New horizons at L’Anse aux Meadows

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Abstract

The UNESCO World Heritage site of L’Anse aux Meadows (LAM) in northern Newfoundland is the only undisputed site of pre-1492 presence of Europeans in the Americas. In August 2018, we undertook fieldwork at LAM to sample the peat bog 30 m east of the Norse ruins for a multiproxy paleoenvironmental assessment of Norse settlement. Instead, we encountered a new cultural horizon. Here we report our fieldwork at this iconic site and a Bayesian analysis of legacy radiocarbon data, which nuance previous conclusions and suggest Norse activity at LAM may have endured for a century. In light of these findings, we reflect on how the cultural horizon, containing nonnative ecofacts, may relate to indigenous or Norse activities.

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Most cited references 7

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Furs, Fish, and Ivory: Medieval Norsemen at the Arctic Fringe

Christian Keller (2010)

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Paleoenvironment and the archaeological record at the L'Anse Aux Meadows Site, Newfoundland

A Davis, J. McAndrews, B. L. Wallace (1988)

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A Critical Review of Radiocarbon Dating of a Norse Settlement at L'Anse Aux Meadows, Newfoundland Canada

Reidar Nydal (1989)

Recent progress in high-precision calibrations of radiocarbon dates has led to evaluations of earlier research. This has been the case with dates from the Norse settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows which was discovered by Helge Ingstad in 1960. The most problematic feature of this series up to now was the use of sample material which partly derived from driftwood. The present paper concludes that charcoal from this site demonstrated no greater errors than normal from other settlement sites. With an assumed total systematic error of 30 ± 20 years, as a mean for various tree rings, the calibrated age range of L'Anse aux Meadows is AD 975–1020. This agrees well with the assumed historical age of ca AD 1000, a result which has also been recently corroborated by high-precision accelerator dating at the University of Toronto.

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Author and article information

Journal

Journal ID (nlm-ta): Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A

Journal ID (iso-abbrev): Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A

Journal ID (hwp): pnas

Journal ID (pmc): pnas

Journal ID (publisher-id): PNAS

Title: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

Publisher: National Academy of Sciences

ISSN (Print): 0027-8424

ISSN (Electronic): 1091-6490

Publication date (Print): 30 July 2019

Publication date (Electronic): 15 July 2019

Publication date PMC-release: 15 July 2019

Volume: 116

Issue: 31

Pages: 15341-15343

Affiliations

[1] ^aDepartment of Archaeology, Queens College, Memorial University of Newfoundland , St. John’s, NL, Canada A1C 5S7;

[2] ^bDepartment of Geography, Memorial University of Newfoundland , St. John's, NL, Canada A1B 3X9;

[3] ^cSchool of Natural Sciences and Psychology, Liverpool John Moores University , L3 3AF Liverpool, United Kingdom

Author notes

¹To whom correspondence may be addressed. Email: pledger@ 123456mun.ca .

Edited by Dolores R. Piperno, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, and approved June 17, 2019 (received for review May 9, 2019)

Author contributions: P.M.L. and V.F. designed research; P.M.L., L.G.-F., and V.F. performed research; P.M.L. and V.F. analyzed data; and P.M.L. and V.F. wrote the paper.