The curious Newark holy stones are Hebrew inscribed objects found in association with ancient Native American earthworks in the vicinity of Newark, New Jersey, in 1860. For some years Dr. Lepper, curator of archaeology for the Ohio History Connection, and his colleague Jeff Gill been promoting the theory that the stones were forged as emancipationist propaganda to try to prevent a civil war. Obviously, the plan did not succeed.
I have discussed the Newark Stones in more detail here. You can follow the links from there for more posts on them. It looks like all the previous article I had linked to have rotted, so this is a recent article in Dr. Lepper's own words. As far as I know, his theory, which in itself sounds plausible, has not been published in a peer-review journal.
No specialist thinks today that the Newark holy stones are ancient artifacts. But Rochelle Altman once argued that they are stolen medieval Jewish relics. (The link is gone.) Again, I am not aware of any formal publications of this idea.
Whatever kind of thing they are, they look pretty cool. Someone did put a lot of work into them. The current article has some photos. Lepper and Gill have a more detailed popular article posted on Dr. Lepper's Academia.edu page. It has some close-up photos as well.
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