Whispers of the Vikings
Space archeologist Sarah Parcak famously used satellite imagery to find the lost city of Tanis. And then, using infrared satellite data, she came across telltale ovals of dirt that may indicate a previously unknown Viking settlement in the southwest corner of Newfoundland. The National Post’s Tristin Hopper spoke with Doug Bolender, an archeologist from the University of Massachusetts Boston, sent by Parcak to ‘discredit’ the findings, but who instead found signs of what may be Canada’s most groundbreaking archeological find since the discovery of HMS Erebus.
Q First off, is it true that everybody in Newfoundland thinks that their house sits atop an old Viking settlement?
A I don’t know if it’s quite that much, but in every community there’s somebody who “has” a Norse settlement. I would put it that way. We get a claim for a legitimate Norse site every year, be it local folklore or a feature on the ground that somebody decides looks Norseish. Even in the very short time I was in Newfoundland last summer working on this, we had a bunch of people just from the local community coming out with “their” Norse sites.
Q You’ve yet to confirm for sure that this is a Norse site, but as is my understanding you can say that somebody lived there and that they probably weren’t indigenous?
A That’s really what it is. There’s two areas that show evidence of what we would call “Norse-style turf architecture.” It looks like somebody was cutting out blocks of sod and building a wall, which is sort of the typical thing you would find on a Viking age Norse site in Greenland or Iceland. And it’s right next to an area where we found piles of bog iron that were found to have been roasted — which is the first step in processing iron. We have no evidence that any Native Americans in the area ever did that.
Q To the average observer, is there anything at this site that stands out as being particularly Viking-y?
A You walk out to this place and there is nothing to see — at all. You would never pick it up with a regular survey; even specialists would miss it. And even when you take the sod away and look underneath, we’re talking about little bits of remains of structures, and some bits of remains of fire. It’s very little material. Q What would be the smoking gun, short of a stone plaque saying “Thorvald was here?” A That would be a sure sign that this was a fraud. But the thing that would absolutely prove it would be ship’s rivets from a Viking boat.
Q How big might this place have been? Major Viking village or campsite for half a dozen guys?
A This could have been two months over a summer, although we think it’s likely that we’ll find more substantive remains nearby. I would be surprised if (the) Norse came down the coast and the one thing they did is pick up some bog iron. That seems like an odd thing to do. But that’s what we have evidence for; some people on a ship for a few weeks heading down for a reconnaissance mission.
Q What might this tell us about Vikings in North America that we don’t already know?
A If it ends up being a site and we can get more out of it, it’s going to expand the area that we can confirm the Norse were working in. And it should tell us more about what they were doing, how long they were in the region. And it may even tell us more about why they left.
Q Does it ever strike you as strange that, a millennium ago, some Norse found an entirely new continent, kicked the tires and then promptly forgot about it?
A Frankly, they were pushed really far out from the European world, and so I’m not terribly surprised. It didn’t economically make a lot of sense. This was a few people in a boat; small-time stuff going on at the edge of the world.