5 Ridiculous Archaeological Frauds (That Fooled the World)

5 Drake's Plate of Brass

Sometime in 1579, British sailor Sir Francis Drake landed in California and declared it the property of Queen Elizabeth, to the bemusement of the people who already lived there. Since then, archaeologists have figured it would be really cool to find something he left behind. UC Berkeley professor Eugene Bolton was particularly obsessed with the legend of a brass plate that Drake apparently minted, and he frequently bored his colleagues with this during pub sessions with a club known as the Ancient Order of E Clampus Vitus, who described themselves variously as "a historical drinking society" or "a drinking historical society."

In 1936, someone dug up a brass plate signed by Drake in the California mud, and Bolton immediately lost his shit over the discovery. Before anyone could sit him down and sober him up, he'd shelled out thousands of dollars for the hunk of metal and told the world how it was all sorts of really real. And if Bolton's fangirlish squealing, shaking and crying wasn't a convincing enough declaration, the word of the California Historical Society's president and directors seemed to do the trick. The plate was displayed at the Smithsonian, Golden Gate International Exposition and Bancroft Library. When Bolton eventually kicked the brassy bucket, he did so with the knowledge that his life's goal had not been a failure, and that's where the story ends.

But Wait ...

It took until 1977 before the truth about Drake's plate of brass came to light -- it was a cruel prank on Bolton by his drinking buddies.

Those wacky professors of Clampus Vitus became so exhausted by Bolton's obsession that they decided to make his dreams come true, and then set them on fire. Together, they forged an insanely detailed replica of the missing plate, buried it in the ground and waited for the fun to begin. Of course, they did leave a sign that the plate was a forgery -- they painted the club's logo on it, in fluorescent paint that can be seen under a black light.

The only problem was that when the plate was dug up, nobody bothered analyzing it for secret black light messages, because why the hell would they? That's when things began to spiral out of control. It turns out that the Clampus club had created such an awesome forgery that it went on to fool every expert that they had hoped would uncover their prank, laugh and buy them a round of beers. Very soon, it had gone so far that the club members presumably spat in their hands and vowed never to talk about it, thus wasting everyone's time for the next 40 years.

4 The Cardiff Giant

In 1869, two men digging a well on New York farmland hit something they thought was rock but turned out to be something much more unusual -- an 11-foot-tall man made of stone. Despite the bizarreness of the find -- the statue was lying down and appeared to be in agony, like a real dying person, and Native Americans aren't known for their statue carving anyway -- the discovery proceeded to ring exactly zero warning bells for the men who went on to sell tickets to the public to come and see the thing.

The farm owner, William Newall, and his cousin, George Hull, claimed that the statue was actually a petrified, fossilized giant from Bible times, possibly a friend or relative of Goliath. The public thought, sure, why not? They'd know, they were farmers.

But Wait ...

Obviously it wasn't a real giant, but it wasn't even a real artifact. Turns out it was all part of George Hull's scheme to mess with religious people's heads and make them give him all their money. After getting his cousin and a small number of men on board with the hoax, he obtained an 11-foot block of gypsum stone under the pretense that he was commissioning a statue of Abe Lincoln, then they carved and buried the "giant" and spent a year practicing their surprised faces.

Apparently, nobody involved in selling Hull an 11-foot hunk of stone thought it was suspicious that the same man would claim a year later to have accidentally found an 11-foot stone statue. The hoax became one of the most successful in American history before it fell apart thanks to P.T. Barnum, the world-famous bullshit peddler who didn't fancy being upstaged. He declared the Cardiff Giant to be a hoax, and Hull sued him over it. Before accepting the case, the judge demanded that Hull state under oath that the giant was not, in fact, a hoax. Perhaps seeing a prison cell in his near future, Hull wisely declined to do so.

Later, as most things do, the affair became the inspiration for a Simpsons episode.

3 The AVM Runestone

The Kensington Runestone has been one of the biggest and most hotly debated archaeological finds in U.S. history. Discovered by a Swedish farmer named Olof Ohman in 1898 in Minnesota, the runestone is written in an ancient Viking language and suggests that medieval Swedish settlers lived in Minnesota centuries before Columbus made his voyage.

We know what you're thinking. This article is about archaeological hoaxes, and this is a story about a guy who happened to be Swedish "finding" an ancient Swedish artifact just lying around. Bullshit, right?

Actually, no. Despite the coincidences, Ohman was not responsible for the runestone, and its authenticity continues to be debated.

Instead, we're focusing on the second runestone that turned up over a hundred years later in the same area. In 2001, a professional stone carver named Janey Westin found what came to be called the AVM stone, another rock covered in Viking runes that everyone figured was proof of the Kensington stone's authenticity.

We still know what you're thinking. A professional stone carver just happened to stumble upon an amazing artifact that happened to be a carved stone. Bullshit?

Haha, no. Amazingly, Westin is also legit.

But Wait ...

Oh, but the runestones are still bullshit.

In the case of the AVM stone, what really happened was far more embarrassing. A museum run by runestone experts was fooled by the cunning skills of a few spring breakers.

Like all college students, Germanic philology majors Kari Ellen Gade and Jana Schulman were looking for a good time during their time off; unlike all college students, they thought carving Norse invocations on a big-ass rock made for a crazy night. Drunk on knowledge, they invited their friends to get "totally hammered," broke out the chiseling supplies and headed to a field to reenact Girls Gone Wild: Archaeological Hoax Edition.

When they owned up to their hilarious pranking years later, Gade and Schulman said they'd been conducting a little experiment to prove how gullible those Kensington folks were, and it totally worked.

As for the original Kensington stone? Scholars are starting to think that's probably also fake.

2 The Tiara of Saitaphernes

As any cultured individual will tell you, the Louvre is one of the world's most respected museums, so it would be safe to assume its collections are bullshit-free. In addition to housing things like the Mona Lisa and that armless statue, they also adopted a mint-condition third century crown from a Greek colony near Russia in 1896, scoring big when less French places like the Imperial Court and British Museum passed on it for some weird reason. The Louvre, assuming these dumbasses had made a huge mistake, immediately rushed in to claim it in the name of their proud nation. After analyzing it for a total time of "Fuck it, why bother?" hours, their leading experts tossed 200,000 francs at the tiara's owner, put it on display and toasted each other for their genius decision-making skills.

But Wait ...

But no one else was congratulating the museum on their awesome deal, mostly because the world was too busy laughing in their faces. Among the people waiting in line to spit on France's dreams was Adolf Furtwangler, a specialist of Greek archaeology and professor from Germany, who found this flawless tiara business to be kind of suspicious. When he called it out as a hoax, the Louvre responded in the extremely mature manner you'd expect from a world-class institution: by crying "RACIST!" and telling the press how this German guy was a baguette-hating, uncouth dick.

But aside from being covered in obvious traces from modern tools and soldering, there was also the problem of the ancient third century artifact not looking the tiniest bit disheveled after so many centuries supposedly spent in a crumbling cave.

So where did the tiara actually come from? It was made by a Russian guy named Israel Rouchomovski, whose buddy had asked him to whip up a fresh fake antiquity "as a gift for an archaeologist friend."

Once Rouchomovski proved his tiara-faking skills, the Louvre finally fessed up to their error. The embarrassing crown was hidden away in a back room and spoken of only in hushed tones of total humiliation for years, until they decided that putting it on display in the 1954 Salon of Fakes exhibit was the best way to save face.

1 The Persian Mummy Princess

Digging up a mummy is just about the biggest deal in the dick-measuring contest that is archaeology. So when the 2,600-year-old body of a Persian princess turned up in Pakistan wearing a kickass golden crown and a breastplate with an inscription that translated to "I am the daughter of the great King Xerxes," people got pretty excited, because until then, making mummies was thought to be purely an Egyptian hobby.

The Persian princess became an instant worldwide celebrity, causing an international incident about whose museum would get to take her home. Iran and Pakistan both wanted to claim it, and even the freaking Taliban wanted it. But while everyone was bickering over ownership of a really old rotted corpse, some scientists decided they wanted to take a look at it, and that's where things started to really get strange.

But Wait ...

Somebody who was an expert at this kind of thing happened to notice that the grammar in the mummy's inscription was terrible, like it was written by someone from a first year undergraduate course on ancient Persian. Deciding that this warranted deeper investigation, researchers began to uncover some more interesting facts about the princess:

1) The coffin was not ancient, but a modern forgery no more than 250 years old.

2) The mummification process was hack work, like someone cobbled the process together from what they remembered from school classes on ancient Egypt and Brendan Fraser movies.

3) The woman had only actually been dead for two years.

4) She'd been murdered, possibly for the purpose of making her into a fake mummy.

In what was the weirdest black market scheme ever concocted, it appears that someone actually murdered a person in an effort to make money from mummy fraud. That kind of dedication makes us wonder why they didn't go to the effort of studying the Persian language and how to mummify people. Once you've killed someone, we'd say you're well past the point of half-assing it.

The victim hasn't yet been identified, nor have the perpetrators of what resembles a rejected plot outline for a Weekend at Bernie's sequel.

When she's not writing comical tales and drinking her weight in tea, you can find Josie making fun of/studying hipsters at Obscurity in the Wilderness.

For more hoaxes that people won't let go of, check out 5 Myths That People Don't Realize Are Admitted Hoaxes and The 6 Most Bizarre Medical Hoaxes People Actually Believed.