View From Space Hints at a New Viking Site iA thousand years after the Vikings conquered the frigid oceans from Greenland to the New World looking for timber and loot, satellite innovation has discovered captivating proof of a long-tricky prize in archaic exploration — a second Norse settlement in North America, promote south than any time in recent memory known.
The new Canadian site, with indications of iron-working, was found the previous summer after infrared pictures from 400 miles in space demonstrated conceivable man-made shapes under stained vegetation. The site is on the southwest shoreline of Newfoundland, around 300 miles south of L'Anse aux Meadows, the first thus far just affirmed Viking settlement in North America, found in 1960.
From that point forward, archeologists, catching up pieces of information in the histories known as the sagas, have been chasing for the sacred chalice of other Viking, or Norse, milestones in the Americas that would have existed 500 years before Columbus, to no avail.n North America
However, a year ago, Sarah H. Parcak (proclaimed PAR-kak), a main space paleologist working with Canadian specialists and the science arrangement NOVA for a two-hour TV narrative, "Vikings Unearthed," that will be circulated on PBS one week from now, turned her eyes in the sky on coastlines from Baffin Island, west of Greenland, to Massachusetts. She discovered several potential "problem areas" that high-determination airborne photography contracted to a modest bunch and afterward one especially encouraging competitor — "a dim stain" with covered rectilinear components.
Magnetometer readings later taken at the remote site, called Point Rosee by analysts, a verdant headland over a rough shoreline a hour's trek from the closest street, demonstrated lifted iron readings. What's more, trenches that were then burrowed uncovered Viking-style turf dividers alongside fiery debris deposit, simmered metal called swamp iron and a flame broke stone — indications of metallurgy not connected with local individuals of the district.
Furthermore, radiocarbon tests dating the materials to the Norse time, and the nonappearance of authentic items indicating some other societies, induced researchers included in the task and outside specialists of the site's guarantee. The specialists are to resume burrowing there this mid year.
“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 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.
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.
View From Space Hints at a New Viking Site in North America
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