New horizons at L’Anse aux Meadows

• Published in: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
• Main Authors: Ledger, Paul M., Girdland-Flink, Linus, Forbes, Véronique
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: National Academy of Sciences 2019
• Subjects: Social Sciences; Newfoundland
• Online Access: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6681721/; http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31308231; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1907986116

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.