Interesting point of view.

from
https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-history-archaeology/viking-outpost-0012319

Vikings Didn’t Just Pop into Canada for a Visit, They Stayed for

Do you remember that 1992 electro-techno tune by KLF America What Time
is Love , which at the beginning declares this music is a 1000 year
celebration of the Vikings of modern day Norway reaching America? Well
that actually happened, and now a team of scientists has been digging
new truths from a bog near the ancient Norse explorers’ Newfoundland
settlement - which indicates the “barbarian” Vikings might have
integrated with natives of North America over 1000 years ago.

Five centuries before the Christian discovery of the New World, Norse (
ancient Norwegian ) explorers established a remote colony in
Newfoundland known today as L’Anse aux Meadows, and while it has always
been believed occupancy at the site was short-lived, microscopic new
finds are demanding the length of its occupancy be revised, and then some!

Three days ago I reported on the team of archaeologists who in 2018
excavated a peat bog almost 100 feet (30 meters) east of L'Anse aux
Meadows and discovered a layer of “ ecofacts” - environmental remains -
radiocarbon dating to the “12th or 13th century.” Paul Ledger, the lead
author and postdoctoral fellow at Memorial University of Newfoundland,
who took the sedimentary core samples from the bog, discovered “a layer
of trampled mud littered with woodworking debris, charcoal, and the
remains of plants and insects.” He found that they dated to the late
1100s or early 1200s, long after the Norse were thought to have left
Newfoundland, never to return.

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Did a Native American travel with the Vikings and arrive in Iceland
centuries before Columbus set sail?
Did the Vikings use crystal sunstones to discover America?

Ledger spoke to ARSTechnica about the discoveries from the bog and he
said they include: “a bronze cloak pin, a soapstone spindle piece, iron
nails, and rivets,” which make it clear to archaeologists that the
“Norse were here.” Stone tools found at the site, believed to have
belonged to the Beothuk people, are thought to have been brought by
natives revisiting their traditional hunting camp to scavenge metal
tools and resources left behind by the European fishermen.

A Beothuk woman, possibly Demasduit (Mary March). ( Public Domain )

Everything About this Place Requires Re-Thinking
The radiocarbon dating undertaken by Ledger and his colleagues was
published on Wednesday this week on PNAS and suggests the Viking
adventurers arrived in Newfoundland as early as 910 AD and may have left
as late as 1145 AD. This means the Norse explorers stayed much longer
than historians or archaeologists currently believe and another ‘really’
interesting aspect of the project is that the indigenous occupation of
the site started between “710 and 1130 AD” and between “1540 and 1810
AD”. There are limited ways in which to account for such over-laps and
one suspected answer is “cultural interaction.”

What Ledger finds “really interesting” is the pollen tests and dead
insects, including Simplocaria metallica from Greenland and Acidota
quadrata found “ just south of the Arctic Circle .” And he told
ARSTechnica that in Greenland and Iceland archaeologists generally study
“the open areas between buildings and the environment around
settlements” whereas in the North Atlantic teams “tend to focus solely
on the structures themselves rather than the spaces outside and between
them”. He concluded that the microscopic content of this bog layer
reflects similar deposits in Greenland, “however, we have no real point
of comparison for Indigenous sites.”

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Poles in North America

C) Insects and seeds (left to right): Eanus macullipennis , S. metallica
, A. quadrata , Pycnoglypta sp. , and dock seed (cf. R. aquaticus ). (
D) Pollen (left to right): H. lupulus -type, Juglans, and cereal-type. (
E) Wood debitage. ( Paul M. Ledger, Linus Girdland-Flink, and Véronique
Forbes )

What’s Next at this Fascinating Remote Viking Outpost?
When the team of archaeologists return to Newfoundland next month they
will attempt to map how far the peat bog extends in relation the
structures and this will require reopening some excavated trenches from
the 1970s digs and some new test pits. Furthermore, the new paper’s
Coauthor Linus Girdland-Flink of Liverpool John Moores University plans
to examine the “DNA of dock seeds ” which is a type of grain that
Vikings mixed with sediment and waste materials to determine where
exactly the species came from. And while some of the scientists are
looking into the macrocosm for answers, they also plan to “bring some
geophysical methods to bear on the site.”

In 2010 the government of Canada marked the 50th anniversary of the
discovery of the Viking remains at the L’Anse aux Meadows by Helge and
Anne Stine Instad, and their guide, local fisherman George Decker, in
1960, which you can read about in this Medievalists article.

Norse long house recreation, L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland and
Labrador, Canada. (D. Gordon E. Robertson/CC BY SA 3.0)

Top Image: Viking explorers Source: diter / Adobe Stock

By Ashley Cowie

On Wed, 16 Nov 2022 13:11:31 -0800, a425couple
<a425couple@hotmail.com> wrote:

>Three days ago I reported on the team of archaeologists who in 2018
>excavated a peat bog almost 100 feet (30 meters) east of L'Anse aux
>Meadows and discovered a layer of “ ecofacts” - environmental remains -
>radiocarbon dating to the “12th or 13th century.” Paul Ledger, the lead
>author and postdoctoral fellow at Memorial University of Newfoundland,
>who took the sedimentary core samples from the bog, discovered “a layer
>of trampled mud littered with woodworking debris, charcoal, and the
>remains of plants and insects.” He found that they dated to the late
>1100s or early 1200s, long after the Norse were thought to have left
>Newfoundland, never to return.
>
This research goes back considerably further than 2018 - we were there
in 2004 and the reconstructed buildings had been there for at least a
decade further back than that. What is new is evidence that they
stayed at least another century beyond when they were thought to have
left Newfoundland.

Incidentally L'Anse aux Meadows (which is a name that is neither good
French nor English) is located at the extreme northern tip of
Newfoundland fairly close to where Newfoundland meets Labrador
separated by a straight perhaps 2-3 miles wide at most.

(We took our kids there in 2004 as my eldest was starting grade 12
that fall and we knew it was likely to be our last vacation trip
together as a family - and it turned out to be our last vacation in a
LONG time as my mother was killed in a freak accident the following
year and the family business couldn't handle my being away for the
length of time typical of a vacation for several years after that. The
net result of this trip is that our kids have been in all 10 Canadian
provinces which in a country the size of Canada is rare)

On Friday, November 18, 2022 at 1:40:11 AM UTC-5, The Horny Goat wrote:
> On Wed, 16 Nov 2022 13:11:31 -0800, a425couple
> <a425c...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> >Three days ago I reported on the team of archaeologists who in 2018
> >excavated a peat bog almost 100 feet (30 meters) east of L'Anse aux
> >Meadows and discovered a layer of “ ecofacts” - environmental remains -
> >radiocarbon dating to the “12th or 13th century.” Paul Ledger, the lead
> >author and postdoctoral fellow at Memorial University of Newfoundland,
> >who took the sedimentary core samples from the bog, discovered “a layer
> >of trampled mud littered with woodworking debris, charcoal, and the
> >remains of plants and insects.” He found that they dated to the late
> >1100s or early 1200s, long after the Norse were thought to have left
> >Newfoundland, never to return.
> >
> This research goes back considerably further than 2018 - we were there
> in 2004 and the reconstructed buildings had been there for at least a
> decade further back than that. What is new is evidence that they
> stayed at least another century beyond when they were thought to have
> left Newfoundland.
>
> Incidentally L'Anse aux Meadows (which is a name that is neither good
> French nor English) is located at the extreme northern tip of
> Newfoundland fairly close to where Newfoundland meets Labrador
> separated by a straight perhaps 2-3 miles wide at most.
>
> (We took our kids there in 2004 as my eldest was starting grade 12
> that fall and we knew it was likely to be our last vacation trip
> together as a family - and it turned out to be our last vacation in a
> LONG time as my mother was killed in a freak accident the following
> year and the family business couldn't handle my being away for the
> length of time typical of a vacation for several years after that. The
> net result of this trip is that our kids have been in all 10 Canadian
> provinces which in a country the size of Canada is rare)

I strongly recommend Kristen Seaver's "The Frozen Echo" (1997)
for a thorough view of the viking Greenlanders, including a section
on how much longer they lasted than is commonly believed.

The Catholic Church declined after a while to send out bishops
(but of course a bishop of Gardar still existed and lived in Rome -
no point in wasting a good sinecure)
..
Though there is no evidence that the Greenland vikings were
ever anything but catholic, the church papered over its
negligence by declaring that they had all become heretics.

Ivar Bardarson's taxation/looting mission in the late 1300s was
in part to collect taxes for the church that was providing
Greenland with no service.

William Hyde