Vikings in North America: Arrival 471 years before Columbus – Knowledge

The discovery of America has a new date: the year 1021. It was not Christopher Columbus who was the first to cross the Atlantic, but the Vikings. With their fast ships they conquered the stormy northern seas, sailed from Iceland via Greenland to the coasts of Newfoundland. One in the trade magazine Nature published study now names the year for the settlement. The Vikings could have reached America as early as 1021 AD, exactly 1000 years ago. “It is an important moment in the history of our species when we first crossed the Atlantic from Europe to America,” says lead author Michael Dee from the University of Groningen.

The researchers dated four pieces of wood from a settlement on Black Duck Brook, a stream directly on the Newfoundland coast in what is now Canada. L’Anse aux Meadows has long been considered a candidate for one of the earliest residences of the Vikings in the New World. There are remains of Viking houses, huge long buildings with a floor space of up to 160 square meters, a forge and a workshop. Around three larger complexes, archaeologists found numerous artifacts such as ship nails, bronze pins or bone needles, which are attributed to the northern people. The site has not yet been dated exactly.

Like a date stamp: Cosmic events have left their mark on the wood

It is not the only reference to the early presence of the Vikings. This is how the old Norse sagas spoke, the so-called Vínland sagas, not only that Northerners from Iceland first colonized Greenland. They also told of how they drove west from Greenland and how occasional exploratory trips brought the sailors as far as Newfoundland. The texts can be put together surprisingly well in terms of time. “According to the sagas, these occasional trips must have taken place in the first years after 1000 AD,” says Matthias Toplak, the new director of the Haithabu Viking Museum in Schleswig-Holstein. But as long as there were no archaeologically secured dates for the Nordic activities in L’Anse aux Meadows, the archaeologists did not know how reliable the information from the literary texts really was. There was no specific year.

The researchers have now dated four wooden finds from the Viking settlement in Newfoundland. Rather, they are not spectacular objects, there is a tree stump underneath, a kind of plank, one part looks like a piece of an arch. The team first had to clarify that the artifacts really came from the Vikings and not from indigenous peoples of North America. The context of the find was a first clue here: the wooden remains in the middle of the settlement on the brook. In addition, all pieces of wood have clearly been processed with metal blades. The indigenous population did not come into contact with metal tools until centuries later.

The highlight of the Nature-The work lies in the dating itself. For the first time, Dee and his team were able to determine the age of an organic material such as wood to the nearest year. Previous radiocarbon methods, in which the concentration of the carbon isotope C14 is measured and compared with calibrated comparative data, could only specify a period, often with years or decades of uncertainty. Anyone who wants to celebrate anniversaries could not be satisfied here. Michael Dee and his team in Groningen have been working on a new approach for years. He calls his method “Echoes”. For the first time, it uses rare cosmic events that had an influence on the carbon concentration of the earth. When high-energy particles from space hit the earth’s atmosphere, they trigger an increase in the CO₂ concentration.

High-energy particles from space set a date stamp in the year 992, so to speak

Such an event apparently took place in the year 992 AD and was visibly reflected in the growth rings of all plants in the following year. “We were able to prove this in all archives with old tree rings around the world,” says Dee. Such rare extreme events are like universal time stamps, as if someone had stamped a date on a piece of wood.

Indeed, this procedure is a little mysterious, at least as far as the cosmic events themselves are concerned. Astronomers are not sure whether extreme solar storms with their high-energy particle showers are sufficient for this. “So far, we have only known five such radiation events in human history,” says Dee. Two in historical time, in addition to AD 992 also in AD 774, plus three more in 660 BC. BC and around 9,000 and 11,000 years ago. The latter cannot yet be precisely defined. The traces appear synchronously in the dendrochronological records all over the world, i.e. in the samples of tree rings. The higher radiocarbon concentration in the atmosphere causes the rings to become noticeably wider. “We were able to find this point in three pieces of wood from L’Anse aux Meadows, so we knew we had the tree rings from AD 992 and 993,” says Dee.

The rest was tree ring counting – and a bit of luck. The researchers counted 29 rings in all three pieces of wood, they came from three different trees, balsam fir and juniper or thuje, and the last growth ring was also the transition to the bark. This made it clear that no one had removed rings through machining, i.e. years. “So we had the exact felling date,” says Dee. 1021 AD, 471 years before Columbus, there were Vikings in America.

Archaeologists still disagree as to whether the Vikings might have discovered America even earlier. Matthias Toplak again refers to the two central Nordic sagas, the Greenlendinga saga and the Eiríks saga rauðathat portray the discovery of Vínland in slightly different ways. the Greenlendinga saga speak of a branch by name Leifsbúðir, translated the “Houses of Leif”, built by the discoverer of North America, Leifr Eiríksson, son of Erik the Red, so Toplak. the Eiríks saga rauða mention two branches; the settlement of Straumfjörðrthat probably with Leifsbúðir was identical and was at L’Anse aux Meadows on Black Duck Brook, and a summer camp called Hóp. The Vikings could have built this further south on the coast, perhaps even on what is now US territory. So far, only the branch at L’Anse aux Meadows on Black Duck Brook is known archaeologically. The archaeologists consider further Viking settlements possible, but they were probably temporary summer camps.

Matthias Toplak is enthusiastic about the exact dating, but believes further archaeological investigations are necessary, which could even reveal earlier dates and thus a longer period of settlement. In L’Anse aux Meadows, three groups of buildings can be archaeologically proven, the structure of which corresponds almost exactly to the house types known from Greenland and Iceland and which can therefore be assigned to the Vikings with great certainty. “There are theories that the division into three groups, each with a larger building, also reflects three ship crews or three expeditions,” says Toplak. It is therefore not yet clear whether the dated objects come from the beginning or the end of Nordic activities. For many archaeologists and also for Michael Dee’s team, it is clear that the branch at Black Duck Brook was the camp of the first Vínland drivers from the Sagas.

However, the attempts at colonization by the Vikings were probably not long-lasting, as there is no evidence of genetic influence in North America. However, it cannot be ruled out that even after 1021 a few ship crews from Greenland used the settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows as winter storage and got the timber for their ships there.