Dan Snow's History Hit - The Vikings Who Beat Columbus to America

Episode Date: November 4, 2021

Five centuries before Christopher Columbus set foot in America, the Vikings had already crossed the Atlantic. Using new dating techniques, scientists studying timber buildings at L’Anse aux Meadows on the northern tip of Canada’s Newfoundland, have established the Norse settled in AD 1021, 471 years before Columbus’s first voyage. While it’s already known the Vikings landed in North America, exactly when they settled has remained an estimate, until now. Cat Jarman, world-leading Vikings expert and host of History Hit's sister podcast, Gone Medieval, joins Dan to speak to archaeologist Birgitta Wallace about this breakthrough research. Discover how a long-ago Solar storm provided vital information for the study, the significance of the date, and what's left to be discovered in the future. You can read more about the evidence here.

This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, everyone. Welcome to a very special episode of Dan Snow's History. We've got a crossover episode here with the history hit Medieval podcast,

which, of course, inevitably is called Gone Medieval. It's presented by Dr Kat Jarman, Matt Lewis, and it's going great guns. But Kat Jarman and I, we're a little Mexican standoff because there's big news coming out of Newfoundland about the Vikings and their precise dating at that site. Kat and I eyeballed each other. None of us blinked. So it's like a crossover episode. So this will be going on my feed and her feed. It was great for me. I had a little co-presenter and one that actually knew what she was talking about, unlike your host Dan Snow. We were both very excited to talk to Brigitte Wallace. She is an archaeologist, sort of a legend in the field really, a Norse specialist working in North America. She spent most of her career working for Parks Canada and her best

known work is at L'Anse aux Meadows. Google is such a wonderful site. It's on the northern tip of Newfoundland. It is the most perfect place the Vikings would possibly have built a way station if they were travelling from their settlements in Iceland, Greenland, in to the North American continent. And so sure enough, when legendary husband and wife team in the 1960s started looking for Viking sites in North America, they just looked at the map, they hiked into this point, Helga and Anne in Nishtad, they found humps and bumps. They did actually find a Viking settlement. I have been there. It's one of the most exciting places I've ever gone. Proof that the Vikings crossed the Atlantic 500 years before Christopher Columbus. But until now, we didn't have reliable dates.

We didn't exactly know when they settled and built Anso Meadow. But thanks to fantastic, know when they settled and built Anse aux Meadows. But thanks to fantastic, cutting-edge, isotopic dendrochronology, I think those things are true, thanks to the wonderful team looking at the site that the Vikings were present in Newfoundland in 1021. While King Canute was lording it up, had established Scandinavian rule over England, the Vikings were busy making things in Newfoundland. The reason they know that is because there was an amazing upsurge in atmospheric radiocarbon concentration in 993. So a kind of solar flare or something like that, a big spike. And you see it all over the world when you look at tree rings. And all they've had to do is count the tree rings from that moment they've identified in 993 out to the waney edge of the wood, basically where

the bark is. And that tells you exactly what age the wood was when it was cut and it was used in these wooden objects. It is a great honour both to have Dr Kat Jarman, who's a world leading expert on the Vikings, as co-presenter of this pod, but also Birgitta Wallace, who knows the site better than anybody else alive. Very, very exciting new developments. In fact, if you watch mine and Kat's programme, which we trace the process of a Viking army, the Great Heathen Army,

across north-eastern and southern England, you can do that at History Hit TV. It's one of our most successful ever programmes, documentary on there. It's like Netflix for history. We've got an annoying number of people at the moment watching The Rise of Napoleon. It's knocked my Nelson documentary off the top spot, very annoyingly.

But well done, everyone, for watching The Rise of Napoleon. I'm knocked my Nelson documentary off the top spot very annoyingly, but well done everyone for watching The Rise of Napoleon. Glad you're enjoying it. If you sign up today, you get 30 days free, get a historyhit.tv, historyhit.tv, and then you become a subscriber. You join the revolution. And if you subscribe, this is the good news, folks. You're going to pay less than it costs for a pint of beer every month for the rest of eternity, and you're going to have access to History Hit TV, which is brilliant. In the meantime, folks, here's Kat Jarman and I talking to Birgitta Wallace. Enjoy. beer every month for the rest of eternity and you're going to have access to history at TV, which is brilliant. In the meantime, folks, here's Kat Jarman and I talking to Birgitta Wallace. Enjoy. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you very much for inviting me.

It's great to have you on talking about this exciting discovery. Yes, it is. It's very unusual to get anything absolutely precise in archaeology. Yeah, I mean, this is really something that's taken the world by storm, hasn't it, for so many reasons. So, yeah, we'd love to hear a bit more about it. Yes, well, I'm only an archaeologist, so I do not understand all the science behind it. So I do not understand all the science behind it. But it's a really interesting discovery that every so often there is solar activity that affects the radiocarbon in trees and that affects the tree rings. Here, 1993-94 had a period of solar activity that was unusual, very unusual, and it affected tree growth in the entire world. And it's reflected in the tree rings.

The tree rings will show a spike. They form a sharp peak, and it becomes very distinctive in tree rings. And if you know that this happened in 993-94, you can use it for dating. If you have a piece of wood with bark, and it's cut, and you can see the tree rings, if you can identify the tree rings. If you can identify this one tree ring, you then can count the rings from the bark in.

And you know that that particular tree ring is from 993, 94, then you can just count the rings out to the bark. And if you have 14 more rings, then you just add that to 993, 994, and you get the date when that tree was felled. And of course, that is very useful. You've been very modest and said you're just the archaeologist, but as the archaeologist, you must be thrilled when the scientists deliver evidence like this to you,

because it must confirm lots of things that you believe about this site. Yes. From the archaeology, we have decided the Lansomedo site, which was chosen to test this new method because the site had already been dated roughly to the late 10th century, early 11th century. We knew that from, we have a large number of radiocarbon dates, but they were not precise. Although radiocarbon dates over the years we have been using them have become much more accurate or have less error margin than before, but we certainly did not have an exact date for the site. So when Margot Kutems, and I apologize for my pronunciation of her site, I cannot do it in Dutch, which is quite different. When she and her co-worker Michael D came to us and said they would like to

see if we could get an exact date on Granso Meadows. I was very excited. And it's exciting for so many reasons isn't it? So I mean obviously the methods in itself is exciting but should we just backtrack a bit to the site itself and why it's interesting? So this really is the only known and excavated Viking site in North America. And you really were one of the main people to have excavated it. So can you tell us a little bit, what was actually discovered there? Just sort of to go back to the beginning. Well, it made quite a splash in the news when Helge Ingstad, the Norwegian Helge Ingstad, in 1960, 61, he founded in 1960, declared that he had found a north site.

And the excavation began there. But it's located on the northernmost tip of Newfoundland, at the top of a long peninsula in an area which in the 1960s was quite remote. I mean, there was no road in. When I came there, I had to walk in the first time. So there was a lot of skepticism. Not so strangely, because for a couple of hundred years, people have been looking for this particular North site. Since we have textual references to North people from Greenland coming to North America. Yeah, that's from the sagas, isn't it? Yes. So the sagas describe this Vinland, which nobody quite knew where it was. Exactly. I mean, there are descriptions in the sagas how they sailed from Greenland and south.

The sagas are deceptively accurate in their descriptions of things. So people have become sure of yes, it's there or there. And it varied from Labrador down to the Washington area, when everybody using the same text. So there was a lot of disbelief in what Helge Ingstad had found. Yeah, so we had these sagas describing this Vinland and then in the 60s, this discovery is being made and he was claiming that this was it. This was the same site. Yes. And what they found were eight buildings.

And these buildings form three complexes, each consisting of a big hall and a smaller building right beside it. And it's on the shore of a bay looking out towards Labrador. And the buildings, architecturally, you can see immediately that they are the same type as you find in Iceland and Greenland in the early 11th century. They are built of sod over a wooden frame and the halls found there are very large. They can room about 30 people each. But there was disbelief because no other professionals had gone there. It was so difficult and so remote that people didn't bother even checking out.

But eventually it was recognised that, yes, this really is a north site. And then you got involved a little after that, didn't you, in the excavations? Yes. I worked with Ingstad for a couple of summers. And then the site became a national historic site of Canada. And a committee was formed with Ingstad as the head of it to see how they could develop it the way Parks Canada usually does, prepare it for visitors and so forth. And they found out that there were many questions that still remained unanswered. For instance, how long were they there? And what did they do?

How did they interact with the indigenous population? Because there are indigenous sites there as well. And so the committee recommended further excavations. But unfortunately, Anastasia Ingstad did not want to lead those. So a Swedish archaeologist by the name of Bengt Schönbeck was called in to continue lead excavations. And he asked me to become an assistant there. me to become an assistant there and I was. At the time I was working at a museum at Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. So I was far away but the museum seconded me for the field work. Then after three years, I returned to Sweden and more excavations was needed. So at that time, it fell into my hands.

At that time, I became the director for the archaeology of the site. That was a pretty amazing thing to be part of, really, wasn't it? Yes, and it so happened, too, that in 1975, for personal reasons, I wanted to leave Pittsburgh. for personal reasons I wanted to leave Pittsburgh and Parks Canada offered me a job as archaeologist for the Atlantic region of Parks Canada and Los Medos came under that so it became part of what I did for Parks Canada. I'm always struck by its position geographically it's perfect for crews moving from Greenland down into the eastern seaboard and there's a hint isn't there there's a hint that North people did go further South but is it the butternuts that you found yes after one excavation I took all the seeds

and handed to a botanist and asked him can you? And also, are they natural to the region? And he said, they are everything. It's exactly what you expect, except for these darn butternuts. What are they doing there? And that, of course, sent me searching for where do they grow? And so it happens that the northernmost limit for butternuts is in northeastern New Brunswick. But the nuts, there are three of them.

Unfortunately, we haven't been able to radio carbon dating because the DNA also has more or less disappeared over time. But they were found in context with the Norse artifacts. We knew that they had come there with the Norse. And that opened up a whole new window, what the site was about. You're listening to Dan Snow's History and a Gone Millennial crossover. We're talking about the Vikings in the New World. More after this. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas and the courage to stand alone,

including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Do you think we'll ever find sites to the further south into either New Brunswick, the Maritime Provinces or even into New England? Do you think that's the dream? It's the dream, but I really doubt it. For one thing, I don't think we will find any trace of them in the area where I think they went and got the butternuts, which is the Miramichi-Charleur Bay area on New Brunswick, because you had a handful of people there for a couple of months, probably living in tents in the booby or just temporary north dwellings where you

build the walls but don't bother with a roof but you add a tent cloth or so to cover them instead as for more sites than last meadows when you know now that the initial period of the Greenland colony didn't have more than about 400 to 500 people. And Lansomere is very big. It would have been able to room anywhere between 60 to 90 people. That's a big proportion of the entire colony in Greenland. And especially as the type of artefacts we found at Lansom Meadows are primarily of male nature.

It's hard work like iron making, carpentry and boat repair. Then you don't expect people to have had energy to go and build another site of the same nature. Kat, it's so amazing, isn't it, listening to Brigitte here, because you're someone who specialises in the Vikings going east all the way into Central Asia. And now we're talking about the very furthest westernmost point of that Norse expansion as well. So it's a very special thing for you, I imagine. It really is for both of us. Yes, it is. It's because I ended up in the Western Hemisphere. And I know from my DNA,

I'm 14% Norwegian. So there. It is really remarkable. I think it shows that westernmost that you've been looking at and the easternmost that I'm looking at. But it's quite similar because a lot of these are quite temporary because what you've been describing is this, they're quite temporary settlements, aren't they? They're not sort of permanent colonies. And I think we see that in so many other parts. We see that, you know, early stages in England

and we see it in the east as well. They're sort of temporary camps for specific reasons, which I think is quite remarkable over that distance. And can you say a little bit more about the reason for this settlement? I mean, the reason for Lanzamero's existence is, I think, it's not colonisation. It is exploration of what would be useful to use in Greenland because it was a new settlement in Greenland in a completely different environment than Iceland.

settlement in Greenland in a completely different environment in Iceland. So they had to change their lifestyle to some extent. And also they knew here were other lands and let's see what's there. So it's just an exploration, but it was not a possibility to actually expand as colonists all the way there. It was too far away from the mother country. So do we know then, I mean, is that the reason, do you think, that it was so short term, that distance? Why did it not last? Why did they not stay and settle? The Greenland colony was too small to split up further. To found a settlement, you know,

from the later colonization, it takes 300 to 400 people. And especially when you found a new settlement where you can't go to a store and buy things. You have to start completely from the beginning, even with herds, with cattle, with sheep. You have to build them up. You can't transport a huge herd of sheep or cattle in Viking ships. You have to be modest at the beginning and expand them. So there were sort of natural limits then, I suppose. Yes, but you could also see the usefulness of finding another area where you have, for instance, tree growth, since Greenland did not have that to any extent.

And that would have been useful. And I do think they kept contact with the areas north of Lansom Meadows in the closer ones, like Labrador, that has big forests. Yeah. And in the Sargos, one interesting aspect is the interaction between the indigenous population and these incomers. And you said that that was one of the things that you'd wanted to look into as well. Is that something that we know anything about? Yes. At Lanzarmeros, I think we know that they did not encounter indignous people there. As far as we can tell from the relatively rough radiocarbon datings we have, there were no indignous people there between around 850 and 1200, except one little really tempting piece, a little arrowhead that could be from the time of the nose, but it was found inside one of the turf walls.

And we don't know if it was shot into that or if it was simply in the turf when the doors came there, because that's a possibility as well. Can you give us a sense, us soft British people, give us a sense of what winter is like in Anse aux Meadows, or what it was like in the 11th century? What do we think the climate would have been like for months on end? It would have been slightly warmer than, let's say, in the 1970s. Now, of course, we are approaching that again. And today, winters can have a lot of snow, but it certainly wouldn't

have had more snow than in Greenland. They would have been used to the environment there. It's very similar to that of Iceland. Winters are not terribly cold and summers are short. They were used to that from both Iceland and Greenland. But we have one interesting fact, and that is if the temperatures had been 1.5 to 2 degrees warmer, there may not have been snow there at all. The winter of 1998, the overall winter there was warmer, so there was no snow at L'Anse aux Meadows at all. If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn't believe it. So that could have

been the case in the early thousands. One thing that nobody's found there, there's no sign of any burials, is there? So there's no cemetery, there's nothing like that. So we don't have evidence for any of the people who came there and really who they were. have evidence for any of the people who came there and really who they were. No, we searched high and low for that. We have photos, we have foot inventories, and we thought we found one, one of the early years there. And we began digging, he had worked for about two or three days. When the caretaker of the site, a local person by the name of Lloyd Deckard, son of a man who had led Helge Ingstad to the site, came and sat down on the low turf wall and said, hmm, I see you are digging my turnip garden.

So not quite. Because they had both gardens and the little walls were of turf. So, so much for some archaeologists. But no, and if they had been there a long time, I think they would have found burials. That's one of the many indicators. It was very short. So we've got this big news that's just come out.

Are you excited there's going to be more? Are we going to be learning about Also Meadow for years to come? Probably. And the whole site, there have been so many little pieces of information coming. And everyone has just added one little fact to it. And we now have a fairly full story, but we'll probably have more sometime. Kat, we need to get out there. We need to get out there and do some looking. Yeah, I think we do. We'll help the search.

Yes, well, a group from Memorial University of Newfoundland is going to do some more work beginning this summer. So we'll see. That's very exciting. Very, very exciting. And obviously, Kat, we will be covering this. Every time anyone finds anything to do with the Norse Vikings, you can listen to History Hit because we will be covering it, that's for sure.

We're obsessed with it. Yes, absolutely. Well, thank you so much for joining us. Yes, thank you. My pleasure. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Thank you for making it to the end of this episode of Dan Snow's History Hour. I really appreciate listening to this podcast.

I love doing these podcasts. It's a highlight of my career. It's the best thing I've ever done. And your support, your listening is obviously crucial for that project. If you did feel like doing me a favor, if you go to wherever you get your podcasts and give it a review, give a rating, obviously a good one, ideally, then that would be fantastic. And feel free to share it. We obviously depend on listeners, depend on more and more people finding out about it, depend on good reviews to keep the listeners coming in.

Really appreciate it. Thank you. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas and the courage to stand alone, including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.