Exactly 1,000 years ago, some of the first known European visitors were living, eating and chopping down trees off a small bay on the northern end of Newfoundland. These Norse seafarers didn’t etch a date into a tree or leave a rune stone during their temporary foray in the Americas.
But we now know for certain they were really there in A.D. 1021, thanks to a solar storm that occurred about a quarter century before they used local trees to build at at a Viking settlement called L’Anse aux Meadows. “We know that in 1021 somebody was cutting down this wood,” says Birgitta Wallace, a retired archaeologist with Parks Canada who still works at the archaeological site at L’Anse aux Meadows.
L’Anse aux Meadows has fascinated historians and archaeologists for years since it was excavated in 1961. The settlement was clearly of Viking origin, pushing the date for the first Europeans to reach the Americas centuries earlier than 1492, when Christopher Columbus touched land in the Bahamas.
