The ancient chronicles told of a larger-than-life Viking warrior with a shock of red hair, banished from his home for killing another man, who sailed with hundreds of followers to an icy island in the sea. And they told of his son, who set out only a few years later to an even more distant place he knew as “Vinland,” but which today’s historians believe were the eastern coasts of modern day Canada and the United States.
To date, the Icelandic Sagas have only led archaeologists to one actual, verified Norse historical site in the New World — the 1,000-year-old seaside settlement L’Anse aux Meadows on the northernmost tip of Newfoundland. It would take 55 years and a view from space to track down a possible second one.
The new archaeological find, announced Thursday, offers tantalizing evidence of a Viking presence 300 miles from the only place in Canada they’d ever been seen before.
It doesn’t look like much — a fire-cracked stone and some mangled scraps of iron unearthed from a muddy patch of ground called Point. But lead archaeologist Sarah Parcak says the site is almost certainly only one of two things:
“Either it’s … an entirely new culture that looks exactly like the Norse and we don’t know what it is,” she told The Washington Post in a phone interview. “Or it’s the westernmost Norse site that’s ever been discovered.”
And although her team is still seeking definitive evidence, Parcak is feeling more and more optimistic that the latter possibility is the right one.
Researchers say that the discovery, which is the subject of a 2-hour documentary that will air on PBS next week, has the potential to rewrite the history of Vikings in North America. It may confirm the belief that the Norse presence here was fleeting; just another short-lived expedition by a seafaring society. Or it could touch off a wave of discoveries of other Norse settlements in the region, proving that the Vikings strayed farther in the New World than anyone realized.
“With just one site, it’s easy to explain it away,” Parcak said, noting that the search for Viking settlements since L’Anse aux Meadows was discovered in 1960 has been so fruitless that some archaeologists concluded there might not be anything more to be found.
“But if there’s two, there might be more,” she continued. “There could potentially be a number of other sites out there that haven’t been found.”
Despite five and a half decades of unsuccessful searching, the evidence from L’Anse aux Meadows and elsewhere does suggest that the Norse ventured pretty far along the Atlantic coast. Excavations at the Newfoundland settlement uncovered seeds of the butternut tree, which doesn’t naturally grow north of New Brunswick, suggesting that inhabitants traveled south to obtain them. Meanwhile, the sagas tell of exploration in a body of water much like the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. The site at Point Rosee would be an ideal way station for such a journey.
