THIS DISCOVERY COULD ...

[Michael Grove]

 rewrite the history of the Vikings in the New World

A joint venture between the BBC and PBS recently reported that following on from her recent success in the Satellite Mapping of Portus - the ancient port of the city of Rome, to which it was directly connected by way of a canal - space archaeologist Dr. Sarah Parcak, historian Dan Snow and a team of experts have discovered, using satellite technology, excavation and investigation of archaeological evidence, a new archaeological site on the island of Newfoundland.

"On analysis, the team have discovered evidence of probable bog iron ore roasting that dates to sometime between 800 and 1300 AD. Point Rosee is therefore the second known, pre-Columbian, iron processing site discovered in North America (after the site which was previously discovered 55 years ago at L’Anse aux Meadows). Aside from some Inuit applications of meteoric iron and turf structures far to the north in the Arctic, there is no evidence of any indigenous people processing iron, while only one culture had turf walls and processed bog iron ore in North America: the Vikings. This is the first site found in 55 years that has merited closer examination and excavation, and it could reveal new insights into the remarkable journeys of the Vikings, who were the first Europeans to set foot in North America - 500 years before Columbus."

It was during the BBC broadcast of THE VIKINGS UNCOVERED, the other evening, that Dr. Stephanson reported that Eric the Red arrived in Iceland, having been banished from Norway for Murder, and that there was a book written in Iceland, about a thousand years ago, called the Book of Settlement, which says that Iceland was settled by Norwegian Vikings who stopped by in the British Isles to pick up slaves, both men and women, before sailing to Iceland; and that as a geneticist, he and his team set out to examine that story, and in so doing, traced the inherited DNA of men, to be 75% Norwegian, and the inherited DNA of women, to be 66% British.

Dr. Stephanson concluded... 

"So it looks like Iceland was settled by Norwegian boys who stopped by the British Isles to pick up their future wives, and men-slaves of Irish as well as British descent, before setting sail for, and settling down in, Iceland ".

My thanks to the Viking Archeology Blog - which was primarily constructed as a source for the University of Oxford Online Course in Viking Archaeology - for first alerting me to this latest story of the Vikings' exploration of North America, which I have been following for some time.

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