Tag Archives: L’Anse Aux Meadows

Uncategorized

Birgitta Wallace, 1934-2025

1 Comment

I recently learned that the archaeologist Birgitta Wallace has died, aged 91. (She is featured in the Canadian video above, which is in English with French subtitles.)

Birgitta Wallace is memorable to the world for her outstanding work as chief archaeologist at the Viking site at L’Anse Aux Meadows, Newfoundland (which I have visited, he mentioned casually).

She was the successor there to Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad, the original discoverers of Viking artifacts at the site. Helge Ingstad was adamant throughout his career that the Vinland (“Wineland the Good”) of the sagas was the place he’d found in Newfoundland and nowhere else. He insisted – for some reason – that it was impossible that the Vikings could have gone anywhere else. “Stop looking. This is all there is,” was his message. The fact that no grapes have ever grown at that latitude did not trouble him – he considered the wine story pure fantasy.

Birgitta Wallace was less convinced. She noted that butternut shells were found in the excavations at L’Anse Aux Meadows, and butternuts also do not grow at that latitude. But they do grow at latitudes where grapes grow. She believed (and most historians today agree) that other Viking settlements very likely did exist in America. We just haven’t found them yet. We may never find them.

For me, Birgitta Wallace had the distinction of being about the most famous person I ever met personally. She spoke at the Chicago seminar on Vinland organized by Prof. Torgrim Titlestad back in 2010, which I attended. I walked up to her and told her I would like to be able to tell my friends I’d met her. We shook hands (very delicately; she was quite frail). It never occurred to me to take a selfie – I’m not in fact sure whether I even owned a phone with a camera in those days.

R.I.P. Birgitta Wallace.

Uncategorized

The past may change, again

1 Comment
Reconstructed Norse house at L’Anse Aux Meadows. My own photo. lw

There’s news in the Viking world this month. New excavations at L’Anse Aux Meadows, Newfoundland, have uncovered traces of occupation that suggest the Norse remained at the site for a couple hundred years, rather than just one or two seasons, as had been thought.

But it’s not a slam dunk, in spite of the sensationalist headlines you might have seen. The new stuff might not be Viking at all. This from the Canadian Broadcasting Company:

As Ledger explained, what they found is not necessarely Viking, “it’s more likely that this material relay to an Indigenous occupation on the site based on the radio carbondates from the material we got from this layer.”

But what is interesting is that this cultural horizon is where the researchers know that Norses used to be. If archaeologists find evidence that these series of layers that appear to have been trampled by humans or animals come from Vikings, this could be evidence that they stayed longer in North America than we thought.

(Who did that horrible transcription? “relay to?” “necessarely?” I have no idea where the word “Norses” comes from; the proper term is “the Norse.”) But the discoveries are very intriguing. Ever since the early excavations, we’ve been fairly certain the houses at L’Anse Aux Meadows were occupied only briefly, then abandoned. A longer occupation would suggest what a lot of us have believed for a while: that the whole Vinland enterprise was a bigger, more serious thing than Helge and Anna Stine Ingstad, the original discoverers, thought.

What exactly was the site’s function? I’ve been telling people that the best evidence suggests it was a boat repair station. However, I read in Nancy Marie Brown’s book The Far Traveler that there’s actually evidence of only one boat being repaired there. She suggested it was a “staging site” for further exploration and settlement.

I’ve been to L’Anse Aux Meadows (as I never tire of telling people), and even shook the hand of Birgitta Wallace, the second chief archaeologist there (though that didn’t happen at L’Anse Aux Meadows). The picture above is one I took there. I forget the year, 2004 or so.

A while back they found a spot that looked like a second Viking site not far away, but subsequent digging proved it not to be so. Now we’ve got something fresh to hang our hopes on.

Personally, I think the real settlement – where Thorfinnn Karlsefni and Gudrid the Far-Traveler lived, exists somewhere, but may never be found. But I think it’s there.

Uncategorized

A Rosee outlook for Vikings in America

Leave a comment

Viking house at L'Anse Aux Meadows, Newfoundland, photo by Lars Walker
My photo of a reconstructed Viking house at L’Anse Aux Meadows, Newfoundland.

It’s been some time since I did my public duty by updating our erudite audience on the latest news from the world of Viking studies.

This story has been making the rounds lately, and to be honest it’s got my ears standing up. Archaeologists have used satellite imagery to identify a site in southwest Newfoundland that looks very much like a Viking Age Norse settlement.

“I am absolutely thrilled,” says Parcak. “Typically in archaeology, you only ever get to write a footnote in the history books, but what we seem to have at Point Rosee may be the beginning of an entirely new chapter.

“This new site could unravel more secrets about the Vikings, whether they were the first Europeans to ‘occupy’ briefly in North America, and reveal that the Vikings dared to explore much further into the New World than we ever thought.”

It’s too early to know for sure yet, of course. When the Ingstad group excavated the one known Viking site in North America, L’Anse Aux Meadows, Newfoundland, it took quite a lot of digging before they found something indisputably Norse – a ring-headed bronze pin, used for fastening a cloak. There’s a difference between finding a sod building, however much it might resemble the houses in Greenland, and finding something that couldn’t possibly have been left by Native Americans or English or Portuguese fishermen. That’s what they’ll be looking for now.

A lot of us have been waiting for something like this for some time. Prof. Helge Ingstad, having discovered his Vinland site in the 1960s, planted his metaphorical flag there and declared, “This is Vinland. This is all of Vinland there ever was. There’s no point for looking for any more traces of the Norse on this continent.” Everyone respects Ingstad immensely, and almost nobody agrees with that contention anymore. Ingstad thought that many of the saga descriptions, especially those speaking of grapes, were just folklore accretions to the story, because grapes have never grown at that latitude. Nowadays we take those descriptions more seriously – especially since butternuts were found in the excavations. Butternuts have also never grown at that latitude, but they do grow where grapes grow. This new site, further south along the Saint Lawrence Seaway, leads in the direction most scholars have been thinking of.

So this is exciting. We’ll be watching for more news.