View From Space Hints at a New Viking Site in North America. By Ralph Blumenthal. New York Times, March 31, 2016.
Possible Viking Settlement Discovered in Canada. By Tessa Berenson. Time, April 1, 2016.
Blumenthal:
A thousand years after the Vikings braved the icy seas from Greenland to the New World in search of timber and plunder, satellite technology has found intriguing evidence of a long-elusive prize in archaeology — a second Norse settlement in North America, further south than ever known.
The new
Canadian site, with telltale signs of iron-working, was discovered last summer
after infrared images from 400 miles in space showed possible man-made shapes
under discolored vegetation. The site is on the southwest coast of
Newfoundland, about 300 miles south of L’Anse aux Meadows, the first and so far
only confirmed Viking settlement in North America, discovered in 1960.
Since
then, archaeologists, following up clues in the histories known as the sagas,
have been hunting for the holy grail of other Viking, or Norse, landmarks in
the Americas that would have existed 500 years before Columbus, to no avail.
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Douglas
Bolender, left, and Sarah H. Parcak, right, looking for evidence of a Viking
presence at a remote site, called Point Rosee by researchers, in Newfoundland. If
confirmed, the site would be the second known Viking settlement in North
America. Credit Greg Mumford.
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But
last year, Sarah H. Parcak (pronounced PAR-kak), a leading space archaeologist
working with Canadian experts and the science series NOVA for a two-hour
television documentary, “Vikings Unearthed,” that will be aired on PBS next
week, turned her eyes in the sky on coastlines from Baffin Island, west of
Greenland, to Massachusetts. She found hundreds of potential “hot spots” that
high-resolution aerial photography narrowed to a handful and then one
particularly promising candidate — “a dark stain” with buried rectilinear
features.
Magnetometer
readings later taken at the remote site, called Point Rosee by researchers, a
grassy headland above a rocky beach an hour’s trek from the nearest road,
showed elevated iron readings. And trenches that were then dug exposed
Viking-style turf walls along with ash residue, roasted ore called bog iron and
a fire-cracked boulder — signs of metallurgy not associated with native people
of the region.
In
addition, radiocarbon tests dating the materials to the Norse era, and the
absence of historical objects pointing to any other cultures, helped persuade
scientists involved in the project and outside experts of the site’s promise.
The experts are to resume digging there this summer.
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A lump
of what scientists say is bog iron ore, and one of the samples being tested
from the possible
Viking site at Point Rosee. This roasted ore is a sign of
metallurgy not associated with native people
of the region. Credit Greg Mumford.
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“It
screams, ‘Please excavate me!,’ ” said Dr. Parcak, an associate professor of
anthropology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, who won the $1 million TED prize last year for her pioneering work using satellite images to expose
the looting of ancient Egyptian antiquities and is using it to globally
crowdsource new archaeological sites from space.
The
NOVA program will stream online at http://pbs.org/nova in the United States at 3:30
p.m. Monday, Eastern time, (along with a BBC program in England), and will be
broadcast on PBS at 9 p.m. Wednesday.
Given
the dashed hopes of previous searches and the many spurious claims of Viking
presence in the Americas, scientists on the project as well as outside experts
have voiced caution.
“Tremendous,
if it’s really true,” said William Fitzhugh, director of the Arctic Studies
Center and Curator in Anthropology at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of
Natural History in Washington. “It wouldn’t be unexpected,” he said, but added
that he wanted to see the data.
“There’s
no lock that it’s Norse, but there’s no alternative evidence,” said Douglas
Bolender, a research assistant professor at the Andrew Fiske Memorial Center
for Archeological Research and the Department of Anthropology at the University
of Massachusetts, Boston, who joined the expedition. He said a buried structure
there could be a smithy for longboat nails and weaponry, another strong
indicator of Viking presence.
“It
would just be logical that there’s more than one site,” said Gerald F. Bigelow,
a lecturer in history at Bates College in Lewiston, Me., and a specialist in
archaeology of the North Atlantic.
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One of
the satellite images used by Sarah H. Parcak to identify potential Viking
settlement sites along North America’s Atlantic coast. Darker areas were seen
as potential structures. Credit DigitalGlobe.
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Davide
Zori, an assistant professor of archaeology at Baylor University in Waco, Tex.,
and a specialist on Viking expansion in the North Atlantic, called the find
potentially “very important.”
Much
depends on what else is found at the site. In archaeology, context is everything.
A famous prehistoric site in Brooklin, Me., yielded an 11th century silver
Norse coin but it is believed to have landed there through trade and not as
proof of Viking settlement.
Master
shipbuilders and seafarers, warriors, traders and raiders, the Vikings boiled
out of the Scandinavian fjords starting around the 8th century, marauding
through Asia and the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. The Vikings focused
particularly on the British Isles, and west to Iceland and Greenland, as
memorialized in oral narratives and later recorded as the sagas by 13th-century
Icelandic monks.
Around
1000, Leif Ericson led an expedition to what became known as Vinland at the
northernmost point of Newfoundland at L’Anse aux Meadows (the name an obscure
corruption from the French) where explorers starting in 1960 discovered
remnants of an extensive colony, including dwellings, a forge, and carpentry
workshop — the Vikings’ first and so far only known landmark in the New World.
They appear to have been routed by indigenous people the Norse called
Skraeling.
One
intriguing find was the seeds of a butternut tree, which did not grow that far
north and hinted of travels to milder climates in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. But
evidence of other Viking settlements has been lacking.
Dr.
Parcak began her research by using a commercial satellite called WorldView-3,
belonging to the company DigitalGlobe, to search known Norse sites on minuscule
Papa Stour in the Shetland Islands of Scotland. Using the near-infrared
spectrum invisible to the human eye, the satellite detected buried walls, and
digging yielded a carnelian bead from India similar to those found at other
Viking sites. Dr. Parcak then focused her satellite search on thousands of
miles of coastline from the Canadian Arctic to New England.
After
two weeks of digging at Point Rosee, an unexpected find in a flooded trench
excited the explorers — several seeds, or perhaps blueberries, which were
hurriedly sent for testing. The dates came back wildly off — 700 years after
the Vikings, maybe even contemporary. They seem to have migrated onto the site
much later.
“You
feeling nervous, Sarah?” a NOVA reporter asked Dr. Parcak.
“No,
I’m not,” she said.
