Eight interesting-looking mounds were excavated near the village of L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, Canada, starting in 1960. They were soon identified as the remains of Norse-style buildings and presented as evidence that the Vikings reached the New World around the year 1000 CE, a good five centuries before Columbus.
The excavation leaders, a Norwegian couple named Helge Ingstad and Anne Stine Ingstad, were looking for evidence of Viking occupation. But why did they believe that they might find it in this region of the world? What did people believe about a Viking presence in America before this discovery? And how has the discovery shaped our assumptions about the Vikings in the New World?
An Old Legend: Vinland in the Sagas
According to the Saga of the Greenlanders and the Saga of Erik the Red, both written in the 13th century, around the year 1000 CE, Leif Erikson, the son of Erik the Red, the leader of recently colonized Greenland, discovered a rich new land far to the west of Greenland. He had heard about the land from a man called Bjarni Hergelfson, who came across it when he was blown off course on his way to Greenland.
Leif Erikson set off and encountered several inhospitable lands before finding the lush, green region that Bjarni had described, rich in green pastures, dense forests, and large salmon. The explorer reportedly named the area Vinland after his friend Thryker went missing for a few days, only to return claiming that he had found wild grapes.
The Greenlanders reportedly made several expeditions to Vinland in the following years, mostly led by members of Erikson’s family, such as his sister Freydis. They were described as launching missions to obtain valuable goods to take back to Europe. Accounts include encounters with locals, which the Vikings called Skraelings, and stories of betrayal and murder between business partners.
These sagas were not, in fact, the earliest references to Vinland in the surviving sources. In 1073, Adam of Bremen wrote a history of the archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen. He said that the Danish king had told him of an island in the ocean called Vinland, where grapes grow of their own accord, producing the most excellent wine. He also implies that the Danish Vikings visited regularly.
Vinland as North America: A Viking Columbus
Once the North American continent was discovered at the end of the 15th century, many people started to believe that Erikson’s Vinland must be North America. As early as the 16th century, claims that the Vikings had visited the New World emerged. Famously, some claimed that a Norse city settlement called Norumbega was established in the Boston region. It appeared on maps as early as the 16th century, and English sailor David Ingram claimed to have visited in 1568.
The idea of an early Viking presence in the New World became extremely popular in the 19th and 20th centuries as Scandinavian people started to migrate to North America. Many began to hold up Leif Erikson as an alternative Viking Columbus. A statue of Leif Erikson was erected in the Boston area in 1887.
In 1890, a chemist and science professor at Harvard named Eben Horsford claimed to have found the remains of Norumbega near his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. While the find was widely publicized in local papers and commemorated with a plaque and a monument, later excavations have found no evidence to support this claim.
A little bit later, in 1897, a Swedish immigrant named Olof Ohman reported that he found a runestone carved with Viking runes on his property in Western Minnesota, now known as the Kensington Runestone. This was followed in the 1920s by another supposed Viking runestone in the foothills of the Ouachita Mountains in Oklahoma, known as the Heavener Runestone. While both discoveries were met with a lot of enthusiasm at the time, they have generally been dismissed as runestones left by modern Scandinavian migrants or hoaxes.
The evidence around these runestones is fairly inconclusive, but scepticism prevailed in the 20th century when Nazi appropriation of Norse legends made the prospect of a Viking Columbus less appealing. Therefore, by the 1950s, it was generally believed that the idea of the Vikings visiting the New World was just a story, with no real basis in fact.
The Discovery of L’Anse aux Meadows
Contrary to popular opinion, explorer Helge Ingstad and his archaeologist wife Anne Stine Ingstad believed they could find evidence of the Vikings in the New World.
Helge Ingstad trained as a lawyer, but he was also a keen outdoorsman. In his mid-20s, he sold his law practice and went to northwest Canada, where he spent three years traveling with the local Caribou Eaters tribe. When he returned to Norway, he wrote a bestselling book about his experience; the first of several compelling publications based on his travels.
In 1941, he married Anne Stine Moe, a student of archaeology who graduated with her master’s from the University of Oslo in 1960. Despite the support of her husband, Anne felt extreme pressure from her family to balance her responsibilities as a wife and mother with her professional ambitions. This led her to try to commit suicide twice. Supporting Anne’s career and mental health encouraged the two to jump on a government medical boat to Canada in 1960 in search of Vikings.
The couple headed to Newfoundland because they doubted the traditional assumption that the Vinland described in the sagas must be between Nova Scotia and New England due to the reported presence of grapes. The pair knew that climate patterns were different a millennium earlier and that grapes probably appeared further north. Plus, even the sagas acknowledged that the supposed wild grapes were some distance from where Erikson and his expedition landed. They believed they would make their discovery further north on the Atlantic Coast, familiar terrain for the Vikings.
A resident of the fishing hamlet of L’Anse aux Meadows, George Decker, led them to a group of mounds near the village that the locals assumed was an old Indian camp. But when Anne saw a terrace overlooking a peat bog and a small brook, she thought that this was exactly the type of place the Vikings would have chosen to settle.
Excavations Begin
In her first season of excavations in 1961, Anne had workmen clear the turf and level the overgrowth. This revealed two banks running parallel and possibly connected to something else. Pulling back the turf on the first, she found black sand, followed by brown sand, and then grey sand, but no stones or artifacts. Moving onto the second bank, she found more black soil, but also bits of charcoal and then stones. These turned out to be the remnants of a Viking-style hearth. The foreign nature of the deposit was confirmed when an iron slag was found, since natives of the region were not using iron at the time.
This led to seven years of excavations between 1961 and 1968, with the Ingstads leading an international team with representatives from Sweden, Iceland, Canada, the United States, and Norway.
Vinland’s Secrets Revealed
In the end, a site spanning 8,000 hectares of land and sea was excavated at L’Anse aux Meadows. The site included eight buildings constructed in the Norse style of sod over a wood frame. These have been identified as dwellings of workshops. A large building 28.8 by 15.6 meters with several rooms was probably the main dwelling. There is also evidence of an iron smithy containing a force and iron slag, a carpentry workshop that generated wood debris, and a specialized boat repair area, containing worn rivets.
More than 800 objects were also unearthed. In addition to the iron slag and boat rivets, these include iron nails, soapstone spindle whorls, bronze ringed pins, bone needles, glass beads, and jasper fire starters, all consistent with Norse artifacts.
The site has been dated to around the year 1000 CE. Carbon dating suggests the site was occupied sometime between 990 and 1050 CE, while tree ring analysis suggests that the site was definitely occupied in the year 1021. This aligns closely with the suggested dates from the sagas. This suggests that while the stories of Freydis scaring off the locals by fighting them naked while eight months pregnant are probably an exaggeration, the general tale told in the sagas was based on fact. The sagas even suggest that Erikson set up a camp in the region, as Freydis disagreed with her business partners about the use of these buildings.
Supporting Evidence
Some further supporting evidence for a Viking presence in the region has been found beyond Newfoundland. To reach L’Anse aux Meadows, Norse ships would have had to sail past Baffin Island and Markland, which are probably the inhospitable lands mentioned in the sources. Recent archaeological evidence may reveal a Viking presence there.
In 1977, archaeologists investigating the native Thule culture on Baffin Island found a small wooden carving of a human figure in the stone-paved floor of a Thule house. Several authorities have suggested that it was meant to represent a Norseman.
Also, a small stone vessel recovered from another Baffin Island site was analysed as containing abundant traces of copper-tin alloy, or bronze, plus glass spherules, both of which suggest that the vessel was a crucible for metal working. Again, locals were not working with metal at the time, suggesting an outside, potentially Viking presence.
Interpreting the Evidence
How the L’Anse aux Meadows site was used is still up for debate. Archaeologists believe that the site could have supported somewhere between 30 and 160 people. This is a modest number, but Greenland only had a population of around 3,000 at the time. Some researchers suggest that the site was occupied for about 20 years before it was abandoned, while others suggest that it may have been seasonally occupied for as long as 100 years.
But scholars agree that this was an outpost rather than a settlement, as there is no evidence of burials or agriculture. So, as the sagas suggested, expeditions probably sailed to the region, set up camp, harvested valuable resources, and took them home to Europe. This was done for between two and ten decades, until it was decided that the venture was too risky and not worth the return on investment.
Some scholars have used the location and relatively short occupation of L’Anse aux Meadows as evidence that the Vikings probably did not travel further south to Massachusetts and Oklahoma, where the Kensington and Heavener Runestones were found. They suggest that the Viking occupation was restricted to the Newfoundland region for a few decades. However, food remains of things like butternuts, which do not grow natively in Newfoundland and come from further south, suggest that the Norse travelled further afield to obtain them.
It is not hard to imagine the Vikings, having discovered Newfoundland, were keen to explore this New World further. It seems natural that they would have followed the coastline and rivers further south to see what they could find. The limited nature of the outpost suggests that any traveling groups would have been modest and would have left a minimal impact on the landscape around them. They were small fish in a massive new pond. Therefore, it is not inconceivable that in the future we might find limited evidence of Vikings elsewhere in the New World.
That is not to say that either the Kensington or Heavener Runestones are genuine artifacts; they must be assessed on their own values, but they should be approached with an open mind. That is how Anne Ingham approached her excavations at L’Anse aux Meadows, for which she earned her doctorate in 1978 after publishing two volumes on her finds, finally proving that the Vikings did indeed make it to the New World 500 years before Columbus.
