The Kensington Runestone: Approaching a Research Question Holistically

This short book summarizes the various viewpoints concerning an artifact discovered in western Minnesota. Generally, two opinions have been held, that the artifact is a hoax or that it is genuine. The overview by Kehoe quickly, accurately, and entirely sums up the differing opinions, and comes to a surprising conclusion.

"The issue comes down to ...competing paradigms. One is the myth that the Americas had been isolated from the historical world until Columbus broke the barrier in 1492. The other charts world patterns of trade, easily accommodating a Scandinavian expedition west from Vinland in 1362." ~ pg. 86 Alice Beck Kehoe's research sheds new light on the Kensington Runestone found in 1898. Was this stone really inscribed in 1362 or was it a hoax? All the evidence presented by Alice Beck Kehoe leads me to believe that it was real, although she presents both sides of the story. It seems few of the experts who were consulted were willing to rock the boat and called it a hoax. Still the evidence in favor of it being valid is overwhelming. Page after page presents perfectly good reasons for an expedition in 1362. The story gets even more interesting when Alice Beck Kehoe uncovers evidence (1960 discovery by Helge Ingstad) of a Vinland in a fishing village called L'Anse aux Meadows. "The site fit the landscape selected by Norse in Greenland and Iceland, and the low mounds resembled Norse ruins there." ~ pg. 24 While this book covers a wide range of topics one of the most interesting notes is about Cinderella's slippers that were made of "vair" (fur) not "verre" (glass). This book is easy to read in one sitting and I think you will find it to be quite entertaining. ~The Rebecca Review

The Kensington Runestone's tale is fantastic: a farmer unearths this headstone-sized artifact in a Minnesota farm field in 1898, and discovers mysterious runes carved into it with the date A.D. 1362, implying that Norse travelers journeyed an unbelievable distance inland from Newfoundland & planted the stone, 130 years before Columbus made landfall in the West Indies. Prior to this book, much of the writing on the Kensington Runestone has been dated, unscientific, and has treated the stone variously as a hoax, UFO-ish mystery, or object for advocacy. But Ms. Kehoe's 87 well-written pages treat the Kensington Runestone as a case study in critical thinking. An anthropologist noted for her North American Indian ethnographies, Ms. Kehoe presents the runestone's facts in the context of pre-Columbian European-North American history and trade economics. Once you read her broad, clear-eyed view -- incorporating archeology, anthropology, geology, Indian history, and economics -- the stone's authenticity suddenly becomes plausible, even likely, even to scientific skeptics like myself. Its authenticity rests not only on a recent geological examination of the stone and on newer learnings about early Swedish runes, but on the surprising economics and geographic scope of fur trading in the mid-14th century. If you want an intelligent eye-opener on the Kensington Runestone's story, I highly recommend this little book. And a good companion is the exhaustive scientific analysis of the stone and its runes, "The Kensington Rune Stone: Compelling New Evidence" (2005) available from its publisher.

I have to admit that Alice B. Kehoe is my mom. Be that as it may, her new book, "The Kensington Runestone," is one of the most thought-provoking books I've read in years. I also liked that the book is short - 80 pages - and readable in one evening. Ask anyone the question, "Who discovered America?" and you'll be told that Columbus discovered America, in 1492. Then the English settled Jamestown in 1607, followed by the Pilgrims in Massachusetts in 1620. Right? Don't bet on it. In 1898 a Minnesota farmer found a rock carved with Norse runes. Translated, it said that a party of 30 Swedes and Norwegians were on a trading journey. Ten men were murdered near the spot, apparently by hostile natives. Ten more of their party were waiting with their ships fourteen days away, on the sea. The inscription ended with "Hail Mary, deliver us from evil" and the year: 1362. The stone was dismissed as a hoax for several reasons. First, no other archeological evidence existed showing that Norse had explored west of Greenland. Second, scholars said that the runes had grammatical errors, words not seen on other runes, and letters not seen on other runes or carved differently. Third, the farmer was Norwegian, suggesting that he'd faked the stone to promote Norwegians. Geologists, however, found the weathering in the engraving to be hundreds of years old. And the geologists who interviewed the farmer agreed that he was an honest, intelligent, and respectable man. The farmer never sought money or publicity for his discovery. The Kensington Runestone passed into obscurity, for nearly 100 years. Kehoe, professor emeritus of anthropology at Marquette University and the author of textbooks on North American Indians and four-field anthropology, has brought together recent research that sheds new light on the Kensington Runestone. One of her goals was to show that using all four fields of anthropology - linguistics, archaeology, physical anthropology, and cultural anthropology - can solve problems that examining only a single field can't. Linguists now say that the "grammatical errors" in the Kensington Runestone are a dialect from a certain area of Sweden. The unknown runes and words have been found in previously unknown Old Swedish inscriptions. In the 1960s, archeologists excavated a Norse village in Newfoundland, dated to around A.D. 1000. Kehoe describes the dedicated work over twenty years leading to this discovery. She also notes that archeologists excavate villages where people lived for generations. A party of 30 or 40 men traveling through a region would likely leave little or no evidence obvious hundreds of years later. Kehoe also describes 14th-century Scandinavian politics. Let's see, the Black Death killed half the population, Norway and Sweden merged, along with a couple of Danish provinces, then Germans took over, a three-year-old boy became king, who later married a ten-year-old girl...OK, I can't keep it all straight. But a lot happened. The Norse los

As an amateur historian who has been researching the Kensington Runestone (or KRS), a runic inscription that is an account of a Norse exploration to Minnesota 130 years before Columbus, I have been looking forward to reading Alice Kehoe's new book, The Kensington Runestone: Approaching a Research Question Holistically (Waveland Press). Kehoe is an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and it is from this field of science that she approaches the question of the Kensington Runestone. As an anthropologist, Kehoe notes that she is "accustomed to taking a holistic view, encompassing data from archaeology, natural sciences, history and human behavior" (p1). Later she contineues in a similar vein: "[fellow anthropologist Guy] Gibbon and I, looking on as anthropologists familiar with the philosophy of science... see, on one hand, the intertia of mainstream science - the Runestone is a hoax 'everybody knows that' - and on the other hand, anomalies that press upon the accepted position. The range of data and interpetations, from geophysics to world history, calls for the anthropological perspective, weaving together hard science and humanities." (p15). This book is liable to be a dissapointment for those seeking in depth analysis of specific contentious points regarding the Stone. Rather than focusing intently on the smallest detail, Kehoe steps back, looking at the case from a broader perspective. It is from this persepective that Kehoe finds the weight of evidence supports the claim that the Kensington Runestone is authentic. Much of the book is spent in summary of the history and agruments regarding the Runestone. In this endeavor, Kehoe is both factual and objective. What she adds to the discussion is an examination of the reasoning behind the arguments. For instance, Kehoe notes that the pro-authenticty philologist Robert Hall was a student of the linguist Leonard Bloomfield, whose work concentrated on the phonetic aspects of the science. Hall used this backround to present the KRS as a document whose abberitions could be explained as a phonetic rendering of the dialect used by the expedition, as opposed to the more formal renderings of the literary record. Kehoe also examines the historical record, and suggests that during the mid-14th century, Sweden might be looking to establish fur trading on the North American continent, beyond the control of the Hanse. The KRS inscription may have been the result of a failed mission to establish a base for such trade. Kehoe also believes that the reason it is difficult for so many to accept the KRS as an authentic artifact, is that such acceptance requires a major paradigm shift. "Dropping the pardigm of a pristine New World outside of history until Columbus sailed to the world's edge jolts the structure of beliefs taught to Americans." (p86). The Ingstad's discovery of the Norse site at L'Anse aux Meadows has begun such a shift, and there is now an acceptance of early Norse in