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The House of Israel

Ancient Site in Newfoundland But they were also farmers and herders at home
and no less sophisticated in arts and invention
Offers Clues to Vikings in than other medieval Europeans.
America
They were successful ship builders who engaged
in ever-widening trade, east to Russia and south
L'ANSE AUX MEADOWS, Newfoundland, to Rome and Baghdad. In their Iceland colony at
May 4 -- A spring snow fell all night and all day the end of the 10th century, these people created
and buried the land down to water's edge. Drifts the first democratic parliament. Their further
piled high against the walls of the sod houses. western expansion brought about the first
The mind's eye could see the place as it was tenuous contact between the Old World and the
1,000 years ago when Vikings, led by Leif New.
Ericson, first wintered here while exploring the
coasts of a country they called Vinland. These new interpretations of the Vikings and
their Norse descendants are illustrated in an
exhibition, "Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga,"
Here, at the northern tip of Newfoundland, is
what archaeologists agree is the first and still which opened recently at the National Museum
only authentic site of Viking settlement in North of Natural History in Washington and will run
America, 500 years before the voyages of through Aug. 13. It will then move to the
Columbus. The ruins of eight houses and American Museum of Natural History in
workshops, some with their thick walls and Manhattan in October.
pitched roofs meticulously restored, will be a
focus for this year's millennial commemoration Recent research is described in detail in the
of all things Viking. exhibition's elaborate companion book,
published by the Smithsonian Press, and a new
"This settlement has led us to Vinland, at last," translation of the Norse sagas has been issued,
said Dr. Birgitta Linderoth Wallace, an appropriately, by Viking Press.
archaeologist with Parks Canada who has studied
the site for years. Dr. William W. Fitzhugh, the exhibition's
principal curator, said that as travelers and
traders the Vikings were "catalysts that
The excavations have not only confirmed
elements of truth in the sagas of the seafaring transformed European societies," and as
adventurers from Norway and the rest of explorers they took the first steps to "reconnect
Scandinavia who crossed the North Atlantic and, human populations into a single global system."
for a brief time, tasted the berries and grapes in They were presumably the first Europeans to lay
North America, their Vinland. They have also eyes on descendants of the people who had long
inspired new scholarship revising the legendary before migrated into the Americas, where one
image of the Vikings. branch of humanity had lived unknown to the
other.

Yes, they were feared warriors who plundered
the coasts of Europe and the British Isles, Sometime at the end of the 10th century, halfway
especially between 750 and about 1050; the term between today and the birth of Christ and Rome's
Viking, strictly speaking, refers only to men who heyday, Ericson set out from the Greenland
went on raids. colony in a sturdy longboat with a soaring prow
and a large square sail. Another seafarer, drifting