Vikings in North America: Could new discovery in Newfoundland prove it was more than a brief stay?
When it comes to Europeans first ‘discovering’ North America, people have generally abandoned the image of the wholesome Christopher Columbus sailing the ocean blue to land ashore a new world.
To a degree this is because we now know Columbus likely instigated the genocide of indigenous tribes who had lived there for millennia, which isn’t a very wholesome image at all. But mainly this is because he was clearly beaten by history’s great explorers: the Vikings.
As any know-it-all will be quick to remind you, the Norsemen supposedly pitched up on the continent some 500 years before Chris and were led from Greenland by the enigmatic Leif Erikson, son of Erik the Red. Despite this, settlement was both limited and short-lived and much of the little we know is gleaned from ‘sagas’: Viking stories that weren’t put to paper until hundreds of years later.
The only settlement found beforehand, now known as L’Anse aux Meadows at the very top of Newfoundland, seemed to show just how fleeting Viking occupation was in North America. When uncovered in the 1960s the archaeological site suggested only a few years before the settlers upped sticks and left.
For a long time this was thought to be cut and dry, exploration didn’t make it far towards the mainland and colonists didn’t hang around for very long, but now a brand new site has been unearthed. It’s a settlement, it’s very old and it might just be Norse. If that’s the case then it changes everything we know about Vikings in America.
The area in question, at the most westerly point of Newfoundland, was spotted by American archaeologist Sarah Parcak using the power of satellites and a very keen eye as she looked for signs of human interference in soil and plant patterns. While staring at soil from space might not sound like a productive way to spend a week, it’s led her to a potential treasure trove of historical significance.
With the site already yielding its first artefacts, a stone used for iron working and some burnt iron ore, anticipation is building.
If proven to be Viking, the Point Rosee settlement will prove that the Greenland explorers made it much further than thought before, hundreds of miles south in fact, but it’s the dating of the settlement that historians are really waiting for.
If it dates to a different time period than that of L’Anse aux Meadows (around 1000AD), then it will provide definitive proof that Norse settlers spent a significant amount of time inhabiting North America.
But even this revelation can’t solve the mystery of why the Vikings abandoned their colonisation of the new world. America would’ve had resources beyond the dreams of the ironically named Greenland, home of Leif Erikson and Co., with a wealth of trees and game able to sustain any self-respecting Norseman.
One of the few reasonable explanations would be that they encountered a few too many scuffles with a local force unwilling to play nice and share their things. You could understand a small band of tired settlers being overwhelmed by an indigenous tribe entirely familiar with their environment. Nonetheless it is disappointing to even consider that the supposedly proud warriors from Scandinavia, conquerors of the Atlantic, were pushed back by a little bit of foul play. It never stopped the rest of the Europeans nearly five centuries later.
Whatever the case may be it would be naive to forget what the Vikings actually achieved, not the murder and pillage they’ve become synonymous with, but reaching across the globe from the east coast of Canada to the far side of the Mediterranean. All at a time when most of mankind had barely left its front door.
