KENSINGTON, Minn. — A team of Minnesotans who believe the famous Kensington runestone is authentic has found a second carved rock, which they say might have marked the gravesite of Viking explorers in the 1300s.
Janey Westin, a member of the seven-person Kensington Runestone Scientific Testing Team, said she noticed a faint inscription on a boulder in May. "Oh, my gosh! That stone — it has writing on it," she remembers saying softly to herself.
Because the stone bears the Latin letters "AVM," perhaps for Ave Maria, the team is calling it the AVM stone.
The team says the AVM stone is "new evidence" to help prove the legitimacy of the Kensington runestone. However, it does little to persuade those scientists and historians who believe that the inscription on the first runestone is fraudulent.
State archaeologist Mark Dudzik said the runestone theory "has not held up well under professional scientific scrutiny." Also, he said, it's "just not logical" that Scandinavians got to the middle of Minnesota more than 600 years ago.
But team members are treating the AVM rock as a major find. They'll hold a news conference Monday in Kensington and expect eventually to display the stone at the Kensington Runestone Museum in Alexandria, Minn. The museum attracts 12,000 visitors a year.
Immediately after spotting the rock, Westin said, she photographed and mapped the site. On July 11, team members lugged the 2,200-pound rock to a secure — and secret — place. Then they hired three impartial archaeologists to conduct an exploratory dig. Using standard archaeological procedures, the scientists spent much of July 25 digging nine test holes, from 12 to 27 inches deep.
Team members hoped the archaeologists would find evidence of human activity in medieval times. They did not. They found two quartz flakes, probably chipped from arrowheads, and other evidence of Indian habitation, but no clues of early Norsemen.
Westin had spotted the 43-inch-long rock on an island about a quarter-mile from where the runestone was found in 1898. That stone, the subject of international controversy ever since, is in an "Unsolved Mysteries" exhibit in Vienna, Austria, until Sept. 23.
Most doubting scientists and historians suspect that the Kensington Runestone was carved by Olof Ohman, a man of little formal education who was born in Sweden and farmed near Kensington. He claimed to have found the stone on his property, wrapped in the roots of a tree. Historians have put a great deal into the story that he wanted to pull a hoax on educated people.
But in the past year, a small group of scientists led by geologist Scott Wolter of St. Paul, Minn., have examined the runestone closely, including studying it with powerful microscopes in his laboratory. After investigating weathering and other features, they have concluded that the letters were carved long ago, long before Ohman's time, perhaps in Viking times.
Both the Kensington Runestone and the AVM stone probably were incised with hammer and chisel and display the ancient Scandinavian language called runes.
The AVM stone also carries the runic date of 1363 — a year after the runestone date — and has some runic letters, which the team speculates may stand for "Christ the Savior conquers."
Historians who don't believe the runestone legend say the second rock might have been carved in 1898 or 2001 or anytime in between, but not in 1363.
Dudzik, the state archaeologist, said he doesn't believe the runestone legend, partly because early Vikings were seafaring people, plundering along coastlines. Why would they abandon that lifestyle to get to the center of a gigantic continent? "Why would they all of a sudden happen to end up in a Scandinavian-settled state, in a Scandinavian farmer's back yard? It makes no sense," he said.
Russell Fridley, former director of the Minnesota Historical Society, said he, too, remains a skeptic.
"I have come to feel it's a fraudulent inscription, but a fascinating one," he said. "It's a great testimony to Scandinavian humor on the frontier."
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.shns.com.)