Pinning down the Norse 'Vinland'

In Newfoundland, a small bronze pin was the key to authenticating the first European settlement in North America.

By ROBERT N. JENKINS
Published July 10, 2005

[Times photo: Robert N. Jenkins]

OLD FOLKS AT HOME: Costumed re-enactors head into the sod and timber “long house” built on the site of the first settlement in North America by Europeans. This is L’Anse aux Meadows, at the tip of Newfoundland’s Great Northern Peninsula.

L'ANSE AUX MEADOWS, Newfoundland - The popular story is that Leif Ericson landed here from Greenland, but who actually settled on this northern tip of Newfoundland is not certain. Nor is it known how many people there were, how long they stayed or why they left.

None of that matters, because in the dirt here researchers found a bronze clothing pin - a metalwork beyond the capability of indigenous North Americans and thus proof that Norse explorers lived here about 1000 A.D. That makes L'Anse aux Meadows the first authenticated European settlement on this continent.

Perhaps 3 inches long, the pin would have been used to hold together ends of a cloak worn by one of the Norse settlers, descendants of the fierce Vikings. Discovery of the pin in 1968 came after eight years of excavation by Norwegian archaeologists of grass-covered mounds behind an isolated village of fishermen. The little pin, probably created in what is now Ireland, was better proof than even the iron-smelter and buried ruins of European-style sod houses already uncovered.

Four more years of excavations by Canadian government researchers added substance to the research. In 1978, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization proclaimed L'Anse Aux Meadows as part of its first list of World Heritage Sites.

Historians and researchers have pieced together the likely events of the settlement but much is beyond determination. The theories begin with the Icelandic Sagas, a 14th century written account of oral histories of Viking culture, their explorations and conquests. The sagas relate that Eric the Red was banished from Iceland for committing murder and that he sailed west, reaching what he later named Greenland.

From that island in the North Atlantic, according to the Sagas, Eric's son Leif (pronounced LAYF) retraced another Norse sailor's westward voyage to yet another new place. His comments about smaller islands and coastlines were to become part of the Sagas, too. It was those remarks, as well as a crude map several centuries old, that were used by husband and wife researchers Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad on a years-long quest to find Leif's settlement.

Leif had named his discovery Vinland, for what he said were the wild grapes he found there. Grapes don't grow in Newfoundland, but the Ingstads thought the coastline matched Leif's description.

A village elder in this tiny community took the Ingstads to grass-covered mounds, within sight of the villagers' back yards and close to where a creek emptied into a cold Atlantic. The Ingstads began digging.

During warm-weather months for the next eight years, they and their colleagues uncovered ruins of homes and workshops, found the iron smelter where the Norse settlers must have made nails with which to repair their ships, and finally they found the cloak pin, which resembles a nail with an upright circle at one end.

By the time the Canadian government's archaeologists finished their work in 1976, eight grass-covered mounds were shown to be sod and wood dwellings and work buildings of three shiploads of Norse settlers, from 75 to 90 people. A researcher even found butternuts, which grow where there are wild grapes, hundreds of miles to the south. That was taken as proof that this place was Leif's "Vinland."

The historians surmise that the three largest buildings, called long houses, each held one shipload of settlers. The best guess is that four voyages, lasting six to eight weeks from Greenland, were made to this settlement. Here the Norse men, and a few women, would fish, farm, hunt seals and land animals, and gather berries.

Archaeologists estimate that the settlers' time here lasted seven to 15 years.

No skeletons were found around the mounds. The best guess is that because the Norse people were now Christian, they had taken the bodies of deceased settlers back to Greenland for burial.

Why and when the settlers abandoned the village is unknown; a common theory is that indigenous people fought with them and drove them off. These were not the fearsome Viking raiders of centuries before, but rather sailors and fishermen.

At the historic site, the Parks Canada Agency has built a few structures using methods and materials thought to be those of the Norse settlers. Interpreters spend the day at household chores likely performed 1,000 years ago, but they don't hunt or fish.

The interpreters answer visitors' questions using the Icelandic Sagas, the archaeologists' research and the conflicting ideas as to what happened here.

The interpreters are dressed in modern versions of period clothing, kept closed, of course, by little metal pins.

[Last modified July 8, 2005, 09:45:07]