The so-called Berlin tablet was found in Ohio in 1876. S. D. Peet believes it genuine (Amer. Antiq., i. 73; vii. 222).
On the Rockford tablet, see Short, 44.
The Davenport tablets, found by the Rev. J. Gass in a mound near Davenport, in Jan., 1877, are described in the Davenport Acad. Proc., ii. 96, 132, 221, 349; iii. 155. Cf. further in Amer. Asso. Adv. Science Proc. (April, 1877), by R. J. Farquharson; Congrès des Amér. (1877, ii. 158, with cut). The American Antiquarian records the controversy over its genuineness. In vol. iv. 145, John Campbell proposed a reading of the inscription. The suspicions are set forth in vii. 373. Peet, in viii. 46, inclines to consider it a fraud; and, p. 92, there is a defence. Short (pp. 38-39) doubts. In the Second Amer. Rept. Bur. of Ethnol., H. W. Henshaw, on “Animal Carvings,” attacked its character. (Cf. Fourth Rept., p. 251.) A reply by C. E. Putnam in vol. iv. of the Davenport Acad. Proc., and issued separately, is called Vindication of the Authenticity of the Elephant pipes and inscribed tablets in the Mus. of the Davenport Acad. (Davenport, Iowa, 1885). Cf. Cyrus Thomas in Science, vi. 564; also Feb. 5, 1886, p. 119. The question of the elephant pipes is included in the discussion, some denying their genuineness. Cf. also Amer. Antiq., ii. 67; Short, 531; Dr. Max Uhle in Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 1887.
[1748] It has been found convenient to follow an advancing line of geographical succession, but the affiliations of the peoples of the mounds seem to indicate that those dwelling on both slopes and in the valleys of the Appalachian ranges should be grouped together, as Thomas combines them in his section on the mounds of the Appalachian District. (Fifth Rept. Bur. Ethnol.)
[1749] Proc., Oct. 23, 1849, p. 13; Belknap’s New Hampshire, iii. 89; Haven’s Archæol. U. S., 42.
[1750] D. A. Robertson, Journal Amer. Geog. Soc., vol. v., contends that the North American mounds were built by a colony of Finns long before the Christian era.
[1751] It was also issued, with some additional matter, at Buffalo (1851) as Antiquities of New York State, with supplement on Antiquities of the West (1851). Squier has also at this time a paper on these mounds in N. Y. Hist. Soc. Proc., Jan., 1849, p. 41. Cf. Am. Journal of Science, lxi. 305, and Harper’s Monthly, xx. and xxi. His conclusions, distinct from those pertaining to the Ohio mounds, were that the N. Y. earthworks were raised by the red Indians.
[1752] Cf. W. M. Taylor on a Pennsylvania mound in Smithsonian Rept., 1877.
[1753] A few minor references may be given. The Smithsonian Reports have papers by D. Trowbridge (1863); and by F. H. Cushing on those of Orleans County (1874). W. L. Stone held them to have been built by Egyptians, who afterward went south (Mag. Amer. Hist., Sept., 1878, ii. 533). Cf. Ibid. v. 35, and S. L. Frey in the Amer. Naturalist, Oct., 1879. A small book, Ancient Man in America (N. Y., 1880), by Frederic Larkin, takes issue with Squier, and believes the builders were not the modern Indians. He says he found in one of the N. Y. mounds, in 1854, a copper relic, with a mastodon, evidently in harness, scratched upon it! H. G. Mercer’s Lenape Stone describes a “gorget stone” dug up in Buck’s County, Penn., in 1872, which shows a carving representing a fight between Indians and the hairy mammoth, which we are also asked to accept as genuine. What is recognized as an ancient burial mound of the Senecas is described at some length in G. S. Conover’s Reasons why the State should acquire the famous burial mound of the Seneca Indians (1888).
[1754] Contributions to a bibliography and lists of the Ohio mounds are found as follows: Mrs. Cyrus Thomas’s “Bibliog. of Earthworks in Ohio” in the Ohio Archæol. and Hist. Quarterly, June, 1887, et seq.; a lesser list is in Thomson’s Bibliog. of Ohio, p. 385. Lists of the works are given in the Ohio Centennial Rept. and in MacLean’s Moundbuilders, pp. 230-233. J. Smucker, in the Amer. Antiquarian, vi. 43, describes the interest in archæology in the State, and instances the results in the numerous county histories, in the Western Reserve Hist. Soc. publications, in those of the Nat. Hist. Soc. of Cincinnati, of the Archæological Soc. at Madisonville, of the Central Ohio Scientific Association (begun 1878), and of the District Hist. Society (beginning its reports in 1877. Cf. P. G. Thomson, Bibl. of Ohio, no. 328). The course of the West. Reserve Hist. Soc. is sketched in the Mag. West. Hist., Feb., 1888 (vol. vii.).