The so-called Vinland map, a world map…

1432 CE to 1443 CE

The so-called Vinland map, a world map supposedly made about 1440, redrawn from a thirteenth century original, in addition to showing Africa, Asia and Europe, depicts Greenland and a body of land across the Atlantic called Vinland; the map describes this region as having been visited in the eleventh 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 twentiethth-century artificial pigment. (Yale University, the current owner of the map, had chemical analysis performed on the ink; based on this test, the map was pronounced a forgery in 1974. Later tests, however, have persuaded many scholars that the Vinland map may be authentic: chemist Jacqueline Olin, a retired researcher with the Smithsonian Institution, has concluded that the map's ink was made in medieval times. Her article appears in the December 2003 issue of the journal Analytical Chemistry. The origin of the parchment has been placed between 1423 and 1445.)

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, other than to say they watch the debate with unusual interest.

"We regard ourselves as the custodians of an extremely interesting and controversial document," said Yale librarian Alice Prochaska in 2002, "and we watch the scholarly work on it with great interest."

More recently, Yale's Chester D. Tripp Professor of History, Paul Freedman, has stated that the map is "unfortunately a fake".

Individual pieces of evidence continue to be challenged, most recently at a 2009 conference.

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The Vinland map

The Vinland map

Groups
Greenland, Norwegian Crown Colony of View →

Topics
Colonization of the Americas, Norse View →

Commodities
Fish and game View → Weapons View → Hides and feathers View → Gem materials View → Lumber View → Land View →

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Commerce View → Labor and Service View → Government View → Mystery View → Finance View → History View → Geography View →

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