Originally published at: New analysis confirms Vinland map drawn with modern ink, is fake as heck | Boing Boing
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If I could time travel, I’d be tempted to piss off every archeologist, art historian, and pigment analyst by teaching the Egyptians or Romans about the joys of titanium dioxide pigment.
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You’d also want to convince them to build a mass spectrometer to seperate out the Ti-44 isotope to further confound future archeologists
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Indeed, finding an ancient Egyptian mass spectrometer would be pretty surprising, I agree.
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Can you imagine the ancient aliens dudes minds blowing when they find a pyramid with a series of gas centrifuges in the basement?
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I’d settle for handing out a few cases of ball-point pens.
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Boy, really had me going there…
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Right? Now my whole worldview has changed! 
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Is… is that a pigment pun?
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Two related things for the intellectually curious:
The very-racist-in-origin “Nordic Revival” of the ~1870s - 1930s;
and
L’Anse aux Meadows.
Illustration of the former: my town’s weathervane atop City Hall
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I dunno how many people got the final pun, but it made my morning.
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It was one of those lines where I knew this was a Beschizza without having to look at the byline. 
slow clap
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No shit, Sherlock
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Yes, it was quite iron-ic.
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With all the trouble the hoaxer went to, how hard would it have been to whip up a batch of authentically 15th century ink? I made some walnut ink myself last year, and it worked pretty well. I could have thrown in a few iron nails to darken it. With a little care, I’m sure I could have kept it free of modern contaminants.
The provenance remains unclear. For all we know the perpetrator may well have been Gallic.
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“…didn’t have the gall to pull it off.”? Fie, Sir! Fie! He who would pun would pick a pocket
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L’Anse aux Meadows
Kim Stanley Robinson wrote a short story “Vinland the Dream” about L’Anse aux Meadows, wherein the narrator discovers that the whole thing was a brilliantly executed hoax.
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If the forgery worked for a century I’d say he did a pretty good job. He might not have cared if some future super science managed to expose him long after his death.
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I suspect that the chance to use that pun was the entire reason for the rest of the post.
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