Posted on 07/29/2002 6:36:30 PM PDT by Swordmaker
NEW HAVEN, Conn. - Yale University's parchment map of the Vikings' travels to the New World, purportedly drawn by a 15th century scribe, is a clever 20th century forgery, according to a new study.
The study is the latest development in a debate that began in the 1960s when the map was given to the university by benefactor Paul Mellon.
Scholars who believe it is real have said it predates Christopher Columbus and proves he was not the first European to reach America.
But researchers at University College in London who analyzed the ink have concluded the map was produced after 1923.
"The results demonstrate the great importance of modern analytical techniques in the study of items in our cultural heritage," said Robin J.H. Clark, a University College professor who did the analysis.
Another map expert, however, said Clark's study does not prove the map is a fake.
"Nothing so far has changed my opinion that the map is consistent with other documents of the same age we had analyzed," said Thomas Cahill, a professor of atmospheric science and physics at the University of California at Davis.
The research by Clark and a colleague, Katherine Brown, is published in the July 31 issue of Analytical Chemistry, the journal of the American Chemical Society.
The map depicts the world, and includes the north Atlantic coast of North America. It includes text written in medieval Latin and a legend that describes how Leif Eiriksson, a Norseman, found the new land around the year 1000.
Other experts have dated the map to around 1440 - 50 years before Columbus sailed to the New World.
The map was sold by a dealer in rare Spanish books to a Connecticut dealer in the 1950s, who then sold it to Mellon. The original dealer never revealed his source. Now valued at more than $20 million, the map is housed at Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
Yale has not taken a position on whether the map is authentic, said the university's head librarian, Alice Prochaska.
"I think probably research will reveal one day what the truth is, but it is certainly very much under discussion and debate," Prochaska said Monday.
In the 1970s, Yale hired the late Chicago chemist Walter McCrone Jr. to do a microscopic analysis of the map. He focused on the map's ink - a black layer that is flaking off over a yellowish layer that adheres firmly to the parchment.
McCrone found round, uniform crystals of anatase in ink. Anatase, a form of titanium dioxide, has been used to produce inks since the 1920s.
Anatase is found in nature, but in small amounts that would be found in jagged, irregular crystals if a medieval scribe had used it to make the Vinland Map's inks, he said. Based on this conclusion, McCrone pronounced the map a fake.
In a 1995 book, however, Cahill and a colleague debunked McCrone's conclusions.
Among other conclusions, they found that most of the crystals McCrone found were not anatase, and that a third of the ink contained no titanium.
Clark's study, using a Raman microscope, found that anatase was detected solely in the yellowish ink lines, and not elsewhere on the parchment. The Raman microscope uses a laser beam that scatters off molecules as radiation with different colors.
Yellow lines are sometimes left behind when medieval ink, made of iron gallotannate, degrades. Clark said a forger would know about the yellow residue and would try to reproduce it.
But, the black ink on top of the yellow ink was found to be carbon-based, not iron gallotannate, so no yellow residue should be present, Clark said.
just more data to add to the mystery.
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