L'Anse aux Meadows:
The Vikings have landed
Around the turn of the 19th century, Canadian historian W.A. Munn pored over medieval
Icelandic manuscripts. Two of them, "the Greenlander Saga" and "Eirik's
Saga" reported on the explorations of Thorvald Arvaldson, Eirik the Red, and Leif
Eiriksson, three generations of a rather cranky family of Norse mariners. According to the
manuscripts, Thorvald fled a murder charge in Norway and eventually settled in Iceland;
his son Eirik fled Iceland under a similar charge and settled Greenland; and Eirik's son
Leif (the Lucky) took the family westward still, and circa AD 998 he colonized a land he
called "Vinland." Leif's colony remained at Vinland for between three and ten
years, before they were chased away by constant attacks from the earlier residents, called
Skraelings by the Norse. Munn believed that the most likely site for the colony was on the
island of Newfoundland, stating that "Vinland" did not refer to grapes, but
rather to grass or grazing land. (Whether "Vin" referred to grapes or pasture is
still somewhat hotly debated).
In the early 1960s, archaeologists Helge Ingstad and his wife Anne Stein Ingstad
undertook a close survey of the coastlines of Newfoundland and Labrador. Ingstad, a Norse
investigator, had spent the majority of his career studying Northern and Arctic
civilizations, and was following up on research into the Viking explorations of the 10th
and 11th centuries. In 1961, the survey paid off, and the Ingstads discovered an
undisputably Viking settlement near Epave Bay and named the site "L'Anse aux
Meadows," or Meadow Cove.
Found at the site were evidence of three timber-and-sod longhouses and five smaller
buildings, a possible charcoal kiln and the remains of a small iron smithy. Eleventh
century Norse artifacts recovered from l'Anse aux Meadows numbered in the hundreds, and
included a soapstone spindle whorl and a bronze-ringed pin process, as well as other iron,
bronze, stone, and bone items.
L'Anse aux Meadows is now owned by Parks Canada, who carried on excavations at the site
during the mid-1970s. The site was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1978; and
Parks Canada has reconstructed some of the sod buildings and maintains the site as a
"living history" museum, complete with costumed interpreters.
Read more about it
[(c) 1997 K Hirst] See ya
next week!
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