Michigan stone: You must mean the Kensington Rune Stone? My own opinion is that it's a fraud, but a very clever one. However the jury is still very much out on it and some scholars think it's geniune and others are undecided. If it is geniune, it suggests that Norsemen from Greenland discovered the Hudson Strait (which is not hard to believe), sailed down through the Hudson Bay into the James Bay (if you accept that they could have discovered the Strait, also not hard to believe), and from there navigated through hundreds of miles of the glacial river and lake system into northern Minnesota where they all were killed, according to the stone. For me, it's hard to accept that they would have done all this exploring through uncharted wilderness without turning back to report it before attempting to penetrate that deep into the American interior.
Church in R.I.: You mean the Viking Tower in Newport. It's an interesting structure, and I've seen it myself, but I don't think it's Norse. I would suspect that if a stone building had been built a more permanent town ruin should have surrounded it. 'Runes' have been discovered there but there's nothing to keep Viking-centrist revisionists from having carved them before they were discovered.
My own opinion is that the Vikings probably explored further south than the Gulf of St. Lawrence, which is now what most scholars believe. The saga descriptions seem to suggest to me that they did reach Cape Cod and this is probably where Hop was. Archaeological evidence, though incredibly scant, seems to suggest that (assuming none of the evidence is faked) they *may* have done some sketchy exploration of Massachusetts and the rest of New England, including:
Dighton Rock: strange rock in Dighton, Ma. which has many carvings of disputed script on them; some see them as Ogham, some as Portuguese glyphs (left by Jose Corte-Real?), and some as Norse runic graffiti. Dighton Rock is a state park and protected by the state of Massachusetts.
The Westford Knight: located in Westford, Ma., close to the banks of the Merrimack River ('America's Stonehenge' is about a dozen miles north of here on the north side of the Merrimack Valley). Medieval-looking rock carving of a knight. Some link this to the legend of Henry St. Clair, the travelling Grail knight.
Bass River: a site in Dennis, Ma., on Cape Cod, has been suggested as a Viking outpost because what appear to be Norse mooring-holes have been discovered along the river.
The Nomans Land Stone: alleged runestone reading 'Vinland 1010' (I think) on a small uninhabited island a few miles SW of Martha's Vineyard. Erosion may have destroyed it sometime during the 20th century.
Spirit Pond Runestones: Alleged Viking runestones found in a pond in southern Maine by an amateur archaeologist.
Norse Penny: This is the only piece of hard evidence in the list; a Norse penny from the 11th century (or maybe 10th) *was* unearthed in an Indian burial mound in the same vicinity as the Spirit Pond stones. Nobody disputes that it's an authentic find; however the conservative consensus on it is that it was traded via Indian commerce networks south from Newfoundland.
-Caliga
Originally posted by Jer8m8
No I'm not a newbie, I know the map won't feature the above 2 places, but how will their effects be implamented? I'm no history buff, but I'm assuming that it was good to settle Greenland-didn't they remove prisoners or something and ship them there? Or did it provide any revenue? What about the fame and glory Leif Erriksson brought to his people? And wasn't there a bishop on Greenland=piety. BTW, are there any diffusionists here to want to either comment on that stone in Michigan or the church in Rhode Island (or the Celtic ruins in the Northeastern USA)
C'mon, is it really too late to add these to the map? Or maybe do something like only Vikings can discover these and can't trade the knowledge. Please?
