discovery. Upon finding the land was not owned, he immediately set up residence there, in order to homestead the property. Bent felt there was money to be made in further excavating the site. Latin inscriptions The first object removed from the caliche by Manier was a crudely cast metal cross that weighed ; after cleaning it was revealed to be two separate crosses riveted together. After his find, Manier took the cross to Professor Frank H. Fowler, Head of the Department of Classical Languages of the University of Arizona, at Tucson, who determined the language on the artifacts was Latin. He also translated one line as reading "Calalus, the unknown land", giving a name for the supposed Latin colony. The Latin inscriptions on the alleged artifacts supposedly record the conflicts of the leaders of Calalus against a barbarian enemy known as the "Toltezus", which some have interpreted as a supposed reference to the Mesoamerican Toltec civilization. However, the Latin on the artifacts appears to either be badly inflected original Latin, or inscriptions brazenly plagiarized from Classical authors such as Virgil, Cicero, Livy, Cornelius Nepos, and Horace, among several others. This has led many experts to condemn the artifacts as frauds. What is perhaps most suspicious, however, is that most of the inscriptions are identical to what appeared in widely available Latin grammar books, like Harkness's Latin Grammar and Allen and Greenough's Latin Grammar, as well as dictionaries like The Standard Dictionary of Facts. Views on authenticity Manier took the first item to the Arizona State Museum to be studied by archaeologist Karl Ruppert. Ruppert was impressed with the item, and went with Manier to the site the next day where he found a caliche plaque weighing , with inscriptions that included a date of 800 A.D. A total of thirty-one objects were found. Other contemporary scholars including George C. Valliant, a Harvard University archaeologist who visited the University of Arizona in 1928, and Bashford Dean, curator of arms and armor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, thought the articles were fakes. Neil Merton Judd, curator of the National Museum at the Smithsonian Institution, happened to be in Tucson at the time of the discovery of the objects and, after examining them, also thought they were fakes, proposing that they may have been created by "some mentally incompetent individual with a flair for old Latin and the