Breakthrough Space Discovery Of Ancient Viking Site

A potential new Viking site has been found by archaeologists from...space! This spot in Newfoundland, Canada, highlights a site that is located at the farthest point in the south that the Vikings have conquered and known to settle in.

Archaeologists hit upon the site last summer at Point Rosee, by examining infrared satellite images picking up manmade shapes that were camouflaged by vegetation. It led to the finding of "a fire-cracked stone and some mangled scraps of iron."

Images were shot by cameras that were situated 400 miles above the earth. The team scanned for a number of clues that could point to the site, such as discolored soil and vegetation changes.

This method has led archaeologist Sarah Parcak to discover 17 pyramids, 1,000 tombs and approximately 3,000 forgotten settlements.

"I am absolutely thrilled," she said of the find. "Typically in archaeology, you only ever get to write a footnote in the history books, but what we seem to have at Point Rosee may be the beginning of an entirely new chapter."

If the Viking habituation is confirmed, it will turn out to be the second site discovered in North America, even as the first one was found in 1960, just about 300 miles north in Canada.

"Either it's ... an entirely new culture that looks exactly like the Norse and we don't know what it is, or it's the westernmost Norse site that's ever been discovered," she said.

Even as the team looks for some leading signs to confirm some theories, Parcak is confident that the new site is the westernmost Norse site that has been found.

This finding might change the history of Vikings in North America, proving the point that the existence of the Norse was brief here, and this was merely one trip of a society that was "seafaring."

On the other hand, it might also prove the opposite---that the Vikings stayed here longer than believed.

"With just one site, it's easy to explain it away," Parcak said. "But if there's two, there might be more. There could potentially be a number of other sites out there that haven't been found."

"For a long time, serious North Atlantic archaeologists have largely ignored the idea of looking for Norse sites in coastal Canada because there was no real method for doing so," said Douglas Bolender, an archaeologist who specializes in Norse settlements. "If Sarah Parcak can find one Norse site using satellites, then there's a reasonable chance that you can use the same method to find more, if they exist. If Point Rosee is Norse, it may open up coastal Canada to a whole new era of research."