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Most estimates have relied heavily on information gleaned from Icelandic sagas, but since these were only written down centuries after the fact and talk about things like glittery one-footed assassins, researchers have wisely taken them with a grain of salt.But the new study, published today in the journal Nature, has pinpointed the Viking presence in North America to an exact year: 1021

THAT VIKINGS crossed the Atlantic long before Christopher Columbus is well established. Their sagas told of expeditions to the coast of today’s Canada: to Helluland, which scholars have identified as Baffin Island or Labrador; Markland (Labrador or Newfoundland) and Vinland (Newfoundland or a territory farther south). In 1960 the remains of Norse buildings were found on Newfoundland.But there was no evidence to prove that anyone outside northern Europe had heard of America until Columbus’s voyage in 1492. Until now. A paper for the academic journal Terrae Incognitae by Paolo Chiesa, a professor of Medieval Latin Literature at Milan University, reveals...

1957, was donated to Yale in the 1960s where it immediately came under a great deal of suspicion and intrigue. Alleged to date back to the 15th-Century, the map depicts 'Vinlanda Insula' - a section of North America's coastline. It also claims that the region was visited by Europeans in the 11th Century. Despite appearing outwardly genuine, the map has been mired in controversy ever since it first appeared. Previous studies have indicated the presence of modern ink on its parchment, however it wasn't until Yale researchers were able to apply modern tools and techniques that it was possible to...

Some have suggested that trading commodities – most notably walrus tusks – with Europe may have been vital to sustaining the Greenlanders. Ornate items including crucifixes and chess pieces were fashioned from walrus ivory by craftsmen of the age. However, the source of this ivory has never been empirically established. Now, researchers from the universities of Cambridge and Oslo have studied ancient DNA from offcuts of tusks and skulls, most found on the sites of former ivory workshops across Europe, in order to trace the origin of the animals used in the medieval trade. In doing so they have discovered...

Patricia Sutherland, a Canadian archaeologist, announced that she had found a 10 foot strand of ancient yarn in a collection of Dorset artifacts from Northern Baffin Island that were lying uncataloged here at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, where she is a curator. Since the Dorset, forerunners of today's Inuit inhabitants of northern Canada, at the time dressed only in cut and stitched skins, the yarn implied contact with the Norse. Now, as she studies of Canadian collections of native artifacts, she says, "I am finding new Norse materials every couple of weeks. It suggests there was a significant...

Evidence of the beliefs and rituals of the inhabitants of the Danish island of Bornholm (Baltic Sea) over 5,500 years ago, have been discovered by Warsaw University archaeologists during excavations in Vasagard. The research project is the result of several years of collaboration between the Institute of Archaeology of the University of Warsaw and Bornholms Museum. This year also included students from the University of Copenhagen. Sun worship The study site -- Vasagard, is a puzzling one, but is thought to be a temple for Sun worship. During this season of excavations, archaeologists have discovered several ditches, in which, in...

The Norwegian archaeologists Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad's famous identification, in 1961, of a Viking settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, from just after A.D. 1000 is, of course, a notable exception, no longer in dispute. But that discovery has so far gone nowhere. The Norse settlers, who may have numbered as many as 160 and stayed for three years or longer, seem to have made no lasting impression on the aboriginal skraellings that, according to Norse sagas, they encountered, and to have avoided being influenced in turn. The traditions of the Micmac people, modern-day inhabitants of the area, have...

The Vikings are both famous and notorious for their liking of beer and mead and archaeologists have discussed for years whether Eric the Red (ca 950-1010) and his followers had to make do without the golden drink when they settled in Greenland around the year 1,000: The climate was mild when they landed, but was it warm enough for growing barley? Researchers from the National Museum in Copenhagen say the answer to the question is 'yes'. In a unique find, they uncovered tiny fragments of charred barley grains in a Viking midden on Greenland. The find is final proof that...

600-Year-Old American Indian Historical Account Has Old Norse WordsBy Larry Stroud, Guard Associate EditorPublished on Thursday March 15, 2007 Vikings and Algonquins. The first American multi-culturalists? BIG BAY, Mich. — Two experts on ancient America may have solved not only the mysterious disappearance of Norse from the Western Settlement of Greenland in the 1300s, but also are deciphering Delaware (Lenape) Indian history, which they’re finding is written in the Old Norse language. The history tells how some of the Delaware’s ancestors migrated west to America across a frozen sea and intermarried with the Delaware and other Algonquin Indians. Myron Paine,...

It's one of Minnesota's greatest mysteries. It's something that puts settlers in America well before Columbus. A Minnesota geologist thinks the controversial Kensington Runestone is the real thing and there is evidence that he says backs up the theory. The Kensington Runestone is a rock found near Alexandria a century ago. It's inscription speaking of Norwegians here in 1362. It begs the question. Were Vikings exploring our land more than 100 years before Columbus? Or is it just an elaborate hoax? New research shows that the stone is genuine and there's hidden code that may prove it. It contains carved...

Letter from Newfoundland: Homing in on the Red Paint People Volume 53 Number 3, May/June 2000 by Angela M.H. Schuster (Lynda D'Amico) Port au Choix, Newfoundland-- More than 5,000 years ago, this barren, sea-lashed coast was home to the Maritime Archaic Indians (MAI), who hunted and fished the coasts of Labrador and Newfoundland for more than 2,000 years. The first evidence of the Maritime Archaic culture was discovered more than 30 years ago when James A. Tuck of Memorial University of Newfoundland excavated 56 elaborate burials exposed during housing construction on a small promontory at Port au Choix, on the...

Kensington Rune Stone This subject used to fascinate me when I was 9 or 11. I read everything the late Hjalmar Holand ever wrote. It has fascinated many others, unfortunately mainly “professional Scandinavians” who have made their lives out of their ethnicity, especially as professors of that language or culture. Most have used it only as a way to get a cheap Ph.D. thesis by demolishing it once again, or by using its possible validity to back up some ulterior theory or hobby-horse they may have. Few if any mainstream observers of American antiquities have been willing to touch it. ...

The sun was not necessary for Vikings to navigate, say researchers Vikings may have used a special crystal called a sunstone to help navigate the seas even when the sun was obscured by fog or cloud, a study has suggested. Researchers from Hungary ran a test with sunstones in the Arctic ocean, and found that the crystals can reveal the sun's position even in bad weather. This would have allowed the Vikings to navigate successfully, they say. The sunstone theory has been around for 40 years, but some academics have treated it with extreme scepticism. Researcher Gabor Horvath from...

A team of researchers working in Hungary has proposed that a sun compass artifact found in a convent in 1948 might have been used in conjunction with crystals to allow Vikings to guide their boats even at night. In their paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical & Engineering Sciences, the team describes theories they've developed that might explain how Viking sailors were able to so accurately sail to places such as Greenland. Since the discovery of the sun compass fragment, researchers have theorized that Viking sailors used them to plot their course—at least when the...

A rough, whitish block recovered from an Elizabethan shipwreck may be a sunstone, the fabled crystal believed by some to have helped Vikings and other medieval seafarers navigate the high seas, researchers say. In a paper published earlier this week, a Franco-British group argued that the Alderney Crystal—a chunk of Icelandic calcite found amid a 16th century wreck at the bottom of the English Channel—worked as a kind of solar compass, allowing sailors to determine the position of the sun even when it was hidden by heavy cloud, masked by fog, or below the horizon. That's because of a property...

Vikings used rocks from Iceland to navigate the high seas, suggests a new study. In Norse legends, sunstones are said to have guided seafarers to North America. Now an international team of scientists report in the journal the Proceedings of the Royal Society A that the Icelandic spars behave like mythical sunstones and polarise light. By holding the stones aloft, voyaging Vikings could have used them to find the sun in the sky. The Vikings were skilled navigators and travelled thousand of kilometres between Northern Europe and North America. But without a magnetic compass, which was not invented until the...

'Sunstone' crystals may have helped seafarers to find the Sun on cloudy days. A Viking legend tells of a glowing 'sunstone' that, when held up to the sky, revealed the position of the Sun even on a cloudy day. It sounds like magic, but scientists measuring the properties of light in the sky say that polarizing crystals — which function in the same way as the mythical sunstone — could have helped ancient sailors to cross the northern Atlantic. A review of their evidence is published today in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B1. The Vikings, seafarers from Scandinavia...

A small stone container found by archaeologists a half-century ago has now been recognized as further evidence of a Viking or Medieval Norse presence in Arctic Canada during the centuries around 1000 A.D. Researchers reporting in the journal Geoarchaeology discovered that the interior of the container, which was found at an archaeological site on southern Baffin Island, contains fragments of bronze as well as small spherules of glass that form when rock is heated to high temperatures. The object is a crucible for melting bronze, likely in order to cast it into small tools or ornaments. Indigenous peoples of northern...

For the past 50 years—since the discovery of a thousand-year-old Viking way station in Newfoundland—archaeologists and amateur historians have combed North America's east coast searching for traces of Viking visitors. It has been a long, fruitless quest, littered with bizarre claims and embarrassing failures. But at a conference in Canada earlier this month, archaeologist Patricia Sutherland announced new evidence that points strongly to the discovery of the second Viking outpost ever discovered in the Americas.

The most popular and very believable account is that the island was named by the British explorer Bartholomew Gosnold, after his infant daughter -- Martha... He would take short sails to "the big island" (Martha's Vineyard) for the purpose of gathering sassafras root, to be hauled back to England for medicinal use. Gosnold was only on Cuttyhunk about six weeks because of a small skirmish with the Wampanoags... the British wisely withdrew from the Islands before winter. Before leaving, however, it's believed that Gosnold named the big island after his infant daughter, Martha... Another, not as popular version of the...