The Map May Have Been Fake, but the Journey Was Real
The history of the Viking presence in North America has gotten a lot more interesting. Both those who believe the Vikings were here before Columbus, and those who deny it, have something to cheer about.
In September, the famous Vinland map, once claimed to be from the 15th century and depicting the North American coast, was declared a fake. Yale University experts not only claimed to have detected modern components in the ink of the parchment map, but also evidence that the map makers were intentionally attempting to deceive. Ironically though, The case for a Viking presence almost half a millennium before Columbus, suddenly became much stronger. Reuters reported in October, that a newly developed dating technique used on wood fragments from Norse layers at L’Anse aux Meadows Viking settlement near Hay Cove, Newfoundland, has authoritatively determined that the site was occupied, a full thousand years ago, long before Columbus.
So while scholars, long convinced that our continent was hermetically sealed off from the outside world before the arrival of Christopher Columbus, are—Vinland map notwithstanding—left with proof of a pre columbian presence.
Bound in a mid-15th Century history of the Mongols, the so-called “Vinland Map” was purportedly re-drawn from a two-hundred-year older compilation of several, earlier maps, apparently indicating extensive knowledge of what is now the eastern United States going back a thousand years. The land mass portrayed farthest to the left, identified as Vinilanda Insula, encompassed an area from Maine in the north to the Carolinas in the south; from the Atlantic Seaboard to the Susquehanna River in central Pennsylvania.
The new analysis revealed that a titanium compound used in inks first produced in the 1920s was used in the map’s lines and text.
“The Vinland Map is a fake,” said Raymond Clemens, curator of early books and manuscripts at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, which houses the map. “There is no reasonable doubt here. This new analysis should put the matter to rest” (https://news.yale.edu/2021/09/01/analysis-unlocks-secret-vinland-map-its-fake).
The new study also uncovered evidence that the map deception was intentional. A Latin inscription on its back, possibly a bookbinder’s note guiding the assembly of the Speculum—an authentic medieval volume and likely source of the map’s calfskin parchment—is overwritten with modern ink to appear like instructions for binding the map within the genuine 15th-century manuscript.
Nevertheless, long before Columbus crossed the Atlantic, eight timber-framed buildings covered in sod placed on a terrace above a peat bog and stream at the northern tip of Canada’s island of Newfoundland, would provide irrefutable evidence that the Vikings reached the New World first. Previously, the date when the Vikings journeyed to L’Anse aux Meadows had remained unclear—but no more.
Scientists used new dating technique referencing a long-ago solar storm to establish that the settlement was occupied in 1021 AD, exactly a millennium ago and 471 years before the first voyage of Columbus. The method was used on three pieces of wood cut for the settlement, all pointing to the same year. The study was published in the journal Nature.(https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03972-8)
The Viking voyage, it is agreed, represented multiple milestones for humankind. The settlement offers, say the scientists, the earliest-known evidence of a transatlantic crossing. It also shows where they believe the globe was finally encircled by humans. There is evidence, however, that Columbus himself was guided by maps predating his own voyages by thousands of years.
