The Davenport Tablets

Jacob Gass, a Lutheran minister and Swiss immigrant, found a group of three tablets inside a Native American burial mound at the Cook Farm in Davenport, Iowa, in 1877 and 1878. The tablets included a wide variety of languages and showed images from hunting, cremation, and an astrological table. The tablets were initially hailed as the missing connection between Native Americans and people in the ancient world, indicating that their mounds had been constructed by an older, more sophisticated culture of settlers by eminent historians like Spencer Bird of the Smithsonian Institution.

Later, when they were revealed to be complete forgeries, Jacob Gass's credibility as an archaeologist was called into question. According to some, Gass didn't carry out the forgeries; rather, he was the target of xenophobic attempts by envious coworkers who didn't like the thought of a foreigner working for their organization to exclude him from the Davenport Academy. This theory was eventually refuted by the revelation that Gass frequently traded in imitation Native American pipes, but it has been suggested that Gass was unaware of the fakes and that his own relatives convinced him to accept them.