DIGHTON ROCK

Opening

Dighton Rock is a sandstone boulder of about 40 tons that sat for centuries on the shore of the Taunton River at Berkley, Massachusetts, on Assonet Neck, covered by the tide twice a day. Its sloping face, roughly 11 feet long, carries carved lines, figures and marks. Since the 1680s, Europeans and Americans have tried to say who made them, crediting Phoenicians, Norse explorers, a lost Portuguese captain and Chinese sailors.

The simplest answer was there from the start: the carvings are Indigenous, made by the people whose homeland this was. Writer Douglas Hunter argues that the parade of foreign-visitor theories pushed that answer aside for three centuries. Since 1963 the rock has been out of the river, in a museum in Dighton Rock State Park, and the arguments about it say as much about its readers as about the stone.

Timeline

1676 and afterFollowing King Philip's War, Wampanoag people are driven from much of the region, including the land around the rock.

1680The Reverend John Danforth draws the carvings. His drawing survives in the British Museum.

1690Cotton Mather describes the rock in The Wonderful Works of God Commemorated, probably without having seen it.

1730Isaac Greenwood gives the first reliable description and says the cuts are "not very considerable".

1783Ezra Stiles, president of Yale, proposes Phoenician authors in an election sermon.

1837Danish scholar Carl Christian Rafn's Antiquitates Americanae links the carvings to Thorfinn Karlsefni and the Vinland sagas.

Mid-19th centuryHenry Rowe Schoolcraft records a reading by the Ojibwe leader Shingwauk and supports Indigenous authorship, the view that largely prevails for decades.

February 1919Edmund Burke Delabarre, a Brown University psychologist, announces that the rock carries the name of Miguel Corte-Real, a Portuguese captain last seen sailing from the Azores in 1502, and the date 1511.

1954Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison mocks the decoding habit.

1955The rock is damaged by a chain.

1963State officials raise the rock during cofferdam work and later house it in a museum.

1970George F. W. Young publishes a Portuguese reading that shapes the museum's approach. In 1971 the rock is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

2002Gavin Menzies attributes it to a Chinese fleet in his book 1421.

24 September 2011Azorean and Portuguese-American groups mark a "500 years" celebration of Delabarre's date.

2017Hunter publishes The Place of Stone with the University of North Carolina Press.

Key figures

The Indigenous carvers, most likely Wampanoag ancestors, whose names and intentions are not recorded.

Cotton Mather, who made the rock famous.

Carl Christian Rafn, who gave the Norse theory scholarly standing.

Edmund Delabarre, author of the Portuguese theory, which still has strong community support.

Douglas Hunter, whose 2017 book argues for Indigenous provenance and documents its erasure.

Ellen Berkland, archaeologist with the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation.

Physical and documentary trail

The record is a run of drawings from 1680 onward, which disagree with each other and with the rock as it is now, plus the stone itself, now in the museum. Weathering, graffiti and copyists who saw what they expected have all changed what can be read. Mather's description is the one that launched the puzzle:

Among the other Curiosities of New-England, one is that of a mighty Rock, on a perpendicular side whereof by a River, which at High Tide covers part of it, there are very deeply Engraved, no man alive knows How or When about half a score Lines, near Ten Foot Long, and a foot and half broad, filled with strange Characters: which would suggest as odd Thoughts about them that were here before us, as there are odd Shapes in that Elaborate Monument.

Hunter notes that no unfiltered Indigenous account of the markings' meaning survives; even Shingwauk's reading reaches us through Schoolcraft. Berkland, briefing him on a 3-D imaging project, was direct: "The carvings are definitely Native American."

Corrections to the earlier version of this report. Delabarre announced his Corte-Real reading in February 1919, not 1918. No other errors were found; the drawings, the Mather and Rafn dates and the 1963 removal all check out.

Things you might not know

• Mather probably never saw it. His "very deeply Engraved" contrasts with Greenwood's "not very considerable" forty years later.
• It nearly emigrated. In the 19th century there were proposals to move the rock to Copenhagen, home of the Norse theory, or to Boston.
• Morison had a joke ready. Given enough time, he said in 1954, he could find "Kilroy Was Here" or "To Hell With Yale" on the boulder.
• The Portuguese theory came from a psychologist. Delabarre was a Brown professor of psychology, not an archaeologist or a linguist.
• It had another name. Because it sat on Assonet Neck, it was often called Assonet Rock.
• A modern Wampanoag voice was conciliatory. At a 2013 talk at the museum, a representative of the self-identified Assonet Wampanoag asserted the markings' Indigeneity but allowed that others may have written on it too.

Competing explanations

Indigenous petroglyphs. The style matches Native rock art in the region, the attribution was raised from the earliest inquiries, and it needs no hypothetical voyage. Hunter argues this was the plain reading all along.

A Portuguese inscription. Delabarre's reading depends on letters and a date that do not appear clearly in the earliest drawings. It is backed by Young's 1970 study and by deep community feeling among Portuguese Americans in the area, but not by later scholarship.

Norse, Phoenician or Chinese voyagers. These rested on sagas, Biblical ideas about human origins and wishful reading, with no support from the carvings themselves.

Later life of the case

The museum has long presented several theories side by side, with the Portuguese reading prominent. Hunter hopes it will change its interpretation, and he notes that the modern Indigenous relationship with the rock remains largely unexplored. The Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah) and the Mashpee Wampanoag won federal recognition only in 1987 and 2007, and Hunter says he knew of no formal claim by either to the rock.

Finding

Folklore, in the foreign-visitor stories, not in the stone. The carvings are real and best explained as Indigenous work, with later marks added by visitors. Phoenician, Norse, Portuguese and Chinese readings rest on marks the earliest records do not show clearly.

What still will not resolve: what the carvings meant to the people who made them. No Indigenous account survives unfiltered, and which marks are original rather than added over three centuries is still argued.