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Vikings were in North America by 1021 CE
Oct 20, 2021 1 min, 11 secs

Centuries before Christopher Columbus stumbled across the Bahamas, the Vikings established a beachhead at L’Anse Aux Meadows, a site on the northern peninsula of what is now Newfoundland, Canada.

A recent study narrows down the date of the Norse arrival in North America to as early as 1021 CE, based on scraps of discarded wood from the site and with help from the aftermath of an ancient solar storm.

Based on those sagas and the types of artifacts left behind at L’Anse aux Meadows, archaeologists today generally agree that the Norse arrived sometime near the end of the 1st millennium CE.

For a few years (between three and 10), the Norse settlers used the site as a base for explorations farther south—and then they left.

To narrow down when the Norse arrived in Newfoundland, University of Groningen chronologists Michael Dee and Margot Kuitems, along with their colleagues, looked for evidence of the year a solar storm bombarded Earth’s atmosphere with radiation.

Dee, Kuitems, and their colleagues recently used it as a landmark to help pinpoint the age of three wood fragments from L’Anse aux Meadows.

The fragments, which come from three different trees (a mixture of juniper and fir), were cast-off cuts of wood discarded by the Norse, but all still bear cut marks from iron tools. “We imagine they were refuse from construction projects or indeed just the clearance of land,” Dee told Ars.

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