Don’t tell me this is another “Vikings in central NA” hoax (except that they’re somehow supposed to be Christian Vikings this time).
Nope. Swedes who worked for Hudson’s Bay in the early 1800’s.
Oh, I wasn’t suspecting the excavators of a hoax, I was suspecting the people who put the thing there in the 18th century. There were a whole series of “Vikings in the Americas” hoaxes in (mostly) the 19th century, although this would be early for that type of thing, and all the runestone-specific hoaxes I’m aware of were down in the States. The choice of runes for this carving was almost certainly deliberate—by the 18th century, the Latin alphabet would have been dominant in most of Scandinavia—but there’s no way of telling whether it was intended to be deceptive.