Vikings Were in North America in the Year 1021
Historians have long known that Norse voyagers reached North America centuries before Christopher Columbus. In 2021, scientists were able to attach an exact year to that presence.
The fact
Norse people were active at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland in 1021 CE.
A study published in Nature used an unusual cosmic event preserved in tree rings to identify the exact year in which pieces of wood at the site were cut.
L’Anse aux Meadows
The archaeological site at the northern tip of Newfoundland is the only confirmed Norse settlement in the Americas outside Greenland.
Excavations revealed buildings and artifacts consistent with Norse construction and activity, establishing that Europeans had crossed the Atlantic around the end of the first millennium.
For decades, however, the precise calendar year remained uncertain.
A solar event became a historical timestamp
The breakthrough came from a sharp increase in atmospheric radiocarbon associated with a cosmic-ray event in 993 CE. That event left a detectable marker in tree rings around the world.
Researchers examined wood from L’Anse aux Meadows that had been cut with metal tools. Indigenous peoples in the region at that time did not manufacture such iron cutting tools, linking the modified wood to the Norse presence.
Once scientists identified the 993 radiocarbon marker in the trees, they counted the annual growth rings outward to the bark edge. The result was 1021.
Why the date matters
The year provides the earliest securely dated evidence for Europeans in the Americas before Columbus’s voyage of 1492.
That is a gap of more than 470 years.
What the discovery does not mean
L’Anse aux Meadows was not the beginning of a large, permanent European colonization of North America. Archaeological evidence suggests a relatively small Norse presence, probably connected to exploration, repair, resource gathering and voyages farther south.
Nor does the Norse arrival diminish the much older history of Indigenous peoples in the Americas, whose societies had existed on the continents for thousands of years before the Norse crossed the Atlantic.
History written in wood
The most remarkable part of the discovery may be the method. A burst of radiation from space altered the chemistry of Earth’s atmosphere, trees recorded that change in their annual rings, and a thousand years later scientists used those rings to date human activity.
For one moment in Viking history, archaeology can now give us not merely a century or decade, but a year: 1021.