Archaelogical Evidence

Well, one of the major problems in Viking studies is that we're biased towards the historical
accounts—early chronicles that all came from the church centers or official reports to the kings
or regional authorities. It's always been that way. Only in the past 20 years or so have
archeological and other studies begun to provide information that fleshes out and in some cases
contradicts or even replaces the historical record. These findings are giving us a totally different
view of the Vikings. We see them archeologically not as raiders and pillagers but as
entrepreneurs, traders, people opening up new avenues of commerce, bringing new materials
intoScandinavia, spreading Scandinavian ideas into Europe. This contrasts sharply with the early
accounts. They were inevitably based on victims' reports and were extremely one-sided.

The Icelandic sagas are phenomenal documents that for hundreds of years provided everything
we knew about the Vikings. If we were interested in Vinland [the Viking name for a far-off land
they visited, which scholars now believe is eastern Canada in and around Newfoundland], it was
the sagas. If we were interested in the history of the kings of Norway, it was the sagas. But then,
beginning with the discovery of Viking burial ships a century ago, archeology started to poke its
nose into Viking affairs, and today, excavations have become an invaluable new source of
information. Scholars have gone back to the sagas and asked, "How much of this is history? How
much fabrication? How much just the elaboration of family storytelling?"

Current saga scholarship is wonderful, because it's giving us a lot of insights as to why the sagas
are the way they are. The sagas were compiled in the 13th century and later based on stories that
originated as early as 400 or 500 years before that. This is a long time for an oral tradition to be
handed down. Even the Vinland sagas, which chronicle events around A.D. 1000, were not
recorded for a couple of hundred years after that. Some now believe the sagas are basically
family stories relating the ancestry, say, of Erik or of Gudrid and her family. But archeology is
actually proving that a lot of these stories have a good basis in fact, so much so that Helge
Ingstad could use them to find the L'Anse aux Meadows site [an archeological site in
Newfoundland believed to have been a Viking settlement established hundreds of years before
Columbus arrived in America].

No. We've seen as a result of archeological research large amounts of Viking material turning up
in native sites in the arctic regions of North America. This material dates to perhaps as much as
300 years after the initial Vinland voyages. We seem to have a time period that began with the
Vinland contact episode, explorations, and so forth, and then after the society in Greenland got
rolling and people were settled, walrus-ivory trade with Europe started to be really important.
Probably more than any other factor, this stimulated the continuous western orientation of the
Greenland Norse, not only up into the Greenland walrus-hunting territories but across the Davis
Strait to Ellesmere and Baffin islands and south into Labrador. These are areas where the
Vikings were exploring and trading, and where native populations were trading Viking materials
through their own trade networks. Of course, the continuing need for wood in treeless Greenland
prompted return visits to Markland, which we know to have been today's Labrador.

There are lots of different theories. This is a wonderful area of exploration in terms of
archeological and historical theory, because we have environmental changes, we have growing
human populations, we have an important economic and climatic downturn. You see a society
Archaelogical Evidence

that is reaching a peak and then just maintaining itself, but all the forces are going against it after
1300 or so. The western colony disappears around 1350. The eastern settlement continues for
another century, but it seems not to be doing too well, and then it just drops off the line. The last
historic record is from 1408, a church wedding of Hvalsey. There are also theories of pirate raids
and other kinds of trauma that may have occurred in these settlements. All in all, I think we have
here a real human experience. This is not the wrath of God coming down, it's not an Ice Age
descending. When pondering this extinction story, one has to consider a multiplicity of factors.

The publication of the Vinland Map was a total surprise to all scholars, as it had been kept
completely under wraps between the time it was acquired by Yale [in 1959] and the publication
of the Yale Press book. Only a handful of Yale's inner circle and a few others knew about it. This
was a major point of concern among historical cartographers as well as archeologists, since the
publication of the map came as a public fait accompli before the scholarly community had had a
chance to consider its veracity in the normal vetting process. It was, in fact, a slap in the face of
the scholars most knowledgeable about medieval cartography.

At the party celebrating Yale's unveiling of the map, Alexander Vietor, curator of Yale's map
collection, playfully donned a helmet sent by the King of Norway. Enlarge Photo credit:
Courtesy Yale University

Today's scholarly community is almost universally united in its condemnation of the map and the
process by which it was published. The problem has been that during the past couple of decades
there have been numerous studies that have taken pro and con stances, each validating report
stimulating a succeeding contrary view. So only the most serious students of the Vinland Map
have been able to keep up with events. The fact that [Norse historian] Kirsten Seaver has spent a
decade parsing the issues in a Stanford University Press book is an indication of the general
academic view.

"When we look into the future now, I think we implicitly look back to the Vikings as the origin of this
kind of human endeavor to find new horizons..."

At present there are only one or two scholars arguing in its favor, and even they admit that their
studies do not prove the Vinland Map is genuine. They only show that it is presented on an old
piece of parchment and could be genuine, or that early inks might have had ingredients similar to
the ink on the Vinland Map. In fact, almost all serious scholars now believe it is a hoax but
despair of ever being able to prove it conclusively. It is one of those great cases of a story being
kept alive by the persistent efforts of a few "true believers" who refuse to accept the obvious.