Evidence for Vikings in Canada Grows with Surprising Find of Ironworking Site in Newfoundland

Ancient Origins

Experts are “cautiously optimistic” that a hearth where people worked iron about 1,000 years ago in Newfoundland, Northeast Canada, was the site of a Viking settlement, says National Geographic.

This site, at Point Rosee, is the second where there is strong evidence of Viking settlements in the New World. The first, at L’Anse aux Meadows, also in Newfoundland but hundreds of miles north of Point Rosee, was discovered in 1960.

The hearth at Point Rosee is surrounded by the remnants of a rectangular turf wall, says the National Geographic article announcing the find. The hearth itself is just a boulder with a depression in front of it, surrounded by smaller rocks.
But in the hearth’s shallow pit archaeologists found 28 pounds of slag—a byproduct of iron roasting, the step in the ironworking process before smelting and forging. The smith burns and dries the ore in the fire so it doesn’t explode in the forge.

A blackened rock said to be the hearth. Slag was found around the boulder. (Dan Snow)

Scholars do not believe natives of this area in the 11th century were working with iron, though there was metalworking in the New World before Europeans arrived.
The Point Rosee Viking site is the southernmost and westernmost location where evidence of ironworking has been discovered in the Americas before Columbus arrived.

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The method of the discovery is noteworthy, too. “Space archaeologist” and National Geographic fellow Sarah Parcak, working with a $1 million TED prize, used satellite imagery to find evidence of human activity in the landscape. She usually studies satellite imagery of Egypt to find signs of ancient human activity there but recently expanded her horizons.
At Point Rosee, she saw a faint difference in the vegetation in the form of a rectangle—possibly a structure. Investigations on-site showed the turf walls and hearth.
The site has bog iron, natural deposits of the metal that would have been very attractive to Vikings. It has other features, too, that may have attracted the wandering Norsemen.
The southern coast of the Point Rosee peninsula has few submerged rocks, allowing beaching of ships or anchoring in shallow water.
There was good farm land, plenty of good fishing and a lot of game they could have hunted, National Geographic says. Other things that may have attracted the Vikings include turf for constructing houses and chert for making stone tools.

The researchers found what they believe to be evidence of Norse grass walls at their dig site in Point Rosee in Newfoundland. (BBC)

Parcak told The Washington Post that there is nothing that “absolutely confirms the site as Norse.” She said: “This is going to take years of careful excavation, and it’s going to be controversial. It raises a lot more questions than it answers. But, that’s what any new discovery is supposed to do.”
National Geographic says the most valuable resource for the site was the iron, which formed as rivers carried ore from the mountains into wetlands, where bacteria leached iron from water and left behind the metal.

A lump of what the researchers say is bog iron ore. It is one of the samples being tested from the possible Viking site at Point Rosee. (Greg Mumford)

Instead of mining, the Vikings usually harvested iron from peat bogs, and they needed a lot of it for the nails they used to construct the ships they roamed much of the world in. One reconstructed Norse longship needed 7,000 nails—880 pounds (400 kilograms) of iron, which would have required a blacksmith to heat and smelt 30 tons of raw iron ore.

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Archaeologists say the structure found at Point Rosee is unlike native construction and also unlike the construction of Basque fishermen and whalers who visited 16th century Newfoundland. And the only people who would have been working with bog iron were the Vikings, Doug Bolender, an archaeologist and expert in Viking settlements, told National Geographic.
Bolender says there is documentary evidence for the Norse in North America:

“The sagas suggest a short period of activity and a very brief and failed colonization attempt. L’Anse aux Meadows fits well with that story but is only one site. Point Rosee could reinforce that story or completely change it if the dating is different from L’Anse aux Meadows. We could end up with a much longer period of Norse activity in the New World. A site like Point Rosee has the potential to reveal what that initial wave of Norse colonization looked like not only for Newfoundland but for the rest of the North Atlantic.”

L’Anse aux Meadows showed the sagas weren’t entirely fictional, National Geographic says. The sagas and now even more physical evidence show the Norse probably did venture west from Europe and their Greenland settlements.

Archaeologists conducted small-scale dig to search for initial evidence that the site merits further study. (Robert Clark, National Geographic)

Other evidence of Vikings in the New World include a copper coin and other artifacts of the 11th century found in the U.S. state of Maine. Scholars have speculated the things were obtained by natives trading with Norse people.
Ms. Parcak’s documentary film Vikings Unearthed will be broadcast on American public television the week of April 3.
Featured Image: Artistic representation of a Viking ship. (CC BY 3.0) Detail of Newfoundland from an 1858 map of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and Prince Edward Island. (Public Domain)
By Mark Miller

More Evidence that Ancient Romans May Have Made It to Oak Island, Canada

Ancient Origins

What appears to be an ancient Roman sword has been found off the East Coast of Canada, but it is just one of several indications that Romans may have been there around the 2nd century or earlier. That’s at least 800 years before the Vikings landed, which is currently believed to be the first contact between the Old World and the New World.
The sword was discovered off the coast of Oak Island, Nova Scotia, during investigations into local lore of treasure buried on the island, conducted as part of the immensely popular History Channel show, “The Curse of Oak Island.”

A map showing Oak Island, Nova Scotia, Canada. (Norman Einstein/CC BY-SA)

J. Hutton Pulitzer worked as a consultant on the show for two seasons and he appeared in the show’s second season. His team began investigations on the island eight years before the History Channel arrived in 2013.
Pulitzer has given Epoch Times exclusive information about new discoveries on the island that, along with the sword, support his theory of a Roman presence.
Pulitzer is a well-known entrepreneur and prolific inventor. Many remember him as the host of the “NetTalkLive” TV show, an early Internet IPO titan, and the inventor of the CueCat (an idea that attracted major investors; it involved a device people could use to scan codes, similar to today’s QR-codes). His company famously went down in flames during the dot-com bubble burst, but Pulitzer’s patents live on today in 11.9 billion mobile devices.
A little over a decade ago, he turned his sights to his passion for lost history and, as an independent researcher and author, he has been working with experts in many fields, to investigate the mysteries of Oak Island.
His theory about an ancient Roman presence on the island has already met with some resistance, as it defies the currently accepted theory that the Vikings were the first Old World explorers to make it to the New World. He asks, however, that historians and archaeologists approach the evidence objectively, without a preconceived idea that the Romans did not make it to the New World.

J. Hutton Pulitzer. (Courtesy of J. Hutton Pulitzer/InvestigatingHistory.com)

The Oak Island sword’s authenticity has been verified by the best available tests, according to Pulitzer (Epoch Times was given access to the testing data).
The sword alone isn’t evidence however that the Romans were on Oak Island themselves. It is possible that someone only a few hundred years ago was sailing near the island and had in his possession this Roman antique. It may have been later explorers who left it there, not the Romans.
But other artifacts also found on-site provide a context that is difficult to dismiss, Pulitzer said.
Other artifacts his team has studied include a stone with an ancient language connected to the Roman Empire, burial mounds in the ancient Roman style, crossbow bolts reportedly confirmed by U.S. government labs to have come from ancient Iberia (encompassed by the Roman Empire), coins connected to the Roman Empire, and more.

The Sword

An X-ray fluorescence (XRF) analyzer confirmed the metal composition of the sword matches that of Roman votive swords. XRF testing uses radiation to excite the atoms in the metal to see how the atoms vibrate. Researchers can thus detect which metals are present. Among the materials detected in the sword are zinc, copper, lead, tin, arsenic, gold, silver, and platinum.
These findings are consistent with ancient Roman metallurgy. Modern bronze uses silicon as the primary alloying element, but silicon is absent in the sword, Pulitzer said.

J. Hutton Pulitzer holding an XRF machine. (Courtesy of J. Hutton Pulitzer/InvestigatingHistory.org)

A few similar swords have been found in Europe. This model of sword has a depiction of Hercules on the hilt and it is believed to be a ceremonial sword given by Emperor Commodus to outstanding gladiators and warriors. The Museum of Naples made replicas of one of these swords in its collection, leading some to wonder whether the Oak Island weapon is a replica.
Though the replicas match the Oak Island sword in appearance, Pulitzer said the tests on its composition have 100 percent confirmed it is not a cast-iron replica. The sword also contains a lode stone that is oriented due north and could thus aid navigation, which is absent in the replicas.
History Channel producers obtained the sword from a local resident, which had been passed down in his family since the 1940s. It was originally found while illegally scalloping and it was pulled up in their rake. The family never told anybody about the discovery until the recent flurry of interest in Oak Island because, in addition to facing penalties for breaking the law, illegal scalloping is frowned upon and considered taboo in the small community.
By Tara MacIsaac , Epoch Times

400-Year-Old Crucifix Found by Canadian Student

by Amanda Onion

The small copper crucifix found at the Colony of Avalon site.

Colony of Avalon Foundation

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Artifacts Revealed in Tomb of King Henry VII: Photos

     

It is tiny in size — measuring only 1.1 inches in width — and its top is broken, but a 400- year-old copper crucifix found at Newfoundland's Avalon Peninsula earlier in July has big historical significance, according to historians. It symbolizes an early dream of religious freedom in North America.
The artifact is clearly a Catholic item, featuring a simple representation of Christ on the front and the Virgin Mary and Christ Child on the back. Yet it was found in a predominantly English settlement.
Back in England, its owner would could be fined, imprisoned or put to death for practicing Catholic faith, according to Barry Gaulton, Field Director of the Colony of Avalon and Associate Professor of Archaeology at Memorial University of Newfoundland.

"The Catholic iconography is unmistakable. As with all archaeological discoveries, the context in which the artifact was found tells us its story," Gaulton said in a release.
The story the crucifix tells is that of the dream of the Newfoundland's settler, Sir George Calvert. Calvert was an English lord who helped settle the colony around 1628. His vision was to create a community where all Christians could enjoy freedom of religion without fear of persecution. He was one of the early pioneers of religious freedom in North America.
Just the presence of the Catholic crucifix reveals that Calvert's vision had started to take shape. The small cross was found by Anna Sparrow, an undergraduate student at Memorial University in St. John’s.

As for who the crucifix belonged to, the archaeologists are not sure. They say it could have belonged to one of the craftsmen working on Calvert's house, or the colony's second governor, the Catholic gentleman Sir Arthur Aston, or even George Calvert himself.
An archaeologist's job can be painstaking, tedious work, involving careful excavation, delicate sifting and gentle brushing. For Sparrow, the thrill of finding such a significant artifact, made all the hard work worthwhile.
As she said in a press release, "There is so much time, effort and patience involved in excavation, that to find something with such historical significance is incredible."

http://news.discovery.com/history/archaeology/400-year-old-crucifix-found-by-canadian-student-140723.htm

Pocket Pets? Mini Hedgehog and Tiny Tapir Fossils Found in Canada

By Stephanie Pappas,

An artist's reconstruction shows a newfound tapiroid drinking in the shallows of an Eocene lake in British Columbia, with the small, newly identified, proto-hedgehog in the foreground. Credit: Illustration © by Julius T. Csotonyi

A miniature hedgehog smaller than a mouse and a pint-sized tapir are the first mammals ever found at a fossil site in British Columbia known for exquisitely preserved plants, insects and fish.
The new fossils date back about 50 million to 53 million years ago, to the warm Eocene Epoch, when British Columbia's climate was similar to that of Portland, Oregon, today. These are the first two mammals ever found at the dig site in Driftwood Canyon Provincial Park, and they fill in a gap the size of Canada.
"We know a lot about this time interval in Wyoming and Colorado. We know a bit about it in the high Arctic," said study researcher Jaelyn Eberle, the curator of fossil vertebrates at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History. "But we know nothing about what was going on in between."
Fossil surprise
Scientists made this gap-filling discovery by accident. Study researcher David Greenwood of Brandon University in Manitoba and his colleagues were quarrying for plant fossils in the lakebed shales of Driftwood Canyon Provincial Park, when a student cracked open a rock and found a miniscule bone inside. [See Images of the New Hedgehog & Tapir Fossils]
"When they looked at it under a hand lens, they realized it was a fossil vertebrate," Eberle told Live Science. The bone turned out to be a partial jaw and some teeth belonging to a previously unknown species of hedgehog, dubbed Silvacola acares, from the words for "tiny forest dweller" in Greek and Latin.
This little hedgehog would have been only about 2 inches (5 centimeters) long, smaller than a house mouse. Its molars were a mere millimeter (0.04 inches) long, so small that paleontologists declined to chip the animal's tiny jaw from the rock surrounding it. Instead, the study researchers sent the whole hunk to Penn State University to be scanned with high-resolution computed tomography (CT), a technique that yields virtual slices of the interior of an object.
The tapir was equally surprising. Greenwood and his colleagues found it in coal-rich rock beds in the park, the site of a swampy spot in the Eocene and a rare place to find vertebrate fossils.
"It was just kind of, 'Whoa, not expected,'" Eberle said.
Balmy British Columbia
The tapir is a species of the Heptodon genus, which is part of a group that is the oldest in the tapir lineage. Species of Heptodon would have been about half the size of modern tapirs, which weigh around 330 to 660 pounds (150 to 300 kilograms). (During the time these creatures lived, other animals were pipsqueaks, too — the earliest known horse, which started out evolutionarily the size of a mini schnauzer, shrunk to housecat size during the warmest part of the early Eocene.) Heptodon probably ate leaves, which makes sense as it shows up in many forested Eocene environments, Eberle said.
The early Eocene was a steamy time on Earth. The breakup of the supercontinent Pangea came with no small amount of volcanic activity, which released billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. These emissions, among other greenhouse gases, heated the globe by about 11 degrees Fahrenheit (6 degrees Celsius) over roughly 20,000 years. The areas that now comprise Colorado and Wyoming hosted tropical rainforests, and ferns and trees thrived in the Arctic.
"This is the height of global warming since the extinction of the dinosaurs, so it's the time interval that people look at a lot for trying to understand global warming today," Eberles said.
A forest of mixed conifer and broadleaf trees carpeted Northern British Columbia, with palms and spruce living side-by-side, Eberle said. It would have rained often and frozen rarely, not unlike the climate in Portland today, 700 miles (1,126 kilometers) to the south.
"British Columbia is adding a new dimension to that time interval," Eberle said. "Not everything was hot and tropical."
The researchers reported their findings today (July 8) in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

http://www.livescience.com/46700-tapir-hedgehog-fossils-discovered.html

Fossils of dinosaur-era forest fire discovered in Canada

By Megan Gannon

In the badlands of southern Saskatchewan, Canada, scientists discovered evidence of a 66-million-year-old forest fire locked in stone.
Fossilized plants found on top of the layers of ancient charcoal show that forests bounced back from wildfires during the last days of the dinosaurs much like they do today, the new study found.

 

Dry, treeless grasslands cover much of southern Saskatchewan today, but 66 million years ago, the region was covered in swampy, lowland forests. It was perhaps six times rainier and 18-26 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than it is today, the researchers said. The area may have resembled North America's Pacific Coast, with forest canopies dominated by towering sequoias and a diversity of smaller plants growing closer to the ground. [See Photos of Fossils from the Ancient Forest]
The ancient forests also suffered the occasional fire. Researchers from McGill University, in Montreal, and the Saskatchewan Museum found evidence of one of those blazes among fossilized plants at Grasslands National Park, in a geologic layer known as the Frenchman Formation (so named because it's exposed around the Frenchman River).
This rock deposit is a natural time capsule from the Late Cretaceous Period, just before a mass extinction wiped out the dinosaurs. In this layer of stone and dirt, scientists have discovered the fossils of ancient turtles, crocodiles, croc-like champsosauruses, as well as dinosaurs, including Tyrannosaurus rex and the three-horned Triceratops horridus.
The scientists compared the fossils at Grasslands to another deposit without any fire disturbance, located about 125 miles away in a valley called Chambery Coulee. Differences in the type of plants found at both sites reveal how the prehistoric landscape recovered after a fire.
Similar to patterns of regrowth seen today, the fossils from Grasslands showed that plants like alder, birch and sassafras started popping up in the early stages after the fire. Meanwhile, the fossils from Chambery Coulee told the scientists that sequoia and ginkgo would have been thriving in mature forests that hadn't been scorched by a blaze.
The researchers hope their findings and further study will help them understand the forest ecology and biodiversity in this region immediately before the dinosaurs fell.
"We won't be able to fully understand the extinction dynamics until we understand what normal ecological processes were going on in the background," study researcher Hans Larsson, of McGill University, said in a statement.http://www.foxnews.com/science/2014/06/06/fossils-dinosaur-era-forest-fire-discovered-in-canada/