Vinland

Vinland, Vineland, or Winland (Old Norse: Vínland hit góða, lit. 'Vinland the Good') was an area of coastal North America explored by Vikings. Leif Erikson landed there around AD 1000, nearly five centuries before the voyages of Christopher Columbus and John Cabot. The name appears in the Vinland sagas and describes a land beyond Greenland, Helluland, and Markland. Much of the geographical content of the sagas corresponds to present-day knowledge of transatlantic travel and North America. In 1960, Helge Ingstad and Anne Stine Ingstad discovered the remains of Norse buildings at L'Anse aux Meadows, on the northern tip of the island of Newfoundland. Before the discovery of archaeological evidence, Vinland was known only from the sagas and medieval historiography. The 1960 discovery further proved the pre-Columbian Norse exploration of mainland North America. Archaeologists found butternuts at L'Anse aux Meadows, which indicates voyages into the Gulf of Saint Lawrence as far as northeastern New Brunswick. L'Anse aux Meadows has been hypothesized to be the camp Straumfjörð mentioned in the Saga of Erik the Red.