Vikings viewed from space

[kbs2244]

For what it is worth, she now has Nova on her side.
That should be good in the court of public opinion.

View From Space Hints at a New Viking Site in North America

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/01/scien ... .html?_r=1

[Sam Salmon]

I'm sure we'd all love this to be Norse but caution is the byword- there were a lot of Basque fishermen in southern Newfoundland pre-Columbus.

In other Norse news I note that everyone seems to have forgotten about this evidence on far Baffin Island

[uniface]

A thousand years after the Vikings braved the icy seas from Greenland to the New World in search of timber and plunder, satellite technology has found intriguing evidence of a long-elusive prize in archaeology — a second Norse settlement in North America, further south than ever known.
The new Canadian site, with telltale signs of iron-working, was discovered last summer after infrared images from 400 miles in space showed possible man-made shapes under discolored vegetation. The site is on the southwest coast of Newfoundland, about 300 miles south of L’Anse aux Meadows, the first and so far only confirmed Viking settlement in North America, discovered in 1960.

Since then, archaeologists, following up clues in the histories known as thesagas, have been hunting for the holy grail of other Viking, or Norse, landmarks in the Americas that would have existed 500 years before Columbus, to no avail.

But last year, Sarah H. Parcak (pronounced PAR-kak), a leading space archaeologist working with Canadian experts and the science series NOVA for a two-hour television documentary, “Vikings Unearthed,” that will be aired on PBS next week, turned her eyes in the sky on coastlines from Baffin Island, west of Greenland, to Massachusetts. She found hundreds of potential “hot spots” that high-resolution aerial photography narrowed to a handful and then one particularly promising candidate — “a dark stain” with buried rectilinear features.

Magnetometer readings later taken at the remote site, called Point Rosee by researchers, a grassy headland above a rocky beach an hour’s trek from the nearest road, showed elevated iron readings. And trenches that were then dug exposed Viking-style turf walls along with ash residue, roasted ore called bog iron and a fire-cracked boulder — signs of metallurgy not associated with native people of the region.

In addition, radiocarbon tests dating the materials to the Norse era, and the absence of historical objects pointing to any other cultures, helped persuade scientists involved in the project and outside experts of the site’s promise. The experts are to resume digging there this summer.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/01/scien ... .html?_r=2

[Minimalist]

I'm sure we'd all love this to be Norse but caution is the byword- there were a lot of Basque fishermen in southern Newfoundland pre-Columbus.

In other Norse news I note that everyone seems to have forgotten about this evidence on far Baffin Island

Wait....wait. What about the Romans? Did they find any more ceremonial swords for the History Channel to go nuts over?

[kbs2244]

I do not know much about the Basque fishermen habits.
Did they go ashore much?
Were they bog iron users?

[Sam Salmon]

I do not know much about the Basque fishermen habits.Did they go ashore much?Were they bog iron users?

They used temporary 'stages' (what we would call long racks) to dry split fish and built shacks to live in over the summer-eventually the British govt who claimed Newfoundland made it unlawful to winter over so I guess some had been doing it-although how they enforced that law I don't know even here in Canada evidence is fragmentary & sometime contradictory.

As to bog iron I don't know.

[shawomet]

Vikings Unearthed, as the documentary effort by the BBC and PBS is called in the United States, will be broadcast on Nova on Wed., April 6. Here is the trailer:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/vi ... rthed.html

Partly funded by National Geographic:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016 ... chaeology/

"Was Point Rosee a Viking outpost a thousand or so years ago? The evidence thus far is promising. The turf structure that partially surrounds the hearth is nothing like the shelters built by indigenous peoples who lived in Newfoundland at the time, nor by Basque fishermen and whalers who arrived in the 16th century. And, while iron slag may be fairly generic, “there aren’t any known cultures—prehistoric or modern—that would have been mining and roasting bog iron ore in Newfoundland other than the Norse,” says Bolender."

[Sam Salmon]

...The turf structure that partially surrounds the hearth is nothing like the shelters built by indigenous peoples... nor by Basque fishermen and whalers who arrived in the 16th century....

Basques were in Newfoundland a helluva lot earlier than the 16th century but by now it's all politics.