Revealing a rune stone's secrets (geo-archaeology)

[Dover]

In 1898, a Swedish immigrant farmer was clearing his land in west-central Minnesota, near Kensington, when he found a tombstone-shaped stone that was covered with unintelligible carved figures, resembling old Scandinavian runes. Some claim that the rune-covered stone is a hoax perpetrated by the farmer, while others claim that the rune stone is the greatest American artifact: If legitimate, it would mean that Scandinavians reached the interior of North America more than 130 years before Columbus. New geologic evidence may lend some credibility to that claim.

Geologists are trying to determine whether this stone, found in 1898 and covered with ancient Swedish runes telling a tale of a massacre of a band of Scandinavian explorers in Minnesota in 1362, is authentic. Courtesy of Scott Wolter.

Runes are characters from an old Scandinavian alphabet, widely used from the third to the 13th centuries and continuing in lesser usage throughout the next centuries. The Kensington rune stone's inscription, dated 1362, tells of a band of Scandinavians moored near a lake in Minnesota, who returned to camp after a day of fishing to find their comrades massacred, says Richard Nielsen, an engineer and expert on the Kensington rune stone.

When the farmer, Olaf Ohman, found the stone in 1898, many of the words and runes were unknown to linguistics experts, Nielsen says. Furthermore, a fair number of these words are part of the modern Swedish language, which led to suggestions that the farmer carved the inscription. Recent discoveries in Sweden, however, show that all of the words represented by runes on the stone can be found in Old Swedish and were in use in the 1300s, Nielsen says. It is highly unlikely, he says, that a 19th century farmer would know these words were authentic, if linguistics experts did not even know that until recently.

Still, the exact date of the stone has been in question. So in 2000, the Kensington Runestone Museum in Alexandria, Minn., asked Scott Wolter, a geologist and president of American Petrographic Services in St. Paul, to perform "an autopsy" on the 202-pound rock to determine when the runes were carved...cont'd

http://www.geotimes.org/jan05/NN_MNrunestone.html

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

1. There is another runestone in OK

eastern OK-said to be a boundary marker. No one knows its age.

[semillama]

2. wrote an article about a conference session on the KRS

published in Fortean Times a few years ago. I was at the Midwest Archaeology Conference when it was held in Minneapolis and was at the runestone session. The linguistic evidence is pretty convincing, as is the geologic evidence. It's not a ballpark slam, since there is still some questionable evidence on both sides, but it's not clearly a hoax as folks thought, if it is a hoax.

If it's a hoax, it's one of the best perpetrated ones I've seen. Most 19th-century archaeology hoaxes are pretty obvious and lame.