The Place of Stone: Dighton Rock and the Erasure of America’s Indigenous Past. By Douglas Hunter. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017.

This review was recently published in The Public Historian Vol. 40 No. 2, (May 2018): 170-172.

In the early nineteenth century, Joseph Smith claimed that he unearthed golden plates in a New York hillside that told the story of a Lost Tribe of Israel’s journey to America. In the early twentieth century, rural Minnesotans used a stone with a runic inscription to argue that Norsemen visited the region long before the voyages of Columbus. Even today, the  popularity of television shows such as Ancient Aliens and America Unearthed demonstrate that many are still on the look-out for alternative theories about pre-Columbian America. Douglas Hunter’s book,The Place of Stone, uses the history of the Dighton Rock to explain the motivations behind the centuries-long belief that North America was…