While taking sediment cores from a nearby peat bog to help study the
ancient environment, archaeologist Paul Ledger and his colleagues
discovered a previously unknown chapter in the story of L’Anse aux
Meadows. Buried about 35cm (14 inches) beneath the modern surface, they
found signs of an ancient occupancy: a layer of trampled mud littered
with woodworking debris, charcoal, and the remains of plants and
insects.
Based on its depth and the insect species present, the layer looks like
similar surfaces from the edges of Viking Age Norse settlements in
Greenland and Iceland. But organic material from the layer radiocarbon dated to the late 1100s or early 1200s, long after the Norse were thought to have left Newfoundland for good.
2 comments:
Historians do not know when Europeans started fishing the Grand Banks - fishermen don't reveal their best spots. It's very likely that the Norse, who always ate a lot of cod, noticed the rich fishing there, and quite possible that they didn't abandon it when they abandoned their settlement. But they would need to camp on the shore and dry the fish before heading back. And so would any British, Irish, or Basque fishermen who learned about it.
This would explain why Columbus was so sure that the world wasn't as big as everyone else thought The usual estimates were a diameter around 24,000 miles, and perhaps 12,000 miles across Eurasia, leaving about 12,000 miles from Spain to the (East) Indies. Everyone presumed that stretch was without land. With the ships available, this was an utterly impossible distance. The sailors would die of thirst, they'd die of starvation, and if they managed to find sources of these, the ships would fall apart unless they found a beach to pull them out of the water for repairs.
I think he learned that fishing boats were heading west to northwest in the Atlantic, and coming back loaded with dried cod in a few months - which meant they'd found both fishing grounds and land on the other side. He assumed that land was Japan, so it was only a few thousand miles across to China or the East Indies, and his ships could make that distance.
A lot of it is speculation but still a good read.
https://www.amazon.com/1421-Year-China-Discovered-America/dp/0061564893/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?keywords=1412+china&qid=1563718429&s=gateway&sr=8-1
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