Vikings’ presence dated to A.D. 1021

Six decades ago, a husband-wife team of archaeologists discovered the remains of a settlement on the windswept northern tip of Newfoundland. The site’s eight timber-framed structures resemble Viking buildings in Greenland, and archaeological artifacts found there — including a bronze cloak pin — are decidedly Norse in style.

Scientists now believe that this site, known as L’anse aux Meadows, was inhabited by Vikings who came from Greenland. To this day, it remains the only conclusively identified Viking site in the Americas outside of Greenland.

But many questions remain about L’anse aux Meadows: Who exactly settled it? Why? And, perhaps most importantly, when was the site occupied?

But in results published Wednesday in Nature, scientists presented new answers to this mystery. By analyzing the imprint of a rare solar storm in tree rings from wood found at the Canadian site, scientists have decisively pinned down when Norse explorers were in Newfoundland: the year A.D. 1021, or exactly 1,000 years ago.

Getting a more precise handle on when the Vikings inhabited L’anse aux Meadows is important, said Michael Dee, a geoscientist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and an author of the study.

“It was the first time the Atlantic Ocean was crossed,” he said.

Dee and his colleagues analyzed three pieces of wood. Each piece had been cleanly cut with a metal tool, perhaps an ax. That’s a giveaway this wood was cleaved by Vikings, said Margot Kuitems, an archaeologist at the University of Groningen, and a member of the team.

“The local people didn’t use metal tools,” she said.

But L’anse aux Meadows hasn’t given up all of its secrets just yet, said Mathias Nordvig, a historian specializing in Old Norse literature and culture at the University of Colorado, who was not involved in the study.

“What was its significance?” he asked about the site. “And where did they go from there?”