Posted on 12/07/2009 7:43:37 PM PST by SunkenCiv
When Minneapolis artist Janey Westin first came across the runes near the town of Kensington, she assumed they were left behind by the same Norse explorers who created the so-called Kensington Runestone, found nearby in 1898. The infamous 200-pound rock is covered with runes that describe the travails of a party of Scandinavians beset by Indians in 1362. Though most scholars doubt the stone's authenticity, it continues to fuel debate about a Norse presence in the Midwest.
Excited by the new find, the Kensington Runestone Museum paid for archaeological testing at the site, which yielded only a few Native American artifacts, and removed the stone to a laboratory for further examination. But hopes for the stone's authenticity were dashed when professors Kari Ellen Gade of Indiana University and Jana Schulman of Southeastern Louisiana University came forward with an affidavit stating that as graduate students they and three classmates in the Germanic philology department at the University of Minnesota carved the runes... After sneaking onto property adjacent to Kensington Runestone Park, the graduate students used a hammer and chisel to engrave a pagan magical formula, a Christian invocation, and the date 1363 on a 2,000-pound boulder...
Scott Wolter, a forensic geologist who has studied the Kensington Runestone, analyzed the students' handiwork before the affidavit was released. Wolter says he was troubled by nagging doubts about the runes before Gade and Schulman came forward, but the revelation of the hoax doesn't make him happy....
Gade, now chair of the Germanic studies department at Indiana University, is unrepentant. "I'm sorry that people spent their time and money on the stone, but it was clearly a fake."
(Excerpt) Read more at archaeology.org ...
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Runestone Fakery site:freerepublic.com |
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Cheers!
Shouldn’t it have been relatively easy to show by chemical and physical inspection and test, that inscriptions carved by modern-day pranksters were of recent provenance. You know, degree of chemical weathering, sharpness of edges, and the like.
This refers to the Minnesota stone, not the Kensington one in case people are confused....it wasn’t well-written.
I remember seeing this on an interesting History Channel documentary about this, and they had some skepticism toward the Minnesota stone.
Correct! The Kensington Runestone wasn’t even recognized as having a carved text until it had been in use for some years in a building. Sounds like the hoaxer *really* wasn’t in much a hurry. ;’)
Probably. Authentic stuff can also be shown to be fake if one looks hard enough. :’)
Hey, I had planned to mine that source all week. Now you’ve gone and blown those to smithereens. ;’)
:’)
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