Vinland Map

The Vinland Map is a 20th-century forgery purporting to be a 15th-century mappa mundi with unique information about Norse exploration of North America. The map first came to light in 1957 and was acquired by Yale University. It became well known due to the publicity campaign which accompanied its revelation to the public as a "genuine" pre-Columbian map in 1965. In addition to showing Africa, Asia and Europe, the map depicts a landmass south-west of Greenland in the Atlantic labelled as Vinland (Vinlanda Insula). The map describes this region as having been visited by Europeans in the 11th century. Although it was presented to the world in 1965 with an accompanying scholarly book written by British Museum and Yale University librarians, nonetheless historians of geography and medieval document specialists began to suspect that it might be a fake as soon as photographs of it became available. Later chemical analyses identified one of the major ink ingredients as a 20th-century artificial pigment. In 2018, after several investigations and many years of debate, specialists at Yale declared that the latest scientific and historical research had conclusively established that it was a modern forgery. The map remains in Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library as part of its collection.