Article content continued

In most stories about Canada’s origins, the original inhabitants of the country are introduced only at the moment of contact with heroic newcomers from Europe. And one only needs to consider how much we hear about momentary Viking visitors to Newfoundland compared with knowledge of the island’s vanished Beothuk – the who? – to realize there are vast gaps in Canadians’ collective understanding of the country’s distant past.

About 4,000 years before the Norse reached Newfoundland, indigenous inhabitants of Canada’s future capital began burying their dead at a shoreline site directly across the Ottawa River from Parliament Hill – the present-day location, as it happens, of the national museum now hosting that Viking extravaganza (and, to its credit, many exhibits showcasing Canada’s aboriginal history).

We only recently gained a clear picture of the exact whereabouts and complexity of that burial ground, a better idea of how it must have connected to the spiritually potent Chaudière Falls and other local archaeological sites, and a greater sense of just how deeply and enduringly this “ossuary” was rooted in the human history of the Ottawa Valley, the wider Great Lakes region and beyond. (Full disclosure: I co-authored several recent research studies on the site.)

But there is so much we don’t know about the people who grieved lost loved ones at this riverbank cemetery at a time before the Parthenon rose on an Athens hilltop or the Great Pyramids were built at Giza – let alone before a small band of Norse made camp for a few months in Newfoundland a mere millennium ago.

So let’s enjoy the latest twist in the story of Vikings in North America –while recognizing that there are many untold or little-known sagas about ancient Canada still waiting to be shared.

Randy Boswell is a journalism professor at Carleton University and a former Citizen reporter who wrote often about Canadian history. He recently co-authored two articles about ancient Ottawa-Gatineau in theCanadian Journal of Archaeology.