Discovery of the Site

It was nearly nine centuries later, in 1960, that a Norwegian explorer and writer, Helge Ingstad, came upon the site at L'Anse aux Meadows. He was making an intensive search for Norse landing places along the coast from New England northward. At L'Anse aux Meadows, a local inhabitant, George Decker, led him to a group of overgrown bumps and ridges which looked as if they might be building remains. They later proved to be all that was left of that old colony. For the next eight years, Helge and his wife, archaeologist Anne Stine Ingstad, led an international team of archaeologists from Norway, Iceland, Sweden, and the United States in the excavation of the site.

The Ingstads found that the overgrown ridges were the lower courses of the walls of eight Norse buildings from the 11th century. The walls and roofs had been of sod, laid over a supporting frame. The buildings were of the same kind as those used in Iceland and Greenland just before and after the year 1000. Long narrow fireplaces in the middle of the floor served for heating, lighting and cooking.

Excavation by Parks Canada (1973-76)

Parks Canada continued excavation of the site from 1973 to 1976. Among the new areas excavated by Parks Canada was the peat bog below the Norse building terrace. Three separate layers with a total of about 2000 pieces of worked wood were discovered. One of these layers was from the Norse occupation. The wood there was largely debris from smoothing and trimming logs and planks with metal tools - a reminder of the Sagas' description of timber being prepared to take back to Greenland. There were also broken and discarded objects, including what was probably a floorboard from a small Norse boat.

The Norse site included three complexes, each with a dwelling and a workshop. Although the major purpose of the buildings was to serve as winter living quarters for the whole group, each complex housed specialized craftsmen. The smiths probably lived in the complex closest to the brook. They roasted bog iron ore, and used one room of a house for smithing. They also operated a forge on the other side of the brook, where iron was smelted in a furnace.

The furnace itself was little more than a pit lined with clay and topped by a frame of large stones. The quality of the production was not impressive: four-fifths of all iron stayed in the slag. After firing, the furnace was destroyed and the building used as a smithy where the iron was reheated and the worst impurities hammered out. Only after this was done could the iron be forged and shaped into finished objects - mostly nails or rivets.

Another building complex was home to carpenters whose wood debris was found in the bog below this area

The major specialized activity in the the next complex was boat or ship repair. Here excavators found many rivets which had been deliberately cut and removed from boats to be replaced with new ones, presumably forged in the smithy.

To protect these significant archaeological resources, they were buried in situ, under a layer of white sand, and the whole area of the dig covered with fresh turf.

Their burial for long-term protection also met one of the fundamental conditions for inclusion on the world heritage list: protection of the significant resource.

Among the ruins of the buildings, excavators unearthed the kind of artifacts found on similar sites in Iceland and Greenland. Inside the cooking pit of one of the large dwellings lay a bronze, ring-headed pin of the kind Norsemen used to fasten their cloaks. Inside another building was a stone oil lamp and a small spindle whorl, once used as the flywheel of a handheld spindle. In the fire pit of a third dwelling was the fragment of a bone needle believed to have been used for a form of knitting. There was also a small decorated brass fragment that once had been gilded.

From these finds we know not all the Norse settlers had been men. Spindle whorls and knitting-needles were tools used by women. A small whetstone, used to sharpen needles and small scissors, was found near the spindle whorl. It would have also been part of a woman's kit.

A great deal of slag from smelting and working of iron was also found on the site together with a large number of iron boat nails or rivets. This, more than any other find, led archaeologists to identify the site as Norse.