L'Anse aux Meadows (lit. Meadows Cove) is an archaeological site, first excavated in the 1960s, of a Norse settlement dating to approximately 1,000 years ago. The site is located on the northernmost tip of the island of Newfoundland in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador near St. Anthony.
With carbon dating estimates between 990–1050 CE, tree-ring analysis dating to the year 1021 and a mean carbon date of 1014 overall, L'Anse aux Meadows is the only undisputed site of pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact of Europeans with the Americas outside of Greenland. It is notable as evidence of the Norse presence in North America and for its possible connection with Leif Erikson as mentioned in the Saga of the Greenlanders and the Saga of Erik the Red, which were written down in the 13th century. Archaeological evidence found at the site indicates that L’Anse aux Meadows may have served as a base camp for Norse exploration of North America, including regions to the south.
Spanning of land and sea, the site contains the remains of eight buildings constructed with sod over a wood frame. In excess of 800 Norse objects have been unearthed at the site. Evidence of iron production and bronze, bone and stone artifacts have been identified. The site was designated a National Historic Site of Canada in 1968 and a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1978. Parks Canada manages the site as outlined under the Parks Canada Agency Act (1998) and the Canada National Parks Act (2000).
Etymology
L'Anse aux Meadows is a French-English name which can be translated as "Grassland Bay" (lit. "[the] bay with [the] grasslands"). How the village itself came to be named "L'Anse aux Meadows" is debated. One possibility is that "L'Anse aux Meadows" is a corruption of the French designation , which means "Jellyfish Cove". A more recent supposition is that the name derives from "L'Anse à la Médée" (Medea Cove") the name it bears on an 1862 French naval chart. Whether Medea or Medusa, it is possible that the name refers to a French naval vessel. The shift to "Meadows" from or Médée may have occurred because of folk etymology linking the name to the open landscape around the cove, with many meadows.
History
Indigenous occupation
Before the Norse arrived in Newfoundland, there is evidence of occupations by five Indigenous groups at the site of L'Anse aux Meadows, the oldest dated at roughly 6,000 years ago. None were contemporaneous with the Norse occupation. The most prominent of these earlier occupations was by the Dorset people, who occupied the site about 300 years before the Norse. Birgitta Wallace gives radiocarbon date ranges for these groups of c. 4000–1000 BCE for the Maritime Archaic tradition, c. 1000–500 BCE for the Groswater tradition, c. 400–750 CE for the Middle Dorset, c. 800–850 CE for the Cow Head Group and Beaches traditions, and c. 1200–1500 CE for the Little Passage tradition.
Norse activity
The Norse settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows has been dated to approximately 1,000 CE (carbon dating estimates 990–1050 CE), with a mean carbon date of 1014, an assessment that tallies with the relative dating of artifact and structure types. A 2021 Nature study, using radiocarbon analysis of three separate tree ring samples and evidence from the anomaly in atmospheric 14C concentrations in the year 993, pinpointed 1021 as a date of Norse activity at L'Anse aux Meadows.
Anthropologist John Steinberg has suggested that the site may have been "occupied at least sporadically for perhaps 20 years". Eleanor Barraclough, a lecturer in medieval history and literature at Durham University, suggests the site was not a permanent settlement, but was instead a temporary boat repair facility. She notes there are no findings of burials, tools, agriculture or animal pens—suggesting the inhabitants abandoned the site in an orderly fashion. According to a 2019 PNAS study, there may have been Norse activity in L'Anse aux Meadows for as long as a century.
There is no way of knowing how many people lived at the site at any given time; archaeological evidence of the dwellings suggests it had the capacity of supporting 30 to 160 people. The entire population of Greenland at the time was about 2,500, meaning that the L'Anse aux Meadows site was less than 10 percent of the Norse settlement on Greenland. As Julian D. Richards notes: "It seems highly unlikely that the Norse had sufficient resources to construct a string of such settlements."