----------------------------Original message----------------------------
In February there was quite a discussion on MapHist about the Vinand map.
The discussion founds its origin in the New York Times article concerning a
symposium at Yale.
Andrew Cook posted the whole article to MapHist. For those on Maps-L
interested in the matter, I forward Andrew Cook's posting. I am sorry, it's
long and MapHisters have read it already.
Those interested in the discussion should ask for the archives file of Feb.
1996 (or, order early January 1997, for the printed hardcopy of the MapHist
messages - I produce them, 1994 and 1995 are available, those interested,
send me privately a request for information).
The NPR broadcast had renewed the discussion on MapHist.
Peter
Date: Fri, 16 Feb 1996 17:33:07 +0000
Reply-To: Map History Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
Sender: Map History Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
From: Andrew Cook <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Posting the New York Times article on the Vinland Map
Now I've seen both texts, I echo Ed Dahl's comment.
Simplest thing to do is post it to the list, so that
more of us can review it (thanks to Deborah Natsios for
e-mailing it)
Andrew.Cook@ bl.uk
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The New York Times, February 13, 1996, pp. C1, C11.
Disputed Medieval Map Called Genuine After All
By John Noble Wilford
[Photo] Site of Vinland is at left edge of Vinland Map;
inset, modern map puts it roughly at Newfoundland.
No map in the hands of a puzzled traveler in a strange
land was ever examined as closely as the Vinland Map.
Scientists and various scholars have pored over
everything about it -- the ink and parchment, the faint
lines of known and imagined coasts and inscriptions in
Latin -- to see if this is a clever forgery or the
genuine article, a map drawn about 1440 and containing
the earliest cartographic representation of any part of
the Americas.
And still, after more than 35 years, they cannot be
sure and perhaps never will be. The first detailed
chemical test, completed in 1974, indicated that the
ink might be a 20th-century product, which seemed to
brand the map a modern forgery. But a more recent test
and other research appear to tip the balance toward
authenticity.
At least the editors of the Yale University Press think
so. On the strength of the new evidence, the press is
publishing today a new, expanded edition of "The
Vinland Map and the Tartar Relation," the book that
created a sensation when the first editipn appeared in
1965. At the time, Yale called the map "the most
exciting cartographic discovery of the century."
In an introduction to the new edition, Dr. Wilcomb E.
Washburn, director of American studies at the
Smithsonian Institution in Washington, said that while
the dispute may never be resolved, it "can now be said
to have reached a new stage." Those who have been
charging forgery, he said, "must now assume a defensive
role and respond to those previously on the defensive."
Dr. Washburn was less circumspect in an interview. "I
think the evidence is clearly on the side of
authenticity," he said.
John G. Ryden, director of the Yale press, said the
decision to reissue the book was influenced by the
strong challenge to forgery claims and a thorough
examination of all recent findings conducted by Dr.
George D. Painter, a retired scholar at the British
Museum who is the last survivor of the team that
produced the original edition.
Dr. Painter wrote in an essay for the new edition that
both scientific and cartographic evidence reestablished
the map and accompanying manuscript as a "major and
authentic message from the middle ages." The map was
found bound with a text called the Tartar Relation
describing Friar John de Plano Carpini's mission to the
Mongols in the 13th century.
At a symposium held on Saturday at Yale University in
New Haven in conjunction with the publication of the
book, the object of controversy made a brief appearance
under armed guard. Valued by insurers at $25 million
and normally locked away in a library vault, the
Vinland Map rested on a lectern, covered by a
protective layer of plastic. It is no bigger than two
open pages of a moderately large book, in the book
being published, it is reproduced at actual size. The
ink, presumably black when first applied, has mostly
faded to lines of pale yellowish-brown.
On the far left side of the map is a large island in
the Atlantic Ocean, the reason for the map's renown.
The island occupies approximately the position of
Newfoundland and is labeled "Vinlanda Insula."
Since the material found with the map was prepared
about 50 years before the 1492 voyage of Columbus, some
scholars believe the map was drawn by an unknown
European cartographer from records or oral traditions
left by Norse explorers. A legend above the island
describes how Leif Ericson and Bjarni Herjolfson sailed
from Greenland about 1000 and discovered a new land,
which they named Vinland.
If genuine, the map further established the historical
validity of the lcelandic sagas and the Norse priority
in the discovery of America. Archeological excavations
in Newfoundland and elsewhere have since convinced most
scholars that the Norse had indeed reached northeast
America 500 years before Columbus, though their
attempts to establish settlements were failures.
The map came to light in 1957 when a Connecticut
rare-book dealer acquired it in Geneva and then sold it
to Paul Mellon, a patron of the arts, who gave it to
Yale. For eight years, Yale scholars quietly
scrutinized the map and determined on the basis of the
parchment and certain geographical errors that it had
probably been drawn in Basle to illustrate the Tartar
Relation, dated at about 1440.
Not until after the book was first published, when
several respected historians of cartography raised
serious questions, did the map undergo the chemical
test that forced Yale to concede that it "may be a
forgery."
Commissioned by Yale to conduct a chemical study, Dr.
Walter C. McCrone, a Chicago microscopist and analyst
of fine particles in air pollution, removed 29
particles of vellum and ink from the map. X-ray
analysis showed that the particles consisted largely of
anatase, a crystalline form of titanium dioxide that is
rare in nature and was not commercially available as a
white pigment until 1920. Dr. McCrone decided the map
must be a fake.
A decade later, physicists at the University of
California at Davis came to a much different
conclusion. They used a powerful cyclotron to fire a
beam of protons through the map. The procedure,
harmless to the map, generated X-rays from which all
elements present in the ink and parchment could be
almost instantaneously identified and quantified. The
results were surprising and reassuring.
Dr. Thomas A. Cahill, the physicist who directed the
project, reported that the ink contained only trace
amounts of titanium, amounts consistent with a genuine
medieval document. "The prior interpretation that the
map has been shown to be a 20th-century forgery must be
reevaluated," Dr. Cahill's team reported in 1987.
At the Yale symposium, Dr. Cahill said further studies
strengthened the case for authenticity. Comparative
analysis of other documents of the time, including a
Gutenberg Bible, revealed traces of titanium occurring
naturally in somewhat greater amounts than those
detected in the map. None of the quantities were
sufficient to be considered a purposefully added
ingredient.
Microscopic analysis of faded lines, Dr. Cahill
reported, also seemed to discredit the hypothesis by
Dr. McCrone about how the forger had worked to give the
map an antique appearance. He could have first drawn
lines with a vellow ink, presumably rich in anatase,
and then applied a black ink over them. But the
yellowish lines on the map, as analyzed by Dr. Cahill,
turned out to have almost no anatase.
"I leave it to others to talk about authenticity," Dr.
Cahill said at the symposium. "What do we say? There is
nothing about the chemistry or morphology of the
Vinland Map that in any way makes it stand out from any
of the parchments of that period that we have
analyzed."
Based on the new findings, Dr. Painter concluded: "The
chemical constitution of the ink can no longer be used
as an argument against authenticity. On the contrary it
becomes, instead, a series of proofs of the map's
entire medievality."
But Dr. McCrone is unyielding. He had not been invited
to the symposium, the organizers said, because he had
previously declined to participate in such discussions,
saying there was nothing new to say. He arrived
unexpectedly and passed around copies of a letter he
had sent to Mr. Ryden of Yale press, complaining about
not being invited to contribute to the new edition. Had
he been asked, he said, the title of his contribution
would have been, "The Vinland Map, Still a 20th-Century
Fake."
Dr. McCrone continued to argue that the forger had
produced the entire map after 1920, using a yellow ink
for antique effect and then applying a black ink line
down the middle of the yellow lines. He had one
outspoken ally at the meeting, Dr. Kenneth M. Towe,
curator of paleobiology at the Smithsonian's National
Museum of Natural History.
In a new analytical approach to the problem, Dr. Garmon
Harbottle, a physicist at the Brookhaven National
Laboratory in Upton, L.I., conducted a statistical
analysis of data from Dr. Cahill's group, looking for
any patterns in the distribution of chemical elements
over the map. The composition of the ink was uniform,
he determined, except for one place on the map -- the
part pertaining to Vinland itself and the legend above
it.
"I don't attribute much to this in terms of the
authenticity question," Dr. Harbottle said. "Maybe
someone came along a few years later and added Vinland
to a map that already existed. The island does seem to
be stuck out on the edge. Maybe a monk copying the map
ran out of ink and made up a new batch at that point.
But the ink is different, no question about it."
Other scholars reported on their detective work trying
to track down the origins of the map.
Ardell Abrahamson, an independent scholar from
Minneapolis, reported detecting what might be a
modified double acrostic with an anagram in each of the
two map legends, something
a modern forger would have been unlikely to devise.
Another independent scholar, James Enterline of New
York City, suggested that some of the particle
contaminants in the ink could have been introduced by
anyone who had had the map cleaned in this century. He
described how a bleaching technique used in the 1950's
for cleaing old documents would have softened the map's
yellow-brown stain and resulted in wrinkles and bumps.
Scholars said new techniques in DNA analysis should
reveal the type of animal skin used for the parchment,
perhaps thereby identifying the area it came from.
Although the sentiment of the meeting and most of the
reported research tended to favor the Vinland Map's
antiquity, Dr. David Woodward, a historian of
cartography at the University of Wisconsin at Madison,
who could not be at the symposium, said in an
interview: "I'm not sure that anybody yet has come up
with positive evidence that the map is a forgery. I am
impressed by Cahill's work. But my mind is still very
much open."
[Close-up photo] Area of Vinland Map where two parts of
inked line do not run exactly parallel was once taken
as proof of double-inking by a forger; some now say
such misregisters were common in authentic period
documents.
[End]
>----------------------------Original message----------------------------
>I heard the last half of a story on the famous "Vinland" map, wednesday
>on NPR. It turns out that the map is NOT a fake, but is in fact real.
>The story mentioned something about a publication about the map. Does
>anyone know when and where this new article or book about the "Vinland"
>map can be found?
>
>--christopher jj thiry
>map librarian
>colorado school of mines
>
>[log in to unmask]
>http://www.mines.edu:8080/library/maproom/
>
>"At the mines, but far from the pits."
>
>
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Dr Peter van der Krogt
FRW-Cartography
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P.O. Box 80.115 2613 XM DELFT
3508 TC UTRECHT The Netherlands
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