The site of L'Anse aux Meadows, located on the northern tip of modern day Newfoundland in Canada, is a confirmed pre-Columbian Norse site. A pair of archaeologists, Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad, suspected tales like that of The Saga of Erik the Red described a Norse settlement in the Americas. Their suspicious eventually led them to L'Anse aux Meadows, where excavations throughout the 1960s eventually led to the discovery of Norse style building foundations, metal tools, and wooden artifacts dating to about 1000 CE.

The settlement itself, however, was fairly small and (in a historical sense) transitory, with the site being occupied by no more than 100 people and probably lasting only a few years. Davis et al. (1988) noted:

The temporary nature of the settlement is indicated by the paucity of artifacts, the lack of extensive middens, and the absence of burials. Only one generation of buildings is evident. The settlement was devoted to boat repair. Nails and rivets, worked from local bog iron, are the most numerous artifacts. Most of the wooden artifacts are consistent with boat repair. The pollen record indicated no large scale or long-term impact on the local and regional vegetation (p.62).

The transitory nature of the site, combined with references in the sagas to grapes and the presence of butternut squash remains (neither actually growing in northern Newfoundland), have led to the hypothesis that L'Anse aux Meadows was actually a stop-over for forays further south. As such, there has been decades of speculation about other Norse sites further down coast, but, to date, none have been conclusively found.

Regardless of possible other sites, L'Anse aux Meadows was a short-lived experiment. Though there's no conclusive proof as to why the site was so quickly abandoned, various theories include a worsening climate (the area was settled during a warm period), conflict with indigenous peoples (fights with "skraelings" are mention in the sagas), and/or the site simply being far removed from the main core of Norse culture and trade. Newfoundland is quite a ways from Greenland, which was already the far edge of the Norse world.

We get a lot of questions about the possibility of disease introduction via this pre-Columbian Norse settlement, but seeing as how major Afro-Eurasian epidemic diseases had yet to reach Iceland at this time, this is a moot point. There is a FAQ section though.

Ref:

• Davis, McAndrews, Wallace 1988 Paleoenvironment and the Archaeological Record at the L'Anse aux Meadows Site, Newfoundland Geoarchaeology 3(1)

• Wallace 2003 The Norse in Newfoundland: L'Anse aux Meadows and Vinland. Newfoundland and Labrador Studies 19(1)

• Wallace 2009 L'Anse Aux Meadows, Leif Eriksson's Home in Vinland. Journal of the North Atlantic 2(SP2)