It’s almost as if the Vikings wanted to drive archeologists and historians nuts.
Starting more than a thousand years ago, they sailed all over the known world and then found a few worlds that hadn’t been known, at least to Europeans.
But after they did all this cool stuff, they didn’t bother to sell it. True, Twitter and Facebook weren’t options, but the Vikings didn’t even write anything down. As in, anything.
Don’t need no stinking writing.
They also didn’t leave much of anything behind. In contrast to most explorers and conquerors, who couldn’t wait to build monuments to themselves, the Vikings were more like Grateful Dead concertgoers. Leave nothing behind but footprints.
So here it is 800 or 1,000 or 1,300 years later, and we have almost no clues about some of the places where these guys sailed, maybe 500 years before Columbus.
Nova’s “Vikings Unearthed,” which airs Wednesday 4/6 at 9 p.m. ET on PBS (check local listings), doesn’t beat up on the Vikings for their inconsideration. It does explain in detail how painstaking the authentication process can become when a site is found where Vikings may have landed.
Specifically, this Nova follows a team of experts, including archaeologists Sarah Parcak and Douglas Bolender and historian Dan Snow (all at top), who have identified a site in southern Newfoundland where the Vikings may have landed a millennium or so ago.
It’s about 300 miles south of L’Anse aux Meadows, which lies at the northern tip of Newfoundland and some 50 years ago became the first North American site positively identified as a Viking settlement.
The vague but intriguing Vinland Sagas, which were written down by 13th century Icelandic monks from stories going back 300 years in Norse oral tradition, suggests the Vikings made more than one landing. Until now, there was no evidence where.
The findings in this Nova episode aren’t conclusive. They are promising. There is evidence, for instance, that someone on this site in medieval times had forged metal, which no North Americans were known to do.
The Vikings, conversely, were highly skilled in casting and employing iron, which they used for everything from swords to the nails that held their ships together.
This being a PBS show, it has a strong academic flavor, with detailed explanations of Viking culture. Naturally it emphasizes their reputation as plundering raiders who terrorized most of the people they dropped in on, but it notes that the Vikings also became skilled traders who, in some areas, settled down and coexisted peacefully with the natives.
Anything to escape those Scandinavian winters, apparently.
Their culture comes across as an intriguing mix of sophisticated and primitive. Their metalworking, shipbuilding and jewelcraft were advanced. Meanwhile, they lived in “longhouses,” windowless rectangles with thick walls of sod and fires burning at intervals along the floor.
On the modern end, “Vikings Unearthed” enthusiastically explains new imaging technology wherein a satellite 400 miles above the earth can detect an underground object no bigger than 10 inches.
That’s the system that found this potential new site, and needless to say, the archaeologists are salivating over its possibilities.
Almost as an incidental footnote, this Nova also notes something that could revise historical thinking about Native Americans.
Some of the Vikings who landed in Newfoundland left and never returned, because Native American warriors, who were apparently unimpressed with the Vikings’ military reputation, drove them out.
Since the common view of Native Americans is that they were overrun by Europeans and eventually lost pretty much everything, it’s heartening to hear that they seem to have repelled the first European invasion, buying themselves another 500 years before the next wave showed up.
That’s impressive. And so were the Vikings.