Posted on 11/26/2004 12:01:26 PM PST by blam
Viking map may rewrite US history
Agençe France-Presse
Friday, 26 November 2004
Experts are testing the map to see if it is really evidence for Vikings landing in the New World first, not Columbus (Image: Climate Monitoring & Diagnostics Lab) Danish experts will travel to the U.S. to study evidence that the Vikings landed in the New World five centuries before Columbus.
A controversial parchment said to be the oldest map of America could, if authentic, support the theory that the Vikings arrived first.
The map is said to date from 1434 and was found in 1957. Some people believe it is evidence that Vikings, who departed from Greenland around the year 1000, were the first to land in the Americas.
The document is of Vinland, the part of North America believed to be what is today the Canadian province of Newfoundland, and was supposedly discovered by the Viking Leif Eriksen, the son of Erik the Red.
Three researchers from the Danish Royal Library and School of Conservation hope that modern techniques developed in Denmark will be able to "shed more light on this document whose authenticity is questioned worldwide", said Rene Larsen, head of the School of Conservation in Copenhagen and the leader of the project.
The trio will on Monday begin their work on the map, which is kept at Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in Connecticut.
The three have been "authorised to, for two to three days, photograph, analyse with microscope and undertake various studies of the document and its ink, but not alter it", Larsen said.
He said the results of the study would be presented early next year.
The Vinland map, possibly the first map showing the New World, at Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (Image: Brookhaven National Lab/Yale University Press)
"We hope that the new techniques that we have developed in Denmark ... will help to better [date] the document and ink with which the map was drawn in order to lift the veil on its authenticity or counterfeit," he said.
The map was considered a sensation when it was found. Experts largely agree that the parchment dates from the 1400s, but by the 1970s some experts had begun arguing that the ink used contained materials that were only developed in the 20th century.
U.K. chemist Professor Robin Clark, from University College London, has meanwhile said he believed the document was a fake.
He based his conclusion on the work of another researcher, Dr Walter McCrone, who in the 1970s found that the ink contained a derivative of titanium dioxide, which did not exist until the 1920s, according to the journal Analytical Chemistry.
Or rename it LeifLand? The United States of Leifland? Leiflanders? Leifland the Beautiful?
This is really going to play havoc with our national songs.
Someone showed that titanium occurs naturally, thus debunking the debunkers.
If the Viking visitors to America had had the luck of Cortez, and landed among friendly tribes....
Horses and iron making in AD 1100. Just imagine.
America was discovered by humans long before Columbus. Whether the vikings discovered it again before Columbus, there's little doubt that the Columbus discovery was the most significant because it led to colonization.
But don't ask me. Ask Big Ole!
At risk of sounding politically correct...I'm not sure of the significance of Vikings landing here "first" since Native Americans were already here. The significance of Columbus was not that he was here first -- he wasn't -- but rather that he brought news of the area back to Europe, sparking an historical period of settlement and colonization. And that's pretty darn significant. So if the Vikings didn't do that, AND they weren't here before the Natives, then who cares?
Lots of history needs to be corrected because it has been corrupted.
Today we are still deliberately having history corrupted as we go along.
The days are coming when testing will prove lots of what other self intereseted groups declared as bogus to be the real thing.
In the interest of truth I wish these reasearchers well.
Yes, Alexandria IS a great place, however I haven't been there in more than 15 years and I am a mere 130 miles away!
Perhaps I could get a job renting ice fishing cabins...
I've seen it several times. I don't know if it has any link to authenticity. As a good Norsky Lutheran, I'd be more inclined to believe it was if they found coffee cups, a lefse iron and a bag of stale fish in lye in the same spot.
Columbus was not the first to discover America, but he was the last.
JASÅ!
Well said.
Big Ole ping
Did they get this map from Bill Burkett, Mary Mapes, or Dan Rather? /sarc
Since 1964. A village with a Viking long house, iron smithy and other stuff Native Americans would not have had.
Norsky Lutheran, lefse...
If you start with the "They used ta call it yam, and now they call it yelly" I'd swear we are related.
(Any kin in North Dakota?)
Vitus Bering in the employ of the Tsar discovered Alaska which nobody suspected existed except Hudsons Bay fur traders, who didn't know where in H they were, and the Alaska Natives, who also didn't know where the H they were.
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