Aurora borealis (northern lights) over Sweden.
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The discovery in the 1960s of a Viking settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows on the northern tip of the island of Newfoundland in Canada is one of the most striking, if little-heralded, findings in the history of European historical research and archaeology. The staggering accomplishment of Norwegian explorer Helge Ingstad and his archaeologist wife Anne Stine Ingstad is far less known than it should be.
The Ingstads furnished the first conclusive physical proof of Norse settlement on the mainland of North America around 1000 AD, as recorded in the Saga of Erik the Red and the Saga of the Greenlanders, written two hundred years after the events took place. (more…)