Archaeologists have discovered a potential new Viking site in Newfoundland, Canada, which would mark the farthest south that the Vikings have ever been known to settle.
The site was discovered last summer at Point Rosee through the examination of infrared satellite images that picked up manmade shapes hidden by vegetation, leading to the discovery of "a fire-cracked stone and some mangled scraps of iron."
The satellite images were taken by cameras located 400 miles above the Earth, and the team scanned for numerous signs that pointed to a site, such as discolored soil and vegetation changes.
Using this same technique, lead archaeologist Sarah Parcak has uncovered 17 pyramids, 1,000 tombs and approximately 3,000 forgotten settlements.
"I am absolutely thrilled," she said of the find. "Typically in archaeology, you only ever get to write a footnote in the history books, but what we seem to have at Point Rosee may be the beginning of an entirely new chapter."
If the site is confirmed to be a Viking habituation, it will be the second one ever found in North America, with the first discovered in 1960 approximately 300 miles north in Canada.
Parcak says the Viking site finding will reveal one of two things: "Either it's ... an entirely new culture that looks exactly like the Norse and we don't know what it is, or it's the westernmost Norse site that's ever been discovered," she said.
Although the team will continue to look for definitive evidence to support one of the two leading theories, Parcak feels that it's most likely that the new site is the westernmost Norse site that has ever been discovered.
If her gut instinct is true, the findings have the potential to completely change the history of Vikings in North America and could confirm the idea that Norse presence was a short-lived affair that represented just one expedition of a seafaring society. However, it could also prove the opposite, revealing that the Vikings stayed longer in the New World than we realized.
"With just one site, it's easy to explain it away," Parcak said. "But if there's two, there might be more. There could potentially be a number of other sites out there that haven't been found."
"For a long time, serious North Atlantic archaeologists have largely ignored the idea of looking for Norse sites in coastal Canada because there was no real method for doing so," said Douglas Bolender, an archaeologist who specializes in Norse settlements. "If Sarah Parcak can find one Norse site using satellites, then there's a reasonable chance that you can use the same method to find more, if they exist. If Point Rosee is Norse, it may open up coastal Canada to a whole new era of research."
