SAS Webinar
Saturday, November 1, 2025
2:00 – 3:30 PM PT
“Culprits behind Plate of Brass: Dare Stones”
By
Melissa Darby MA
Senior Archaeologist/Historian
Lower Columbia Research & Archaeology LLC
via
Zoom

In 1937, two Elizabethan artifacts came to light that created headline news across the United States and each of the alleged artifacts addressed a different long-standing Elizabethan mystery. The first artifact to come to light that year was the Drake Plate of Brass, inscribed in crude block letters of old English text and found on a hillside overlooking San Francisco Bay. A few months later a stone slab was allegedly found along the Chowan River in North Carolina. The similarly inscribed stone seemed to describe the fate of the 117 settlers of the Lost Colony of Roanoke. This presentation will demonstrate that historian Herbert E. Bolton was the ringleader of the Plate of Brass hoax, and assisted other historians, George Hammond and Haywood Pearce Jr., with the planning and implementation of the Dare Stone fraud. An underlying motive of these men was the desire to uplift a White and English national identity for America. However, one of Bolton’s motives for the Plate of Brass hoax, and perhaps his main motive, was his desire to shut down the theory that Drake landed further north on either the Oregon or Washington coasts. The paradigm is shifting, and a consensus is building among academics that Drake actually landed on the Oregon coast.

Melissa Darby is an award-winning historian and anthropologist, and affiliated research faculty in the Anthropology Department at Portland State University. She is principal investigator and sole proprietor of Lower Columbia Research & Archaeology. Darby has worked for over forty years in the Northwest and is a noted authority on the ethnohistory of the Native people of the lower Columbia River region. Her research on Native American cultures of the area includes important works on settlement patterns, plankhouse architecture, and plant foods used by the indigenous people of the region. She has contributed substantially to our understanding of the Native peoples and the world they inhabited prior to European colonization.

The seminar will start at 2:00 PM PT and formally conclude at 3:30 PM.
Friends are welcome and also invited to join our organization. There is no participation fee.
You are invited to attend the webinar before 2:00 PM for chat time.