Vinland Map

The Vinland map was claimed to be a 15th-century mappa mundi with unique information about Norse exploration of North America but is now known to be a 20th-century forgery. 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, historians of geography and medieval document specialists began to suspect that it might be a fake as soon as photographs of it became available, and chemical analyses have identified one of the major ink ingredients as a 20th-century artificial pigment. Individual pieces of evidence continue to be challenged, most recently at a 2009 conference.
The Vinland map first came to light in 1957 (three years before the discovery of the Norse site at L'Anse aux Meadows in 1960), bound in a slim volume with a short medieval text called the Hystoria Tartarorum (usually called in English the Tartar Relation), and was unsuccessfully offered to the British Museum by London book dealer Irving Davis on behalf of a Spanish-Italian dealer named Enzo Ferrajoli de Ry. Shortly afterwards, Ferrajoli sold the volume, for $3,500, to American dealer Laurence C. Witten II, who offered it to his alma mater, Yale University. 
In June 2013, it was reported in the British press (eg here) that a Scottish researcher, John Paul Floyd, had identified both the source of the "Speculum" manuscript and the particular reproduction of the Andrea Bianco map which had been used to create the Vinland Map forgery. Mr Floyd had found published references in two pre-1957 Spanish books, describing in detail a 15th-century manuscript volume, clearly identifiable as the Yale "Speculum" / "Tartar Relation" book but containing no reported map. He had also spotted details in the Vinland Map which matched badly with the original 1436 Bianco map, but much better with an engraving based on the Bianco map and printed in 1782
==Identification as a forgery, 2018==
As controversy has swirled around the map almost since its acquisition, authorities at Yale University chose not to comment on the authenticity of the parchment document. In 2002, Yale librarian Alice Prochaska commented that "We regard ourselves as the custodians of an extremely interesting and controversial document…and we watch the scholarly work on it with great interest." However, in 2011, Yale's Chester D. Tripp Professor of History, Paul Freedman, did express his view that the map was "unfortunately a fake".
At the 2018 Vinland Map Symposium, Yale conservation scientist Richard Hark revealed the results of new global chemical analyses of the Map and the Tartar Relation, which established, among many other things, that the ink lines of the Map contain varying amounts of anatase "consistent with modern manufacture". So too do two small patches on the first page of the Tartar Relation, where the original iron-gall ink appears to have been erased and replaced.
Raymond Clemens, Curator of Early Books and Manuscripts at Yale's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, considers that the latest historical and scientific research proves "beyond a doubt" that the Vinland map "was a forgery, not a medieval product as it claimed to be." In a March 2019 article, Clemens highlights the fact that "historical investigations by John Paul Floyd have revealed that the Vinland Map is actually based not on Bianco’s 1436 map, but on a printed facsimile map made in 1782. Floyd discovered this by noting mistakes in the 1782 map that were replicated on the Vinland map, but could be found nowhere else." Furthermore, the map has been studied at the Beinecke Library using new technology. "In the case of the Vinland map we were able to prove... [the map] was clearly a 20th century fake."
More information, including the various analyses in the 20th and 21st centuries, on the Wikipedia page 
The WebExhibits page is 
An essay on the Map can be found here 
There is various other coverage on the web and in print.
Category:Forgery controversies
Category:20th century
Category:21st century