Glorious dreams and accusations of lies have swirled about the Kensington Runestone for more than a hundred years.
In 1898, Olof Öhman, a Swedish immigrant in America, reported that he had found a grey slab of rock carved with runes in a field in Minnesota. It soon became known by the name of the nearby settlement of Kensington. And that’s about the only thing that’s clear about this rock. Was it, as the inscription on the rock suggests, left there by Vikings in 1362? Or was Öhman a liar?
This is the mystery that sees actor Peter Stormare (
Fargo) and history enthusiast Elroy Balgaard set out to delve into the discovery in the series
The beads were found at three sites in the Brooks Range with is the northernmost extension of the Rocky Mountains in northern Alaska: located entirely within the Arctic Circle . The new study by Michael Kunz of the University of Alaska Museum of the North , and Robin Mills of the Bureau of Land Management , was published in the journal
American Antiquity . The researchers assert that the rare glass Italian objects are among “the oldest European-made items ever discovered in North America .”
These pre-Columbian artifacts found in Alaska are the oldest European-made items ever discovered in North America. (M. L. Kunz et al. /