L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland is famed for being a site where Norse travelers set up a colony hundreds of years before Europe at large became aware of North America's existence. The colony was thought to be short-lived, but a new find may extend the length of its occupancy.

While taking sediment cores from a nearby peat bog to help study the ancient environment, archaeologist Paul Ledger and his colleagues discovered a previously unknown chapter in the story of L’Anse aux Meadows. Buried about 35cm (14 inches) beneath the modern surface, they found signs of an ancient occupancy: a layer of trampled mud littered with woodworking debris, charcoal, and the remains of plants and insects.

Based on its depth and the insect species present, the layer looks like similar surfaces from the edges of Viking Age Norse settlements in Greenland and Iceland. But organic material from the layer radiocarbon dated to the late 1100s or early 1200s, long after the Norse were thought to have left Newfoundland for good.

First contact

Artifacts like a bronze cloak pin, a soapstone spindle piece, iron nails, and rivets make it clear who lived in the eight Icelandic-style turf shelters at L’Anse aux Meadows. Stone tools at the site suggest that indigenous North Americans, probably ancestors of the Beothuk and Dorset people, also lived or visited here. L’Anse aux Meadows may be the first place where Europeans and indigenous Americans interacted, and those interactions may have happened off and on for as long as 195 years.

Ledger and his colleagues did statistical analysis of all the recorded radiocarbon dates from Norse artifacts at the site to calculate the most likely start and end dates for the Norse occupation. Their calculations suggested that the Norse probably first set foot in Newfoundland sometime between 910 and 1030 CE and left sometime between 1030 and 1145 CE. That means they could have used the site for anywhere up to 200 years. That gives the Norse a longer run in Newfoundland than archaeologists and historians usually assume, but their occupation still ends at least 50 to 100 years before the newly discovered archaeological layer.

Most of the early work at the site focused on the Norse settlement, so Ledger and his colleagues had fewer dates to work with from indigenous artifacts. The statistical analysis returned much broader, less precise results for indigenous occupation of the site, starting between 710 and 1130 CE and ending sometime between 1540 and 1810 CE. That’s a lot of overlap, which supports the possibility of cultural interaction. It also confirms that indigenous people lived and worked at L’Anse aux Meadows long before the Norse arrived and long after they left.

What’s bugging the archaeologists?

In many ways, the layer of lived-on ancient ground, captured in the sediment core, looks more like layers from the margins of Norse settlements in Greenland and Iceland than like pre-Columbian Beothuk and Dorset sites in Newfoundland. The charcoal and the woodworking scraps could have belonged to either culture, but what’s really interesting are the bits of pollen and dead insects mixed in.

Those dead insects include a pill beetle called Simplocaria metallica, which (as far as anyone knows) is native to Greenland, not Canada. In Greenland, S. metallica has turned up (usually without electric guitars) at both Norse sites and indigenous areas once inhabited by the ancestors of today’s Inuit people. Another beetle, Acidota quadrata, had never been seen in Newfoundland until it turned up in Ledger and his colleagues’ sediment core; the species lives much further north, typically in the boreal forests and taiga just south of the Arctic Circle.

“Ecofacts from cultural waste sandwiched between layers of peat may not be as evocative as artifacts such as a ringed bronze pin or a finely crafted lithic projectile point,” admit Ledger and his colleagues, but these more subtle cues may still have some very interesting things to say. This layer of ground was walked on, and littered on, around a century after the Norse left the continent. It’s a time capsule, in other words, recording what the local ecosystem looked like a century after the earliest anthropogenic transfers of plant and animal species between continents.

“Studies of this nature can provide baseline ecological data on species movements and inform hot topic debates in the science of biodiversity and biological invasions,” Ledger told Ars. Coauthor Véronique Forbes, an archaeo-entomologist at Memorial University of Newfoundland, now plans to look for similar evidence at other archaeological sites in Newfoundland.

What you find depends on where you look

“The simplest explanation for this deposit would be that it reflects the general detritus (trampled plants, other organic waste) that accumulates wherever people live and work,” Ledger told Ars Technica. “The area is currently a peat bog and very wet and most likely was similar eight centuries ago. Therefore, it may also be possible that this layer accumulated in part through the intentional deposition of plant materials to reduce surface moisture, but that is very much speculation.”

It’s not just the bugs that make this layer look more Norse than Beothuk or Dorset. It's 10cm (14 inches) deep, for one thing. The depth suggests that material piled up pretty quickly before being trampled and buried. That’s pretty common at Norse settlements in Greenland, but layers from indigenous sites in Newfoundland tend to be shallower. Then again, Ledger says that may reflect a bias in how archaeologists in different places have approached different kinds of sites. Those differences have shaped the kind of information we have—and what we think we know.

“Yes, the character and microscopic content of the layer resembles deposits in Greenland; however, we have no real point of comparison for Indigenous sites,” he told Ars Technica. In Greenland and Iceland, archaeologists studying Norse sites also tend to study the open areas between buildings and the environment around settlements. But excavations at indigenous sites around the North Atlantic “tend to focus solely on the structures themselves rather than the spaces outside and between them.”

Digging deeper

“Since the horizon is buried within a peatland, the preservation of biological remains is excellent. This may afford us the opportunity to examine aspects of pre-contact lifeways that are not present in other depositional environments,” Ledger told Ars Technica.

When they return to Newfoundland in August, Ledger and his colleagues will try to learn more about this chapter in the site’s history. The peat bog where they found the first evidence of this buried layer is about 30m (99 feet) from the excavated parts of the site, and they want to map how far it extends and where it lies in relation to the nearby structures. To do that, they’ll reopen some excavated tranches from the 1970s, dig some new test pits, and bring some geophysical methods to bear on the site.

Coauthor Linus Girdland-Flink of Liverpool John Moores University, who studies ancient DNA, plans to examine its presence in the layer. That could shed some light on the origin of dock seed, a type of grain mixed in with the sediment and waste. The species could be native to Eurasia, but dock also tends to hybridize easily, so without the DNA evidence, it’s hard to be sure where the species came from.

While they’re there, Ledger and his colleagues also hope to get the paleoenvironmental data they were looking for in the first place.

PNAS, 2019. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1907986116. (About DOIs).