L'Anse aux Meadows

L'Anse aux Meadows is the site of a Norse encampment at the northern tip of the island of Newfoundland, near St. Anthony, in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. Built by Norse seafarers around the year 1000, it is, outside Greenland, the sole undisputed site of pre-Columbian European contact with the Americas. Found in 1960 and excavated over the following years, it confirmed that Norse voyagers had reached North America nearly five centuries before Christopher Columbus.

The cove was used long before any Europeans arrived. Archaeologists have identified five earlier or later Indigenous occupations, the oldest roughly 6,000 years old. They include the Maritime Archaic tradition of about 4000 to 1000 BCE, the Groswater and Dorset peoples, and, after the Norse had left, the Little Passage tradition of about 1200 to 1500 CE. The Dorset people had camped there some three centuries before the Norse came, but none of these groups was present at the same time as the newcomers.

Radiocarbon dates for the Norse occupation fall between about 990 and 1050, and a 2021 study, which used a known spike in atmospheric carbon in the year 993 to date tree rings precisely, pinpointed 1021 as a year of Norse activity there. The visitors built eight structures of turf laid over wooden frames. The largest, a hall of several rooms, measured nearly 29 by 16 metres. Others served as workshops: a smithy with a forge and slag from iron smelting, a carpentry shop, and an area where worn ship rivets point to boat repair. More than 800 objects have been recovered, among them a bronze pin, a stone oil lamp, a bone needle, a whetstone and part of a spindle, finds that suggest women as well as men were present.

How long the camp was used is debated. The anthropologist John Steinberg has proposed sporadic use over perhaps twenty years, while a 2019 study allowed for Norse activity lasting up to a century. The historian Eleanor Barraclough has described it as a temporary boat-repair station rather than a settlement, noting the absence of burials, farming and animal pens, which suggests the occupants left in an orderly way. The buildings could have housed between 30 and 160 people, a small fraction of the roughly 2,500 Norse then living in Greenland. Butternuts found in the deposits do not grow north of New Brunswick, so the Norse must have sailed further south, and the site is generally seen as a base for wider exploration.

Two Icelandic sagas written down in the thirteenth century, the Saga of the Greenlanders and the Saga of Erik the Red, describe voyages from Greenland to a land in the west called Vinland, attempts to settle there and violent clashes with the people the Norse called Skrælings. The earliest surviving mention of Vinland comes earlier still, in a history written around 1073 by the German cleric Adam of Bremen. Some have identified L'Anse aux Meadows with Leifsbudir, the camp the sagas attribute to Leif Erikson or with another saga settlement called Hóp. Such identifications remain contested; the scholar Stuart C. Brown, reviewing Helge Ingstad's 1988 report, judged the case for Leifsbudir unconvincing. The site belongs to the wider story of Viking Age expansion across the North Atlantic.

Earlier scholars had assumed that Vinland, often read as "wine land", lay at least as far south as the wild grapes of Massachusetts. The Norwegian explorer Helge Ingstad and the archaeologist Anne Stine Ingstad thought it might instead mean a land of meadows. In 1960 George Decker, who lived in the small fishing village, showed Helge Ingstad a set of grassy mounds that locals called the "old Indian camp". The couple led an international team that excavated them in seven seasons from 1961 to 1968, identifying the remains as Norse by comparison with sites in Greenland and Iceland.

Canada declared the site a National Historic Site in 1968, and UNESCO listed it as a World Heritage site in 1978. Parks Canada has managed it since, ordering further excavations, led by Bengt Schonbach in 1973–75 and by Birgitta Wallace in 1976, after which the remains were reburied to protect them. Reconstructed turf buildings now stand near the original foundations. Searches for other Norse outposts have produced possible sites in the Canadian Arctic, such as on Baffin Island, but excavations at Point Rosee in south-western Newfoundland in 2015 and 2016 found no Norse presence.