Where are the Vikings from?
Indice
Kuitems wasn’t looking for the prettiest pieces. Along with Michael Dee, a radiocarbon dating expert at the same university, they were looking for sites to test a new dating method that relies on tree rings. To see if they could further pinpoint the age of L’Anse aux Meadows, Kuitems looked at four spruce and juniper logs that still had bark on them, all four of which had been felled and left near the Nordic elongated houses. “They’re really not artifacts or pieces crafted by the Vikings,” Kuitems says of his key samples; “they’re wood debris.”
The cosmic storm, along with a similar event in 775, left “spikes” that skewed the radiocarbon dating of the wood by nearly a century, a fact the researchers first identified in 2012. Identifiable only by comparing individual radiocarbon dates of a tree’s rings, the resulting anomaly creates a sort of time stamp on the tree rings. “When you get to the peaks the thing is clear,” says Dee, who led the new study.
Characteristics of the Vikings
“Before the Vikings, did other peoples cross the Atlantic to reach the New World? The dry answer is that they might have done so, but at least so far the evidence does not exist,” explains medievalist F. Donald Logan in his book “The Vikings in History” (CFE), while historian Manuel Velasco states the following in “A Brief History of the Vikings” (Nowtilus): “As much as it has been questioned, the arrival in Vinland (as the Vikings called the territory they discovered in America) is not so extraordinary. Their ships were the great engineering feat of their time. If they got as far as Iceland by crossing the entire Atlantic, how could they not get from Greenland to the northeast of present-day Canada?”
“The king talked about yet another island that had been discovered by many in that ocean. It is called Vinland because there in that country grow wild vines that produce excellent wine. There the plants that grow by themselves abound. I have learned this not from fantastic accounts but from reliable Danish reports”.
Send comments
The study examined wooden artifacts from a previously undated Viking settlement in Newfoundland, Canada, which provide the earliest known record of humans crossing the Atlantic to reach the Americas.
When the Vikings arrived at L’Anse aux Meadows, they cut trees with metal blades that were not made by the indigenous people living in the area at the time. The pieces of wood left in the settlement came from three different trees.
“The clear increase in carbon-14 production that occurred between 992 and 993 has been detected in tree ring archives around the world,” says Michael Dee, lead author of the study and associate professor of Isotopic Chronology at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands.
This date suggests that this is the earliest known presence of Europeans on the continent before Christopher Columbus, as well as the earliest evidence of all human migration and exploration that the Atlantic had been crossed, Dee said.
As far as the Vikings went
Map showing the area of Scandinavian settlements in the 8th (dark red), 9th (red) and 10th (orange) centuries; yellow shows areas conquered by the Normans in the 11th century and green shows areas subject to Viking raids.
A depiction of Vikings abducting a woman. Viking men often abducted foreign women, for marriage or concubinage, from lands they had plundered. Illustrated by the French painter Évariste Vital Luminais in the 19th century.
Another idea is that the Viking population had outstripped the agricultural potential of their homeland. This may have been true in western Norway, where there were few land reserves, but it is unlikely that the rest of Scandinavia that was experiencing famine.[22] On the other hand.
On the other hand, some scholars propose that Viking expansion was driven by a population pyramid effect: since the eldest son of a family usually inherited the entire family estate, younger sons had to seek their fortune by emigrating or participating in raids. Peter Sawyer suggests that most Vikings emigrated because of the lure of owning more land rather than the need to own land. [23]