Bourne Stone

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The Bourne Stone is an archaeological curiosity located in the town of Bourne, Massachusetts.

The object is a 300 pound chunk of pink granite, upon which two lines of carvings were made. For many years it served as the doorstep for a meetinghouse in Bourne.

As with many such objects, there is no consensus as to what the writing on the stone means. The well-known and controversial epigrapher Barry Fell conjectured that the carvings were made in Iberian script and read as follows:

A proclamation. Of annexation. Do not deface. By this Hanno takes possession.

Fell presumed that the "Hanno" being referred to above was none other than Hanno the Navigator, which, if true, would date the stone to about 570 BC and offer tantalizing evidence that the Carthaginians crossed the Atlantic in ancient times.

Mainstream historians do not take these claims seriously and presume that, if the stone is something more than a hoax, the carvings were made by Native Americans.