User:Vanvance/Jacob Gass

This article requires a WP:LEAD written in the correct style.

Early Life
Reverend Jacob Gass was born in 1842 in Oltingen, Switzerland. Reverend emigrated form Switzerland to the United States of America in 1868. He began his career as a Reverend at the First Lutheran Church in Davenport, Iowa in 1871. Davenport had a large German speaking community and Reverend Gass gave sermons and taught mostly in German.

Contributions to Archaeology
Soon after being ordained as a Reverend, Gass became curious about the mounds in the U.S. to archaeological finds in his home country of Switzerland, where archaeologists found traces of houses of the La Tène culture. Gass undertook his own excavations in Davenport, Iowa, where his work received the attention of the Davenport Academy of Sciences

[You need to include discussion of Gass' earlier finds and his sales of material to museums.]

Excavations at Cook's Farm
Reverend Gass excavated several different mounds in 1874 at Cook's Farm, situated on the banks of the Mississippi River. Mound 3, the largest of nine recorded at the site, received the most attention. Most of the mound's excavation took place on the southern side, where the excavators found two historic-period Native American graves. These burials were not examined. Artifacts such as shells, textiles, chipped stone, and copper celts were also discovered. Similar artifacts were also found in other mounds at the site. In January 1877, Jacob Gass discovered the Davenport Tablets on the northern part of Mound 3.

The Davenport Tablets Conspiracy
While most of the artifacts found by Gass were genuine, the Davenport Tablets were considered to have been faked. Robert Farquharson, president of the Davenport Academy of Sciences, was the first to express doubts about their authenticity in ____. They bore inscriptions in symbols that archaeologists and other scholars agreed were atypical of North America. Suspicious finds associated with the tablets and further investigation proved conclusively that the slate tablets were a hoax.

However, despite documentation of the controversy and the reality that the Davenport Tablets were a hoax, these objects were regarded as legitimate inscriptions and deciphered by biologist Barry Fell in the 1970s and 1980s. . Fell himself is considered to be a crank. .