The map describes this region as having been visited by Europeans in the 11th century. Although it was presented to the world in 1965 with an accompanying scholarly book written by British Museum and Yale University librarians, historians of geography and medieval document specialists began to suspect that it might be a fake as soon as photographs of it became available, and chemical analyses have identified one of the major ink ingredients as a 20th-century artificial pigment.
In 2018, after several investigations and many years of debate, specialists at Yale declared that the latest scientific and historical research had conclusively established that it was a modern forgery. The map remains in Yale University's
The Vinland map first came to light in 1957 (three years before the discovery of the Norse site at
Yale was unable to afford the asking price and was concerned because Witten refused to reveal the
Many academic reviewers of The Vinland Map and the Tartar Relation took the opportunity to point out evidence that called the map's authenticity into question. So a year later, a Vinland Map Conference was held at the Smithsonian Institution, during which further significant questions were asked, particularly of Witten. However, the proceedings were not published for another five years.[4]
There were questions about the actual content of the map. Witten had pointed out that it bore strong resemblances to a map made in the 1430s by Italian mariner
In addition, the text uses a
Another point calling the map's authenticity into question was raised at the 1966 Conference: that one caption referred to Bishop Eirik of Greenland "and neighboring regions" (in Latin, "regionumque finitimarum"), a title known previously from the work of religious scholar Luka Jelić (1864–1922). An essay by British researcher Peter Foote for the Saga Book of the Viking Society (vol. 11, part 1), published shortly after the conference, noted that German researcher Richard Hennig (1874-1951) had spent years, before the Vinland Map was revealed, fruitlessly trying to track Jelić's phrase down in medieval texts. It seemed that either Jelić had seen the Vinland Map and promised not to reveal its existence (keeping the promise so rigidly that he never mentioned any of the other new historical information on the map), or that he had invented the phrase as a scholarly description, and the Vinland Map creator copied him. In practice, because Jelić's work had gone through three editions, Foote was able to demonstrate how the first edition (in French) had adopted the concept from the work of earlier researchers, listed by Jelić, then the later editions had adapted the anachronistic French scholarly phrase "évèque régionnaire des contrées américaines" into Latin.
Handwriting experts at the 1966 Conference tended to disagree with Witten's assessment that the map captions had been written by the same person as the Speculum and Relation texts. This had also been a major reason why the British Museum had rejected the map in 1957, the Keeper of Manuscripts having detected elements of handwriting style not developed until the nineteenth century.[1]
Complaints were made at the Conference that no scientist had been permitted to examine the map and its companion documents in all the years of study since 1957. Skelton's scientific colleagues at the British Museum made a short preliminary examination in 1967 and found that:
In 1972, with new technology becoming available, Yale sent the map for chemical analysis by forensic specialist Walter McCrone whose team, using a variety of techniques, found that the yellowish lines contain anatase (titanium dioxide) in a rounded crystalline form manufactured for use in pale pigments since the 1920s, indicating that the ink was modern. They also confirmed that the ink contained only trace amounts of iron, and that the black line remnants were on top of the yellow, indicating that they were not the remains of a penciled guide-line, as the British Museum staff had speculated.[6]
A new investigation in the early 1980s, by a team under Thomas Cahill at the
The McCrone team had also made mistakes, though none as fundamental as Cahill's. Revisiting his notes in 1987 to draft a detailed reply to the abbreviated public version of Cahill's report, Walter McCrone chose the wrong sample to illustrate a "typical" black ink particle, selecting one which had been found only loosely attached to the ink.[14] By focusing on this contamination, rich in chromium and iron, he gave Cahill the opportunity to re-emphasise his case in an essay for an expanded version of the 1965 official book, a few years later.
In 1991, McCrone, then director and senior research microscopist with the
Various scientists have formed their own theories to explain how the 20th century manufactured anatase in the Vinland Map ink could have got into genuine medieval ink. The first was chemist Jacqueline Olin, then a researcher with the Smithsonian Institution, who in the 1970s conducted experiments which produced anatase at an early stage of a medieval iron-gall ink production process. Examination of her anatase by a colleague, mineralogist Kenneth Towe, showed that it was very different from the neat, rounded crystals found in the Vinland Map and modern pigments.[8][17][18] Towe himself, a clay specialist, briefly considered the possibility that the anatase could have come from clay, where it is present in trace amounts, but on checking McCrone's data found no significant traces of clay minerals. Shortly before the Raman analysis was published, historian Douglas McNaughton based a mistaken theory about the ink around McCrone's emphasis on the chromium-rich black particle, having obtained unpublished data on the similar particles in Möller's report.[19]
Olin published a paper that identifies the anatase in the Vinland Map ink as being truncated bi-pyramidal rather than rounded crystals [20] (however, this is not vastly different from the McCrones' 1974 description of the crystals as "smooth, rounded rhomb shapes"[6]).
In 2008, Harbottle's attempt to explain a possible medieval origin for the ink was published, but he was shown by Towe and others to have misunderstood the significance of the various analyses, rendering his theory meaningless.[13][16]
The expanded 30th anniversary edition of the 1965 official book, The Vinland Map and the Tartar Relation, was notable for its exclusion of most of the evidence against the map's authenticity, concentrating instead on vindications by George Painter, and Thomas Cahill with colleague Bruce Kusko (in which they claimed specifically that they had not analyzed the loose particles they took from the map at the time of their PIXE research), but it did reprint an essay written in 1989 by the original book dealer Laurence Witten. He stated that, when the McCrone investigation concluded the map to be a forgery in 1974, he was asked by Yale to reveal its provenance as a matter of urgency, and to discuss the possible return of Mr Mellon's money. He replied that he had no idea where the map came from, beyond Ferrajoli (who was convicted of theft shortly after the sale, and died shortly after release from prison). On the subject of the money, he said he could not pay it all back because he had paid agreed shares of his profit to Ferrajoli and to another dealer who had introduced him. For his part, Mellon did not ask for the return of any money. The essay also revealed that Witten had, on Ferrajoli's recommendation, met with Irving Davis after buying the map volume in 1957.[22]
Regardless of the controversy, the map, which had been valued for insurance purposes at over $750,000 in the 1960s, was claimed in 1996 to be worth $25,000,000.[23]
In 2004, Kirsten A. Seaver published Maps, Myths, and Men: The Story of the Vinland Map, a wide-ranging review of the arguments and evidence presented to that date. Seaver was hailed as the Vinland map's "most thorough and outspoken critic in recent years" for her "exemplary interdisciplinary study".[24][25][26] She also theorized that the forger could have been Father Josef Fischer (1858-1944), an Austrian cartographer and Jesuit scholar. However, subsequent research into the provenance of the Vinland map documents (see below) suggests that they are unlikely to have spent any time in Fischer's possession.[27] Robert Baier, a forensic handwriting analyst, examined the map text and correspondence of Fischer, and his opinion was that "they are not the same writer."[28]
In 2005 a team from the
Members of the Danish team later joined with others to perform microanalyses of the remaining piece from the 1995 carbon dating sample. They found a significant quantity of monostearin (Glycerol monostearate) which is commonly used in the food and pharmaceutical industries, with additional aromatic compounds. It was thought that if it was not purely localised contamination from handling by somebody using something like hand lotion, it was likely to be the unidentified post-1950 chemical soaked into the parchment. Their microscopic examination confirmed that the parchment had been treated very roughly at some time, with 95% of fibres damaged.[33]
In June 2013, it was reported in the British press that a Scottish researcher, John Paul Floyd, claimed to have discovered two pre-1957 references to the Yale Speculum and Tartar Relation manuscripts which shed light on the provenance of the documents.Madrid, Spain to commemorate the voyages of Columbus).[35] Floyd noted that Spanish priest and scholar Cristóbal Pérez Pastor also reported having seen such a codex, in historical notes organised and published posthumously in 1926.[36] Neither the catalogue entry nor Pérez Pastor's description mentioned the presence of a map. It is known that Enzo Ferrajoli, who offered the Vinland manuscript for sale in 1957, was convicted of having stolen manuscripts from the Cathedral Library of La Seo, Zaragoza, in the 1950s.[37]
Separately, Floyd also observed that the creator of the Vinland Map had evidently made use of an 18th-century engraving of the 1436 Bianco map by Vincenzio Formaleoni (1752–97), since the Vinland Map reproduces several of Formaleoni's copying errors. He argued that this furnished a new and decisive proof that the map is inauthentic.[27][38]
Floyd's book appeared in 2018 under the title, A Sorry Saga: Theft, Forgery, Scholarship... and the Vinland Map.[39]
As controversy has swirled around the map almost since its acquisition, authorities at Yale University chose not to comment on the authenticity of the parchment document. In 2002, Yale librarian Alice Prochaska commented that "We regard ourselves as the custodians of an extremely interesting and controversial document…and we watch the scholarly work on it with great interest."[40] However, in 2011, Yale's Chester D. Tripp Professor of History, Paul Freedman, did express his view that the map was "unfortunately a fake".[41]
At the 2018 Vinland Map Symposium, Yale conservation scientist Richard Hark revealed the results of new global chemical analyses of the Map and the Tartar Relation, which established, among many other things, that the ink lines of the Map contain varying amounts of anatase "consistent with modern manufacture". So too do two small patches on the first page of the Tartar Relation, where the original iron-gall ink appears to have been erased and replaced.[42]
Raymond Clemens, Curator of Early Books and Manuscripts at Yale's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, considers that the latest historical and scientific research proves "beyond a doubt" that the Vinland map "was a forgery, not a medieval product as it claimed to be." In a March 2019 article, Clemens highlights the fact that "historical investigations by John Paul Floyd have revealed that the Vinland Map is actually based not on Bianco’s 1436 map, but on a printed facsimile map made in 1782. Floyd discovered this by noting mistakes in the 1782 map that were replicated on the Vinland map, but could be found nowhere else." Furthermore, the map has been studied at the Beinecke Library using new technology. "In the case of the Vinland map we were able to prove... [the map] was clearly a 20th century fake." Despite the reveal of the map's forged origins, Clemens stated that the map would remain at the Beinecke Library, as it had "become an historical object in and of itself."[43][44][45]
Provides 2.5 Mb hi-res image of the map.
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