Grave Creek Stone

The Grave Creek Stone is a small sandstone disk inscribed on one side with some twenty-five characters, discovered in 1838 at Grave Creek Mound in Moundsville, West Virginia. If genuine, it could provide evidence of a primitive alphabet, but the discovery that the characters can be found in a 1752 book suggests that it is probably a fraud. The only known image of the actual stone is a photograph of items in the E.H. Davis collection (circa 1878) before the majority of the collection was sold to the Blackmore Museum (now part of the British Museum).
At a meeting of the West Virginia Archaeological Society in October 2008, the anthropologist David Oestreicher suggested that the inscription had been forged by James W. Clemens, a local physician who had financed the excavation through loans.
More information on the Wikipedia page . There is various other coverage, eg .
Category:American runestones
Category:18th century
Category:19th century