New potential Viking site discovered in southern Newfoundland

If archaeologists determine that this site was, in fact, a Viking settlement, it would be only the second one ever found in North America.

Infrared images captured from more than 400 miles up in space revealed the possible site.

The first site is at L’Anse aux Meadows, near the northern-most tip of Newfoundland, which remains the only authenticated Norse site in North America. When Parcak and her team conducted excavations in the site, they unearthed the iron-working hearth that was enclosed in turf walls.

Sarah Parcak, an archeologist and National Geographic Fellow, led a team of researchers in finding an ancient Viking settlement in secluded peninsula in Newfoundland called Point Rosee.

Evidence about the thousand-year-old L’Anse aux Meadows settlement was discovered in the 1960s.

Norse oral histories that described lost Viking settlements inspired the search, archaeologists involved in the project said in a statement.

She used her pioneering brand of satellite imagery analysis to aid in the excavation and investigation of archaeological evidence in Newfoundland.

Parcak took part in examining and excavating the possible Viking settlement or site in New Foundland, along with historian Dan Snow, University of Boston archaeologist Douglas Bolender and a team of worldwide scientists.

But since the discovery of the first settlement, nothing else has been found. Until now, that is, because archaeologists might have found a second settlement. It all seems to suggest that Point Rosee was the ideal point for settling humans, but the stronger piece of evidence lies in bog iron, which is formed in rivers by joining the seeping iron particles coming from streams in the mountains, down to the shore.

“Tremendous, if it’s really true”, said William Fitzhugh, director of the Arctic Studies Center and Curator in Anthropology at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington. There are always claims about these sites in North America. The artifacts found indicate the use of metal working that is not associated with the native people of the region, the New York Times reported, and radiocarbon dating places them firmly during the Norse era.

Instead of mining, the Vikings usually harvested iron from peat bogs, and they needed a lot of it for the nails they used to construct the ships they roamed much of the world in. Gerald F. Bigelow from Bates College in Lewiston said that it would be logical to consider that there could be more than one site. Moreover, the Vikings are thought to only have landed in Greenland in about A.D.

Using satellite images, scientists identified changes in the landscape that suggested there might be something beneath the surface. “Loathsome invasions. The Vikings are infamous for their fearsome conquests-but they were also expert seafarers, skilled traders, and courageous explorers”, states a PBS description of the program.

Dr. Doug Bolender and Dr. Sarah Parcak on site in Point Rosee, Nfld., in this undated handout photo.