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L’Anse aux Meadows and Vinland: An Abandoned Experiment
... Bjarni Herjolfsson's accidental sighting of the Atlantic Coast of North America in 985/6 CE is said to have led to later expeditions and eventually a short-lived settlement, (Arneborg, 2003;Fitzhugh and Ward, 2000;Wallace, 2003a;2003b). The site of L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland Canada is our only evidence of the greatest extent of Scandinavian expansion outside of literary sources (Wallace, 2003a;2003b). ...
... Bjarni Herjolfsson's accidental sighting of the Atlantic Coast of North America in 985/6 CE is said to have led to later expeditions and eventually a short-lived settlement, (Arneborg, 2003;Fitzhugh and Ward, 2000;Wallace, 2003a;2003b). The site of L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland Canada is our only evidence of the greatest extent of Scandinavian expansion outside of literary sources (Wallace, 2003a;2003b). Brigitta L. Wallace (2003b) suggests that L'Anse aux Meadows is the location of the 'Fjord of Currents' or Straumfjörðr recorded in the Vinland Sagas as the primary basecamp from which much of Vinland was explored. ...
... Lignite, jet, and cannel coal artifacts share a similar distribution, having been recovered from burials and settlement sites Ireland, England, the Hebrides, the Faroes, the Shetland Islands, Orkney, and Iceland (Hamilton, 1956;Hansen, 2003;Hunter;Wallace, 2016). Steatite stone vessels and other soapstone artifacts, crafted in either Norway or Shetland, have been found at sites across the North Atlantic and British Isles from the Northern Isles of Scotland, the Faroe Islands, England, Ireland, Iceland, and Newfoundland, Canada (Foster & Jones, 2017;Hamilton, 1956;Hansen 2003;Larsen, 2016;Sindbaek, 2019;Wallace, 2003a;2003b). ...
During the Viking Age, settlements and trading centers were often located near lakes, seas, waterways, and sailing routes. As such, access to other locations was facilitated, whether for the purpose of settlement, trade, resource acquisition, or conflict, by some form of seafaring vessel or watercraft. Over the course of the Scandinavian Diaspora, a level of cultural and economic interconnectedness was maintained between mainland Scandinavia and the settlements in the North Atlantic region. This shared link with Scandinavia contributed to the development of local connections between insular and coastal sites within the broader diasporic network. This thesis considers the archaeological evidence for insular interconnectivity during the Viking Age ca. 790-1066 CE in the British Isles and North Atlantic, as well as the potential for using a GIS-based joint visibility and mobility model that depicts the experiential use of, and interaction between, past landscapes and seascapes while maintaining a quantitative approach. This is considered through the evaluation of intervisibility between a mobile sailing ship entering the mouth of Grutness Voe and the occupants of the Norse farmstead at the Jarlshof archaeological site, Mainland, Shetland over the course of its occupation ca.850-1200 CE. The results of this research support the argument that the investigation of the diasporic maritime communities of the Viking Age can benefit from the use geospatial technology to evaluate insular interconnectivity and to better conceptualize broader patterns within those extensive maritime networks. Broadly speaking, these findings can also inform our understanding of coastal and insular populations in the past, and the way that they have engaged with their environment, both aqueous and terrestrial. Advisor: Heather Richards-Rissetto
... Greenland held a native population of Palaeo-Eskimo Dorset people, at that time largely concentrated in the northwest of the island. The Vikings also settled briefly in North America at L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, Canada, around AD 1000 (Wallace 2003). Thus, by the turn of the first millennium AD, a common language and culture stretched across Northern Europe and the North Atlantic to eastern Canada (Fig. 1). ...
... Excavations conducted there for almost a decade by Ingstad, his archaeologist wife Anne Stine Ingstad, and a Canadian team uncovered a series of houses and workshops of unquestionable authenticity (Wahlgren 2000;B.L. Wallace 1990B.L. Wallace , 2003. The remains of 8 sod buildings were uncovered along with a number of artifacts. ...
... The Newfoundland settlement does not appear to have witnessed lengthy occupation; perhaps only a few years of use are represented. The settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows probably served as an exploration base and winter camp for expeditions heading south (Wallace 2003). The sagas suggest that the Vinland occupation eventually failed because of conflicts both among the Vikings themselves and with the native people they encountered. ...
This volume presents the results of a symposium focused on a project of archaeological research concerned with the colonization of the North Atlantic using new methods of analysis. This introduction to the volume discusses the historical and archaeological background of the study and the major questions involved. The larger issues concern the settlement of a number of the islands of the North Atlantic by Vikings during the last quarter of the first millennium AD. Questions about the timing of this settlement and the place of origin of the settlers are still subject to debate and are important components in constructing the archaeology of the Vikings. More specifically, because these methods involve human remains, the study focuses primarily on Iceland and Greenland where Norse settlements contain substantial numbers of burials, in contrast to some other locations in the North Atlantic.
... The viking presence in America receives a disproportionate amount of attention given how short-lived the settlement was. Involving few people and inviable in the long term, it was not sustained (see Wallace, 2003). To Viking-Age Norse speakers, Vinland was simply an extension of the North Atlantic and not the discovery of a 'New World'. ...
The Vikings are an excellent example of the significance of cultural memory: from post‐Viking‐Age sources to their rediscovery in the Victorian period to their popular appeal in current times. Ancestry is a key dimension as vikings could be dynasty founders or imbue a region with Scandinavian heritage. The importance of settlements remaining connected with Iceland and the Old Norse cultural milieu is highlighted. Archaeological evidence and non‐Scandinavian sources can highlight the gaps in Norse memory, where specific events have been forgotten and some regions of the Viking world have received less attention than others. Stretching from America to Russia, the impact of post‐medieval political events, of modern marketisation and of different scholarly approaches is also considered.
... Overexploitation of the walrus (and the need to travel to increasingly distant hunting and/or trading grounds, perhaps as far north as Smith Sound) may thus have undermined the resilience of the colony e especially in the Western Settlement, for which hunting was particularly important (McGovern, 1985a;Enghoff, 2003). Like earlier Norse expeditions to Newfoundland, abandoned after experimentation around 1000 CE (Wallace, 2003), lengthening northern voyages may not have been sustainable. No Greenlandic exports of walrus tusks are historically recorded after 1327 and the Western Settlement is generally thought to have been abandoned in the fourteenth century (Arneborg et al., 2012:4;Nedkvitne, 2019:172, 350e355). ...
The impacts of early ecological globalisation may have had profound economic and environmental consequences for human settlements and animal populations. Here, we review the extent of such historical impacts by investigating the medieval trade of walrus (Odobenus rosmarus rosmarus) ivory. We use an interdisciplinary approach including chaîne op eratoire, ancient DNA (aDNA), stable isotope and zooarchaeological analysis of walrus rostra (skull sections) to identify their biological source and subsequent trade through Indigenous and urban networks. This approach complements and improves the spatial resolution of earlier aDNA observations, and we conclude that almost all medieval European finds of walrus rostra likely derived from Greenland. We further find that shifting urban nodes redistributed the traded ivory and that the latest medieval rostra finds were from smaller, often female, walruses of a distinctive DNA clade, which is especially prevalent in northern Greenland. Our results suggest that more and smaller animals were targeted at increasingly untenable distances, which reflects a classic pattern of resource depletion. We consider how the trade of walrus and elephant ivory intersected, and evaluate the extent to which emergent globalisation and the "resource curse" contributed to the abandonment of Norse Greenland.
... 1016/j.jas.2018.06.005 arcticus), into their yarn, but elsewhere domesticates provided the raw materials (Østergård, 2004;Walton Rogers, 1989;Sinding et al., 2015;Sinding et al., 2017). Archaeological evidence (including more than 9000 textile fragments analyzed by Hayeur Smith), indicates that spinning and weaving was practiced at nearly every excavated Norse farm in Iceland and Greenland, while the recovery of a soapstone spindle whorl at L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, implies that yarn production was significant enough to be part of the activities undertaken even at this farthest west known Viking Age Norse exploration base (Wallace, 2003). ...
Yarn and textiles recovered from prehistoric Dorset and Thule culture sites in the Eastern Canadian Arctic have raised questions about the extent and timing of indigenous and Norse interaction in the New World, whether the yarn represents technological transfers between Greenland's Norse settlers and the Dorset, or whether these Indigenous Arctic groups had independent fiber technologies before contact with Europeans.
However, the extensive use of marine mammals in northern cultural contexts, and the penetration of oils from these animals' tissues into datable terrestrial materials, has posed general problems for reliably dating sites in the Arctic and has raised questions specifically about previous efforts to date these fiber objects. In this paper, we use a recently developed protocol for removing marine mammal organic contaminants entirely
from radiocarbon samples, making AMS dating possible and reliable for Arctic research. This study uses those protocols to directly date a suite of woven and spun animal fiber artifacts from five Dorset and Thule archaeological sites in the eastern Canadian Arctic. Directly dating these artifacts with marine mammal oils removed helps to answer questions about Norse contact with Dorset and Thule communities, sheds new light on the topic of indigenous fiber technologies in the North, and raises new questions about European contacts with the people of the North American Arctic prior to sustained efforts at colonization after the 18th century.
The implausible medieval toponym Grænland ‘Greenland’ is traced to the walrus hunting station in the Disko Bay region of northwestern Greenland and to the dominant island proto-industry, tusk extraction and trade in ivory. Language substitution and related processes take a notional * tannland ‘tusk land’ (perhaps tabooed) through * granland ‘whisker land’ (a second dominant cranial feature of the animal) to grænland , variously ‘fresh, new land’, ‘land of hope’, and, lastly, ‘green land’. Norse trade as far as to central Asia in ivory and other luxury goods such as North American hardwoods is also reviewed.
Transatlantic exploration took place centuries before the crossing of Columbus. Physical evidence for early European presence in the Americas can be found in Newfoundland, Canada1,2. However, it has thus far not been possible to determine when this activity took place3–5. Here we provide evidence that the Vikings were present in Newfoundland in ad 1021. We overcome the imprecision of previous age estimates by making use of the cosmic-ray-induced upsurge in atmospheric radiocarbon concentrations in ad 993 (ref. ⁶). Our new date lays down a marker for European cognisance of the Americas, and represents the first known point at which humans encircled the globe. It also provides a definitive tie point for future research into the initial consequences of transatlantic activity, such as the transference of knowledge, and the potential exchange of genetic information, biota and pathologies7,8.
A growing number of studies strive to examine wooden archaeological remains recovered from Norse sites in the North Atlantic, contributing to a better understanding of patterns in both wood exploitation and woodland management. Despite the limited diversity and abundance of trees in the North Atlantic islands, the Medieval Norse kept using wood in most everyday activities including the construction and repair of buildings and boats, the production of artifacts and tools, and as a source of fuel. The proximity of the Greenland settlements with the northeastern American coast, puts them at the forefront in the exploration and exploitation of remote resource regions. While some species may have arrived both as driftwood or imported material, there is currently no method to conclusively identify archaeological wood remains as driftwood. Here, we use biogeochemical analysis of stable hydrogen (δ²H), stable oxygen (δ¹⁸O), and radiogenic strontium (⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr) isotopes in soil, water, and modern plant samples from various sites in Greenland and Canada to characterize expected local isotopic baselines. While ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr isotope ratios do not provide a clear distinction between the regions of interest, δ²H and δ¹⁸O ratios appear to help discriminate not only between regions but also specific sites. In addition, we completed a pilot study of archaeological wood samples obtained in Greenland to test the effectiveness of the ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr biogeochemical baseline. Results demonstrate that at least in some cases, diagenetic processes were not sufficient to mask a non-local ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr signature.
I will discuss the history of the “Lost Tribes of Israel” and follow their ancient migrations into every corner of the Earth. The wandering of the Israelite tribe of Dan from ancient Greece to Central Asia and their subsequent migration to Europe will be discussed, based on the Old and New Testaments, Icelandic Sagas, scientific, linguistic, archeological and DNA data, Jewish Torah and secular writings. Many other historical sources will be brought to light. You will learn many new things contrary to your current understanding of the ancestral and cultural identity of many different nations of the World. You will also discover that modern historians and academia have either intentionally or mistakenly omitted certain historical information from the contemporary academic education curriculum. This has resulted in a completely different perspective of ancient history. This has resulted in the belief that the ancient Israelites are either “Lost” in history and/or the assertion that the modern Israeli’s are the last remnant of the descendants of the Israelite descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob – both of which are not true. The ancestors of the Tribe of Dan in the Old Testament include the Danes and all modern European nations.
• The Word of Bible is historically accurate, although subject to the prejudices and distortions of numerous translations by different cultures and linguistic imperfections. The Israelites were scattered throughout all corners of the Earth into every nation and kingdom, just as the Most High God AHAYAH (I AM that I AM, Exodus 3:13-15) said that they would be. We will discover part of the history of the ancient Israelites and their associations with the Scythians and Aryans of secular history. The Israelites became known as the Scythians and in Persia as the Parthians, after their assimilation with these peoples. They also became rulers of many of the foreign lands they migrated or were once enslaved in and founded many ancient empires because of their warrior prowess. The ancient origins of European nations and Scandinavians began with this massive migration of populations, well before the Diaspora in 722 B.C.
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