Debate about the authenticity of the Vinland Map continues to rage (as subscribers to MapHist will readily attest). A brief summary is now on About.com (via Matt). That summary points to this site on the controversy, which is still under…
Oh, look. Someone is arguing that a 16th-century map of the world by Oroncé Fine (Orontius Finnaeus) is proof that global warming caused by human activity isn’t happening. Problem is, he’s using Charles Hapgood’s weird theories about an ancient…
The controversial Vinland Map has usually been dismissed as a modern forgery, but a Danish team led by Rene Larsen argues that tests on the map conducted over the past five years “do not show any signs of forgery.” The…
Mental Floss’s three controversial maps will be familiar to regular readers of The Map Room: Percy’s 38-state map of the U.S. (Rob even draws a new version of Pearcy’s map), the Mercator projection (in the context of the Peters projection…
A reader wrote me in June: I was just wondering if you have read the new book (due out this month, June 2008) called 1434 by Gavin Menzies in which he puts forward a hypthesis that the Chinese set off…
On MapHist, Tony Campbell has announced a major new section of his Map History/History of Cartography site: Cartographic Fakes, Forgeries and Facsimiles Likely to Deceive. It includes a list of known fakes (unfortunately in Word format), a guide to how…
The story of the Piri Reis map is the story of how a perfectly innocent 16th-century navigational chart can end up, through no fault of its own, at the centre of a crackpot theory about our planet’s ancient history. Our…
If you thought Gavin Menzies’s claim that the Chinese discovered America in 1421 was risible, if you thought Liu Gang’s purported 1418 map was a fraud, you’d better brace yourself: a Virginia author argues that the Chinese visited America around…
Carl Weber’s thesis that the Marquette Map is a hoax received a rough reception at a history conference last month: apparently, many historians aren’t buying his claims or his evidence, suggesting that they can be refuted “in about five…
Carl J. Weber, a history professor at DeVry University, argues that a well-known map, purportedly made by Father Jacques Marquette during the 1673 Joliett-Marquette expedition to the Mississippi Valley, is, in fact, a 19th-century forgery meant to bolster Marquette’s…
Set your TiVos: The Viking Deception, a Nova program about the Vinland Map forgery that was first broadcast in February 2005, is being rebroadcast on Tuesday the 10th. If you miss the show, the web site has plenty of…
Last month, Tony Campbell wrote on MapHist, “I do hope somebody will be tempted … to take on the task of compiling a listing of map forgeries/fakes and the references to them.” John Woram has now answered Tony’s challenge and…
Gavin Menzies, he of the hypothesis that the Chinese discovered America and the prime supporter of Liu Gang’s purported 1418/1763 map, will be in Australia this week to give a lecture at the University of Melbourne, according to tomorrow’s edition…
1421 Exposed, which will be officially launched on May 1, is a web site put together by academics and researchers to combat Gavin Menzies’s theory that the Chinese discovered the world in the 15th century, and, in particular, to refute…
From the English edition of the People’s Daily Online: Experts doubt authenticity of China’s pre-Columbus map. In response to yesterday’s press conference confirming the age of the paper: “The test can only prove that the paper is genuine, but it…
We’ve got coverage of Liu Gang’s press conference regarding his so-called “1418 Map”: BeijingLives has a copy of Liu’s written remarks, wherein he takes on the criticisms point-by-point. Liu: “After going through the ‘holes’ one by one, we should see…
Mark your calendars and brace yourselves. On Thursday, Liu Gang, Gavin Menzies and company are holding an invitation-only media briefing in Beijing, where they will announce the carbon-dating test results for Liu Gang’s map, which they believe is a copy…
In a new article this week for the online journal Coordinates, map librarian David Y. Allen raises concerns that the so-called “Velasco Map,” a widely known map of northeastern North America that purportedly dates to 1610, may in fact be…
In November, news broke of the discovery of the Soleto Map, an ostrakon discovered two years ago that depicted the Salentine peninsula. The fragment, dated to 500 BC, was characterized as possibly the oldest map yet discovered in the history…
A couple of weeks ago, an announcement that a Chinese map had been discovered that “proved” that the Chinese had “discovered” the Americas before Columbus swept the world news media. The Economist broke the story on the 16th; see also…
