Is one of the Virginia Dare "Lost Colony" stones now thought to be real, or are they all still just a hoax, as revealed by a 1941 investigative piece in the Saturday Evening Post?
Researchers have been grappling with the question for two years.
Some experts are beginning to believe the authenticity of the first of the inscribed stones which recount the bone chilling murder of English colonists who had landed on Roanoke Island and offer a possible explanation to the nation's oldest mystery, National Geographic reported.
That would be a flip flop of a flip flop. Years ago, the stones were said to be genuine. Then they were exposed as a hoax, and there the matter rested.
For years researchers have been searching for clues as to what happened to the “Lost Colony” of settlers who disappeared from Roanoke Island in the 16th century.
The colony included men, women, and children who arrived there in 1587. The first non-native child thought to be born in America, Virginia Dare, was counted among them.
Their leader, John White, had sailed back to England in 1587. When he returned in 1590, the colonists had disappeared. The only clues left behind being the word “CROATOAN” carved on a gate post, and the letters “CRO” on a tree
Then in 1937, someone believed to be a tourist found a stone containing perplexing markings that, when later translated by Emory University scholars, contained a message that seemed to be from White's daughter, Eleanor Dare, detailing how her husband and child were murdered.
The discovery of that initial stone led to the discovery of 47 more, between 1937 and 1940, all telling a dramatic tale.
The settlers had suffered for two years, during which time more than half of them died, and most of the remaining were later killed after Indian shamans cautioned that the spirits were angry.
However, all but the first stone were later dismissed as fraudulent, The Native Heritage Project noted, and even the authenticity of the first stone came to be questioned, after the Saturday Evening Post unmasked the stone cutter as a contempoary fraud.
NatGeo said the stones were put away in a basement in Brenau College outside Atlanta.
In 2016, the school's president, geologist Ed Schrader, took the original first stone to the University of North Carolina at Asheville for further analysis and the question of its authenticity was once again raised.
Heather Wolfe at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., examined the stone's inscriptions and noted that "there is nothing that jumps out as a forgery," while another scholar of Elizabethan literature, Jean Wilson of Cambridge University, agreed that there was "nothing in the inscription that couldn’t be of its purported date," according to NatGeo.
What’s needed, said Matthew Champion, who leads the United Kingdom’s Norfolk Medieval Graffiti Survey, is a multidisciplinary study of the stone that uses new advances in chemical analysis, epigraphy, and the study of rock-cut Elizabethan inscriptions to produce fresh data.
NatGeo said Brenau’s Schrader hopes to organize such a study in the near future to see, once and for all, whether the message writ on rock is one of America’s most important artifacts -- or a remarkable fake that duped some of the country’s most respected scholars.
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