Norse settlement of North America

The Norse settlement of North America, including Greenland, began in the late 10th century AD and lasted for about 500 years. Further west, the evidence is more limited. Only one Canadian settlement has been confirmed: L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland. There is evidence of Norse activity in other parts of Canada, but no trace of the long-term farming colonies found in Greenland. In the present-day United States, there are no confirmed remains. Claimed US discoveries are hoaxes or mistaken identifications.

Settlements on Greenland's western coast peaked at a population of 2,000 to 3,000, sustained by pastoral farming on scattered coastal fjords and exports, mainly of walrus ivory, to Europe. For timber and iron, colonists launched expeditions into the Canadian Arctic and likely into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. L'Anse aux Meadows, dating to around 1021 AD, was capable of housing between 30 and 160 people. Its lack of stables, farms, and cemeteries indicates it probably functioned as an overwintering base and ship-repair station rather than a permanent community. Wood fragments and butternuts in the Norse remains were from plants not native to Newfoundland, suggesting expeditions to the continental mainland.

The Norse presence on the mainland was short-lived. Scholars suggest that the population pressure that drove colonists from Europe to Iceland and then from Iceland to Greenland never manifested in the sparsely populated Greenlandic colonies. By the 15th century, the Greenland colonies themselves were gradually abandoned due to economic hardship, isolation, lower seal populations, the climatic cooling of the Little Ice Age, and sea level rise in the fjords.

The primary sources for descriptions of these voyages are the Vinland sagas, heroic sagas first written down in Iceland centuries after the events. After European exploration of North America began following the Voyages of Christopher Columbus, it was debated whether the lands from the sagas (Helluland, Markland, and Vinland) corresponded to real places. By the mid-20th century, this debate had produced a range of scholarly and antiquarian theories to explain and locate Vinland. Additionally, nationalist, pseudoscientific, and pseudohistorical theories have emerged around the sagas over the centuries. In the 1960s, archaeologists found Norse remains on the northern tip of Newfoundland. No other Norse settlements have been conclusively identified in Canada or elsewhere on the North American mainland. Possible evidence of Norse contact with the Indigenous peoples comes from a genetic lineage now carried by some Icelanders, likely introduced by a Native American.