Exploration Before Columbus

Two  Book Reviews:                                                                                                                     

            We probably all remember reading about the discovery in 1960 of a proven Viking settlement found at L'ance Aux Medeaux in New Found Land, carbon dated to 1000 AD.  But that is not the only documented case of artifacts from Europe that date to pre-Columbian times.  There is now a great deal of irrefutable evidence showing that many exploration missions, some from Scandinavia and at least one from the Orkney Islands, made in to America before Columbus.  I have just finished reading two books which relate to European exploration of North America prior to Columbus. 

             One book, The Kensington Rune-stone is Genuine, is by the late Robert A. Hall, a Cornell linguist. This book discusses a stone unearthed in 1898 in Douglas County, Minnesota by Olaf Ohman, an immigrant farmer. It was dismissed as a hoax at the time--but Hall says that linguistic evidence discovered in the hundred years since its discovery  now shows that it could not have been forged.  Hall's position, essentially, is that the reason that the stone was originally  rejected as a forgery in 1898 was that some of the runes and some of the usage was believed to have come into use only a century after 1362,  the stone's purported date.  But, Hall explains, we have since discovered that such usage was indeed used at that time, though no one could have known this until at least 1904, when such information was first published, and some of this information was not discovered till 1935.  So the unusual runes and language use which originally was thought to prove that it was a forgery now prove that it could not have been a forgery, since no forger could have known this stuff in the 1890s.  And if it is not a forgery--then it's genuine.

               Hall says that this matter can never be settled absolutely,  but that the probability that it is a forgery is very slim.  I would agree.  For it to have been forged, the forger would have to have had a world-class knowledge of historical linguistics.   He would have to have known a lot of things before anyone had published them.  This, although not mathematically impossible, is highly unlikely.  Whenever a new idea is published, a handful of insiders are often aware of it for a decade or two before it is published but hold off on publishing it for one reason or another.  Darwin and Wallace both knew about natural selection for a while before either of them published.  Newton and Leibnitz  both knew about calculus, etc. And a forger would also have to have known how to fake the weathering patterns, and do it well enough to fool a geologist.   There are people who know how to do this.  Mostly, they sell art forgeries. But the idea that someone in Minnesota in the 1880s or 1890s had a world-class skill level in  both of these arcane disciplines is exceedingly remote.  Also, the forger would need to have had the complicity of the whole Ohman extended family and all of their neighbors.  While not mathematically impossible,  this also seems pretty unlikely.

            Hall makes one interesting point:  We should never expect ancient documents to conform perfectly to our classic model of what the language and writing of the time is imagined to be.  He cites the Oath of Strasbourg as an example .    It was written in 842 AD as a promise between King Louis The German and King Charles The Bald to aid each other against their brother, Lothar.   (Actually Charles the Bald was only a half-brother, but that's beside the point.) It was written in early Romance dialects of the time.   Even though it was written by royal scribes, this document does not conform to either Old North French or Old South French,

deviating sharply from the standard set by all other examples of text from this period.  If it had been carved on a stone and buried and just now dug up, Hall says it would be dismissed as a crude and amateurish forgery. And yet we have the original document and we know exactly where it's been since it was signed---Its provenance is unquestioned---It is absolutely genuine.  So if some of the usage on the Kensington stone seems a little unorthodox, (even with 20th century discoveries, a few things don't seem to fit) we should not be too concerned.  Hall says, if you ever see some ancient document in which everything is exactly what you expect, then that's a good sign it's a fake.   In the real world, things don't come out that neatly.

            Hall says that he does not wish to get involved in the controversy as to whether or not there are cryptograms (hidden messages) in the rune-stone.  He says that since this cannot be proven, it's all speculation.  I think this is a wise position.               

            When reading these books, we tend to feel sorry for the Ohmans because these honest folk were subjected to lifelong ridicule. But what happened to them was entirely predictable.  Tell me this:  If you ever saw a UFO, would you tell anyone about it? Would you report it to the police or to the press? You'd be a damned fool if you did.  It might ruin your whole life.   One of the problems of the rune-stone is that at the time it was unearthed, it was generally believed that no European ever crossed the Atlantic before Columbus.   But we now know, and have known since 1960,  that this is not so.  When the ruins of a genuine Viking settlement at L'ance  Aux  Medeaux (Lance Aux Meadow) carbon dated to 1000 AD was found in New Found Land in 1960,  it settled the matter.  The Vikings were definitely here first. But in the 1890s,  no one believed this except the Scandinavians, whose only evidence was the Vinland Saga, and sagas are poetry; they contain some truth and some fiction.  So the Scandinavians believed it but they couldn't prove it.  So to have pronounced the Kensington Rune-stone as genuine in 1900  would be to have overturned all accepted history;  it would have been an extra-ordinary claim--and an extra-ordinary claim requires extra-ordinary levels of proof.  There was a lot at stake.

            But today, there is less at stake because we already know that the Vikings started coming here about 1000 A D.  And they probably continued doing so, off and on, for the next 500 years.  In fact, they were probably all over this continent like flies on a cow pie because they desperately needed land. So why didn't they settle here? Because the Indians were already here,  (about 30 million of them)  and the Indians wouldn't permit it. The Vikings fought bravely with bows and axes--but so did the Indians.  And wherever the Vikings went, they found themselves outnumbered 100 to 1.  But by the time of Columbus, the Europeans had some advantages over the Indians that the Vikings did not have, including an advantage which they did not even know they had---they carried smallpox!  Jarred Diamond explains in Guns, Germs, and Steel that when the Aztecs and the Inca confronted the conquistadors, they had just been totally ravaged by smallpox.  Much of the population was gone, and what population remained was in chaos and civil war.            

             The other book is The Hooked "X", by Scott Wolter, a forensic geologist who examined the Kensington  stone and concluded that the weathering patterns indicate its age is as old as is claimed by its 1362 AD date.  Apparently, in 1362, some Vikings sailed into Hudson Bay and took their canoes up the Red River as far as they could go and then laid claim to the watershed bordering this river by planting a stone marker, as was the European custom.   Wolter has also examined other Late Medieval European artifacts found in America, and that is the subject of his book.   Besides the Kensington Rune-stone, he discusses runic markers found along the east coast, and also a stone tower at Newport, RI which seems to have been built about 1400 AD and is probably related to the 1398 voyage of Prince Henry Sinclair of the Orkney Islands.  

            Before going on to discuss the Hooked X book, I should comment about one thing: the low opinion that professional archaeologists have for the work of amateurs. While there may be some elitist snobbery going on here,  the pros have a legitimate complaint.  What was the first thing Oley Ohman did when he found the stone?  He grabbed a nail and scratched the dirt out of the grooves so he could see the runes more clearly.   And in so doing, he scratched off all the weathering evidence that would have proved how long ago it was carved.   Fortunately, Oley got lazy that day and left 3 runes untouched.  And it is only those 3 runes that allow us to date the carving.   If Oley had had a little more time that day, he'd have scratched them all and we'd never know when they were carved.  And in the Hooked X book, the man who found rune- stones along the Atlantic coast did the same thing.  Typically, when an amateur finds something,  in the very process of unearthing it he usually destroys all evidence that might be used to date it, and also destroys anything that might be learned from the context of the site where it is found.  If you were a professional archaeologist, I think you'd find this pretty aggravating.

            Scott Wolter, author of The Hooked X also has a degree of credibility.   As a geologist, his pronouncements about weathering patterns and leaching patterns are credible science.  After making these judgments, he proceeds with other matters and has varying degrees of credibility from then on.   Some of the things he points out are absolutely solid scientific facts---the smoking guns.  Yet he presents a lot of other ideas that are pure speculation, supported either by weak circumstantial evidence or none at all. But he mixes it all together, the facts and the speculation , as if all were equally valid.  I would think that as a forensic scientist, he should appreciate the difference. Ahh, where to begin.

            First, Wolter's interpretation of the use of holes bored into boulders near the burial site of the Kensington stone  is that they are markers to provide sighting lines so as to mark the site location where the stone was buried.  He is surely correct.  But his definition of this technique as "sacred geometry" is nonsense.  What makes it so sacred?  Supposing I were to say, "This morning,  I tied my sacred shoes with a sacred knot, I cooked my sacred oatmeal over the sacred fire, and topped it off with a sacred pop tart?"  He also concludes that the use of this surveying technique in some way ties the stone carver to Gotland and to the Knights Templar.  They probably did come from Gotland--we know that from the dialect and the runes.  And if Gotland was then overrun by the Templars, as is evidenced by the Masonic symbols found in 14th century churches there, then this party coming from Gotland probably had Templars with them.  But if they had come from anywhere else, they would still have used exactly the same surveying methods.  Geometry is geometry.  It was invented by the Greeks and Egyptians, and has been used by nearly everyone since and is still used the same way today.  I've used this same technique myself to mark the location of lamp posts that had to be temporarily removed to dig up a sewer line.  You just make  punch marks on a few things that aren't going anywhere--like another lamp post, a brick building, a boulder, etc.    And then you sight two lines between these marks that intersect at a point near the object whose position you are trying to mark.  The word "geometry " means "earth measuring."  Even my old Boy Scout Manual had a page on how to do this. There is nothing secret or sacred about it.

            But Wolter has come up with a few things that are solid facts.

 (1) The images of corn (maize)  carved into a church doorway in the Orkney Islands  in a church that we know was built in 1446,  prove that whoever built that church had contact with someone who had been to America.  Corn is a New World plant.  It was unknown in Europe in 1446.  The most likely candidate is Prince Henry Sinclair, since the Scotts have always claimed that Sinclair made a voyage to America in 1398, and since the church with the corn carving is the Sinclair family chapel.

(2) When digging around the Newport Tower, they found a bit of the original mortar and it contained a foraminifera shell that was dated (carbon dated I assume) to 1450 AD plus or minus 30 years.  This would argue that the tower was pre-Columbian.

            Wolter also has theories which, though not proven, are backed by a lot of circumstantial evidence. The hooked "X",  which he discovers on the Kensington stone, on the rune-stones found on the Atlantic coast, and also in churches in Gotland from the 1300s,  proves that they are all connected by some kind of tie.  He suggests that this tie is the Knights Templar and the Cistercians.   This seems likely, but is not proven.  Wolter then goes on to suggest that the hidden meaning of this symbol has to do with a belief, which Wolter believes was held by the Templars and Cistercians,  that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and had a daughter.  While it is possible that there was such a heretical belief, his conclusion is backed only by inferences drawn from conversations with modern high ranking Freemasons. (These Freemasons could not directly divulge any  information to Wolter because he is not a Mason.  But when he asked specific questions, he was directed to existing sources in which the answers might be found.)  However, the belief set in question would be sufficiently heretical that anyone who confessed to holding it at that time would likely be burned at the stake.  That would certainly explain why the pope permitted Philip The Fair to smash the Templars in 1307, and why Masons even today tend to be pretty secretive.  But making  guesses about which secret beliefs were held by very secretive people 700 years ago gets pretty damn  iffy.  This is an intriguing speculation---but only a speculation.

            From there on, Wolter goes on to speculations that have even weaker circumstantial evidence or none whatsoever.  But I still enjoyed reading into it because I have always been fascinated by the Freemasons and known that they have a lot of unusual beliefs and practices involving occult symbolism.   And since Wolter had access to high ranking Masons, he had access to information normally closed to outsiders.  The beliefs of modern Freemasons contain  assertions of widely ranging credibility.  On the one hand, their claim that Masons were in America before Columbus--a claim which I used to dismiss as patently absurd---is probably true.  On the other hand, their claim to be part of an ancient order that goes back the Pharaohs of Egypt or the building of Solomon's temple--is pure nonsense.  Yes, if you want to define a mason as a guy who does stonework, then Solomon's temple was built by masons--but it was not built by guys who belonged to "The Masons".    Yet the claim that they have an unbroken organizational tie to the medieval Knights Templar is probably true, and  discovering this alone was worth reading the book.

            The Hooked "X" is sloppily edited and contains a lot of typographical errors. On page 181,  paragraph 3, they speak of the knights Templar  "......after their return from Jerusalem in 1119."   Surely they mean 1219, because the order wasn't even chartered till 1128. (See page 55.)   And on page 252, item 7 makes no sense at all unless you change the date 2008 to 1898.  

            Still, it is a fascinating read.  Even the parts that are purely speculative are often interesting.   For instance, Wolter notes that the Newport Tower is a copy of the tower at the Templar's original church and castle in Portugal, which is a copy of the tower in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem.  That would explain the Templars' referring to their attempted settlement in the New World as "The New Jerusalem."  And it would surely suggest that whoever built the tower was a Templar--and likely connected to Henry Sinclair, who, according to the book,  was  at that time the hereditary Grand Master of the Scottish Rite Freemasons, as are the Sinclair heirs today. For an image of the Kensington Runestone,  click on http://www.kensingtonrunestone.us/    
Note:  If voyages to America before Columbus interest you, then The Cat has another review that you won't want to miss:
The Ancient Mines of Kitchi Gummi.