Interesting point of view.
from
https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-history-archaeology/viking-outpost-0012319
Vikings Didn’t Just Pop into Canada for a Visit, They Stayed for
Do you remember that 1992 electro-techno tune by KLF America What Time
is Love , which at the beginning declares this music is a 1000 year
celebration of the Vikings of modern day Norway reaching America? Well
that actually happened, and now a team of scientists has been digging
new truths from a bog near the ancient Norse explorers’ Newfoundland settlement - which indicates the “barbarian” Vikings might have
integrated with natives of North America over 1000 years ago.
Five centuries before the Christian discovery of the New World, Norse (
ancient Norwegian ) explorers established a remote colony in
Newfoundland known today as L’Anse aux Meadows, and while it has always
been believed occupancy at the site was short-lived, microscopic new
finds are demanding the length of its occupancy be revised, and then some!
Three days ago I reported on the team of archaeologists who in 2018
excavated a peat bog almost 100 feet (30 meters) east of L'Anse aux
Meadows and discovered a layer of “ ecofacts” - environmental remains - radiocarbon dating to the “12th or 13th century.” Paul Ledger, the lead author and postdoctoral fellow at Memorial University of Newfoundland,
who took the sedimentary core samples from the bog, discovered “a layer
of trampled mud littered with woodworking debris, charcoal, and the
remains of plants and insects.” He found that they dated to the late
1100s or early 1200s, long after the Norse were thought to have left Newfoundland, never to return.
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Did a Native American travel with the Vikings and arrive in Iceland
centuries before Columbus set sail?
Did the Vikings use crystal sunstones to discover America?
Ledger spoke to ARSTechnica about the discoveries from the bog and he
said they include: “a bronze cloak pin, a soapstone spindle piece, iron nails, and rivets,” which make it clear to archaeologists that the
“Norse were here.” Stone tools found at the site, believed to have
belonged to the Beothuk people, are thought to have been brought by
natives revisiting their traditional hunting camp to scavenge metal
tools and resources left behind by the European fishermen.
A Beothuk woman, possibly Demasduit (Mary March). ( Public Domain )
Everything About this Place Requires Re-Thinking
The radiocarbon dating undertaken by Ledger and his colleagues was
published on Wednesday this week on PNAS and suggests the Viking
adventurers arrived in Newfoundland as early as 910 AD and may have left
as late as 1145 AD. This means the Norse explorers stayed much longer
than historians or archaeologists currently believe and another ‘really’ interesting aspect of the project is that the indigenous occupation of
the site started between “710 and 1130 AD” and between “1540 and 1810 AD”. There are limited ways in which to account for such over-laps and
one suspected answer is “cultural interaction.”
What Ledger finds “really interesting” is the pollen tests and dead insects, including Simplocaria metallica from Greenland and Acidota
quadrata found “ just south of the Arctic Circle .” And he told
ARSTechnica that in Greenland and Iceland archaeologists generally study
“the open areas between buildings and the environment around
settlements” whereas in the North Atlantic teams “tend to focus solely
on the structures themselves rather than the spaces outside and between them”. He concluded that the microscopic content of this bog layer
reflects similar deposits in Greenland, “however, we have no real point
of comparison for Indigenous sites.”
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Poles in North America
C) Insects and seeds (left to right): Eanus macullipennis , S. metallica
, A. quadrata , Pycnoglypta sp. , and dock seed (cf. R. aquaticus ). (
D) Pollen (left to right): H. lupulus -type, Juglans, and cereal-type. (
E) Wood debitage. ( Paul M. Ledger, Linus Girdland-Flink, and Véronique
Forbes )
What’s Next at this Fascinating Remote Viking Outpost?
When the team of archaeologists return to Newfoundland next month they
will attempt to map how far the peat bog extends in relation the
structures and this will require reopening some excavated trenches from
the 1970s digs and some new test pits. Furthermore, the new paper’s
Coauthor Linus Girdland-Flink of Liverpool John Moores University plans
to examine the “DNA of dock seeds ” which is a type of grain that
Vikings mixed with sediment and waste materials to determine where
exactly the species came from. And while some of the scientists are
looking into the macrocosm for answers, they also plan to “bring some geophysical methods to bear on the site.”
In 2010 the government of Canada marked the 50th anniversary of the
discovery of the Viking remains at the L’Anse aux Meadows by Helge and
Anne Stine Instad, and their guide, local fisherman George Decker, in
1960, which you can read about in this Medievalists article.
Norse long house recreation, L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland and
Labrador, Canada. (D. Gordon E. Robertson/CC BY SA 3.0)
Top Image: Viking explorers Source: diter / Adobe Stock
By Ashley Cowie
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