410 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1936 



The most that can be affirmed is that in any pictographic system, 

 the character for a man, for example, resembles a man, which is not 

 remarkable. It is profitless, therefore, even to compare petroglyphs 

 to Chinese writing. 



Occasional attempts are made to show that Europeans, reaching 

 America in pre-Columbian times, inscribed rocks with Runic, Greek, 

 Latin, or other writing. The striking feature of these claims is that 

 each of several persons will authoritatively announce that the petro- 

 glyph represents a different language and that he has translated it 

 with success. A controversy that began 300 years ago has raged 

 about the famous Dighton Rock (pi. 1, B) of Narragansett Bay, 

 Mass., inspiring nearly 600 articles and books. Dighton Rock has 

 been used to prove everything from the presence of buried pirate 

 treasure to the European origin of the American Indian and has 

 been "successfully translated" by various scholars as Scandinavian, 

 Scythian, Hebrew, Phoenician, Egyptian, Persian, Lybian, Trojan, 

 Chinese, and Japanese. Some persons have even claimed that it was 

 not made by man but by God. This orgy of speculation has been sum- 

 marized by Edmund Burke Delabarre in a sizeable volume, Dighton 

 Rock, 1928. Delabarre very sanely concludes that the petroglyphs 

 on this and other disputed rocks in New England were largely pur- 

 poseless drawings made by Indians after the arrival of the white 

 man. Some of the post-Columbian names and dates he claims to 

 have found on the rock are, however, not entirely convincing. 



As Dighton Rock is not nearly so intricate, baffling or fascinating 

 as hundreds of petroglyphs in the far west, one shudders to think of 

 the riot of speculation, dispute, and scholarly invective had the 

 devotees of Dighton Rock known of them. 



It is within the bounds of possibility that some pre-Columbian 

 Norsemen wandered inland from the Atlantic coast and left records 

 of their journeys as petroglyphs. As yet, however, no petroglyph 

 has been satisfactorily proved to have had this origin. The pre- 

 Columbian wanderings in America of other European peoples is 

 totally unsupported by history, archeology, and petroglyphs. Sub- 

 sequent to 1492, however, white men inscribed rocks in all parts of 

 the country. The famous Inscription Rock, now a national monu- 

 ment, in New Mexico, is a huge register of early explorers beginning 

 with the Spaniards. They placed their names over earlier Indian 

 petroglyphs. 



In addition to many moot petroglyphs, there are some which are 

 plain frauds. Although it is not always possible to detect their 

 specious origin, most of them exhibit some patent artificiality. Even 

 these have been the subject of controversy. The fraudulent Grave 

 Creek tablet, claimed to have been found in a mound near the Ohio 



