Free Republic

Wood from three different trees cut by Vikings found at L'Anse aux Meadows been precisely dated to 1021 CE - 1,000 years ago this year. The Viking settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows, located at the tip of Newfoundland's Great Northern Peninsula, was discovered in the 1960s, but has never been precisely dated. Previous estimates about when the Viking crossed the Atlantic and made their way to present day Newfoundland and Labrador have been based on Norse sagas and radiocarbon dating that typically has an error margin of about 50 years. The best estimates put their arrival at around 990 at...

An iron working hearthstone was discovered on Newfoundland, hundreds of miles from the only noted Viking location to date. Another thousand-year-old Viking colony might have been found on the island of Newfoundland, Canada. The finding of the old Viking location on the Canadian coast could drastically change the story of the exploration of North America by the Europeans prior to Christopher Columbus.

What a Viking's smile revealed 07 January 2006 VIKING warriors may have filed deep grooves into their teeth to indicate class or military rank. Caroline Arcini of Sweden's National Heritage Board analysed 557 skeletons from four major Viking-age Swedish cemeteries and discovered that around 10 per cent of men, but none of the women, bore horizontal grooves across the upper front teeth. The marks, which were cut deep into the enamel, are often found in pairs or triplets and appear precisely made. They might have marked certain men as members of a group of tradesmen or warriors, or signified their...

Located in northern Newfoundland, the site of L'Anse aux Meadows was founded by Vikings around A.D. 1000. Until now, archaeologists believed that the site was occupied for only a brief period... In August 2018, an archaeological team excavated a peat bog located nearly 100 feet (30 meters) east of the Viking settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows. They found a layer of "ecofacts" -- environmental remains that may have been brought to the site by humans -- that were radiocarbon dated to the 12th or 13th century. These ecofacts include remains of two beetles not native to Newfoundland -- Simplocaria metallica,...

New research and technologies may end up changing the way we think about early Arctic history, upending the assumption that the ancient ancestors of today's Inuit people learned how to spin yarn from Viking settlers. It has long been assumed that the ancient Dorset and Thule people learned how to spin yarn from Norse settlers who arrived in Newfoundland some 1,000 years ago, according to the Canadian press. “There’s a lot we don’t know,” said Michele Hayeur Smith of Brown University in Rhode Island and lead author of a recent paper in the Journal of Archaeological Science. Hayeur Smith and...

Along the shores in Newfoundland there is an abundance of flint to be found although this material does not occur naturally in the area. The reason for the presence of flint is that it was used as ballast by sailing vessels in the transatlantic migratory fishery that started in the beginning of the sixteenth century and lasted for about four centuries. During this period several millions of tons of material were relocated as ballast from the coasts of England and France to Newfoundland. Among this huge amount of relocated material there are some supposedly Palaeolithic artefacts that have been brought...

Until recently, global temperatures were more than a degree Fahrenheit warmer when compared to the overall 20th Century mean. From August of 2007 through February of 2008, the Earth’s mean reading dropped to near the 200-year average temperature of 57 degrees. Since that time, the mean reading has been fluctuating. (See Long-Term Chart Below.)

In Florida, archaeologists are investigating a site that a century ago sparked a scientific controversy. Today, it's just a strip of land near an airport. But in 1915, it was a spot that became world-famous because of the work of Elias Sellards, Florida's state geologist. Sellards led a scientific excavation of the site, where workers digging a drainage canal found fossilized animal bones and then, human remains. Andy Hemmings of Mercyhurst University is the lead archaeologist on a project that has picked up where Sellards left off a century ago. "Quite literally, where we're standing, they found what they, at...

Native Americans spread out today from Canada to the tip of Chile descended not from one but at least three migrant waves from Siberia between 5,000 and 15,000 years ago, a study said Wednesday. The finding is controversial among geneticists, archaeologists and linguists -- many of whom have maintained that a single Asian ancestral group populated the Americas. But the new study, claiming to be the most comprehensive analysis yet of Native American genetics, claims to have found incontrovertible proof that there were three immigration waves -- a theory first put forward in 1986. Most Native Americans, said the study,...

Ptolemy's Geography, America and Columbus: Ancient Greeks and why maybe America was discovered Michael Lahanas Aristotle: “there is a continuity between the parts about the pillars of Hercules and the parts about India, and that in this way the ocean is one.” [As] for the rest of the distance around the inhabited earth which has not been visited by us up to the present time (because of the fact that the navigators who sailed in opposite directions never met), it is not of very great extent, if we reckon from the parallel distances that have been traversed by us... For...

The coin is the real deal, but how did it get all the way from Norway? ON FEBRUARY 6, 1979, KOLBJØRN Skaare, a Norwegian numismatist with a tall, wide forehead, walked into the Maine State Museum to see the coin. Just a few years earlier, he had published Coins and Coinage in Viking-Age Norway, a doctoral thesis that grew from the decade-plus he had spent as a keeper at the University of Oslo’s Coin Cabinet. The first specialist to examine the coin in person, he had just a day with it before Bruce J. Bourque, the museum’s lead archaeologist, had...

While Christopher Columbus is generally credited with having discovered America in 1492, a 1521 Spanish report provides inklings of evidence that there were, in fact, Irish people settled in America prior to Columbus’ journey. […] In 1520, Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, a historian and professor, was appointed by Carlos V to be chronicler for the new Council of the Indies. Though Martyr died in 1526, his report, founded on several weeks of interviews, was published posthumously in a book named De Orbe Novo (About the New World). […] While interviewing Spanish colonists, Martyr took note of their vicious treatment of Chicora...

...Maine has a reputation of pulling archaeology out of Sunday supplement romances into science. The University of Maine excavation at Passadumkeag, along with several smaller digs scattered through the state, resulted in a detailed picture of Red Paint Man, inhabiting Maine about 1,000 B.C. His tools, utensils, and other Old Stone Age handicraft along with his usage of red ochre strongly suggest that this proto-Indian still practised Cro-Magnon culture. Another excavation at Pemaquid Point awoke a successful settlement from its long sleep under several feet of soil. Radiocarbon dating set it as early as 1540 A.D., and the colony persisted...

Vikings visited Canadian Arctic, research suggests Artifacts suggest Norse settlement in Nunavut BY RANDY BOSWELL, CANWEST NEWS SERVICEMAY 27, 2009 This May 26 handout photo shows a Nanook archeological site on Baffin Island. Traces of a stone-and-sod wall found at the site, if confirmed, would represent only the second location in the New World where Norse seafarers -- popularly known as Vikings -- built a dwelling. Photograph by: P. Sutherland, Canadian Museum of Civilization, Canwest News Service One of Canada's top Arctic archeologists says the remnants of a stone-and-sod wall unearthed on southern Baffin Island may be traces of a...

600-Year-Old American Indian Historical Account Has Old Norse WordsBy Larry Stroud, Guard Associate EditorPublished on Thursday March 15, 2007 Vikings and Algonquins. The first American multi-culturalists? BIG BAY, Mich. — Two experts on ancient America may have solved not only the mysterious disappearance of Norse from the Western Settlement of Greenland in the 1300s, but also are deciphering Delaware (Lenape) Indian history, which they’re finding is written in the Old Norse language. The history tells how some of the Delaware’s ancestors migrated west to America across a frozen sea and intermarried with the Delaware and other Algonquin Indians. Myron Paine,...

Slowly and mostly unnoticed by the major news media, the air has been going out of the global warming balloon. Global temperatures stopped rising a few years ago, much to the dismay of the climate campaigners. The U.N.'s upcoming Copenhagen conference--which was supposed to yield a binding greenhouse gas emissions reduction treaty as a successor to the failed Kyoto Protocol--collapsed weeks in advance and remains on life support pending Obama's magical intervention. Cap and trade legislation is stalled on Capitol Hill. Recent opinion polls from Gallup, Pew, Rasmussen, ABC/Washington Post, and other pollsters all find a dramatic decline in public...

<p>LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- Archaeologists have uncovered the remains of a Viking longhouse that many believe was the home of Snorri Thorfinnsson, thought to be the first European born in the New World.</p> <p>The 1,000-year-old ruins were found in a glacial valley in northern Iceland during a survey of Viking-era buildings led by archaeologists at the University of California, Los Angeles.</p>

1. kafli Óleifur hét herkonungur er kallaður var Óleifur hvíti. Hann var son Ingjalds konungs Helgasonar, Ólafssonar, Guðröðarsonar, Hálfdanarsonar hvítbeins Upplendingakonungs.

A lost Viking settlement known as "Hóp," which has been mentioned in sagas passed down over hundreds of years, is said to have supported wild grapes, abundant salmon and inhabitants who made canoes out of animal hides. Now, a prominent archaeologist says the settlement likely resides in northeastern New Brunswick. If Hóp is found it would be the second Viking settlement to be discovered in North America. The other is at L'Anse aux Meadows on the northern tip of Newfoundland. ...using the description of the settlement from sagas of Viking voyages, along with archaeological work carried out at L'Anse aux...

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.