The Spencer Lake Horse Skull

In 1936, a horse skull was excavated in Spencer Lake, Wisconsin. The skull was found in a burial mound that was later to be securely dated to the Late Woodland Period, about 1000 years before the European conquest of the New World. The researcher who excavated the skull, W. C. McKern, had found no stratigraphic evidence that the mound had been disturbed, and so concluded that it could not have been planted. A university student, however, came forward and claimed to have planted the skull. McKern interviewed the student and, based on discrepancies between the student's description of the planted skull and the one McKern had excavated, concluded that the excavated skull could not be the one the student planted. A heated debate ensued, which ended in something of a stalemate.

In the late 1960's, after McKern had retired, the student came forward and gave more details, which help to explain the absence of stratigraphic disturbance. In the words of Alex Barker, "Sketches they [the purported prankster and his friends] provided of the pit they dug suggest that their short tunnel would have largely been within a single stratum, rather than crosscutting strata as did the usual, vertically oriented looting pits. As a result, the intrusive pit fill would have been relatively undifferentiated from the intact fill around it" (Barker, 30). Barker concluded in 2001 that the skull was a hoax, and that the discrepancies in the prankster's story were due merely to his faulty memory. The evidence was ambiguous enough, however, that it has continued from time to time to be used as possible evidence for the Book of Mormon. In fact, Daniel C. Peterson seems to be alluding to the Spencer Lake skull when he says in a recent FAIR video that horse bones "found in the upper Midwest" "have been radiocarbon dated to about the time of Christ." Presumably in his reference to radiocarbon dating he is thinking of the Late Woodland date of the mound, which was obtained by carbon dating some charcoal found therein. Peterson suggests that archaeologists' late dating of this and other horse finds are simply "assumed, on the basis of ideology and preconceived opinion."

Peterson couldn't be more wrong. In 2002 BYU professor Stephen Jones (a physicist whose research interest include cold fusion, 9/11 conspiracy theories, and Book of Mormon horses) contacted Barker and offered to fund AMS (Accelerator Mass Spectrometry) dating of the horse skull itself. Samples were sent to two separate radiocarbon labs, both of which returned post-conquest dates (averaging about 150 years ago). This study has finally settled the controversy surrounding the Spencer Lake horse skull. The skull is a hoax, and provides no evidentiary support for the Book of Mormon.

Works Cited:

Barker, Alex W. "Stewardship, Collections Integrity, and Long-Term Research Value," in Our Collective Responsibility: The Ethics and Practice of Archaeological Collections Stewardship, ed. S. Terry Childs (Washington, D. C.: Society for American Archaeology, 2004) 25-41.