The Kensington Rune Stone is a White Whale

Recently, I have been watching the new Viking show on the History Channel.  It is a nine part miniseries about the Viking raids into northern England in the 8^th century.  It is historical fiction, not a documentary.  It is a bloody and lusty tale.  I have no idea if the clothing or props are accurate or not.  In general, it is good entertainment.

Of course, as a side show, the publicizing of everything Viking or Norse is now ticked up a notch.  In the US that means the Kensington Rune Stone, the Heavener Rune Stone and the Newport (RI) Tower get some additional attention.

Years ago, I wrote a piece for the newsletter of the Denver Chapter of the Colorado Archaeological Society about proposed evidence for Viking exploration into North America (Moore 2001).  It is reproduced below.  Its title was “Hoaxes and the Norsemen of Canada,” and was a response to a Viking exhibit that was on display at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, March 2 - May 28, 2001.  I’ll have some additional comments afterward.

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The difference between myth and reality is often a fine line, particularly when the story is too good to be true.  No matter how much data is presented or how tight the argument is made some people will believe the version of it they prefer.  This often happens with archaeological research.  Every now and then, we get to debunk an idea, enjoy the two minutes of limelight, and then our findings are ignored because the other story is more appealing.

Two appealing stories are the continued claims for Viking, or Norse, explorations in the upper Midwest, mostly Minnesota, and in New England.  The former is said to have been visited by a Swedish-Norwegian expedition in 1362; the other is linked to the "Vinland Voyages" chronicled in the Norse stories The Greenlanders' Saga and Erik the Red's Saga.  While the sagas do contain useful hints about eleventh century Norse sojourns in parts of Canada, there is little credibility to these ‘Viking Hoaxes’.

These two stories are worthy of attention.  The oldest concerns the origin of the Newport Tower in Newport, Rhode Island.  The tower is an unusual stone structure commanding the view over the town and bay.  In 1837, a Danish professor named Rafn published a book presenting evidence for Norse settlement in the New World.  His interpretation of the sagas placed the colony of Vinland within New England.  This news led to a flurry of attempts at finding the physical remains of Vikings.  Some believed the tower was Norse because it was thought to be different from other English structures from the early days of the town.  Others felt that it was English, dating to the seventeenth century.  The debate about the tower went on for several years and evidence for Norsemen was brought forth from many places within New England.

To resolve the issue, William Godfrey (1949, 1951, 1955) excavated the area within and around the tower in the 1940.  He found numerous artifacts in the builder’s trench dating to the seventeenth century and interpreted the structure as a windmill.  Even so, people still refer to it as evidence that Norsemen had been in New England.

The other story is a hoax from Minnesota (Guralnick 1982).  In 1898, a rune stone was found outside the town of Kensington.  Rune stones are rocks that have been inscribed with some message, often a memorial, in the runic alphabet, common in Northern Europe in Medieval times.  In some parts of Scandinavia this script was used into the early twentieth century.  Many of these stones have been found in Sweden.  The Kensington Stone inscription read:

            8 Goths and 22 Norwegians on

            an exploration journey from

            Vinland to the west We

            had camp by 2 skerries one

            day's journey north from this stone

            we were to fish one day after

            we came home found 10 men red

            of blood and dead  AVM

            We have 10 men by the sea to look

            after our ships 14 day's travel

            from this island       Year 1362

Certainly, this tale is intriguing.  But, soon after it was found, the rock was studied by a linguist and shown to be a fake.  Its alphabet is nineteenth century runic not fourteenth, as the date indicates.  The language is a dialect of Swedish found only in parts of Minnesota, including the Kensington area.  And, the inscription was not weathered, as it should have been if it was older.  However, the rock received much attention, and, after a promoter got onto the story, people began to believe that it was real.  Suddenly many more rune stones were found.  Today, one occasionally hears stories about Vikings in Minnesota.

Not all the stories about Norsemen in North America are hoaxes (Ingstad 1977; McGhee 1984; McGovern 1981, 1990).  During the late eighth through the eleventh centuries, there was a major population expansion out of Scandinavia.  Norsemen spread across the northern part of Europe and to their west.  Iceland was settled in the decade 860-870.  Erik the Red colonized Greenland from Iceland in the 980s.  By 1500, this colony either was abandoned or had died out, possibly due to Eskimo warfare.  About the year 1000, several voyages were undertaken from Greenland to explore further west.  Three places are recorded in the Sagas that were either settled or temporarily used:  the southern part of Baffin Island, called "Helluland," the coast of Labrador below the medieval tree line, named "Markland," and the northern part of Newfoundland, the legendary "Vinland".

Archaeological evidence for Norse settlements or contacts in North America is sparse but they definitely did land in parts of Canada.  The best known site is L'Anse aux Meadows, located along the northern coast of Newfoundland, which was excavated in the 1960s by Anne and Helge Ingstad and by Parks Canada in the 1970s.  There, the remains of ten houses, four boat sheds, refuse heaps, and two cooking pits were recovered.  The houses were medieval Norse long houses, similar to ones found in parts of Iceland and Sweden.  Some of the artifacts, such as a spindle whorl and some rivets are typical Norse products.  Twenty-one carbon dates clustered around the early eleventh century, correlating well with the Sagas.  Anne Ingstad is cautious about calling this site the Vinland colony.  However, it is a very good chance that it is.

Relations between the Norse and American natives, or "skraelings" as they called them, were mostly hostile.  Three groups were probably encountered: the Dorset Eskimos in northern Labrador, the Thule Eskimos in Greenland and eastern Arctic Canada, and the people of the archaeological complex called Point Revenge, found in southern Labrador and Newfoundland.  The Dorset and Thule Eskimos differed in their material culture, the latter having a more complex marine technological system.  The Point Revenge people may be the ancestors of the historic Algonquian speaking Naskapi, Montagnais, and Beothuck tribes.

Fascinating as this archaeology may be, the Norsemen did not leave much of an impact on the New World.  The modern stage of North America does not start with their presence.  There is no evidence for major epidemics, battles, or changed economies.  All of that would come later.  The existing evidence suggests sporadic and wide-ranging contact between Norse and Native Americans, whose legends apparently do not remember them.  Their memory lives on in our culture in the form of runic stones, strange towers, and the all too often vague line between fact and fiction.

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Since 2001, there have been many claims that these two “hoaxes” are in fact truth.  The Newport Tower has been featured in recent cable shows (e.g. America Unearthed), once again arguing for a Viking or a Knights Templar connection.  Godfrey’s research can’t be accepted because it is too boring; people just want more.  I admit I shouldn’t have called the tower a “hoax” because the structure is very authentic.  It was built for a real purpose, as a windmill, a gristmill, built in the 17^th century.  Those perpetuating the “fringe” interpretations about it are con artists trying to make a buck or a name from selling silly ideas.

However, the Kensington Stone has actually gained some respectability in the last few years.  Two recent books (Kehoe 2004; Nielson and Wolter 2005) sum up the sordid story and argue for the stone’s authenticity.  Nielson has done much new research on the linguistics and history of runic writing in Scandinavia.  He actually documents that many of the linguists who first looked at the stone were wrong in their understanding of runic history.  His research seems like a valid contribution to the case.

Wolter’s contribution to the story is his petrographic analysis from which he argues that the inscriptions are older than when the stone was found; in other words, it had to be older than 1898.  Unfortunately, petrographic analysis isn’t an established dating method, so he can’t tell us when the stone was inscribed.  He assumes the date on the stone is correct.

Since their joint publication in 2005, Nielson and Wolter have soured their relationship.  Several physical scientists have waded in on the discussion and Wolter’s petrograhic analysis is considered to have failed.  The best evidence against Wolter is now found on Nielson’s web page, http://www.richardnielsen.org/Welcome.html under the Discussion tab.  Wolter has gone on to be a shill for the Knights Templar/Holy Grail in America theme, using both the Kensington Stone and the Newport Tower as a backdrop.

Into this fray came well respected Anthropologist and archaeologist Alice B Kehoe who argued for the stone’s authenticity and supported Nielson and Wolter in her own book and by writing a Forward to their 2005 book.  In the Forward, Neilson and Wolter are described as “hard scientists” with appropriate resumes.

One has to wonder about Kehoe’s stance in this controversy.  She has spent much of her professional life arguing for a multitude of pre-Columbian contacts from the Old World to the New, and across the two continents of the New.  She seems to particularly dislike the idea that Columbus “discovered” America.  Two essays summarize her position (Kehoe 2003; 2010).  Today, it is widely accepted among archaeologists, myself included, that Polynesians, Basques, Chinese, and others came to the New World long before Columbus.  I would love to see a rigorous analysis that Jomon Japan is connected to Mesoamerican antiquity.  She seems to ignore this commonly held view and acts as if opinions like mine don’t exist.

The Norse certainly lived in Newfoundland; the Chumash probably saved the lives of some Polynesians and adopted their boat making skills and words; and the Basques left words in Micmac.  But none of these events changed the world the way Columbus did.  Archaeologists don’t have to prove that fact.

If Kehoe and others want to argue that pre-Columbian cultural contacts were indeed momentous events then the burden of proof is on them.  Find the evidence, make a good presentation, and convince us that Columbus wasn’t THE watershed event.

Unfortunately, the Kensington Stone has fallen into a terrible state of affairs.  Around 2002 a cast of the stone was made and now a black silicon layer covers the stone.  Physical analysis isn’t possible until the contamination is removed.  Moreover, it is not clear on how to do this without destroying underlying patina and the surface of the stone itself.

Like Indy, all I can say is the stone belongs in a reputable museum.  Regardless of its authenticity, the story of the Kensington Stone is wonderful American folklore that continues to inspire people to do inspiring things.  It shouldn’t be treated as some commercial object.

This whole sad discussion reminds me of the book Moby Dick by Herman Melville.  There, the scarred, tortured, and obsessive character of Captain Ahab chases the elusive goal, destroying his life and everyone else around him.  He never really catches the whale but becomes tied to it, cannot escape, and goes down with it.  Only the narrator, Ishmael, survives.

Nielson, is that you?

References

Godfrey, W. S. (1949). The Newport Puzzle. Archaeology, 2(3), 146-149.

Godfrey, W. S. (1951). The Archaeology of the Old Stone Mill in Newport, Rhode Island. American Antiquity, 17(2), 120-129.

Godfrey, W. S. (1955). Vikings in America: Theories and Evidence. American Anthropologist, 57(1), 35-43.

Guralnick, E. (Ed.). (1982). Vikings in the West. Chicago, IL: Archaeological Institute of America.

Ingstad, A. S. (1977). The Discovery of a Norse Settlement in America. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.

Kehoe, A. B. (2003). The Fringe of American Archaeology: Transoceanic and Transcontinental Contacts in Prehistoric America. Journal of Scientific Exploration, 17(1), 19-36.

Kehoe, A. B. (2004). The Kensington Runestone: Approaching a Research Question Holistically. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press.

Kehoe, A. B. (2010). Consensus and the Fringe in American Archaeology. Archaeologies, 6(2), 197-214.

McGhee, R. (1984). Contact between Native North Americans and the Medieval Norse: A Review of the Evidence. American Antiquity, 49(1), 4-26.

McGovern, T. (1981). The Vinland Adventure: A North American Perspective. North American Archaeologist, 2(4), 285-308.

McGovern, T. (1990). The Archeology of the Norse North Atlantic. Annual Review of Anthropology, 19(1), 331-351.

Moore, L. E. (2001). Hoaxes and the Norsemen of Canada. All Points Bulletin, 38(3), 1-2.

Nielson, R., & Wolter, S. F. (2005). The Kensington Rune Stone: Compelling New Evidence. Eden Prairie, MN: Outernet Publishers.

Enchanted America, Enchanted Archaeology

Morris Berman is a disenchanted American studies scholar and social critic.  He thinks America has failed and that there is no hope for a turnaround (Berman 2012).  In a recent essay (2013), he starts by discussing older thinkers who worried about how our “rational” world was non-harmonious and disenchanted:

The notion that there was a way of life characteristic of modern (or industrial) societies that was qualitatively different from the way of life found in pre-modern (or folk) societies goes back, at least, to the German sociologist Max Weber [2009].  Modern societies, said Weber, are governed by bureaucracies; the dominant ethos is one of “rationalization,” whereby everything is mechanized, administered according to the dictates of scientific reason. Weber famously compared this situation to that of an “iron cage”: there was no way the citizens of these societies could break free from their constraints.  Pre-modern societies, on the other hand, were permeated by animism, by a belief in magic and spirits, and governance came not through bureaucracy but through the charisma of gifted leaders. The decline of magic that accompanied the transition to modernity Weber called die Entzauberung der Welt–the disenchantment of the world.

He goes on to mention other thinkers who have made similar distinctions, such as the Gemeinschaft [community based on good social relations] and Gesellschaft [society based on contracts] cultures of Ferdinand Tönnies (2002), the Genuine [contented, satisfied] versus Spurious [frustrated, dysfunctional] cultures of Edward Sapir (1924), and the moral versus technical order of Robert Redfield (1963).  These are all simple, old fashioned, distinctions about modern culture versus “pre-modern” with the emphasis on the non-modern as being a more humane way of life.  It is them looking over the fence and seeing greener pastures.

Of course, he could have added Nietzsche (1872), Ruth Benedict (1934) and E. T. Hall (1976), who also divided cultures into two types, the Apollonian-Low context cultures versus the Dionysian-High context ones. While there is no doubt that Hall’s Low Context Culture resembles a spurious technically ordered society it is hard to say that Dionysian cultures are always moral orders full of community minded folks.  After all, Dionysians can be genuinely nasty.  I, of course, prefer this distinction and emphasize that it does not force a moral valuation of one over the other.  They are good ways to describe cultures without judging them.

To be disenchanted, one must believe the basic premise of modern versus pre-modern, and then draw a moral distinction. One supposedly seems better than the other based on some yardstick of warm, sweet and cuddly versus cold and impersonal.  Certainly, Weber’s work has been debated greatly.  Does rationalism and technological change really disenchant?  Some folks don’t think so (Jenkins 2000; Landy and Saler 2009) and I don’t think so.  When people become enchanted with science and rationality, the magic of it all isn’t called magic but something else, such as “it’s an elegant theory” or “it’s a no-brainer.” 

However, let us suppose that Berman is correct and play along with him.  Is America disenchanted based on the criteria outlined above?  Let’s look at animism, belief in magic and spirits, and governance via the charisma of gifted leaders.  First, we do have a bureaucracy without charismatic leaders.  In my adult lifetime, back to Reagan, I can’t think of a single person in the political realm who inspired me. Martin Luther King was inspiring but he wasn’t a political leader. So chalk one up for being disenchanted with our leaders.

Does American culture have animism, magic and spirits?  They dominate our popular culture.  In the last year, every commercial for Jaguar cars has been animistic; this month, the tag line for the newest commercial is, the car is “Alive as you are.”  Our entertainment is full of wizards (Harry Potter) and ghost hunting (Ghost Hunters, Ghost Adventures, Haunted Collector).  Moreover, if ghosts don’t get your attention then vampires, werewolves, zombies, and angels are there to fill the void.  The basketball player called “Magic” Johnson didn’t get his name because he plays like a machine but because his movements are “magic.”  By any standard, American popular culture is as enchanting as any recent Brazilian carnival.

Some critics might say that popular culture doesn’t reveal the “real” culture.  This is foolishness, typically coming from older modernists who still glorify intellectualism and “high” culture.  Pop culture is our folklore, our mythology, our soul.

To make this point a little deeper, let’s look at a subset of American culture, the profession of American archaeology.  Do archaeologists believe in ghosts and spirits?  Some of them do.  Most of them do not have cold-blooded clinical mentalities.  Archaeologists go into strange unusual places and they tend to find ones that were once sacred.  They are human, all too human, and many of them are susceptible to their emotions, their imagination, and the heebie-jeebies.  Many will tell stories of places that spooked them so much they had to leave; others talk of having nightmares while excavating graves. Many a lab technician has heard things go bump in the night and day, especially when human remains are on tables or in boxes nearby.  Spookiness and archaeology go together.

Does archaeology have animism? Very much so, it’s everywhere.  Whenever archaeologists discuss artifact assemblages you will likely hear phrases such as “these are objects of change” or “vectors of change” or “this artifact symbolizes.”  Archaeologists reify and animate objects with regularity because it’s the way Americans communicate.  Animistic statements are complex metaphors that tie us to our natural world.  Objects and technology are part of our natural environment.  Tools, all material culture, are extensions of us.  There is no difference between a cyborg and a robot.  Why shouldn’t we talk about them and interact with them as if they were alive? Likewise, we talk about abstractions as if they were alive:  statistics “speak for themselves,” cultures "move" from one place to another, and America is said to “fail”.  How can America “fail”; is it alive with agency?  Just as in “pre-modern” cultures, it is customary for Americans to communicate in this way. 

For archaeologists artifacts have magical powers.  Not every artifact or site does, but some do.  If you dig a hundred shovel tests and find only one arrowhead then that moment of discovery may be magical, special. Most archaeologists are connected to the tools of the trade.  Many have their special trowel that symbolizes their professionalism, like a red badge of courage.  Field vehicles are old friends, held onto for many years.  Just as the cable show Warehouse 13 demonstrates, some artifacts are imbued with meaning and power such that they can be transformative.  Find the right type of site or artifact and it can change your life, your career, no different from winning a large lottery.  Ideas are also magical.  Coming up with a new and compelling interpretation or explanation can be career enhancing.

Moreover, many archaeological ideas are coyote tales, full of trickery and suspension of disbelief.  Given a couple hundred artifacts and a few radiocarbon dates, an archaeologist can reconstruct the life way of a culture.  Do you believe it?  Archaeologists have also held many debates over the “realness” of their artifact typologies.  It doesn’t matter that sand tempered cord marked pottery from Virginia likely resembles sand tempered cord marked pottery from Nebraska; they have to be different based on the archaeological mentality.  Many a thesis or dissertation has been written based on the analysis of a few ceramic shards or a shoebox of “projectile points” (many of which were likely knives or scrappers).  Nevertheless, who cares?  A compelling statement is what matters.  Archaeologists are sometimes magicians.

Currently, there are a few charismatic characters in archaeology.  However, none of them is leading the profession.  In the recent past, there were charismatic leaders, especially in the 1960s and 1970s.  In those years, America was transforming from an Apollonian culture steeped in rationalism into a Dionysian one based on intuition.  This transformation was the Fourth Awakening (McLoughlin, 1978) that was a revitalization movement (Wallace 1956).  It was a frenetic era with social unrest and an unpopular war. These years are marked in archaeology as the New Archaeology era.  During this time, Louis Binford introduced a narrow form of positivism into the profession, the idea caught fire in popularity with minimal disbelievers, and the profession rode the wave of “rational” ecstasy for twenty years, until it burned out.  It also coincided with the broader love fest for science that was underway in the social sciences at that time, such as the New Ethnography, Enthnoscience, the New History, the New Geography, and monetarism in economics.

 The New Archaeology had all the traits of an old-fashioned religious revival movement (McLoughlin, 1978).  Led by a charismatic leader, it used something old and abandoned, positivism, to make corrective changes within the profession, to make it more scientific.  In the face of rising intuitive processes and complex metaphors it was a retro, conservative, effort to continue rationalism that ultimately failed, as all revivals do, because it didn’t instill long term change.  When the New Archaeology flame burned out scientism crashed in American archaeology, as it did in all of American culture in the late 1980s and 1990s.

The irony is that the New Archaeology was a Dionysian process, a slight of the hand, or the brain, if you will.  It is well known that left hemisphere processes (McGilchrist 2009) direct Apollonian cultures; the control, order, hierarchy, and temporal aspects of life are emphasized over their opposites.  Rationalism is a left hemisphere complex metaphor.  But, what happens when the right hemisphere plays with it? You get eye dazzlers.  

Apollonian artifacts usually have geometric designs and they are simple and elegant—think of the popular late modernist corporate buildings from 1970s with all the rectangular glass. Next, take all those rectangles and compound them so much that the positive and negative fields are blurred.  You get a design that shimmers as patterns go back and forth.  It becomes an eye dazzler.  The same thing happens with our concepts and ideas. Take conceptual linearity too far and you get conceptual bedazzlement.  The New Archaeology, with its hypothetical deductive argumentation, was a coyote tale of bedazzlement, enchanted by its supposed rationalism.

Today, American archaeology is fully Dionysian.  There are a few elder modernists holding on to their left brained science but they live at the margins.  Right-brained science and non-science are in control; Post Modernism and Romanticism are the buzzwords of the day.  Other warm and fuzzy concepts are widely used such as collaboration and “community archaeology.”  The preference is Gemeinschaft as a way of approaching archaeology, a desire for a moral order that is genuine and democratic, leaving everyone satisfied and fulfilled. It is enchanted archaeology. 

There are problems within archaeology.  While many likely believe that historic preservation compliance is the redeeming feature of the profession, because it drives the majority of work, it actually is a vampire sucking the soul from the profession by reducing the total number of excavations done every year.  Digging is the true life-blood of the profession.  It is what the majority of the public wants from us; not site preservation. Archaeologists can break free of this cage if they choose.  But since they have not done so, the need is not dire enough for it to happen.

Maybe the troubles of America that Berman documents so well in his books could compel archaeologists to switch gears and go another direction.  I’m all in favor of it.  However, an “iron cage of rationality” is not one of those troubles.  America is fully Dionysian and enchanted; its troubles stem from the wild impulses emanating from our right hemispheres.  This will continue until the next Awakening, some forty years hence.  Meanwhile, resolving immediate problems will have to be done by tickling the right hemisphere, and the solutions will be based in reciprocity and reflexivity, not cause and effect.

There is no reason to be disenchanted when life is such a wonderful carnival.

References

Benedict, Ruth

1934  Patterns of Culture. Houghton Mifflin, New York.

Berman, Morris

2012 Why America Failed:  The Roots of Imperial Decline.  John Wiley and Sons, Hoboken, NJ

2013  The Moral Order:  A Dying Civilization.  CounterPunch, February 8, 2013; (http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/02/08/the-moral-order/, accessed February 22, 2013)

Hall, Edward T.

1976  Beyond Culture.  Doubleday, New York, NY.

Jenkins, Richard

2000  Disenchantment, Enchantment and Re-Enchantment: Max Weber at the Millennium.  Max Weber Studies 1: 11-32.

McGilchrist, Iain

2009  The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World.  Yale University Press, New Haven, CT.

McLoughlin, William G.

1978  Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform: An Essay on Religion and Social Change in America, 1607-1977. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Nietzsche, Friedrich,

1967 [1872]  The Birth of Tragedy, in the Basic Writings of Nietzsche, translated and edited by Walter Kaufman, pp. 1-144.  The Modern Library, New York.

Landy, Joshua and Michael Saler, eds.

2009  The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age.  Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA.

Redfield, Robert

1963[1953]  The Primitive World and Its Transformation.  Cornell University Press.

Sapir, Edward

1924  Culture, Genuine and Spurious. The American Journal of Sociology 29 (4): 401–429.

Ferdinand Tönnies, Ferdinand,

2002[1887]  Community and Society. Translated and edited by Charles P. Loomis. Dover Publications, Mineola, NY.

Wallace, Anthony

 1956  Revitalization Movements. American Anthropologist 58: 264-281.

Weber, Max

2009[1904]  The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Norton Critical Editions.