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The Sagas | The Vineland Map | L'Anse Aux Meadows | What Happened

 The settlement which held forth the truth that the Viking Sagas were true and they had landed and settled in America. There had long been suspicions, belief and theories that the Viking sagas of Lief Eriksson and his brothers did in fact land somewhere along the coast of Canada or the U.S. and started the building of a settlement which would serve as the first Viking toehold on this bountiful new land. There were large lush forests with plenty of wood

 for Long boats, shelter, and all of the articles that the valuable lumber could supply. There was plenty of food in the form of cod in the oceans, seals and whales along the coast, moose and deer in the woods and beaver, salmon  and otter in the rivers and streams and berries and wild wheat in the fields.

In 1914 a Newfoundland historian named William A. Munn published a work in which he had used the Viking sagas to try and pinpoint the potential location of a Norse settlement in America. Like famous archeologists from the previous century who had

used Homer and the Iliad to locate the ancient city of Troy, Munn used the details of the Greenland Sagas to narrow down the scope of geographic possibilities and determine that Leif Eriksson's Vineland was at or near Pistolet Bay at the Northern tip of the island of Newfoundland.

By 1960 another dedicated archeologist appeared on the scene in Newfoundland. . Helge Ingstad, a Norwegian, had explored and surveyed to Northeast coast of the U.S. and the Maritimes in Canada and had determined from his findings and extensive analysis of the old Sagas that Vinland the good must be somewhere along the Northeastern coast of Newfoundland. In 1960 he conducted a careful survey of the North East coast of Newfoundland and determined a likly location where a Viking settlement may have been located. He returned the following year and in 1961 set about exclavating the area known as L'Anse Aux Meadows.