Academic Reading — Test 26

Reading passage

At the northern tip of the island of Newfoundland, in what is now Canada, lies a windswept stretch of grassland and bog known as L'Anse aux Meadows. To the casual visitor it might appear an unremarkable coastal landscape, yet it holds a distinction that no other site in the Americas can claim. It is the only confirmed location where Europeans built dwellings and lived before the voyages of Christopher Columbus. The remains found here demonstrate that Norse seafarers, commonly called Vikings, reached the shores of North America around the year 1000, roughly five centuries before the better-known European expeditions of the late fifteenth century. For a long time the existence of such a settlement was a matter of speculation rather than fact. Medieval Icelandic texts known as the sagas described voyages westward from Greenland to a place the Norse named Vinland, a territory said to be rich in timber, grapes and salmon. These stories were treasured as literature, but historians could not agree whether they recorded genuine events or were merely imaginative tales. The decisive breakthrough came in 1960, when the Norwegian explorer Helge Ingstad and his wife, the archaeologist Anne Stine Ingstad, identified a series of low, grass-covered mounds near the small fishing village of L'Anse aux Meadows. Guided in part by a local resident who pointed out the unusual ridges, the couple recognised that the shapes resembled the ruins of Norse buildings they had seen in Greenland and Iceland. Excavations carried out during the following years uncovered the outlines of eight timber-framed structures, their walls originally built from turf laid over a wooden skeleton. Among them were three large halls that would have served as living quarters, together with smaller buildings used as workshops. The most significant discoveries were the objects that proved the builders were Norse rather than indigenous. Archaeologists found a bronze cloak pin of a type worn in Scandinavia, a soapstone spindle whorl used in spinning thread, and, crucially, evidence of iron working. A small smithy contained slag and the remains of a furnace where bog iron had been smelted to produce nails and rivets. No native peoples of the region worked iron at that time, so this evidence pointed unmistakably to European visitors. The settlement does not appear to have been a permanent colony. The buildings show few signs of the repairs that long occupation would require, and the quantity of domestic refuse is modest. Most scholars now believe the site functioned as a base camp from which the Norse explored and gathered resources further south, returning to it between expeditions. The discovery of three butternuts, the fruit of a tree that does not grow as far north as Newfoundland, supports this interpretation, for it indicates that the inhabitants travelled to warmer regions where such trees flourished. How long the Norse remained at L'Anse aux Meadows is uncertain, but the occupation was probably brief, lasting perhaps no more than a decade or two before the site was abandoned. Several reasons have been suggested for this abandonment. The Norse population of Greenland, from which the expeditions set out, was small and could not easily spare people for distant ventures. The journey across the open ocean was long and dangerous, and the rewards may not have justified the effort and risk. There is also evidence that relations with the indigenous inhabitants, whom the sagas call Skraelings, were often hostile, and sustained conflict would have made a permanent presence difficult to maintain. Whatever the precise combination of factors, the Norse withdrew, and knowledge of their achievement faded into legend. Today L'Anse aux Meadows is protected as a national historic site and was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1978, the first cultural site to receive that status. Reconstructed turf buildings now stand near the original foundations, allowing visitors to imagine the daily life of the settlers. The significance of the place extends far beyond its modest physical remains. It provides the only universally accepted archaeological proof that the two halves of the globe were first joined by human contact not in 1492 but nearly five hundred years earlier, achieved by a handful of determined travellers in open wooden boats.