he was "inclined to regard the whole inscription as Celtiberic". M.C. Reid performed an experiment in the late 1870s to demonstrate that the symbols were not necessarily alphabetic. He asked four people (a teacher and law student, a schoolgirl, a pharmacist, and a college professor) to create for him "twenty or more arbitrary characters not resembling any figures or alphabetical characters known to them". Since the Grave Creek Stone was inscribed using only straight lines (which is quite common, since straight lines are much easier to inscribe than those with curve), Reid instructed the four participants to only use "straight lines or combinations of straight lines". To further simulate the actual inscribing of the stone, the individuals were not allowed to improve upon their first attempt (since one cannot erase all or part of a symbol once it is inscribed). Just like the inscription on the Grave Creek Stone, these symbols were found to resemble characters found in alphabets of the old world. Reid was "compelled to conclude that there is nothing in the form of the characters of the Grave Creek Stone which require us to decide that they are old, that they are alphabetical, or if alphabetical that they are derived from any known alphabet". Recent research At a meeting of the West Virginia Archaeological Society in October 2008, the anthropologist David Oestreicher suggested that the inscription had been forged by James W. Clemens, a local physician who had financed the excavation through loans. Oestreicher claimed to have found the source of the inscription; an 18th-century volume, "An Essay on the Alphabets of the Unknown Letters That are Found in the Most Ancient Coins and Monuments of Spain". "Everything on the stone", including "impossible sequences of characters with the same mistakes", was copied directly from the volume. References 1838 archaeological discoveries 19th-century inscriptions Virginia culture Hoaxes in the United States Archaeological forgeries 19th-century hoaxes North American runestone hoaxes