Scott F. Wolter
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Scott F. Wolter is a Minnesota geologist who was hired in 2000 by the Runestone Museum in Alexandria, Minnesota, to test the surface of the Kensington Runestone, which was discovered by Olof Ohman in 1898 buried under a tree on his farm near Kensington, Minnesota. The KRS (Kensington Runestone) is a 202 pound piece of greywacke rock with a message carved in Scandinavian runes about an exploratory journey to America in the year 1362, long before Columbus came to America.
Scott Wolter brought the KRS to American Petrographic Services in St. Paul for the investigation. With a scanning electron microscope he and his staff found mica degradation on the man-made surfaces, which clearly indicate the stone was buried at least 50 years after carving—probably centuries before Scandinavian settlement of the Kensington area. He also drilled a core sample from the back of the KRS, with permission from the Runestone Museum.
Previous geologic testing was done in 1909-10 by Minnesota's foremost geologist, Newton Horace Winchell. Winchell's investigation concluded "there ((was strong support for an authentic Runestone date of 1362 and little reason to suspect fraud".[citation needed]
Wolter became intrigued with the KRS mystery and visited the Minnesota Historical Society to examine Winchell's field notes and study Ohman family correspondence, as did researcher Barry J. Hanson and avid Scandinavian linguist and runologist Richard Nielsen. In 2004 Nielsen and Wolter travelled with the KRS to the historical museum in Stockholm, Sweden. Wolter and Nielsen joined forces in authoring "The Kensington Runestone: Compelling New Evidence" in 2005.
[edit] References
Barry J. Hanson, Kensington Runestone: A Defense of Olof Ohman the Accused Forger, Volumes I&II, Morris Publishing, 2002.
Alice Beck Kehoe, The Kensington Runestone: Approaching a Research Question Holistically, Waveland Press, 2005.
