Welcome to Vinland” says the Northern Peninsula tourism association’s sign along the Viking Trail, greeting travellers at the northernmost tip of Newfoundland before the turnoff to L’Anse aux Meadows. The Viking settlement is the only site of its kind in North America, outside of Greenland, showing archeological evidence of Norse presence. More recently, researchers have uncovered proof in old, felled trees from the site, date-stamping that presence.
Research published in “Evidence for European presence in the Americas in AD 1021” in the journal Nature in 2021 places the Vikings at L’Anse aux Meadows a millennium ago, in the year 1021. That’s significant because it establishes the earliest known time Europeans were in the Americas, says Professor Michael Dee, one of the researchers in the Netherlands who carried out the study.
“The date also represents the earliest known time by which the Atlantic had ever been crossed,” says Dee. More than 15,000 years ago, after the ice age and long before the Vikings arrived, humans populated the Americas, traversing land and ice. More recently, Cree-Métis archeologist, Professor Paulette Steeves, has argued in her 2021 book, The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere, there’s evidence Indigenous peoples populated the Americas tens of thousands to more than 100,000 years ago. In Newfoundland and Labrador, Indigenous history dates back at least 10,000 years. When Norse seaman crossed the Atlantic in their sail-and-oar longships, human migration marked a key milestone, successfully encircling the planet.
Mid-13th century Icelandic scholars’ histories of the Viking foray into North America — commonly known as the Icelandic sagas and comprising the Grænlendinga saga (“Saga of the Greenlanders”) and Eiríks saga rauða (“Erik the Red’s Saga”) — provide accounts of Norse explorers from Greenland establishing a settlement in Vinland (the Viking name for coastal North America). In 1960, Norwegian researchers Helge Ingstad and Anne Stine Ingstad discovered the remains of a Norse settlement at the tip of Newfoundland’s Northern Peninsula, confirming these accounts.
But what the sagas, architectural remains, and artifacts at L’Anse aux Meadows failed to provide was an exact date of the settlement beyond the Viking Age (793-1066). Christopher Crocker, a scholar of medieval and modern Icelandic literature, says the sagas provide fairly precise proof that the settlement likely occurred around the turn of the millennium.
Until recently, even the most precise scientific approach, radiocarbon dating, could not zero in on a specific year. Radiocarbon dating measures the concentration of carbon-14 in organic material. The Earth’s atmosphere produces carbon-14, which every living thing then absorbs. When they die, the known rate of decay of carbon-14 enables researchers to examine how much remains, providing a general time of death.
But a subsequent Japanese discovery published in the 2012 Nature study, “A signature of cosmic-ray increase in AD 774–775 from tree rings in Japan,” now enhances the accuracy of radiocarbon dating. The researchers found that cosmic radiation or solar flares causes dramatic carbon-14 spikes, which is detectable in the growth rings of trees. In the latest Nature study, the researchers looked for evidence of such a solar flare, which they knew happened in 993 around the time the Norse arrived in Newfoundland, in three L’Anse aux Meadows tree samples.
Cut marks in the samples showed signs of felling with a metal tool, associated with the Norse, rather than an Indigenous stone tool. The researchers identified the solar flare date-marker in tree rings in each sample, then counted the remaining rings toward the bark’s edge. The sum per each sample provided the year the Vikings felled each tree, dating their precise time in the region.
“Our method returns exact-year dates,” says Dee. “We do not know whether this is the first, last, or middle year (the Vikings) were there. Indeed, we don’t know if they were there more than one year or not.”
The date puts the Vikings in L’Anse aux Meadows some decades later than many experts thought, says Dee. It also puts them there four centuries before the next known European (Italian explorer Christopher Columbus) would cross the Atlantic Ocean in 1492. The impact the Vikings had on Indigenous communities of that time remains unknown, as researchers lack enough information about the voyage (or voyages) to draw conclusions.
“It is still not certain if they even encountered any Indigenous groups,” says Dee. “The semi-mythological Viking sagas suggest they did, but one never knows how factual these are. At present, we are not even sure which cultural group they would have encountered, if indeed such contact took place. The promising thing about our work is it provides a means of establishing scientific facts about the Viking journeys, so that perhaps in time we might be able to understand better the nature of these first interactions, assuming that there were some.”
“A curious passage in the Grænlendinga saga mentions a battle between some Viking warriors … and a certain people called Skrælings, potentially meaning ‘barbarians,’” writes Brian Burfield in a 2013 article, “The Vikings in North America: Sagas, swords and Skraelings,” for the journal Medieval Warfare. The account sets that battle around the year 1,000 and indicates the Vikings clashed with Native North Americans. The Beothuk people are thought to be the first Indigenous people in the region to have encountered Europeans, but many historians still cite the first interaction as taking place with another Italian explorer, Giovanni Caboto (AKA John Cabot) in 1497.
These early European-Indigenous encounters led to centuries of colonialism, with European migrants and settlers forcing the Beothuk inland, away from their traditional lands, food sources, and ways of life, and ultimately resulting in the extinction of the Beothuk as a cultural group in the early 19th century. That colonialism has persisted in popular narrative describing the area today, at the expense of understanding Indigenous histories.
“Vinland is a very small corner of medieval Icelandic literature, yet in North America, it’s the biggest thing that people are aware of when it comes to Icelandic sagas,” says Crocker.
In his paper, “What We Talk about When We Talk about Vínland: History, Whiteness, Indigenous Erasure, and the Early Norse Presence in Newfoundland,” published in the Canadian Journal of History in 2020, Crocker shows how popular media often privileges the region’s early Viking presence. One particularly revealing example, writes Crocker, is the provincial government’s Historic Newfoundland tourism booklet, reprinted 19 times between 1955 and 1988, depicting the Beothuk “as a short-lived and somewhat inexplicable aberration that lies outside historical time, in contrast to the Norse settlers who naturally fit within the colonial narrative and even appear to inaugurate Newfoundland’s real history.”
“What other histories are being obscured by this kind of circus around Vikings?” asks Crocker.
Professor Dee says the latest research offers a way to understand much more about where, how, and when the Vikings were in the Americas.
“In many ways, it allows more questions to be addressed than anything else,” says Dee.
The Vikings’ time at L’Anse aux Meadows remains shrouded in mystery. They left no burials, no lasting litter, and apparently took most of their belongings upon departure, after what appears a relatively short stay in what was perhaps an overwintering station. This latest dating method offers a way to test history, helping to make sense of what’s legend versus part of the lengthy human heritage on these shores — a heritage we still struggle to recount.