’s Templar. We’ve talked about all of this, but anyway it’s called Rediscovering Turtle Island.

Steven: Oh, I think…

Scott: And it’s written by Brother Taylor Keen, who is Cherokee and Omaha. And basically, what he talks about in here is the First Peoples account of the sacred geography of America. And how, yes, the indigenous people constructed the mound, they were the mound building culture. And what’s interesting is that he talks about how the mounds that we find in North America, and indeed around the world, actually reflect what’s happening in the heavens.

So, when you go to one site, you see all this interconnectedness that’s happening within the mounds and structures that were constructed there. But they are just one part of a much bigger puzzle, or matrix if you will, that is on Earth, that they’re all connected across the continents. And it’s really an interesting take. Let me tell you, this guy is one sharp dude. He’s an academic, he’s a PhD and he’s a really good guy. So, this just came out here in the last month, and I was asked to write a blurb in here, and I did that.

Nehemia: Okay, on my website NehemiasWall.com, we’ll post a link to that where people can find the book.

Steven: We’ll have a link to this…

Scott: It’s called Rediscovering Turtle Island.

Steven: Okay.

Nehemia: Beautiful. So, here you are back in 2010, from your report, I believe.

Scott: Yeah.

Nehemia: What’s that piece of equipment there?

Scott: That’s just an optical reflected light microscope. We have magnifications up to about 150X, but looking at the artifact, we don’t need to go into that high a magnification for the observations that I was making at that particular point. And just to give you some idea, guys, when we do these analyses, we start by looking at the large-scale features of these objects and we work small. In other words, we start at low magnification, we document the dimensions, the weight, the physical features that are present on the stone, and then we start to work small. And eventually we will get to the scanning electron microscopy, where we can identify things elementally, and we can also go up to magnifications as high as 1,000,000X if we want. But that was not necessary in this particular case.

Nehemia: So, the 1500X… I’m looking at your report that I was able to download online, and by the way, can we have permission to repost this report?

Scott: Sure!

Nehemia: Okay. I’ll post it, because it was hard to find. It was archived by someone else; I couldn’t find it on your website.

Scott: Oh.

Nehemia: I hope it’s actually yours.

Scott: I’m sure it is.

Nehemia: It’s Wolter and Stehly, and it’s from 2010.

Scott: Stehly, yeah.

Nehemia: Okay.

Scott: Dick is no longer with us; he died.

Nehemia: Oh, I’m sorry to hear about that.

Scott: About 10 years ago.

Nehemia: So, you have on Figure 13, 1500X. What was that done with? Was that the electron microscope?

Scott: Yeah, yeah. I’m sure it was, yeah.

Nehemia: Okay.

Scott: So, we’ll get to that.

Nehemia: So, going up to 150X is the optical microscope.

Scott: On this particular one.

Nehemia: Right.

Scott: And it also has a camera on the top, and so, everything that I was looking at you could see on the monitor to my right, that black laptop there, behind that light, you can see it to the right. So, everybody could see what I was looking at in real time.

Nehemia: Okay.

Scott: It was live.

Nehemia: Beautiful. Alright.

Scott: Okay, so there are the ladies. Now these are just… like I said, we start by looking at the large-scale features, and we work small. Now, one of the things that I thought was kind of interesting, you can see Cyrus Thomas was the one that presumably wrote this information on the back of the stone, and J.W. Emmert was the field agent that conducted the dig.

Now, if you look at the back of the stone there’s some interesting things that I want to point out. Do you see how it’s a lighter color than the darker side where the inscription is? And if you look along the edges, you can see the darker areas. What’s happened is that that darker rind, kind of like when you peel back the rind on an orange, has peeled off of the back side. We see one little island of that material that’s still intact on the lower right.

Steven: Okay.

Scott: The corner of the artifact, that’s a little recess, and so it didn’t peel off.

Nehemia: On the circle… you’re talking about this thing here?

Scott: Correct.

Nehemia: Okay.

Scott: And you can see the remnants on the topside, even little bits on the other side, or on the bottom side. But on the opposite side where the inscription is, that dark layer is still intact, okay?

Nehemia: Okay.

Scott: Now, I want you to look directly above that little island that we talked about. Do you see that scratch there? Now in the report, John Emmert talked about taking a probe, and he was probing the mound, and he hit the stone. That’s how he found it. And I think that’s the impact where John Emmert hit the backside with the metal prod. That’s my interpretation.

Nehemia: Okay.

Scott: And it’s a fresh scratch. Okay?

Nehemia: So, let me ask you a geology question, because I don’t know anything about geology.

Scott: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, what’s your explanation of why the rind is on the other side, and only a little bit here, but mostly this is rind free. I read that in your report. I don’t know that I understood it.

Scott: Yeah, well we don’t know exactly why. But at some point in this rock’s history, probably after it came out of the ground, maybe it weathered out and it was found laying on the ground. But there were some conditions, like water freezing, who knows, that caused this side to spall off and the other side didn’t. We’ll just never know. Maybe it was done by the person who found the stone. I don’t think so, I don’t see any evidence of tool marks. I think it was a natural process, but we just don’t know at this point.

Nehemia: You don’t mean Emmert? You mean the ancient Native American who found it on the ground and wrote the inscription.

Scott: Right, right, whoever it was that inscribed the inscription.

Nehemia: So, in other words, they picked up the stone off the ground and it already had that rind removed on the back.

Scott: More than likely, more than likely, yeah.

Nehemia: Okay.

Steven: And just to clarify, we don’t have any pictures of the backside of this from the 1890’s, Scott?

Scott: That’s a good question. I’d have to go back and look. I don’t think so. I think the only one we have in the Smithsonian reports, and you can look this up, it’s volume… I forget what the volume number was, but it was published in 1894.

Steven: Okay.

Nehemia: And guys, you can actually download it. It’s really cool. I downloaded it. You can find these online, the Smithsonian reports.

Scott: Oh, okay.

Nehemia: It’s volume 12…

Scott: Okay, that sounds right.

Nehemia: …of the Smithsonian, and you can see it for yourselves. And they have that black and white photo that you referenced.

Scott: Yeah. I don’t know if they have one on the backside, though.

Nehemia: It’s on page 394, figure 273.

Scott: Okay.

Nehemia: And that’s only the front side.

Scott: Are there any others of the backside? I don’t remember.

Nehemia: Not in this volume.

Scott: Okay.

Nehemia: And what you did, actually, I want to give you credit here, because the mainstream archeologists are saying you didn’t do serious work. But you actually went and found the field notes at the Smithsonian. That’s actually, I think, very commendable. In other words, when it was published in 1894, that was the result of taking a bunch of raw data and putting it into “What can we actually put into the printed form. We can’t put everything.” So, you found the actual field notes written by Emmert, am I right?

Scott: Yes. Well, I read the report. I have a copy, an original copy, of the 1894 volume. In fact, I have all the volumes. I bought a whole set of the Smithsonian reports.

Nehemia: No, but the field report was the handwritten report from February 1889.

Scott: No… field notes. The field notes from 1889, when he did the actual dig.

Nehemia: That’s really important. If we’re saying this is a fake and we’re just basing it on what was published in 1894, well, we can go back before 1894 and see, “Okay what were they saying in February of 1899 when it was first discovered?” That might have changed over those five years. I think that’s important original research that you did.

Scott: Yeah? Well, I wanted to know everything I could about the dig itself, what he found, what his observations were, to see if they were consistent with what I was seeing. And as it turns out some of the things were not; things were different.

Nehemia: Like those two lines on the front.

Scott: Like those two scratches, exactly. So, I wanted to go back… Look, I was doing work for the Cherokee. This is serious work, and I take all my work very seriously. And for people to accuse me of somehow being a shlocky dude… I was assigned to the Pentagon after 9/11, and I was tasked with overseeing the examination of 750 samples of concrete, of fire-damaged concrete from the jet fuel fire after the plane hit the building. And a lot of times we find ourselves, in our business, going out and talking to engineering firms trying to get work in. I had been in business long enough, and apparently had a reputation that was good enough, that the federal government sought me out to work on what was the worst terrorist attack in the history of our country. So, I like to think that they hired me because I knew somewhat what I was doing. And for people out there to make a claim that I don’t know what I’m doing, show me the evidence!

Nehemia: I think their claim is that… well, I don’t know what their claim is. I can give you my impression. When it comes to archeology, and this is meant as an insult, not by me, but they would say that you’re an autodidact. That you taught yourself, and that you weren’t formally trained in their institutions in archeology. And look, let’s just be honest here. If you were to go to the University of Tennessee, like that place there, and you were to get a degree in archeology, you would be told… and this is kind of Oral Law stuff, you would be told, “There’s a bunch of people who publish those things; don’t pay attention to them because they’re wrong.” And you would internalize that and come out and say, “These are the things we consider legitimate; these are the things we consider not legitimate.” And you didn’t have that indoctrination, and so they said, “disregard what you said.”

Scott: That’s the key. That’s the word right there, that’s the word; “indoctrination.”

Nehemia: Yeah.

Scott: This is funny. Here we are, we’re talking about archeology. They dig things up out of the ground. The ground is made up of weathered rock. Remember, I’m a geologist. They examine pottery, right? Pottery is fired clay; clay is a rock, if you will. They study lithic artifacts, they study metallic artifacts, like copper artifacts. Last I checked, they are rocks!

I’m a geologist. I know a little something about rocks, and I don’t want to get into this game where I’m just as qualified as they are and everything else. Look, there are a lot of things about archeology that I don’t know, but I certainly understand the basic premise of archeology and the various techniques and things that they do. It’s not rocket science. We’re talking about a soft science discipline. Let’s be honest, it’s a humanities discipline. And for them to make the accusation that I don’t understand scientific method or that I’m not capable of understanding what they do, that’s just BS.

In fact, what I would love to see is this thing called collaboration. Because I guarantee you if I was working with an archeologist, there are some things that they deal with that I might be able to help them with. And there’s absolutely some wonderful archeologists out there that I have worked with that have helped me understand the archeological aspects of certain things that I’ve looked at.

I wrote a 574-page book called The Kensington Runestone: Compelling New Evidence with a linguist, with a runologist, Dr. Richard Nielsen. And it was the collaboration of our two disciplines that made all the difference in, really, authenticating the Kensington Runestone. I can give you numerous examples of where our collaboration led to breakthroughs that were absolutely profound, that helped us with our overall analysis. And what I really find disappointing is these archeologists that feel that they need to attack me for somehow treading in their sacred ground of archeology. I mean, this is not difficult.

Nehemia: Well, “sacred ground” literally and figuratively, right? Meaning, you didn’t tread there, but this was a Native American sacred… I once heard this described as, “How would you feel if somebody dug your grandmother up?” And you didn’t do that, right? Somebody else did it.

Scott: Yeah, but you get my point, right?

Nehemia: I definitely hear what you’re saying. So, maybe this can be an invitation to any archeologists out there who are watching this to contact Scott Wolter and do some interdisciplinary work with him. And maybe he’ll come to the opposite conclusion if you can explain to him why he’s wrong. Would you be open to that?

Scott: Of course I would be open to that! But I have… and I’ll tell you this right now. When it comes to the Kensington Runestone, I’m just going to give you a quick little diatribe of something…

Steven: You know what? Why don’t you exit out of the screenshare while you… You say you’re going to do a diatribe, so let’s just go to full screen so it enhances the viewers’ experience.

Scott: Alright. Oh jeez, I don’t know if we want that, do we?

Steven: It’s okay. I just don’t like to stay on something for too long.

Nehemia: Especially if someone’s watching on their phone. There’s a little tiny Scott they’re seeing and a giant slide.

Scott: I’m trying to figure out how to get me big here.

Steven: Just exit “Screen Share”.

Nehemia: Or just do “Stop Share”.

Steven: “Stop Share”, yeah.

Scott: “Stop Share”, there we go! Okay, here we go.

Steven: I think it’s important, because I’ve always been respectful… I’ve always liked the mavericks, the people who think outside of the box, people who don’t defoul the institutions but kind of do their own thing. That’s why I’ve always enjoyed the work that you do, Scott. So, why don’t you explain to the audience what you want to tell them?

Scott: Well, when I first did the Runestone, which brought me into this world… and like I said, there are some wonderful archeologists that I’ve worked with in the past that saw the value of the work that we do in our laboratory, the forensic work that we’ve done on many, many of these artifacts. When it came to the Kensington Runestone… think about it like this. In this 574-page book we went down every rabbit hole; we looked at every question, every argument, every complaint. We looked at everything. And in the end, we were able to document voluminous quantities of facts in multiple disciplines which includes geology, late 19th century history, 14th century history, because the stone is dated 1362. We documented the runes, the dialect, the grammar, the dating, the history behind Olof Ohman and his family, the discoverer. And, of course, the history of the Templars who carved it and left it as a land claim.

All this voluminous evidence in multiple disciplines is consistent, cohesive, and conclusive that this is a 14th century artifact. It is authentic, there is no question about it. So, that being true, how can there possibly be factual evidence to support the contrary? It can’t exist and it doesn’t exist. Because when you look at all of the arguments against the Kensington Runestone, they don’t stand up to scrutiny for one second. And how could they? Because there cannot be facts to support a conclusion that’s not valid.

That’s one of the dirty little secrets of our forensic geology, of material forensics that we do. And so, I challenge anyone out there, any archeologist; bring it. You want to have a one-on-one debate with me about the Kensington Runestone? About the Bat Creek Stone? About the Tucson Lead Artifacts, which, by the way, if you haven’t looked at them, you’d better! As a Hebrew scholar, you’re going to love them.

Nehemia: I’m not familiar with those.

Scott: You’re not?

Nehemia: No. I’ve seen the Los Lunas Inscription twice, once before it was defaced.

Scott: No, dude…

Nehemia: But I’m not familiar with the Tucson material.

Scott: Oh my God, dude, you’ve got to look at them! Besides the Kensington Runestone, I would say the Tucson Lead Artifacts are the most compelling out of place artifacts I’ve ever seen. Thirty-two artifacts that were found buried outside…

Nehemia: Let’s do a follow up on that after I’ve done some research, because I’ve literally never heard of them until just now.

Scott: You’re going to go crazy. Tucson Lead Artifacts, look them up.

Nehemia: Lead as in the material? L-E-A-D?

Scott: L-E-A-D, yeah. They’re made of lead, yes.

Nehemia: Oh, okay, alright. I’m interested in looking at those.

Scott: I’ve done scientific testing on them, and I did a pretty good job on those too, if I do say so myself.

Nehemia: So, Scott, in preparation for this, because this isn’t my field… I’m an expert, like I said, in Hebrew manuscripts and Hebrew philology. I haven’t even heard of the Tucson material, the Tucson Lead. So, here’s what I did; I went to Google Scholar, and I typed in archeo-petrography. Is that the term that you’d use?

Scott: I came up with that term, archeo-petrography.

Nehemia: Fair enough. So, I wrote that into Google Scholar to see what’s been published in archeo-petography, and it says online that Scott’s the founder of that, and I couldn’t find anything. What I did find was an archeologist that deals with petrography. And I wrote to her, and I said, “Do you know about this method? And can you refer me to anything on it?” And here’s what she wrote. And I’m not going to name her name because I didn’t get her permission, but I want you to comment on it. “I am unfamiliar with Dr. Wolter’s method, as I specialize in traditional petrography, which doesn’t date artifacts but rather provides the analyst with the object’s mineral composition and geologic and/or anthropogenic development. I have not seen or read anything about his method or the artifact,” meaning Bat Creek, “unfortunately, until reading your email.” This was a couple of weeks ago. And look, to be fair, she says she doesn’t know about it, so maybe there are people who do know about it.

Scott: First of all, I’m not a doctor. I don’t have a PhD, so let’s get that on the table. I am a professional. I am not an academic.

Nehemia: There are academics who don’t have doctorates. Dan Vogel is at the head of his profession, and he only has a bachelor’s degree.

Scott: Yeah.

Nehemia: In humanity… It’s a field of humanity… I want to defend humanities there for a second, because you were pushing on the humanities. And there is some fair criticism, maybe. There are humanities that are serious scholarship.

Scott: They’re all wonderful disciplines. That’s not my point.

Nehemia: And there are people in humanities who are pseudo-scholars, there’s no question about it. And some of them are professors, and some are published scholars, or published, in any event. Within humanities, there are especially certain fields that are pseudo, in my view. And really, they’re unfalsifiable, they can’t disprove them. And it’s true there are hard sciences, like what you’re part of, but the hard sciences without the humanities element, they don’t have the full picture. And I do a lot of interdisciplinary work, and I deal with brilliant physicists and chemists and people who deal with archeometry, really brilliant people. But without the humanities side of it, they’re missing… And they’ll tell you, “We have these powerful tools, we don’t know where to point them unless you tell us. Now you won’t know what the results mean unless we tell you.” There’s this important synergy…

Scott: Hence collaboration.

Nehemia: For sure. So, I think it would be wonderful if there was a collaboration like that in this field, and maybe there is and I’m just not aware of it because I’m not an expert in American archeology. Look, their starting assumption is that these things are fake unless you can prove otherwise, let’s just be honest. They openly say that.

Scott: Well, they do, but…

Nehemia: And it sounds like you’re saying, “Look, I’ve been convinced they are authentic. You need to prove they are fake.” Is that fair to say?

Scott: Well, I think their starting premise is wrong. You don’t start with a conclusion; you start with a blank slate. You don’t have an opinion because you have no basis for an opinion other than your indoctrination. So, the premise from the very beginning is flawed. My experience in dealing with these people for 24 years now is that they seem to have an inability to say three little words, “I don’t know.” It’s okay to say that! And if you don’t know, you don’t draw an opinion. You don’t just defer to, “Well, it’s probably fake, so I’m going to start with that. You prove to me that it’s authentic.” No, that’s not a scientific approach. There should be a blank slate. You have an unknown here, so you do the analysis to try to figure out if there’s something there or if there’s something not. And I will tell you this, in my experience when dealing with these out of place artifacts, I have found plenty of fakes.

Nehemia: Tell us about the most interesting fake. I’d like to hear that. By the way, how are we on time? Because I have some questions about your report and don’t want to run out of time.

Scott: I’m not sure how much time I have, because we are taking Hayley’s sister out to a brewery here in a little bit…

Nehemia: So, we’ll save it for a different…

Scott: I’ve got to get ready for that before…

Nehemia: Let’s save it for a different conversation, about the fakes.

Scott: Yeah.

Nehemia: I have some specific questions about your report.

Scott: Oh, well, we should probably go back to the PDF, because we’re getting into that right now.

Nehemia: Okay, so go ahead, let’s do that. I hope we have a follow up conversation because this has been fascinating.

Scott: Oh yeah, we can do this anytime you want. This is fun. I’m enjoying this. And when I get fired up, don’t take it personally, it’s like I have old memories that are coming back here.

Nehemia: I have thick skin; I have to in my field.

Steven: Same here, my goodness. I get attacked all the time, my friends, so I’m sympatico.

Scott: Yeah, it’s kind of disappointing that people feel they have to attack to try to win their arguments. Where’s the file now?

Nehemia: I once spoke to a professor at Tel Aviv University, and somebody had written something unkind about me. He said, “Look, this is academia. You fight it out and leave as much blood on the ground as possible!” I’m like, “Wow, that’s really sad. I don’t want to be like that.”

Scott: Yeah. It doesn’t need to be like that. But you have to understand something. I went to school on a football scholarship, and I was a linebacker, and if you want to go, let’s go! The linebacker in me will never die! And so, when people challenge me or attack me, bring it.

Nehemia: So, this is the metal prod. This is modern, according to your interpretation of it.

Scott: Yeah. Now let’s go back here. Where the hell am I now? Hold on here.

Nehemia: So, here we have the Paleo-Hebrew letter Vav.

Scott: Okay. Now, this is a close up, and this is actually a scanning electron… No, this is reflected light here. This picture is of the two scratches.

Nehemia: Okay.

Scott: Now, the yellow boxed area is blown up on the right, and you can see where we have clay. That is, we busted through that brown rind that peeled off on the back side, and we are now into the center of the stone, which is clay in composition. It’s an iron rich clay, and you can see the little step fractures, and we can actually see that the direction of the probe went from the bottom to the top. Do you follow me?

Nehemia: So, what we’re seeing here is two scratches on the front, and you call those numbers 11 and 12 in your report, for people who want to check this.

Scott: Right, yeah.

Nehemia: And these were made sometime between 1894 and 1971. They’re not in the 1894 photo, but they are in the 1971 photo.

Scott: Correct.

Nehemia: This is what a modern scratch looks like. That’s your point here, I think.

Scott: Yeah. And we can even tell the direction of the scratch. In this particular case it was from bottom to top. Now, this is also an unweathered scratch, because, unless somebody at the Smithsonian put this thing outside for a while or buried it in the ground, I’m going to make the assumption that this thing has never been in a weathering environment from the time that scratch was made until I took these pictures. Are we okay with that?

Nehemia: I mean, that could be correct. What is the orange rich clay here? You talk about that in your report.

Scott: Iron rich, yeah.

Nehemia: What’s that?

Scott: That’s the iron rich clay. That’s the center of the stone.

Nehemia: You say, “Iron rich orange colored clay.” Where is the orange? I don’t…

Scott: Well, to me that looks orange, those colors.

Nehemia: Okay.

Scott: Kind of yellowish orange.

Nehemia: And then one of the points you’ll make later is that this modern scratch after 1894 has the orange clay in it, but the original scratches of the Hebrew inscription doesn’t. Is that right?

Scott: Yes. Well, I mean, here’s another presumption. When the original inscription was carved, what we’re calling Paleo-Hebrew for this discussion… but you’re the expert. If it’s something else, you can let us know. But for now, let’s refer to it as a Paleo-Hebrew inscription. When that was carved, we’re making the assumption that it would have looked something similar to this. There would have been clay that was in the groove like this that has those step fractures, and it would have looked a lot like this.

Nehemia: Guys, pay attention. That’s a very important statement, that this is an assumption. And this is one of the key points of your argument, if I understand correctly.

Scott: Yeah.

Nehemia: This is what a modern scratch looks like, and the characters, let’s call them that, the Hebrew inscription, what I call Paleo-Hebrew, that doesn’t have this orange clay in it.

Scott: Well, before we go there, let’s agree that when that inscription was done, the day it was done, according to the C-14, at some point in the historical past, those grooves, after they were carved, just like these scratches, would have had that clay in the step fractures that we see…

Nehemia: I will say that I have no reason to think that. That is your assumption. You do state that this was made with a different tool than the other ones. That this tool was more pointy than the letters, which were made with a more rounded tool. So, maybe that type of tool leaves a different residue. I don’t know.

Scott: No.

Nehemia: I think it’s important to identify what the assumptions are.

Scott: In my opinion the answer is no. It would have looked similar to this; it would have that…

Nehemia: But this is the crux of the argument, I think. This is what I wanted to see from Mainfort and Kwas, and maybe they wrote it and I didn’t see it. But this should have been what they were arguing, “Well, Wolter and Stehly make this assumption, and here’s why that assumption is wrong.” Now I’m not a geologist. I have no idea if the assumption is right or wrong. I have no reason…

Scott: Good luck with that argument.

Nehemia: Okay. Alright. And this is something that…

Scott: Let me tell you something. My work has been peer reviewed by other geologists and by Dick Stehly, who was one of the top materials scientists in the world at the time. So, any archeologist that’s going to make that claim is going to have to provide evidence to the contrary.

Nehemia: Okay. I’ve got to challenge you on that. I hate to do it, but you say it’s been peer reviewed. Was it published in a peer review publication?

Scott: Okay. Now what you’re doing is, you’re framing the argument.

Nehemia: No, I’m asking a question.

Scott: You’re asking a question. The answer is no. But you have to understand we do things differently in the professional field.

Nehemia: Okay, so peer review means different things to different people. There’s a really interesting thing recently by Eric Weinstein about how peer review is kind of modern… Let’s not get into that.

Scott: Yeah.

Nehemia: Guys, look that up.

Scott: Let me make this point. When we do our peer review in the professional material science world, we have to be prepared to testify in a court of law to our findings under oath. And that is an extremely high bar, especially when you’re dealing with absolute prick attorneys that are doing anything and everything they can to undermine your findings. So, it is an extremely high bar in my opinion.

Nehemia: Okay.

Scott: And I would argue, probably a higher bar than the opinion truth-by-consensus that we see in various academia.

Nehemia: And the reality is that no peer review journal would publish this. We know that, so let’s move on. Let’s not get bogged down in that. They wouldn’t publish it because they probably wouldn’t even send it for peer review. They would say, “We know that this is pseudo-science so we’re not going to waste our time.” That’s what they would probably say.

Scott: And I wouldn’t even dignify that statement with a response.

Nehemia: Oh, I’m not saying that. I’m saying that’s probably…

Scott: I know. But I’m saying anybody that would say something like that, to me, is ignorant and wouldn’t be worthy of taking the time to even try to explain it.

Nehemia: Okay. So, let’s move on here because we’re running out of time, and this is important. We’ve got the orange clay there…

Scott: Okay. So, now what I’m doing is, I’m looking at these modern scratches, the grooves of these modern scratches, using scanning electron microscopy, and you can see those clay areas with the step fractures… and we’re looking at them closer; you can see that material is in the bottom of that groove. Right?

Nehemia: I guess.

Scott: Now we’re looking at one of the characters of the inscription that is older and came out of the burial mound. Now, if we take a close look, you can see that we see vertical scratches, parallel scratches, that are consistent with the polishing that was mentioned by Emmert. Do you see them?

Nehemia: Guys, those looking at the report, this is character number 6, which is the Lamed in the inscription.

Scott: Okay. And you see those parallel scratches, correct? On the surface?

Nehemia: Yeah.

Scott: Okay. And now, in my conclusion, that is consistent with Emmert’s statement that he saw a polished stone. So, this wasn’t polished after it was pulled out of the ground. This is consistent with the state of the artifact when it was pulled out of the ground.

Nehemia: Wait, I didn’t follow that. How do we know that?

Scott: What I’m saying is that Emmert in his field notes said, and I made a comment on this in the early part of the presentation, that he called it a “polished stone”.

Nehemia: Right.

Scott: These scratches on the surface of the stone, next to the carved Lamed, you called it, are consistent with his statement. So, what that leads me to believe is that this wasn’t polished after it was found, it was already polished when it was pulled out of the ground based on Emmert’s observation and these…

Nehemia: So, here again is another crux of the argument. If Emmert is the one who made it, or someone on his behalf, and polished it, he would know that it was polished and he would say that, or he could say that. What’s your response to that? How do we know that Emmert didn’t polish this, or somebody on his behalf?

Scott: Well, I think you get to the point where things are getting ridiculous.

Nehemia: Really?

Scott: Don’t you want to give this field agent the benefit of the doubt unless you have reason to question him?

Nehemia: No. Well, so, here’s the reason to question him. And Mainfort and Kwas bring this, and you can disagree with it, but there’s a statement from Cyrus Thomas, and Cyrus Thomas was of course the boss of Emmert. And it’s in a book called Introduction to the Study of North American Archeology, published in 1898. And he warns people about how there’s a whole bunch of fakes out there and you can’t trust them, and he mentions specifically Hebrew…

Scott: You know what? I’m sorry, but that’s a rumor. There is no factual evidence to support that statement, it’s just rumor. And it’s designed to create doubt, and it has no place in the scientific discussion.

Nehemia: Wait, doesn’t Thomas say that, though? Are you saying it’s not true that he says that?

Scott: No, I’m sure he did say that. I’m sure a lot of people did. But unless you have evidence to support the statement…

Nehemia: So, it’s on page 24 of his book. He says… this is Cyrus Thomas writing in 1898. “Another fact which should be borne in mind by the student is the danger of basing conclusions on abnormal objects.” Do we agree that this is an abnormal object? Maybe not.

Steven: This is the thing…

Scott: I’m not the one to ask.

Nehemia: Okay. He says, “Or on one or two unusual types,” and I’ll jump ahead a little bit, “stones bearing inscriptions in Hebrew or otherworld characters have at last been banished from the list of prehistoric relics.”

Steven: But you know what? I want to say in defense of this; he did not know at the time that that was a Hebrew inscription.

Nehemia: Fair enough.

Scott: It’s an assumption, and it’s an erroneous statement he had no business making, as far as I’m concerned.

Steven: But I’m just saying, even if he’s saying that, he did not know that we would later find that’s a Hebrew inscription. So, to me that’s not a condemnation…

Scott: That’s right. And he would never have made the statement because he was making an assumption that turned out not to be valid. It’s an erroneous statement he should never have made.

Steven: But also, he thought this was Cherokee, so it would not have been abnormal in his mind because he would have thought it was something that was…

Scott: Exactly.

Nehemia: Well, no, but if it’s Paleo-Cherokee… am I right that it’s the only Paleo-Cherokee inscription?

Scott: They didn’t have a written language, so, no, there’s no Paleo-Cherokee…

Nehemia: Right, but he thought it was Paleo-Cherokee. So, his statement would apply to the stone because it’s the only supposedly Paleo-Cherokee inscription in existence, and he says if you have an unusual thing of one or two, you can’t base conclusions on that. And I agree. He doesn’t mention this specifically, but it sounds like he’s alluding to this. I don’t know. Alright, I’ll let you continue.

Scott: In any case, it’s a statement he shouldn’t have made.

Nehemia: That might be true.

Scott: In my view…

Nehemia: That might be.

Scott: It’s irrelevant and it creates bias. And…

Nehemia: But you said, “Shouldn’t we give Emmert the benefit of the doubt?” And I’m saying, based on his boss, no, we shouldn’t. Meaning, it could be a wrong statement he made, but the statement that he made in 1898 is that if you have some unique artifacts, you should ignore them because we keep digging in mounds and not finding this kind of thing. And the fact that you found a couple, supposedly, you shouldn’t base conclusions on that. That’s the Introduction to the Study of North America Archeology.

Scott: I understand, but frankly it’s a stupid statement. It doesn’t make any sense.

Nehemia: It might be.

Scott: I just don’t have a lot of patience for some of these early statements that just have no basis in fact.

Nehemia: In any event, one of your main contentions is that we should trust Thomas, and obviously scholars are saying “no we shouldn’t”. Meaning, your opponents are saying no, we shouldn’t.

Scott: No, I’m not saying anything. I’m saying look at the data and look at each artifact on a case-by-case basis. You don’t make assumptions about a group of artifacts…

Nehemia: Okay. But you’re saying this is polished, and my question was, how do we know it wasn’t polished by Thomas? And I think your response is, “Because Thomas told us it was.”

Steven: Emmert.

Nehemia: Am I right?

Scott: No, no. Emmert.

Nehemia: Emmert, sorry, Emmert.

Scott: Look, all I am saying is that he made a comment that most people wouldn’t have caught, I don’t think, that he called it a “polished stone”. And when I first looked at the artifact, holding it in my hand, I didn’t notice that, indeed, it was polished until I saw these scratches and it reminded me of what he said.

Nehemia: Okay.

Scott: So, the polish was there when he found it, and not something that was added later. And I just found it consistent with his statement, that’s all.

Nehemia: Right. So, it was found in 1889. So, the polish, in February…

Scott: Was there when he found it.

Nehemia: Right, and he found it on February 15th, or thereabouts, 1889. Maybe it was done on January 31st, I don’t know. Now, if you have different evidence…

Scott: Look, you can sit there and ask questions all you want, but you also have to…

Nehemia: It’s my job to ask questions.

Scott: Yeah, I know, but sometimes it gets to the point of being silly. Take the guy at face value. Now we’ll talk about him at the end, about who John Emmert was…

Nehemia: Yeah.

Scott: … and what happened there. Okay, so let’s keep going. So, now what we’re doing is we’re taking a closer look at the inscription, and what we don’t see in any of the carved lines that are part of the Paleo-Hebrew inscription is any of that silt. It’s gone. That would have presumably been there when it was carved because the fresh scratches tell us what a freshly carved character looks like. And it’s got silt and sediment at the bottom of the grooves, and we don’t see it in any of these grooves of the Paleo-Hebrew inscription.

Wait, why is this jumping ahead. Sorry, this is really pissing me off.

Now, based on that, and there are some more slides here that are not showing up because I made a PDF, but in the end, I concluded that because there’s no evidence of intrusion, there’s no evidence this was made at the time it was found. All the physical evidence that we see geologically on the stone is consistent with this thing having been pulled out of the ground in the state it was in.

The only way for those grooves to be clean and devoid of that clay is if it was weathered in a wet burial mound for an extensive period of time. How long that took, I don’t know, but it’s not going to happen overnight. It’s going to take many years. And based on the C-14 testing, we’re pushing it back over 1,300 years, almost 2,000 years, and could that be consistent with the weathering we see on the stone based on what we know about its discovery? The answer is yes. And I felt that was enough evidence to draw the conclusion that it was genuine.

Nehemia: So, here’s one of my big questions that I wanted to ask you from the very beginning.

Steven: Okay, why don’t we exit out. Let’s exit out of the…

Scott: Wait, I don’t want to do that yet, because… How about this? Let me finish the presentation.

Nehemia: Sure.

Steven: Yeah, let’s do that.

Scott: So, after that… and actually, I wrote that report. You’ll see, it was to the Eastern Band of Cherokee. And when I presented the report, they got pissed off, and they said, “We want that stone back.” And so, I went to the Tribal Council. I was there. They passed a resolution demanding the Smithsonian Institution return the Bat Creek Stone and all the artifacts with it. That is why you saw the stone at the Eastern Band of Cherokee Museum inside that glass box.

Nehemia: That was in December 2014, yeah.

Scott: Yeah. And to my knowledge it’s still there. The Cherokee told me they’re not giving it back. It came out of one of their burial mounds; it’s a funerary object and it’s not leaving. And I don’t blame them. Screw the Smithsonian, they don’t deserve it.

Nehemia: I don’t blame them either.

Scott: By the way, that vote was passed unanimously. There were 12 members of the Tribal Council, and so the stone came back.

Now, this is an interesting slide that I have in here that just shows how ridiculous and idiotic some of these academics can be. And this is Gerald Schroedl, who did an interview on August 3rd, and he accused proponents who are saying that this artifact is in fact an authentic artifact, of being racist. And the reason he calls people like me racist, and I’ve been called racist many times, and what I find ironic is that I have a very, very close relationship with many indigenous people, with multiple tribes, and they have backed me up in my research on the Kensington Runestone and the Knights Templar being in North America 400 years before Chris, but that’s another discussion. But they called me racist because I have the audacity to claim that these so-called out of place artifacts could not have been created by indigenous people.

Well, good luck with the argument that the Kensington Runestone, which is written in old Swedish, is a Native American artifact. Or the Bat Creek Stone, or the Tucson Lead Artifacts, or the Spirit Pond Runestones… there’s a whole host of these artifacts that were not created by the Natives. I’ve asked the Natives. They said, “Are you kidding me? We don’t do this stuff.” But yet, I’m a racist because I make the claim that there were Europeans that carved these and not indigenous people.

Then he went on to say that Emmert could have pulled this stone from his pocket. Well, the geological evidence I just presented to you shows that that’s impossible. And then he talks about the bones and the wood artifacts, that they could have placed 2,000-year-old bones in a grave. Are you kidding me, Gerald? I mean, this isn’t even anything to be taken seriously, but these are the kind of claims these people make just to hang on to that sacred paradigm. To me it’s ridiculous, but in any case…

So, Leslie was the one who took offense to the Smithsonian Institution blaming John Emmert for placing this artifact, just like Gerald Schroedl just did. So, what we did is, we took a trip to the East Hill Cemetery in Bristol, Tennessee, where we found that John Emmert’s name is listed on this monument in the park, but his grave is not marked. He’s buried in an unmarked grave.

And what we also learned is that John Emmert not only served in the Civil War for the Confederates, he also was a member of law enforcement. He was also a Freemason. And I can tell you that the Smithsonian’s official position was that John Emmert is the one that created this fake. And they went on my blog site and they wrote something to that effect. I don’t remember exactly what their wording was, but what I did was I shot back to the Smithsonian, and I said, “Well, you know what guys? You’ve got a real problem here because this is your field agent who conducted this dig. And you’re making the claim that he created and placed a fake artifact into this dig, which calls into question everything about the Bat Creek dig.” Right?

Nehemia: For sure.

Scott: Okay.

Nehemia: And actually, anything that Emmert excavated.

Scott: Exactly!

Nehemia: Not just Bat Creek.

Scott: Did you know that he conducted over 200 digs?

Nehemia: And according to Mainfort and Kwas…

Scott: Archeological digs. So, now you’re calling into question those 200 digs.

Nehemia: For sure.

Scott: This is the guy that you’re riding your hat on, and all these reports are based largely on digs that he conducted? You’ve got to question those too.

So, then the Smithsonian Institution went back on my blog, deleted their previous post, and they took out the part about John Emmert, but they said the stone is still a fake. This is how fraudulent this BS is, and it’s just astounding. Okay, let me just finish real quick.

So, what happened then was, Leslie went back to the Eastern Band of Cherokee, and they put up $10,000 to have that obelisk made out of a very rare and expensive green granite, and invited all of his known relatives, descendants, that we could round up… and that’s a picture of him in the foreground. And we had a dedication ceremony of a marked monument for John Emmert that has on its four sides a symbol that acknowledges his service in the Civil War, his service as a constable, and as a Brother Mason with Shelby Lodge number 162 in Tennessee, and as the discoverer of the Bat Creek Stone.

The reason this is important is because this is the guy that the Smithsonian Institution is throwing under the bus for creating this fake artifact. But I can tell you, to become a member of law enforcement, you need to be vetted. Your background is vetted. I can also tell you as a Freemason, you are also very carefully vetted before you can become a Brother Mason. So, by disparaging the reputation of this person many decades after his death is shameful, and the Smithsonian Institution should issue an apology for their ridiculous behavior.

So, here we are at the Museum of the Cherokee Indian. That is the artifact, that’s the display right there. There is a picture of the artifact.

Nehemia: What year is that from? Because when I was there it wasn’t on display.

Scott: It’s not on display now?

Nehemia: Well, in December 2014 it wasn’t.

Scott: This would have been 2011, I think.

Nehemia: Oh, okay. So maybe they took it down. I don’t know.

Scott: Yeah. And then this is Don Rose and I celebrating at that time what we thought was a real positive plus and a victory, frankly. And then there I am standing next to the monument. So, that’s it.

Nehemia: Okay. So, one question I had, which really is a question of information. Like, I’m not challenging you or anything.

Scott: No, go ahead. Look, I’m just pushing back on you. I’m getting fired up.

Nehemia: No, you should push back. That’s good.

Steven: Okay so, exit out, Scott. Exit out.

Scott: Yeah, yeah, okay, here we go.

Nehemia: Your key contentions is that the original scratches had this orange clay and therefore the ones that don’t have the orange clay, it’s because number one, it was polished, and number two…

Scott: No, no.

Nehemia: No? Oh, the sides are polished.

Scott: No, the polish had nothing to do with removing the clay in the original inscription. It was weathering in a wet burial mound.

Nehemia: So, how does something weather in the ground? I’m not a geologist. I read that and I’m like, “Don’t things weather when they’re on the surface? Does something weather when it’s buried?”

Scott: No, no, no. We can get all kinds of different weathering processes. You can have secondary deposits that build, you have groundwater solutions that are percolating through the ground that are leaching out materials and mobilizing them and redepositing them in other places. That’s probably what we had going on here.

Nehemia: Okay.

Scott: So, yeah, this happens. And of course, it depends on the depth, it depends on the climate, it depends on the soil type. There’s all kinds of variables that will impact the type of weathering that happens above, at, and below grade.

Nehemia: Okay. So that’s something I’m just not an expert in, and I read that and I was curious.

Scott: No, that’s fine.

Nehemia: It was really impressive that you brought the electron microscope. It wasn’t clear to me what the electron microscope taught us that we didn’t get from the visual reflecting microscope.

Scott: Well, we were able to get elemental analysis of whatever it was that we put the probe on, so we could understand exactly what the chemical makeup of that particular clay was, of what the iron oxide rind was, so we understood the geochemistry of the artifact.

Nehemia: That’s how you determined… Okay, I see, that’s in your report where you say it’s something like 50-something percent… so, that’s based on the electron microscope. So, did the electron microscope add anything or clarify anything as far as the weathering? Or as far as the evidence of the antiquity of the object?

Scott: Yeah. I mean, it helped us better understand what the composition of that secondary material was that was produced during the scratch that was no longer present under the original inscription. And when you looked at that one photo, there were some dark areas that actually was iron that was in the rock. So, that whole premise of my statement, that it was an ironstone concretion… I mean, as a geologist I’ve looked at innumerable examples of this. I know what I’m looking at, but in this case, we had to do the confirmation. Even though I knew exactly what I was looking for and what I was looking at, I still had to do the work to confirm what its composition was, and it was what I thought it was.

Nehemia: Okay.

Steven: So, the two scratches, then new scratches that were done, are they deeper than the scratches of the inscription, or superficial?

Scott: No, no. They’re consistent with the original inscription. Let’s just call it the Paleo-Hebrew, whatever you want to call it, the original inscription. There were areas that were deeper, but it really won’t matter, because once you get through that rind you hit that clay material and you’re going to get that same step fracturing build up. It’s kind of like if you take your finger and you run it through wet sand and you get those little step fractures. That’s analogous to what we see here, but it really doesn’t matter how deep you go. Some areas of the original inscription were shallower than those scratches, some were deeper, but most of them were about the same depth.

Steven: I know a lot of people are going to ask this question. Why is it that Emmert would get the stone and recognize that it was polished, see that it was polished after it had been in the ground after all these centuries, but yet it didn’t look obviously polished to you when it had been in a more stable environment.

Scott: Well, when I first looked at it, I didn’t think to comment on the polish. It was Emmert who brought it to my attention, so I’ll give him credit. But then once I looked at it, it was obvious.

Steven: Okay, okay.

Scott: I was singularly focused on the inscribed characters; I wasn’t really looking at the other part of the stone. Shame on me, I should have paid more attention initially. But after I read his field notes, I went, “Polished?” And I went back and looked at it and I said, “I’ll be damned, there it is.”

Steven: Okay.

Nehemia: So, this would be an interesting follow up test to document what an unpolished stone from that area, made of that same material, with the same rind, what it looks like as opposed to a polished one. Because I have no idea.

Scott: I’ll tell you this; it wouldn’t look a hell of a lot different. It probably would have been more shiny, because when you find these ironstone concretions that still have that dark brown, blackish-brown colored rind on it, oftentimes they’re really shiny. I kind of wonder if the person who did that… there may have actually been a ritualistic reason for polishing it, to preserve or to somehow protect this sacred inscription that ended up going inside of a burial mound. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say there was likely some aspect of ritual that was involved with interring this stone beneath the skull of this person that was important enough to receive a burial at all. I mean, obviously that’s speculation, but when you see things like a polish or even an inscribed stone like that, it begs questions.

Nehemia: For sure.

Scott: You know, these humanities aspects of this whole artifact and everything surrounding it. Why did they do this? Who was it that did this? Was there a ritual associated with it? In my heart and in my own head, I’m absolutely convinced that there was, and maybe the polish was one piece of that. Of course, we’ll never know because it’s speculation, but it’s fun speculation.

Nehemia: So, another follow up related question… In the archaeology of Israel that I know about, I know much more about, and they’ll talk about how an ancient artifact will have patina from being weathered. It’s kind of like this crusted layer. This came up when they were talking about the James, the Brother of Jesus, Ossuary. Which nobody disputed that the ossuary was 2,000 years old; the dispute was the inscription on it was maybe made more recently.

Scott: I’m very, very, very familiar with the Talpiot Tomb and that work with Simcha and Charlie Pellegrino, Shimon Gibson and Jerry Lutgen… you don’t know these names.

Nehemia: I know those names. Well, I know some of those names. I don’t know all of them.

Scott: In any case, yeah, one of the things… there’s a lot I could do to help these guys understand those ossuaries and the geochemical fingerprint of the terra rossa soil that flowed into the tomb that was used to help validate the James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus, Ossuary. This is the exact kind of work that I do, and bravo to the guys that did that work. And actually, I’ve written quite a bit about the Talpiot Tomb that you might enjoy.

Nehemia: Oh, really? So, shouldn’t we expect some patina on the Bat Creek inscription? And here maybe I’m completely wrong. You describe it as weathered; I would expect after all that time there would be a layer, like a film, no?

Scott: No, no. Again, it depends on a lot of factors. In some cases, things buried in the ground are going to develop secondary deposits, a patina, if you will. But in other cases, you’re going to have the opposite, where it’s actually going to take away material from the artifact. It’s going to clean it out, if you will, or weather it in a way that’s not going to leave secondary material like it did in the case of the Talpiot Tomb. But you’re talking about two completely different environmental situations.

Nehemia: No, for sure.

Scott: So, it all depends. It depends. That’s why you have to look at every artifact, every situation on a case-by-case basis, because they’re not all the same. And in many cases, what appears to be similar geologically can be very different based on one or two little things. Every situation is unique, and you have to take them on a case-by-case basis; start big, work small, and see what the data tells you.

Nehemia: So, here is an experiment I’m going to suggest… not necessarily for you, but for your critics.

Scott: Okay.

Nehemia: This should be really easy to determine using this… and maybe I’m wrong and you’ll tell me why I’m wrong. If they were to go to that area and collect other stones like this, iron concretions, you called it, I think…

Scott: Ironstone concretions, yeah.

Nehemia: … ironstone concretions with a similar sort of rind, and then scratch them with various implements that could have been around in the 1880’s.

Scott: I already did it.

Nehemia: Okay, so where are those results? Because I haven’t seen that study. That’s something you can publish in a peer review journal!

Scott: Oh, for God’s sake! This is such basic stuff! It’s already done! It was already done on the artifact. There it was, that’s the most…

Nehemia: No, but on other… So, your whole assumption… The way I read it, the central contention that you’re making is that there should be iron clay in the older… if it was modern, it would have orange clay in it, and the fact that there’s no orange clay suggests that this was weathered over centuries in the ground. So, do some tests, and maybe you’ve done these, but your opponents should do some tests and show, “he’s wrong about this assumption” or “he’s right about this assumption. How do we explain it? What’s our excuse?” They’ll still come up with an excuse about why it’s not ancient, but at least they will have done that work. Because right now I don’t know what the answer is; you may know the answer because you’ve done it.

Scott: Well, why do you think I went out in the field and went and visited the location that I already knew was under water? People said, “Why did you go there when you knew you couldn’t get to the actual site?” I said, “I didn’t need to get to the actual site, I just had to get into the area to see if the geology was consistent.” In other words, was that stone, that Bat Creek Stone, that ironstone concretion that that inscription was carved into, could that rock have come from the area? And the answer is yes. Now, does that prove…

Nehemia: So, you’ve done tests where you’ve scratched a different stone and then looked under the microscope?

Scott: Yeah! I did the same thing, but it was so obvious to me, it wasn’t worth even…

Nehemia: Well, it’s obvious to you but obviously not to others. So, have you published those results somewhere? Even on your website, or anywhere? If not, please do! Present the data and let scholars give their excuse of why it’s not valid. Or maybe they’ll accept it.

Scott: It’s all there on the Bat Creek Stone. It’s already done right there. And look, the only thing… I think I see what you’re saying. If I take another ironstone concretion, will it do the same thing as this rock? The answer is yes.

Nehemia: Okay.

Scott: But by testing another rock, really to me doesn’t push the ball down the field at all.

Nehemia: Wasn’t that a scientific control that we want to…

Scott: Well, the control is the stone. It’s right here! The control is right here, and that is the best control sample you could possibly have. We have test scratches right here and then we have the inscription. Maybe I’d pick another ironstone concretion and it behaves slightly differently, but I would always go back to the source material, which is that rock.

Nehemia: You could pick multiple different stones which maybe have different compositions, I don’t know.

Scott: Understood.

Nehemia: That’s my proposal, I don’t know.

Scott: No, I appreciate that, and I see where you’re going, but to me, the tests are performed right there. The Smithsonian did it for us, and you could even make the argument that the Smithsonian, in their haste to try to prove this thing a hoax, went out of their way to test the scratches which ended up being used by me to actually help prove the authenticity. Thanks guys!

Steven: Thank you, this was really great…

Nehemia: Yeah, this was amazing.

Steven: This was an amazing conversation. I’ve got a million more questions I would love to ask you, but I want to be respectful of your time.

Scott: Yeah, I’ve got to get going here pretty soon. But listen, this is fun guys, and I just want to say one thing; I love the pushback, and I love the banter. I think this is healthy, and I really appreciate that we can have this and kind of get after each other a little bit, but it’s all done in the spirit of respect and trying to get to the truth, and I love it. So, I’m happy to do this anytime.

Nehemia: I appreciate you dialoguing with us and giving us more information. I definitely got more information than what I read in the written reports, so that’s really valuable.

Steven: I’m highlighting here real quick the episode, if you want to watch it on YouTube, about the Bat Creek Stone on America Unearthed. I also want to point out to people that Scott has a blog that I want to direct you to. We’ll have links in the description to both of these as well. And I want to thank you so much, Scott, for coming on. I always end at “All the voices of the Restoration will be heard here on Mormon Book Reviews.” Nehemia, how do you close your program?

Nehemia: Well, I mean, I think in this particular case I’d thank you for being so willing to tolerate my many questions and bringing up your critics, some of whom weren’t generous. They were parsimonious, because you should be given credit for finding the original notes, you should be given credit for doing the tests you did. Whether they agree with your conclusions or not, okay, fair enough, you don’t have to agree with his conclusions, but he’s done some tests and found some information from sources you didn’t have, and he’s pushed the story forward. I think that’s really valuable. And let’s acknowledge there what we can acknowledge, even if you don’t agree with him. And thank you for being willing to discuss that with us.

Scott: Hey, thank you. I guess the people that are critical, they expect people to respect their expertise, their knowledge, their findings and their conclusions, and I just find it disappointing that they can’t respect the fact that I’m recognized as an expert in my field. I’ve published a lot of my material. I follow proper scientific method, and frankly, I don’t have a horse in the race. I don’t reach these conclusions because I want them to be real. There’s plenty of other artifacts out there that would support the narrative that I would like to see brought forth as truth. And unfortunately, some of these things I would have loved to have been authentic, I was the one who said they’re not. They’re fake, or they’re modern, and these weren’t made by somebody in the historical past.

So, I call it as I see it, and there are sometimes when I don’t have enough data and I’m not afraid to say I don’t know. If that’s the appropriate response, I’ll say it. But if I say I think something is real, I believe I have the evidence to support it. And I appreciate anybody who wants to push back, but don’t just sit there and call me names and tell me what you think. Show me your evidence to back up your opinion. Otherwise, frankly, your opinion is meaningless. Because that’s what I do; I have to put the evidence forth. I’ve done it in this case, I’ve done it with the Runestone and many other artifacts, including the ones that weren’t authentic, so I think that’s important.

Nehemia: I’m actually looking forward to that, to you coming back on and telling us about the fakes, because that’s really fascinating too.

Scott: Oh, yeah! I’ve got some good ones! Have you ever heard of Burrows Cave?

Steven: Yeah.

Nehemia: I haven’t.

Scott: The artifacts?

Nehemia: I haven’t.

Steven: There’s a lot of people in the Latter-Day Saint world that use the Burrows Cave stuff a lot. Wayne May does, of course, of Ancient American Magazine. Also, I did an episode on the Michigan Relics, which you haven’t been able to get access to, but…

Scott: No, I’ve looked at some of them, but I wasn’t able to get access to… I have been able to look at some of them. I wasn’t able to get access at the University of Michigan because I was doing the show, and they were afraid to see what would happen.

Steven: Yeah. So, we’ll have to…

Scott: I don’t have an opinion on those. I have not been able to do enough work to draw a definitive conclusion.

Steven: I’d like to see what I can do to help you with that, because I’m connected to the family that used to own those relics, and they were given certain promises that those items would be able to be investigated and studied. And they’ve reneged on that promise, so this might be an opportunity for you to use that as a calling card to look at those objects.

Scott: I’d love it.

Steven: Because I’d be fascinated to hear what you have to say…

Scott: Let’s do it, let’s do it!

Steven: Alright, well, this is a great episode, man! This was awesome! I’m looking forward to having you back on the program, Scott, you’re a great human being. Thanks for putting up with us. This was a relatively easy episode for me because Nehemia was doing all the questions. It was pretty good, actually!

Scott: Nehemia, you are awesome, man!

Nehemia: Well, thank you, this has been fascinating.

Scott: I can’t wait to sit down over a beer and get after it, because in all seriousness, there is some stuff that I’m working on right now that you need to know that I think you could be a tremendous help on.

Steven: Yeah, yeah.

Scott: And I just have a quick question. Are you familiar with a Hebrew scholar by the name of Rabbi Mark Sameth?

Nehemia: I’m not familiar with him, no.

Scott: Okay. You might want to look this up. He wrote a book called The Name, and I forgot the subtitle.

Nehemia: How do you spell his name?

Scott: S-A-M-E-T-H.

Nehemia: I’ll look that up.

Scott: He published this book in 2020, it’s called The Name.

Nehemia: Okay, I’m definitely interested in that.

Scott: Yeah, The Secret Hebrew Name of God in the Hebrew Priesthood… that’s not what it is.

Nehemia: Whaaat?

Scott: The Dual-Gendered Name of God, yes. And there’s a reason why it’s so important to me, because there is a symbol on the Kensington Runestone called the Hooked X.

Steven: Yep.

Scott: And it’s being used for the letter A, but in my mind, it looks like a straight line Stonemason’s version of the Hebrew Alef. And I’ve done enough research into Hebrew mysticism to know that the Alef is the first letter in the Hebrew alphabet that, amongst many other things, stands for the oneness of God. And so, you could make the argument that it’s also being used as an acknowledgement of deity.

There’s a lot more to this that I can talk about, but in my research, I came to the conclusion… in fact, I wrote a book called The Hooked X: Key to the Secret History of North America. And my belief is that it also represents the true ideology of the Knights Templar and their ideological and biological ancestors, which go through the Essene priesthood back in the 1st century, Jesus and Mary Magdalene and all of that, and it represents their true ideology in the belief of a single deity that has male and female aspects that are equal.

And it’s interesting, Dr. Mark Sameth, Rabbi Mark Sameth, came to the conclusion that the ancient Hebrew word of Yahweh actually is two words, and you split it in half and you pronounce them inside out, and the English translation of that is Hu-Hee, and it represents an equal male and female aspect of the Godhead. And this was supposedly the ancient secret of the Hebrew priesthood. Now, look it up, read the book.

Nehemia: Yeah, I’ll need to find that book.

Scott: And what happens is, he writes… it’s a quick read, it’s only 150 pages, it’s really good stuff. But the ancient word that he talks about in the Hebrew priesthood of Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, which was Hey-Vav-Hey prior to that, which I think in Hebrew letters spells Hih, which is feminine, but that’s a whole other thing. But anyway, he writes this book as if he was the first person to make this discovery in modern times, and then he has a subsequent chapter at the end of the book where he says, “Guess what? It turns out I wasn’t the first guy.” And then he talks about the person who actually was an archivist at the Roman Catholic Church who made that discovery in the early 1800’s. But later on… and of course, the Roman Catholic Church, when he published his paper they said, “Ah, no. That’s not going anywhere,” and they suppressed it. But eventually, one of his students took up the mantle of this research and he passed it on to a Freemason by the name of Albert Mackey, who wrote the encyclopedia in the 1850’s I believe, 1860’s… the Masonic Encyclopedia and A History of Freemasonry was written by Albert Mackey, and he talks about this discovery in that book. But I never recognized it until Sameth’s book came out, and sure enough, there it was.

So, I find it interesting that we have these ancient Hebrew words for deity, in this case, and it eventually dovetails with Freemasonry, which dovetails with my work with the Knights Templar. And there’s no question that our gentle craft of Freemasonry evolved directly from the medieval Knight Templarism. And of course, Knights Templarism goes back even further to the 1st century, to Egypt and beyond. But that’s a whole other discussion.

Steven: Oh my gosh, okay.

Nehemia: Wow.

Steven: We’re ending on this? Well folks…

Nehemia: I’m like, “Wow, what’s that about?”

Scott: You guys have your assignment, so get after it guys!

Steven: Okay. Well Scott, we’re looking forward to having you back on. Thanks again for joining us, and folks, leave your comments, we’d love to hear them. We’ll talk to you.

Scott: Alright, thanks!

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