NORSEMEN IN NORTH AMERICA~BR0NDSTED 391 



build its church to a Catholic round church pattern, or permit it to be 

 used as a mill when it was only 40 years old) . On the other hand, it is 

 a reasonable assumption that Newport Tower was an English watch- 

 tower from about 1640. The Dutch thesis : It must be recognized as 

 a possibility that the tower was a Dutch watchtower built about 1625. 

 The Portuguese thesis: Herbert Pell's assumption is slender, based 

 as it is upon a single special, acute situation. In theory, however, 

 neither a Portuguese nor a Spanish origin can be rejected. 



Everything taken into consideration, I am most inclined to regard 

 Newport Tower as an English watchtower {or heacon) dating from 

 about IGJfO. 



THE KENSINGTON STONE 



In November 1948 I made a close study of the Kensington stone in 

 the division of archeology of the Smithsonian Institution in Wash- 

 ington, D. C. John Howard Benson, the Newport sculptor, gave me 

 his valuable assistance. The photographs reproduced in plates 8-10 

 were kindly presented to me in 1948 by the Smithsonian Institution. 



The stone is 0.75 m. high and 0.38 m. wide. In thickness it measures 

 0.14 m. at the top and 0.02-0.07 m. at the bottom. The material is a 

 blackish graywacke with a grayish surface. The runes are carved 

 on one side of the stone and on one edge. The rune-carved side, the 

 "front," is naturally smooth, whereas the edge with the runes has been 

 evened off with the point of a pick hammer. On the back there are 

 longitudinal glacial striae. Below, the stone is hewn obliquely up 

 from the back to the plane of the front and smoothed off, with the 

 result that the bottom of the stone (the "foot") is rather thin. To 

 all appearances the stone was shaped to stand upright. 



The runes, about 2.5 cm. high, are cut with a chisel (width of edge 

 4-4.5 mm.) from two sides, generally down to an acute-angled bot- 

 tom. Benson says: "In general it is a chisel-cut inscription, not a 

 point-," 



A large number of the runes have been worked over in recent times 

 with an iron, thus causing the old surface of the character (the "skin") 

 to disappear and making the rune deeper. Nevertheless, more than 

 half of the runes are still intact and reveal a constant weathering 

 (patina), often differing very little in appearance from the untouched 

 surface of the stone. This weathering has a grayish tinge, quite 

 different from the pale, almost white tone in the overworked runes. 



I shall here mention two particular observations : 



1. The second line on the front inscription begins (before the two 

 dots) with the remnant of a rune, the vertical stem; the rune seems 

 to have been either | or ^. 



2. At the foot of the stone is the letter H (see pi. 8, right), cut 

 by Mr. Holand in 1908. On examining this 40-year-old H closely 



284725—54 26 



