The Map Room

Debate about the authenticity of the Vinland Map continues to rage (as subscribers to MapHist will readily attest). A brief summary is now on About.com (via Matt). That summary points to this site on the controversy, which is still under development (and incomplete in a couple of areas).

I’ve been planning to delve into this subject myself. I have copies of Kirsten Seaver’s Maps, Myths, and Men and the Nova documentary on the map, The Viking Deception; with any luck, I’ll be able to report back to you about them soon.

Previously: Vinland Map Not a Forgery: Researchers; The Viking Deception; The Vinland Map.

• Buy Maps, Myths, and Men: The Story of the Vinland Map at Amazon.com
• Buy The Viking Deception at Amazon.com

Oh, look. Someone is arguing that a 16th-century map of the world by Oroncé Fine (Orontius Finnaeus) is proof that global warming caused by human activity isn’t happening. Problem is, he’s using Charles Hapgood’s weird theories about an ancient ice-free Antarctica, supposedly proved by Finnaeus’ map — as well as by the Piri Reis map — in order to do it. Let me explain: no.

Previously: The Piri Reis Map of 1513.

The controversial Vinland Map has usually been dismissed as a modern forgery, but a Danish team led by Rene Larsen argues that tests on the map conducted over the past five years “do not show any signs of forgery.” The map has been carbon-dated to 1440 AD, which puts it a half-century before Columbus; Larsen’s research addresses the physicality of the map, such as the ostensibly anachronistic inks, rather than any anachronisms in, say, the handwriting. And here I thought the issue was settled. Via Map the Universe and Slashdot.

Previously: The Viking Deception.

• Buy Maps, Myths, and Men: The Story of the Vinland Map at Amazon.com

Mental Floss’s three controversial maps will be familiar to regular readers of The Map Room: Percy’s 38-state map of the U.S. (Rob even draws a new version of Pearcy’s map), the Mercator projection (in the context of the Peters projection movement), and the Chinese map purportedly proving the Menzies theory. Via Infonaut.

A reader wrote me in June:

I was just wondering if you have read the new book (due out this month, June 2008) called 1434 by Gavin Menzies in which he puts forward a hypthesis that the Chinese set off the Renaissance by giving their maps, astronomy, and all their knowledge to Europe in 1434, and that it is the Chinese maps that Piri Reis copied. NOTHING to do with extra terrestrials. Now historians are saying that Menzies is wrong, but they have NO better answer, other than extra terrestrials. I for one think, that the Chinese is a much more logical answer to the Piri Reis map than UFOS and extra terrestrials. Menzies also wrote another book a few years called 1421 in which he posited a theory that Zheng He travelled all over the world — including North and South America — thereby “discovering” it before Columbus. Menzies also says that Columbus did not discover America. He already knew it was there. It was on his maps. He just went to see for himself and to claim the land for Spain.

Do you have any comment?

Do I have any comment? Other than, oh goody, more unmitigated horseshit to refute? More assertions not backed up by stodgy old-fashioned stuff like, you know, evidence? More …

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On MapHist, Tony Campbell has announced a major new section of his Map History/History of Cartography site: Cartographic Fakes, Forgeries and Facsimiles Likely to Deceive. It includes a list of known fakes (unfortunately in Word format), a guide to how…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The story of the Piri Reis map is the story of how a perfectly innocent 16th-century navigational chart can end up, through no fault of its own, at the centre of a crackpot theory about our planet’s ancient history. Our…  •  Continue reading this entry.

If you thought Gavin Menzies’s claim that the Chinese discovered America in 1421 was risible, if you thought Liu Gang’s purported 1418 map was a fraud, you’d better brace yourself: a Virginia author argues that the Chinese visited America around…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Carl Weber’s thesis that the Marquette Map is a hoax received a rough reception at a history conference last month: apparently, many historians aren’t buying his claims or his evidence, suggesting that they can be refuted “in about five…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Carl J. Weber, a history professor at DeVry University, argues that a well-known map, purportedly made by Father Jacques Marquette during the 1673 Joliett-Marquette expedition to the Mississippi Valley, is, in fact, a 19th-century forgery meant to bolster Marquette’s…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Set your TiVos: The Viking Deception, a Nova program about the Vinland Map forgery that was first broadcast in February 2005, is being rebroadcast on Tuesday the 10th. If you miss the show, the web site has plenty of…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Last month, Tony Campbell wrote on MapHist, “I do hope somebody will be tempted … to take on the task of compiling a listing of map forgeries/fakes and the references to them.” John Woram has now answered Tony’s challenge and…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Gavin Menzies, he of the hypothesis that the Chinese discovered America and the prime supporter of Liu Gang’s purported 1418/1763 map, will be in Australia this week to give a lecture at the University of Melbourne, according to tomorrow’s edition…  •  Continue reading this entry.

1421 Exposed, which will be officially launched on May 1, is a web site put together by academics and researchers to combat Gavin Menzies’s theory that the Chinese discovered the world in the 15th century, and, in particular, to refute…  •  Continue reading this entry.

From the English edition of the People’s Daily Online: Experts doubt authenticity of China’s pre-Columbus map. In response to yesterday’s press conference confirming the age of the paper: “The test can only prove that the paper is genuine, but it…  •  Continue reading this entry.

We’ve got coverage of Liu Gang’s press conference regarding his so-called “1418 Map”: BeijingLives has a copy of Liu’s written remarks, wherein he takes on the criticisms point-by-point. Liu: “After going through the ‘holes’ one by one, we should see…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Mark your calendars and brace yourselves. On Thursday, Liu Gang, Gavin Menzies and company are holding an invitation-only media briefing in Beijing, where they will announce the carbon-dating test results for Liu Gang’s map, which they believe is a copy…  •  Continue reading this entry.

In a new article this week for the online journal Coordinates, map librarian David Y. Allen raises concerns that the so-called “Velasco Map,” a widely known map of northeastern North America that purportedly dates to 1610, may in fact be…  •  Continue reading this entry.

In November, news broke of the discovery of the Soleto Map, an ostrakon discovered two years ago that depicted the Salentine peninsula. The fragment, dated to 500 BC, was characterized as possibly the oldest map yet discovered in the history…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A couple of weeks ago, an announcement that a Chinese map had been discovered that “proved” that the Chinese had “discovered” the Americas before Columbus swept the world news media. The Economist broke the story on the 16th; see also…  •  Continue reading this entry.