Negative image of the Holly Oak Pendant from the cover
of Science Magazine, 21 May, 1976. Note, the mammoth
image has been picked out from background details.
It is easy to see the lack of feet.
The Holly Oak Pendant is a fraudulent artifact created as a shell gorget bearing the image of a mammoth on the converse side. It was originally presented in 1889 as an authentic Paleolithic artifact from North America, given the image of the mammoth engraved on it.
Late in 1863, Edouard Lartet, the paleontologist, with Henry
Christy, his friend and benefactor, had turned a few shovels of earth in the
rock shelter of La Madeleine by the side of the Vezere River in France. They
found remains of stone, bone and ivory tools so they returned in the Spring of
1864. That May, Lartet’s dig crew recovered five fragments of an ivory plate.
When reassembled they displayed a wonderful engraved mammoth with almost all of
the details of its appearance clearly defined. All this engraving lacked was
the feet, which may have been on an un-recovered piece of the plaque or may have
never existed because of lack of space on the surface.
Illustration of the Holly Oak pendant
from www.museumofhoaxes.com.
In 1889, an archaeological assistant at Harvard's Peabody
Museum named Hillborne T. Cresson, announced that he had discovered a
prehistoric seashell pendant/gorget that bore the engraving of a woolly mammoth
on one surface. He stated that he had discovered it near Holly Oak railroad
station, in northern Delaware, in a layer of peat in the forest. This find was
suspected of being fake by some establishment figures. One reason for suspicion was the unusual circumstance of
its discovery. Cresson claimed he had discovered it in 1864, when he was a
teenager, in the company of his music teacher, Mr. Saurault. He offered no
explanation for why he had waited twenty-five years to share the discovery,
even though its significance should have been obvious to him — especially since
his music teacher was himself a student of archaeology. (http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/archive/permalink/holly_oak_pendant)
“The Holly Oak Pendant
was accepted as authentic by many when it was discovered in the middle of the
nineteenth century. The pendant, found in Delaware, appeared to be an incised
drawing on shell of a prehistoric woolly mammoth. It reminded many of the
Paleolithic cave paintings and carvings of the Europe of 20,000 years ago,
convincing some of the existence of a similar – and similarly ancient –
artistic tradition in North America.
The Holly Oak Pendant,
if genuine, should have dated to more than 10,000 years ago, since that is
about the time that woolly mammoths became extinct – obviously, people would
not have been drawing mammoths long after they had disappeared. In fact, the
shell turned out to be only about 1,000 years old. The artifact was a fake,
though cleverly carved on an old piece of shell. “(Feder 2010:139)
The 1864 Holly Oak Pendant/Gorget bears a very similar
engraved mammoth to the one portrayed on the ivory plaque from La Madeleine –
even down to the missing feet. That is the first detail that gave rise to
suspicion that the image was fraudulent. The mammoth on the Holly Oak
Pendant/Gorget had been copied from a published image of the ivory plaque from
La Madeleine and the feet could not be included, even though there was
sufficient room on the shell, because the forger did not know what they should
have looked like.
“Thus something is
terribly wrong with the context Cresson provided or created. Occam’s Razor
slices right through this one – the Holly Oak Gorget, with its wonderful wooly
mammoth, is not a genuine prehistoric artifact of any significant age. Indeed,
the shell gorget itself, with no engraving on it, may well be from the very
late Fort Ancient culture of Ohio. Cresson dug on one such site, and he was
fired for stealing artifacts in Ohio. A radiocarbon date recently run on the
shell gorget dates it to less than a thousand years ago. Even (Barry) Fell’s Epigraphic Society Occasional
Publication volume branded it a fake based on the carbon 14 finding!”
(Williams 1991:127)
This strongly suggests that the shell gorget in question was one of the artifacts stolen by Cresson, with the mammoth image later added to manufacture the evidence that would ensure his fame. The dating was carried out by Accelerator Mass Spectrometer
C14 analysis, and resulted in a date of AD 885 within a range of AD
750 to AD 1000. (Meltzer 1990:55) The irony of this all is, of course, that we
now know that not only were there also mammoths here in the New World, but
there were people here hunting and eating them – only somewhat earlier than
Cresson claimed, and just not carving their pictures on shells.
Note: Readers who find these subjects to be of interest will be well served to read the books referenced above, and listed below in my References list.
REFERENCES:
Feder, Kenneth L.
2010 Encyclopedia
of Dubious Archaeology: From Atlantis to the Walam Olum, Greenwood, Santa
Barbara, Denver, and Oxford.
Meltzer, David
1990 In Search of a Mammoth Fraud, New Scientist,
July 14, 1990, Volume 127, No. 1725, p. 51-55.
Williams, Stephen
1991 Fantastic
Archaeology, The Wild Side of North American Archaeology, University of
Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia.
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