Mia McDavid, my wife, suggested that I look at Geologist unearthed a mystery, then landed on TV in our local newspaper. It was about Scott Wolter, who believes that the Kensington Runestone is a genuine medieval artifact. I am generally skeptical of fringe scholarship claims. The reference to the Knights Templar immediately set off more alarms in my head.

With medieval technology, it is a long and difficult way from the known Viking settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland to Minnesota, and there are no other records of medieval Scandinavians exploring deep into the interior of North America. There is also a time issue. Tree rings at L’Anse aux Meadows are dated at 1021 A.D. There is no evidence that the site was still occupied in 1362 A.D., the alleged date of the Kensington Runestone. In fact, by that time Norse villages in Greenland were in decline. According to Viking Age Greenland, the Western settlement was abandoned about this time, while the Eastern settlment managed to hang on until about 1450.

According to Wolter:

I ended up comparing the weathering of tombstones of a known age … and in the end, I concluded that the weathering of key minerals, biotite in this case, began to come off the surface of the tombstones at about 200 years. On the runestone, they were gone. So my conclusion was it was older than 200 years — and that’s from the date it was pulled out of the ground in 1898 — because it hasn’t been in a weathering environment since. It was impossible for it to be a late-19th century hoax.

But from The Kensington Runestone:

Wolter’s comparison of the inscription with local tombstones carved in greywacke suggests that the weathering on the Runestone is comparable with inscriptions several centuries old; taking the history of the stone, which was discovered buried, into account might then be used as evidence that the inscription was protected from similar weathering and is thus older. This ignores any damage that might have been caused by cleaning the inscription with a nail (which supporters have used as a reason not to use the weathering (or lack thereof) as evidence for age), although it appears that only the runes on the side of the stone were cleaned in this way. Dating inscriptions by weathering is never an exact science and further work needs to be done to assess whether or not similar weathering could have occurred on a stone carved in, say, 1890, and examined in the early twentieth century; it also needs to be established that no artificial ageing of the inscription has taken place, whether by design or in the course of misguided cleaning (such as scrubbing with a wire brush or soaking in vinegar).

Also, a Swedish Scholar found evidence that the Kensington Runestone Used 19th Century Runes.

Scott Wolter Gives New Interview, Suggests Second Kensington Runestone Exists has more about Wolter’s claims. In fact, a second stone was found in the area in 1985, but it turned out be a modern forgery by two graduate students at the University of Minnesota. Similarly, the original Kensington Runestone is generally believed to be a forgery, likely by its “finder,” Olof Ãhman. In fact, he may have signed it.

It may be that the Kensington Runestone is genuine, but as Carl Sagan said, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. Wolters and the other Runestone advocates have not provided that evidence. Apparently this is not the first time this newspaper has published an uncritical article about Wolter’s work. See Calling out pseudo-science in the Star Tribune.