New horizons at L'Anse aux Meadows

Paul M Ledger; Linus Girdland-Flink; Véronique Forbes

doi:10.1073/pnas.1907986116

New horizons at L'Anse aux Meadows

Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2019 Jul 30;116(31):15341-15343. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1907986116. Epub 2019 Jul 15.

Authors

Paul M Ledger^{1

2}, Linus Girdland-Flink³, Véronique Forbes⁴

Affiliations

¹ Department of Archaeology, Queens College, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John's, NL, Canada A1C 5S7; pledger@mun.ca.
² Department of Geography, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John's, NL, Canada A1B 3X9.
³ School of Natural Sciences and Psychology, Liverpool John Moores University, L3 3AF Liverpool, United Kingdom.
⁴ Department of Archaeology, Queens College, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John's, NL, Canada A1C 5S7.

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.

Keywords: Bayesian modeling; Norse; indigenous; insects; pollen.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Archaeology
Atlantic Ocean
Bayes Theorem
Environment
Grassland*
Models, Theoretical
Newfoundland and Labrador
Radiometric Dating