The Bat Creek Stone was temporarily loaned to the campus’s McClung Museum by the Smithsonian Institution in 2002 but has since been returned to the lender. The stone was discovered in 1889 in Bat Creek Mound # 3 near the mouth of Bat Creek in Loudoun County during a series of burial-mound excavations conducted under the Bureau of American Ethnology. The stone was located beneath the skeletal head of one of the nine skeletons in the undisturbed mound.
The small, flat stone is engraved with marks that experts at the Smithsonian originally interpreted as letters of the Cherokee syllabary. About 80 years later, some scholars claimed that the characters were Paleo-Hebrew. This caused a storm of controversy over the true origin of the stone because the latter explanation sustains an argument for migration of Mediterranean peoples into Tennessee during the Roman time period. Today most experts believe the inscriptions are neither Cherokee nor Semitic writing and that they are a forgery.