L'Anse aux Meadows
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How it came to be
Before the Norse reached the northern tip of Newfoundland, five Indigenous groups had used this site, the earliest roughly 6,000 years ago, and the Dorset people lived here about 300 years before the Norse. Radiocarbon dating places the Norse settlement around 1000 CE, and a 2021 study, which found the trace of a spike in atmospheric carbon-14 in the year 993 in tree rings, pinned down 1021 as a year of Norse activity here.
The Norse built eight timber-framed buildings covered with turf: three dwellings, a forge and four workshops. Some 800 objects of wood, bronze, bone and stone have been found, with evidence of iron-making. A spindle and a bone needle suggest that women lived here too, and butternuts, which do not grow north of New Brunswick, show that the settlers travelled farther south.
In 1960 George Decker, who lived in the hamlet, led the Norwegian explorer Helge Ingstad to mounds that locals called the old Indian camp. Helge and his wife, the archaeologist Anne Stine Ingstad, excavated there from 1961 to 1968 and showed that it was a Norse settlement. It became a National Historic Site of Canada in November 1968 and was inscribed in 1978.
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