The Vinland Map

Extract

The Vinland Map, published with considerable publicity as ‘the most exciting cartographic discovery of the century’ by Yale University Press in 1965, has now, on the evidence of spectographic analysis by Walter McCrone Associates of Chicago, been virtually proved to be a modern forgery. The details, which have appeared widely in the press and were the subject of a meeting at the Royal Geographical Society on 4 February 1974, need not concern us here. The interest in Professor Taylor's paper written in 1963 well before the map's publication, is that working from measurements on a facsimile reproduction and with her own unrivalled knowledge of early cartography she was able to establish, at any rate to her own satisfaction, that the Old Map, as she calls it throughout, was a fake. She was the first scholar to cast serious doubt on the map's authenticity, and needless to say her views were hotly contested.