Question: A 202 pound slab of grewwacke covered in runes on its face and side indicated the Scandinavians came to Minnesota in what century?
Context: The Nigg Stone is an incomplete Class II Pictish cross-slab, perhaps dating to the end of the 8th century.  The stone was originally located at the gateway to the grounds of the parish church of Nigg, Easter Ross.  It is one of the finest surviving Pictish carved stones, and one of the most elaborate carved stones surviving from early medieval Europe.  It is now displayed, restored to its original proportions, in a room inside the parish church (open in summer; key kept locally).  It bears an elaborately decorated cross in high relief on the 'front' and a figural scene on the reverse.  This scene is extremely complicated and made more difficult to interpret by deliberate defacement.  Among the depictions are two Pictish symbols: an eagle above a Pictish Beast, a sheep, the oldest evidence of a European triangular harp, and hunting scenes.  Scholars interpret the scene as representing a story of the biblical King David.  The carvings on the cross side show close similarities to the contemporary high crosses of Iona.  These works may indeed have been created by the same 'school' of carvers, working for different patrons.  The stone was shattered in the 18th century.  The upper and lower parts were crudely joined together using metal staples (now removed), and the shattered intervening part was discarded.  Part of the missing fragment was recovered in 1998 by Niall M Robertson, in the stream which runs below the mound on which the churchyard is set, having probably been thrown down the bank at the time the slab was 'repaired'.  This small fragment shows most of the 'Pictish beast' symbol, and was preserved in Tain Museum, until being reattached during a restoration in 2013. Ying Bu (died 195 BC), also known as Qing Bu, was a military general and vassal king who lived in the early Western Han dynasty.  He was a native of Lu County (六縣; present-day Lu'an, Anhui).  In his early life under the Qin dynasty, Ying Bu was convicted and sentenced to "qing" (黥; a form of punishment which involved branding a criminal by tattooing his face), so he was also called "Qing Bu".  He was then sent to Mount Li to perform hard labour by constructing Qin Shi Huang's mausoleum.  He later escaped with some men and became the leader of a bandit gang.  Ying Bu participated in the insurrection against the Qin dynasty after the Dazexiang Uprising broke out in 209 BC.  After the uprising failed, he became part of a rebel force led by Xiang Liang.  He assisted Xiang Liang's nephew and successor Xiang Yu in overthrowing the Qin dynasty.  After the fall of Qin, he initially fought on Xiang Yu's side in the Chu–Han Contention (206–202 BC), a power struggle for supremacy over China between Xiang Yu and Liu Bang (Emperor Gao).  However, later, he defected to Liu Bang's side and helped Liu defeat Xiang Yu and become the emperor.  During this period of time, Ying Bu held the title of "King of Jiujiang".  After Liu Bang established the Han dynasty in 202 BC, he appointed Ying Bu as a vassal king and granted him the title of "King of Huainan".  In 195 BC, Ying Bu rebelled against the Han dynasty but was defeated and killed. The Kensington Runestone is a 202 lb slab of greywacke covered in runes on its face and side. Paleontology in Minnesota refers to paleontological research occurring within or conducted by people from the U.S. state of Minnesota.  The geologic record of Minnesota spans from Precambrian to recent with the exceptions of major gaps including the Silurian period, the interval from the Middle to Upper Devonian to the Cretaceous, and the Cenozoic.  During the Precambrian, Minnesota was covered by an ocean where local bacteria ended up forming banded iron formations and stromatolites.  During the early part of the Paleozoic era southern Minnesota was covered by a shallow tropical sea that would come to be home to creatures like brachiopods, bryozoans, massive cephalopods, corals, crinoids, graptolites, and trilobites.  The sea withdrew from the state during the Silurian, but returned during the Devonian.  However, the rest of the Paleozoic is missing from the local rock record.  The Triassic is also missing from the local rock record and Jurassic deposits, while present, lack fossils.  Another sea entered the state during the Cretaceous period, this one inhabited by creatures like ammonites and sawfish.  Duckbilled dinosaurs roamed the land.  The Cenozoic period of the ensuing Cenozoic era is also missing from the local rock record, but during the Ice Age evidence points to glacial activity in the state.  Woolly mammoths, mastodons, and musk oxen inhabited Minnesota at the time.  Local Native Americans interpreted such remains as the bones of the water monster Unktehi.  They also told myths about thunder birds that may have been based on Ice Age bird fossils.  By the early 19th century, the state's fossil had already attracted the attention of formally trained scientists.  Early research included the Cretaceous plant discoveries made by Leo Lesquereux. Skeleton Antique is a slab serif wooden letterpress typeface designed by William Hamilton Page and first shown in his company's 1865 catalog.  The face is nearly monoline in its stroke width and lacks the over-ornamentation typical of both Page's faces and of other nineteenth century letterpress types. Kensington is a city in Douglas County, Minnesota, United States.  The population was 292 at the 2010 census.  The city is notable in Minnesota history for being the place where the famous, if questionable, Kensington Runestone was first displayed.  The stone tablet may indicate that Scandinavians had come to Minnesota in the 14th century.  It is now at a museum in nearby Alexandria, Minnesota. The Beaman and Smith Company Mill is an historic factory complex at 20 Gordon Avenue in Providence, Rhode Island.  It consists of two masonry buildings at the junction of Gordon and Saratoga Streets in south Providence.  The older of the two buildings is a one-to-two story brick structure, built in 1898 by the Berlin Iron Bridge Company.  It has a steel frame, and is about 250 ft long.  The second building is an early example of concrete slab construction, built in 1917.  It was designed by local aindustrial architecture firm, Jenks & Ballou.  It is four stories in height, and is attached to the older building's south face.  It originally had a brick surface, but much of this was stuccoed.  The brick building presents four bays to Gordon Street, while the concrete one has two.  The complex exemplifies two notable early modern construction methods, and is a symbol of the industrial development of south Providence in the late 19th century.  Beaman and Smith was a manufacturer of precision machine tools; they went out of business in 1926.  The complex was occupied for many years by the James Hill Manufacturing Company, who produced metal containers. The AVM Runestone, also known as the Berg-AVM Runestone, is a hoax created in 1985 by students carving runes into a boulder near Kensington, Minnesota, not far from where the Kensington Runestone was found in 1898.  In 2001, a carving expert and her geologist father found the AVM Runestone, told the press that it was proof of early Viking or Norse settlement in Minnesota, and began an investigation to prove its authenticity.  The creators came forward with their story that it was purely a hoax and not an artifact of Viking explorers. The Yarmouth Runic Stone, also known as the Fletcher Stone, is a slab of quartzite that first came to the attention of the public in the early 19th Century.  The stone appears to have an inscription carved into it, which some investigators, notably Henry Phillips, Jr., have interpreted as Norse runes.  This has led to speculation that the Yarmouth, Nova Scotia area, in Canada, was visited by Viking explorers sometime around 1000 C.E.  Many other theories have been put forward, including the possibility of a hoax or the inscription being a product of natural forces.  The Stone is currently on display at the Yarmouth County Museum. A ship carrying plutonium collides with a floating atoll off the eastern coast of the Philippines, one of many incidents occurring throughout the area.  As the anomalous formation approaches Japan, a team of scientists led by Naoya Kusanagi (Akira Onodera) discover orihalcum amulets and a stone slab covered in Etrurian runes on the atoll.  During the investigation, the atoll suddenly quakes, destroying the slab and throwing the scientists into the ocean.  One member of the team, Marine Officer Yoshinari Yonemori (Tsuyoshi Ihara), sees the eye and tusk of a giant turtle.
Answer: 14th century