The so-called Alu’th Cairn Fragments are interesting to northern European historians and Incan historians alike only because of the manner of their discovery. There is nothing about them that indicates any form of link between the two cultures, culturally or historically, but their existence links the two nevertheless.

The Fragments were purportedly found by one Arthur Linus Fitzsimmons, a gentleman scholar from Boston, while he was staying with friends in Helsinki in 1841. The story (which he reported in a letter to a friend at in the Yale history department) is that he was in the habit of hiking around various cairn sites in the hills around Helsinki and taking lunch amidst the centuries-old ruins. During one such lunch, he noticed that the pile of rocks that he set his lunch on was covered in a series of regular marks. Sorting through the rocks, he deduced that the pile was a large stellae that had crumbled over the years until it was in the sorry shape that Fitzsimmons found it in.

Several hand-drawn pictures of the rocks and their marks accompanied the letter to his friend at Yale along with a declaration from Fitzsimmons that he would attempt to decipher the script. He stayed the winter in Helsinki and produced a partial translation of the Fragments, which included a passage declaring the name of the cairn where it had been found as Alu’th (which was, in hindsight, the first clue).

When the spring thaw came, several noted historians and archeologists descended on Helsinki and the rooms that Fitzsimmons had rented out in order to store and display the Fragments. A few impromptu trips to the cairn yielded no further fragments or signs of any kind of rock formation similar to the Fragments. In fact, as the routine scrutiny on the Fragments intensified, any number of irregularities arose.

To begin with, the kind of rock that the Fragments were made from was not native to the hills around Helsinki. When a more thorough analysis of the rock was done, it was revealed that the rock most likely came from the Andes Mountains in South America. It was not long after this came out that Fitzsimmons admitted to the attempted fraud. (The logical next step would have been to check the prior travel itineraries of the erstwhile historian, which would have discovered the trip that Fitzsimmons took to the Andes in 1838.)

Fitzsimmons admitted that he had discovered the Fragments during his trip to South America, but he had been unable to decipher the markings on the stones. Frustrated, he cooked up a scheme to “find” them in another venue where he could “decipher” them in any way he saw fit. Obviously, his plans did not take into account geological analysis.

When questioned by historians studying the Incan culture, Fitzsimmons refused to give any more information about the Fragments, including where he found them or what condition they were in when he originally found them (there were fears that Fitzsimmons might have pulverized the original piece to smuggle the Fragments more easily). Given a chance to transform his attempted fraud into a genuine archeological discovery, Fitzsimmons declined. He had not enjoyed his trip to South America and wanted nothing more to do with the place.

Several historians have gone over the itinerary that Fitzsimmons followed across the Andes, but nothing further has been found to date.