Vinland Vikings and — Tree Rings?
It is well known that the Vikings, including Leif "Lucky" Erikson, included North America in their travels around 1000 A.D. My Scandinavian ancestors were a rowdy, restless bunch. Vikings took a notion to explore and set up camps in Iceland and Greenland. They went on to North America and named the place they homesteaded Vinland . Records from Labrador were retrieved, but there was plenty of disagreement among scholars about the timing of Viking journeys. Surprisingly, tree rings helped nail down the date. Viking ship Lofotr , Flickr / Runar Storeide , posted by Geir Are Johansen ( CC BY-SA 2.0 ) Although they never found Spam, the salmon fishing and grape growing were better on the east coast of North America. A couple of ancient Icelandic texts are referred to as the Vinland Sagas, but they were not firsthand accounts of the explorations and commutes. Strangely, dendrochronology and radiocarbon dating were used in conjunction with other forensic (historical) and empirical ...