At the L’Anse aux Meadows historical site in Newfoundland, Canada, a 10th or 11th century Viking home is depicted. The settlement is the only confirmed Norse archeological site in the Americas outside of Greenland.
It’s long been known that the Vikings were the first Europeans to make the long journey to the Americas, arriving in what is now Canada sometime around the end of the first millennium.
But in a new article is the first to pinpoint a precise date: 1021, exactly 1,000 years ago — beating the arrival of Christopher Columbus by nearly 500 years.
The research comes from the only confirmed Norse archeological site in the Americas outside of Greenland, a settlement on the northernmost tip of Newfoundland called L’Anse aux Meadows.
A team of scientists, led by Margot Kuitems and Michael Dee of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, examined four pieces of wood recovered at L’Anse aux Meadows. The samples were no more than discarded sticks and tree trunks, but each had an important marker of at least one clean edge, indicating it had been cut by a metal tool.
Researchers know those items and the cuts belonged to the Norse, as the Indigenous inhabitants in that area at the time didn’t have metal tools.
One Danish archeologist called their findings “incredible.”
The report provides a specific, independently obtained date — one that doesn’t rely on old texts for verification.
