Archaeologists
have unearthed a stone hearth that was used for iron-working, hundreds
of miles away from the only other known Viking site in North America.
POINT ROSEE, CanadaIt’s
a two-mile trudge through forested, swampy ground to reach Point Rosee,
a narrow, windswept peninsula stretching from southern Newfoundland
into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Last June, a team of archaeologists was
drawn to this remote part of Canada by a modern-day treasure map:
satellite imagery revealing ground features that could be evidence of
past human activity.
The treasure they discovered here—a stone hearth used for working
iron—could rewrite the early history of North America and aid the search
for lost Viking settlements described in Norse sagas centuries ago.
To date, the only confirmed Viking site in the New World is L’Anse aux Meadows,
a thousand-year-old way station discovered in 1960 on the northern tip
of Newfoundland. It was a temporary settlement, abandoned after just a
few years, and archaeologists have spent the past half-century searching
for elusive signs of other Norse expeditions.
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