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Wow, what a hornets nest! I'm going to try reducing the complexity
of the left margin black lines, etc., by eliminating re-quotation of
the complete history of the argumentation each time, and address
multiple respondents in one e-mail. The List has a good archive, and
those coming late upon the discussion who are interested can look it
up. Unless I hear otherwise.
First, a comment about motivations. My transfer scenario was not and
never could be an attempt to prove the Vinland Map authentic. It was
merely an attempt to "de-disauthenticate" the map after McCrone's
unstated assumption that 20th Century anatase could only have been
inside the ink from the beginning. I suspect that one of
the motivations that has entered the VM debate is paranoia. Kirsten
Seaver has suggested that R.A. Skelton's reputation has been tainted
by his involvement with the map. Even though I admire British
cleverness , doesn't David Bradbury's description sound a bit
paranoid: "If the British Museum investigators were right in
observing that the finest writing tended to lack the black crust, and
McCrone was right about most of the black crust from the main lines
being removed deliberately, then the "painful" retracing could be a
much more casual process, applying the carbon fairly rapidly to the
major lines and to random points in the fine writing, then scraping
most of it away, particularly where it was badly matched with the
underlying yellow." Talk about painful! This is even more
self-serving to the forgery conclusion than my scenario is to authenticity.
Ken Towe's caustic approach is not unfamiliar to me. But I want you
to know that he was solely responsible for my first public
presentation of the scenario at the Washington ICHC in 1979 (even
though as peer reviewer he had torpedoed its submission to
_Science_). At that time I was willing to go along with what I
understood was the establishment idea of the retracing, and my 2002
Appendix attempted to reflect that presentation. But my scenario is
not fixed by these publications -- I'm willing to change it
organically for the better. Science is not a court of law where
changing stories show weakness. It consists of ongoing steps of
progress. As for the Plenderleith citations, the first one (footnote
7) was to establish his early (1937) advocacy of bleaching, not to
describe the tissue process. The second (footnote 9) was to
establish the front-face tissue process (where he had by 1956
abandoned bleach for other cleaners). But yes, the detailed scenario
for the VM anatase transfer is specifically mine. Ken, in an earlier
post (12:53 AM, 12/13/2009) I had suggested that Jacquelin Olin might
have connections in Chicago that could yield spectra results for
tannin or not. Might you also have such connections?
Best to all, Jim
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