"In the early part of the 16th century, a Danish ship crossing the Atlantic was storm-driven far to the north of its course." "There, one day, the captain saw, rising above the horizon, a coast of bleak, snow-covered cliffs." "Greenland." "Avoiding the ice floes, the captain cautiously sailed up a vast fjord, which took them almost a whole day." "Hoping to refill their water barrels, the Danes had just launched a boat when some strange-looking figures appeared on the cliff top with weapons at the ready." "Eskimos." "The Danes decided that it would be more prudent to avoid them and land on an uninhabited island nearby." "There, the captain himself landed with six of his men." "They crossed the shore and went up onto a little plateau where, to their amazement, they came upon the ruins of several stone houses, obviously European-type farmhouses." "Although there were a number of these ruins, there was neither sound nor movement anywhere from man or beast." "Warily, the captain went into one of these houses, and in it he found a great, metal-studded chest." "He was just examining this when there was a sudden cry from one of his men." "With astonishment, the captain saw that the sailor had found the skeleton of a man dressed in European, woollen clothes." "Beside him lay a worn metal knife." "By chance, the Danes had stumbled upon the body of the last" "Norse Greenlander, the very end of a 500-year story, and one of the most remarkable attempts at colonisation in the history of the world." "Tonight is the first in a series of new programmes about man and his past." "It's about the Norse in America, a subject which has been with us for a very long time, but one that has come very much into the news recently because of the discovery of the Vinland Map," "a very controversial subject, and also the discovery of alleged remains of Norse settlements in Newfoundland." "I will try and tell this story, with the assistance of Magnus Magnusson, a journalist who is also well known as a translator of Icelandic sagas, and Gwyn Jones, scholar, novelist, short-story writer, who is now a professor of English at University College, Cardiff." "Now, the progress of the Vikings across the North Atlantic can be followed by the brief messages that have been carved in their strange alphabet, which we call runes, the ships they sailed in, the ruins of their homes and churches," "and the sad relics they have left in the lonely places of the North Atlantic." "But to start properly, we must first go to the Royal Library in Copenhagen with Magnus Magnusson." "The story really starts with this remarkable document here, one of the most treasured possessions in this Royal Library in Copenhagen." "It's a vellum manuscript book called Flateyjarbok, literally, The Flat Island Book, and it's the largest and handsomest of the 700 or so surviving vellum manuscripts of the saga literature of medieval Iceland." "In the two volumes, it's 450 pages long, and it's made out of 113 calf skins." "And it was made for a prosperous Icelandic farmer in the north of Iceland late in the 14th century, and it was treasured as a family heirloom for generations until it was presented to the King of Denmark for his library here in 1656." "Iceland was then a Danish colony." "Well, it's probably one of the most valuable Icelandic manuscripts in existence." "The Americans once wanted to borrow it for their World Fair at Chicago in 1893, and they offered to send a warship to Denmark to pick it up, and an armoured train to transport it across America, and to insure it for a sum of 1 million." "But even at that, the Danes didn't care to take the risk." "The reasons why the Americans wanted to borrow it so badly was because it contains, amongst much else saga material, the account of the Norse settlement of Greenland in the 10th century, and even more astonishingly, the story of the Norse discovery" "and attempted colonisation of North America a few years later, five centuries before Columbus." "HE READS ANCIENT ICELANDIC" "There it is in the crabbed, economic script of a medieval scribe." "There was a man called Herjolf Bardarson, he had a wife called Thorgerd, their son was called Bjarni." "Well, this man Bjarni," "Bjarni Herjolfsson, is credited with the achievement of having been the first European to discover America, in the year 985 or 986." "And some 15 years, and a page or two, later, he was followed there by Leif Ericson," "Leif the Lucky as he's called, who explored the countries that Bjarni had discovered, explored, in fact, America, and as the saga says, he called the country by its natural qualities, and called it Vinland." "Well, his story and the story of the men and women who followed him to Vinland and attempted to found a permanent Norse settlement there are told in this saga here, Groenlendinga saga, the saga of the Greenlanders," "which was written in Iceland, we think in the 12th century, and was copied into this handsome codex two centuries later." "But this isn't the only account of that remarkable adventure which has survived." "In another library in Copenhagen, the Arnamagnaean library at the University of Copenhagen, are another two medieval Icelandic manuscripts which have a direct bearing on our story." "All the manuscripts here were collected and brought to Denmark by an Icelandic scholar and antiquarian," "Arni Magnusson, early in the 18th century." "Actually, there were a lot more originally, but the library was burned down in the Great Fire of Copenhagen in 1728 and, ironically enough, several of the priceless manuscripts Arni Magnusson had brought here from Iceland for safe keeping were destroyed in the blaze." "But of the ones that escaped, two codices, these two, have a special interest for us." "Hauksbok and Skalholtsbok." "They contain the other major saga account of the discovery and attempted colonisation of Vinland." "This one, Hauksbok, is a collection of sagas and other learned material compiled early in the 14th century." "It's in very much worse condition than Flateyjarbok in the Royal Library." "Its pages blackened by smoke and damp, sometimes the text is almost illegible." "The other manuscript, Skalholtsbok, is clearer." "This one was compiled about a century later." "Both of them contain a version of Eiriks Saga, the saga of Erik the Red, the man who colonised Greenland late in the 10th century and who was the father of Leif the Lucky, the man who first explored Vinland." "And it was Leif the Lucky who was the first European to encounter Red Indians in America, natives whom he and his fellow Icelanders contemptuously called skraelings, a word that just means wretches." "And yet, according to the sagas, it was these same "wretches", these skraelings, who ultimately discouraged and put an end to the first determined attempt to found a permanent European settlement in America," "500 years before Christopher Columbus." "How much credence can be given to these medieval Icelandic sagas?" "In the past, many people dismissed them as fiction, as being fables, rather like the visionary Medieval Irish and Welsh voyage fables." "But now we know better." "We now realise that these are dramatic narratives based on real historical themes." "There is now a formidable mass of evidence, both documentary and archaeo... archaeological, I knew I would get that wrong, to suggest that this is indeed the correct interpretation." "Indeed, there is nothing surprising about this Norse discovery of America, even though the first sighting of it appears to have been accidental, because, given the circumstances of the age, the Norse discovery of America was the logical outcome of the great" "Viking migrations that spilled out of Scandinavia in the early Middle Ages." "The range and scope of this Viking expansion were prodigious." "The first Norwegian raids on Britain started late in the 8th century, and in the 9th century Danish Vikings joined in, making increasingly organised attacks on England and the Continent." "France and Spain suffered in their turn, and the Vikings even went through the Straits of Gibraltar and plundered Morocco and the Balearic Islands and Italy." "Meanwhile, the Swedes of the Baltic penetrated northern Russia, then struck overland to the headwaters of the great rivers and sailed south down them to the Caspian Sea, to the Black Sea, and on to Constantinople," "where Viking warriors formed the famous Varangian Guard." "But it's important to bear in mind that the Vikings were not merely pirates with a spectacular appetite for booty and violence." "They were traders as well as warriors, and one of their chief motives was a desire for land on which to settle, and the raids were forays by which they could raise enough capital with which to set themselves up in business," "and the spur was growing overpopulation in Scandinavia." "What made the migrations possible and the raids so successful was their brilliant seamanship and the quality of their ships." "To find out about these, we go first to Gotland." "MAGNUS:" "Here, more than 100 of these stones have been found." "These two have been left on their original site in open fields, others have been moved and grouped together in open-air museums." "They were originally put up in memory of seamen from the island who had lost their lives far from home." "Not surprisingly, many of these stones have ships carved on them, as well as other scenes which are rather harder to interpret." "Many of the ships are very vividly drawn, especially when the original red paint has been retouched in recent times." "This small one in the museum in Visby is a bit stylised." "And this one is probably not a very exact copy of a Viking ship." "However, others show how these Baltic craft developed from a simple rowing boat with no sail to the great seagoing longships which were such a terrifying sight to many of the coasts of Europe." "In fact, this particular stone gives us more information than any other source about their extremely elaborate system of reefing and sail-handling." "But there's a limit to the information that can be got from carvings." "In the soil of Norway, three Viking ships have been found which had been used in ship burials." "They were so well preserved by the blue clay of Norway that they could be restored and put on display in a museum in Oslo." "The finest one is a celebrated Gokstad ship, one of the most beautiful ships, to my mind, ever built." "Its lines give a clear idea of the brilliance of Viking shipbuilding techniques." "In fact, an exact replica was successfully sailed across the Atlantic in 1893." "But the Gokstad ship is rather a special one, a ship for coastal waters." "The vessels the Norsemen used to cross the Atlantic were rather different." "Formerly, we only had a rather vague idea of what these ships were like." "But a recent, remarkable new discovery looks like filling this gap." "In 1957, Danish frogmen were asked to investigate underwater wreckage which for years had obstructed the narrows at Roskilde Fjord." "Nothing very spectacular was expected to come of it, but in the event, it turned out to be the remains of no fewer than five Viking ships which had been sunk to form a defensive barrier." "Thanks to generous contributions of money from various sources, the Danes were able to dam off this area with pontoons and eventually pump it all out." "They then set about the extremely dirty job of clearing away the mud, finding and sorting out the wreckage of these ships." "The ships had apparently been stripped of all their equipment and filled with stones to hold them down on the sea bottom." "But, even so, quite a large amount of the structures was left." "It looks as if one of them at least was of the seagoing type that took the Norseman across the North Atlantic." "Archaeologists are now engaged in the very complex and delicate task of plotting and preserving all the pieces of wood from the five wrecks." "Eventually, when the various fragments have been fully treated, they will be pieced together again in a special museum at Roskilde, where they will throw new light on the remarkable seagoing achievements of the Norsemen." "GLYN:" "It was in these ocean ships that the Norsemen made their direct crossings to their territories in the northern and western islands of Scotland." "We know of their coming to the Orkneys from a very curious monument, a prehistoric megalithic tomb - one of the finest in Britain, in fact - the Mound of Maeshowe." "MAGNUS:" "The Norsemen broke into this great mound in the 12th century, according to Orkneyinga saga, and robbed it of any contents that might have been valuable to archaeologists, for no bones or grave goods have been found in it." "But at the same time, they corroborated the sagas, and added enormously to the interest of Maeshowe, by leaving in their turn the largest single collection anywhere to be found of runic scrolls - the strange, twig-like signs they used for their earliest writing." "In 24 inscriptions, they left a sporadic record of common, everyday names and happenings." "Orkneyinga saga tells us that a band of Orcadians went on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, arriving back in 1153, and one of the inscriptions at Maeshowe reads," ""The Jerusalem pilgrims broke in here."" "If they were looking for treasure, they were disappointed." "Another inscription reads," ""The treasure was taken away three nights before the pilgrims broke in."" "And a third says, cryptically," ""Away to the north-west a treasure trove lies hidden."" "It's an eerie place, that megalithic chamber, and must have been decidedly spooky." "Indeed, the saga records that in January 1153, a Viking band was forced to shelter in it from a snowstorm overnight, and two of them went mad." "But that didn't stop the local bucks from using it as a place for courting." "One laconic inscription states smugly," ""Thorni bedded, Helgi writes it."" "Another simply says, "Ingigerth is the sweetest woman there is."" "And the local widow, Ingebjork the Fair, is a subject of another boast." ""Many a woman has had to lower herself to come in here" ""despite all her airs and graces."" "There are more conventional Norse remains away in the north of Orkney." "For instance, on the tidal island of Birsay are the relics of the church and hall built by the greatest of all the Norse earls, Thorfinn the Mighty." "All that remains of his 50-year rule are the ruins of his buildings, the magnificent Minster of Christchurch, as Orkneyinga saga called it, with its adjoining palace." "And near the cliff edge, overlooking the seas that he tamed, the remains of his hall with steam central heating channelled under the stone slab dais running down both sides of the hall, where his warriors whiled the winter away in feasting and storytelling." "That's to say when they weren't in the bath-house, where stones were heated and water thrown onto them to provide a medieval sauna bath." "When the spring came, the warriors would take to their ships again, which had been hauled up on this carefully walled and paved slipway." "Orkney is, in fact, a splendid example of the way in which the saga literature of Iceland has been corroborated by and illuminates in its turn the evidence of archaeology." "GLYN:" "About the year 860 AD, the Norsemen moved even further north-west, to the Faroe Islands and then to Iceland." "The accounts in the sagas of the discovery and settlement of Iceland are clear and highly dramatic." "Once again, they are reinforced by the archaeological evidence, though it is very little." "MAGNUS:" "The sagas say that Iceland was empty when the first Norsemen arrived, apart from some Irish hermits who had gone there in search of solitude and who now left in some haste." "And sure enough, all the earliest grave-finds are unmistakably Norse." "These grave-finds are pitifully meagre." "Only about 250 early graves have been found and excavated." "But the things found in them, like this comb and brooch and stirrup, are clearly Norwegian and Scottish-Norse in style, and this corroborates the saga accounts." "But these are rather barren remnants of the teeming, vigorous life of early Iceland." "By the year 930, the Age of Settlement, as it was called, was over, and Iceland had a population of some 30,000 people, a busy, lively community of warrior-farmers." "In that year, the Icelanders established at Thingvellir a remarkable parliamentary commonwealth, the Althing." "It was an open-air assembly of the whole nation, meeting every summer for a fortnight for legislative and judicial purposes." "A dramatic wall of cliffs backed the grassy plain at which it took place, and what turbulent occasions they sometimes were, as we know from the sagas." "A flagpole now marks the law-rock, the hillock from which the nation's laws were expended by the law-speaker." "And at the foot of the hillock, row upon row, one can still make out faintly the huddled remains of the stone-walled booths which were roofed over with cloth to house this great open-air assembly every summer." "Only the foundations, grass-grown and windswept, now remain." "It was here that the agonising court hearings took place that led to the burning of Njal, subject of the most famous of all the Icelandic sagas." "Recently, the cow byre at Njal's farm was excavated, and it was found that once, many centuries ago, it had been burned down." "So, this burnt wood evokes one of the most dramatic and violent incidents in the saga literature of Iceland." "It was never easy to maintain law and order in the vigorously growing community of Iceland, and by the end of the 10th century, this new country was overpopulated, particularly on the more fertile west coast." "Newcomers had literally to fight their way in with the swords and axes that were subsequently buried with them." "One of the many Icelanders who got into trouble was Erik the Red, the son of a late immigrant from Norway." "In 981 or 982, he was banished on account of some killings and he decided to try his luck even further west than Iceland." "The land which he found, and which he decided to try and colonise, he called Greenland, to persuade others to join him." "And so, in about 986 AD, a most remarkable fleet left Iceland." "It consisted of 25 ships loaded with women and children and cattle and household goods and, of course, the menfolk." "They set sail on this, one of the most extraordinary of all Arctic enterprises." "Greenland was an empty country, majestic and formidable." "It was inside the long fjords of the south-west coast that they found the pastures they needed and built their farms." "The foundations were of stone, the walls of turf, often six feet thick, the roofs of turf-covered timber." "Early houses were simple, but later they had many rooms." "Some had the comforts of running water and indoor sanitation." "Of the people themselves, we have various likenesses, some of them carved by the Eskimos after their return to Greenland about the year 1200." "One thing is certain." "They were a tough lot, equipped both physically and mentally for life in their demanding country." "We can learn about them from their tools." "They fashioned spades out of wood, and from reindeer horn." "They had forks." "Hooks and sickles for the rather thin crops they could raise." "Awls, for a hundred purposes." "And the same kind of smith's tongs as back in Scandinavia." "Also, they needed weapons, not only for fighting but for hunting seal and walrus, bear and reindeer." "They used the spear and knife." "And here's an ice crampon for the shoe." "This late-medieval print gives an idea of a Greenland hunting scene." "Then, as now, the Northern peoples knew all about skis." "They had iron tools, but they were always short of metal, because though they had some native ore, they hadn't much fuel for smelting." "So, they learned to shape axes from whalebone as well." "It was hunting and fishing which supplied them with many of their exports - furs and hides, seal oil and more spectacular, the polar bear, a highly prized possession of kings and prelates." "Timber was another necessity of life, and much of it came in the way of driftwood from Siberia." "They used it for building, carving and fuel." "Woman's life was hard, too." "Some of the most remarkable of all Greenland relics are the woollen garments from Herjolfsnes, where they had been preserved in the frozen graves." "The dresses were quite smart, elaborately made, and showed that the women of Greenland were in touch with the very latest from Europe." "This one has a pocket." "And the seamed pieces come to this elaborate point of the front." "This child's dress is sad." "It was found buried with its little wearer, who failed to survive the many hazards of a Greenland childhood." "By the light of little oil lamps like this, the womenfolk must have spent long hours preparing and preserving food for their families." "They had plenty of butter and cheese, ate a lot of fish and seal meat, and huge quantities of gruel." "They kept their spoons in these neat spoon cases." "The women were spinners and weavers and their homesteads have yielded a considerable number of spindle whorls like these." "They needed and had scissors." "They used woollens rather than furs, because they failed to adapt themselves to the deteriorating climate." "Yet, they still wore their rings of gold and cared for their appearance." "We have found examples of tweezers and headed pins." "Round dress pins." "And here's a fashionable comb." "A game somewhat resembling chess helped to pass away the long winter nights." "They played this everywhere, even in the loneliest of all Norse farms in the north, right on the edge of the ice cap, where one of these pieces was found." "In the year 1000 or so, the Norse settlers in Greenland were converted to Christianity by priests from Iceland." "They built a surprising number of churches, a monastery and nunnery, and even a cathedral." "But the finest of all Greenland ruins is the church at Hvalsey, the modern Qaqortoq." "One of the Greenland bishops was found buried at his cathedral of Garoar, with this fine crosier with its head of walrus ivory." "On the fourth finger of his right hand was a gold Episcopal ring." "In contrast is this simple and heartfelt figure of Christ on the Cross, carved out of three pieces of driftwood about the year 1300 and found in a lonely farmstead near the ice cap." "About the middle of the 14th century, events took a bad turn for the Norse settlers in Greenland." "The settlements began to die out." "The climate turned against them, communication with Europe weakened." "Shortly after the year 1500, all would be over." "The indomitable Eskimo was taking over the country." "The 500 years of colonisation had ended." "From Norway to Greenland was a voyage of 1,680 miles and the Norsemen did it very often." "From Greenland to the mainland of America is only another 200 miles, and the question is, did they take this step further west?" "Gwyn Jones." "The saga evidence is so strong that even if we don't find any archaeological evidence in America, the case for the Norse discovery is quite proved." "You'll find references to America under the name Vinland, which presumably means "wine land", in two important early historians, Adam of Bremen, writing about 75 years after Leif Ericson's voyage, and the Icelander Ari Thorgilsson," "a notably severe and truthful historian." "There are references to Vinland and Markland in the Icelandic annals for 1121 and 1347." "And finally, there are the two all-important sagas, the Groenlendinga saga, written just before 1200, and Erik the Red's saga, written about 1265." "Now, these 13th- and 14th-century references may sound a little late, but the point here is that they are a long way before Columbus, in 1492." "But the question is, is there any archaeological evidence?" "Now, quite a lot of archaeological evidence has been described, described as authentic, the Beardmore remains, the Newport tower, but people are very suspicious of the authenticity of these things." "The most canvassed piece of archaeological evidence comes from Kensington in Minnesota, where, in 1898, a farmer called Olaf Ulman found a stone decorated with runes." "The Kensington Stone has on it the runic inscription which purports to be the record of an exploratory journey to America by a group of Norse seamen in 1362." "It is a very vivid account - ten men red with blood and dead at the hands of hostile Indians." "Now, some people have believed in this and some have not." "When, in 1949, the stone was displayed in Washington at the Smithsonian Institution it was declared there to be probably the most important archaeological object yet found in North America." "But I think it's fair to say that at present, almost all archaeologists and certainly all runic scholars do not agree with this verdict." "They think the thing is a 19th-century forgery, and for two reasons." "They are suspicious of the circumstances of its find, and secondly, and more important, the technical grounds of their disbelief - they insist that the runes cannot really date from the 14th century." "But now, in the last few years, new evidence of an archaeological kind has been alleged." "The Norwegian Helge Ingstad and his archaeological wife," "Anne Stine, have found and excavated a site in the north end of Newfoundland, a site called L'Anse aux Meadows." "This site has caused very considerable speculation and discussion, and in an article in the National Geographical Magazine, he makes this claim for it." ""Here on the northernmost tip of the island of Newfoundland," ""we have discovered the first proven remains" ""of a Norse settlement in the Americas."" "Now, this is a very considerable claim and, if true, is extremely important." "It is very exciting." "Now, we have with us here Raymond Newell, an American research student who is taking his PHD at the Institute of Archaeology in London." "He has been to L'Anse aux Meadows and helped to cut some sections there." "He's also photographed the site." "His photographs are in colour, and don't show up very well on our TV screen, but as they have never been published before, we would like you to see them." "RAYMOND:" "As one approaches the site of L'Anse aux Meadows, you see the flat, open meadow, the brook that comes down into the sea and leads back up into the muskeg, and then the highest feature of the landscape," "the building erected by the Newfoundland provincial government to protect Mr Ingstad's site." "The large building in the centre houses the structure called the longhouse, with its adjoining barn and cooking area or outbuilding." "The building to the right of the main house is an outbuilding of some unknown nature." "In the foreground is the smithy with its associated charcoal pit and then to the left of the main building is a workman's shed of no archaeological significance." "It is in open, grassy meadows such as these that any Viking settlement, if it was going to be made in Newfoundland, would have to be found." "This is the general view of the interior of what Mr Ingstad claims to be his Viking longhouse." "The stones and the black features in the centre of the picture are the long fireplace around which people were supposed to have sat." "The stones you see propped up against the rear wall were found over the central fireplace." "It is the custom in Viking houses to have an open fire in the centre of the long hall and a hole in the roof over which were placed stones which were moved around, depending on the prevailing wind, to give a very excellent draught." "A rather strong argument, perhaps, but when one looks at the so-called walls, one's mind immediately runs back to Viking settlements in Greenland and Iceland." "In these settlements, the houses, the barns, the churches, all structures had a stone foundation underneath the walls and then at least one face was facaded in stone." "This was done even when stone had to be imported by land and sea over as long a distance as 60 miles." "In the L'Anse aux Meadows site, there's a rock outcrop which has been broken up by subsequent glaciation." "These broken-up rocks are just lying on the ground in foundation stone and paving stone size, ready for the taking." "Here you see the convolutions and lines of the supposed turf walls." "Ingstad says that these are turf walls and yet when one of the postgraduate students you see here with Ingstad cut sections through these walls, they showed none of the pattern you get from turf walls where the turfs have been laid on top of one other." "Also, the thinness of the walls is very, very puzzling, for if a turf wall is going to be three or four feet high, as these must have been, there must be a rather wide lateral base to support these." "Such a lateral base is not demonstrated here at L'Anse aux Meadows." "Another problem is the end wall." "We asked Ingstad about this." "He said he looked quite carefully but there was just nothing to be found." "These side walls just seem to carry on but carry on from where and to what?" "There is no evidence of a termination of a wall over here at all." "This picture is shooting to the right of the longhouse into what Ingstad feels is a kitchen or another domestic outbuilding." "In the centre you see a hearth from which were taken burnt wood and bone samples which we have carbon-14 dated to around 1000 AD." "This is the date, according to the Norse sagas, that the Viking exploration of North America took place." "It is interesting to note that a number of Dorset Eskimo sites close to L'Anse aux Meadows have been similarly dated." "This is looking straight to the north, at the general countryside showing you the marshiness and also, in the distance, the village of L'Anse aux Meadows." "To the rear of that village, on the opposite headland, which you can see," "I saw a square pattern in the ground." "A pattern, perhaps, from a French fishing hut of the 19th century or perhaps one erected for drying fishing nets or perhaps it could be interpreted as the Viking longhouse as well." "I've been very interested in what you've said." "Now, Ingstad himself has not claimed to be a trained archaeologist, has come new to this discipline." "Now, you've had a lot of experience in excavating these kind of sites." "One thing I want to ask you first is, is the soil condition there very difficult?" "Is the cover very thin?" "Is it very difficult to find out these remains in that thin soil?" "Yes, it is." "It's extremely difficult." "The soil profile is very, very thin." "You have about two inches of actual natural soil before you get down to a very light, sterile sand." "The archaeological deposit is a bit thicker than that but you never really know because the site, as it stands, is merely the cast of the settlement occupation." "Gwyn Jones?" "Well, I'm very interested in the hall, the long hall." "Apart from these curious outside walls, is there any sign within the hall of what you might call a dais, the kind of place where people sat, ate, slept?" "Yes." "When one looks at the site, or at this cast of what he says is the interior of the long hall, you see a definite ridge or bench upon which the people were supposed to have sat with their feet down" "in a lower trough into the long fire." "Such a thing was seen." "Any evidence of water troughing?" "Anything else inside?" "No." "Magnus?" "This is an immensely important site." "Despite the difficulties of excavating it, did I detect, reading between the lines of your report, a certain disenchantment, even dissatisfaction, about the way in which the excavation is being handled?" "Yes." "A very great dissatisfaction." "It should have been handled first and foremost by properly trained professional, world-renowned archaeologists, an international commission to establish this very important scientific case and problem." "There should not have been the air of secrecy and restraint surrounding the site that there has been." "There should have been a proper magnetometer survey, a proper scientific report published immediately." "This is the way scientific excavators and archaeologists would have preferred the site to have been handled." "There was a certain amount of caution in the conclusion that you yourself draw." "Can I clarify this?" "Do you think that this is a Norse site dating from the year 1000?" "The evidence on the ground that we saw was not sufficient to make a statement one way or the other." "What we saw and what you saw in the slides was not the site, it is merely the show of the site." "The actual habitation layer and deposit has been completely excavated out." "Thank you." "That makes us, I think, all three of us believe that L'Anse aux Meadows hasn't proved that there is Norse archaeological evidence yet in Newfoundland." "Now, this other piece of evidence that has been interesting us recently, another fascinating piece of evidence, the publication of the Vinland Map after eight years of work." "The original is in the library at Yale in the care of Alexander Vitour, the librarian." "This is the form in which the Vinland Map first appeared to us here in New Haven." "It was bound in a modern binding of relatively recent date with 21 pages of a relation of the voyage...of a trip to the Tartars in 1245 to '47, made by John of Plano Carpini, one of the first links of the West with the East." "The map preceding the Tartar Relation, in this modern binding, was shown to us by Mr Whitton to me and my colleague, Mr Marston, in the fall of 1957." "We were extremely interested in it." "It looked right to us." "It smelled right, as we say." "But there were two disturbing features." "One, that it was in a relatively modern binding, two, there are certain wormholes in the face of the map, on the surface of the map." "Certain wormholes did not coincide with what was only the single wormhole in the front page of the Tartar Relation." "This lack of coincidence of wormholes, coupled with the modern binding, made us feel that the two pieces did not belong together, and we did not quite know the reasons." "These doubts were settled by Mr Thomas Marston of Yale University library when, quite by chance, he acquired from an English book-seller a 15th-century copy of the Speculum Historiale, a 13th-century world history by Vincent of Beauvais." "He showed this to Mr Whitton, the book-seller who had originally produced the Vinland Map, and it was Mr Whitton who eventually noticed, to his astonishment, that the two wormholes in the Vinland Map, now patched, of course," "coincided with the two wormholes in the first half of the Speculum Historiale." "He then turned to the Tartar Relation and discovered that its single wormhole matched exactly the single wormhole in the back of the newly acquired Speculum Historiale." "So, by an incredible chance, these three pieces - the Vinland Map, the Tartar Relation and the Speculum Historiale, which had once been bound together in one volume, were now reunited and a strong argument was established" "for a 15th-century date for this map and its first known delineation of the North American continent, as the Norsemen had originally found it." "This exciting development of bringing these two books together in the Yale University library constitutes one of the most exciting bibliographical stories of the modern age." "MAGNUS:" "Many other studies and tests on the medieval bull's head watermark, the velum and the writing seemed to confirm this mid-15th-century date." "But at the same time, other people were doubtful." "Could it be a forgery?" "For a very great deal of money, reputedly £100,000, had been spent on acquiring it." "Mr RA Skelton is keeper of the map room at the British Museum and one of the three authors of the book on the Vinland Map." "Now, one of the most disconcerting things about the map is that nothing at all is known about its past history." "I asked Mr Skelton whether it was really possible for such a remarkable document to have lain totally unknown for so many centuries." "I think perfectly possible, if one considers what documents of greatest historical importance still turn up, still appear from obscure, private libraries in Europe." "Some people who are uneasy about this map would," "I think, feel happier if they could know something about its origins." "Is it likely we will ever be told more about its provenance?" "I understand, yes, though perhaps not for some years." "One of the criticisms that's been made about this map is that it's really too good to be true." "I suppose everyone who first sees this map thinks it's too good to be true, and particularly the representation of Greenland." "This was my own feeling when I first saw it." "Mr Skelton, some critics have suggested that the dating of the map is wrong, that in fact it is after Columbus rather than mid-15th century." "The suggestion that this map could have been drawn in the 16th century, that is to say after Columbus and perhaps stimulated by interest in the New World, is one which I don't think holds water." "The map consists, basically, as regards the Old World, of a copy of a world map drawn in 1436 by the Venetian Andrea Bianco." "To this, the compiler of the map has added the islands in the north-west," "Iceland, Greenland, Vinland." "I cannot conceive that any 16th-century cartographer wishing to illustrate the voyages, settlements and discoveries of the Norseman would have chosen such a very elderly stock on which to graft this information." "The map by Andrea Bianco was, one might say, rather out of date even in 1436." "If you take a century later, 1536, it would have looked extremely odd." "Well, this brings us to the question of more or less deliberate fabrication." "It's also been suggested that Vinland and Greenland were added to the map after it had originally been drawn." "This is, to my mind, inconceivable if you are talking of the version of the map which we have for two reasons." "One is the absolute uniformity of the ink, the handwriting." "There's no doubt at all the whole of this map was drawn together, at once." "The other is the fact that if you take away" "Greenland and Vinland, you get an unbalanced design." "Now, this is totally contrary to the whole spirit of the early cartographer, who always filled up his paper, filled up his velum, and made a balanced design." "Then we're left with the most crucial criticism of all that's been made and that is that the map is nothing more nor less than a modern forgery." "Has that ever occurred to you?" "Oh, yes." "I may say this was my very first reaction to the map." "I think anyone with any knowledge of the history of cartography or of navigation who saw this map, and particularly the outline given to Greenland, could hardly believe his eyes." "And it's only..." "This first impression can only be modified by... through the stages of scepticism... and perhaps one might say a reluctant belief when one actually penetrates..." "digs into the...um, map and the associated documents and the connection between the two." "And anyone who wanted to prove a fabrication would have to prove that the map contained features which were inconsistent with the date ascribed to it, in the 15th century." "The only serious attempt to prove this from the content of the map, in relation to the history of cartography, and of 15th-century cartography, particularly, has proved, I think, rather unconvincing." "Having established the authenticity of the map to your own satisfaction, Mr Skelton, what would you say is the real significance of the Vinland Map?" "I consider that the existence of this map is very much less surprising than its uniqueness." "And you yourself still remain utterly unshaken in your conviction that this is a 15th-century map." "Quite unshaken." "When in archaeology and art history we talk about these problems of doubtful authenticity and forgery, we always say," ""But surely there must be some technical and scientific way" ""in which this problem can be resolved."" "Magnus, what do you think about this in relation to the Vinland Map?" "Apart from taking ink scrapings for chemical analysis, which would damage the fabric of the map, there are very sophisticated tests which can be made on the map which would settle once and for all the question of whether it's a modern forgery or not." "I very much hope that Yale library do undertake this because my worry is that, at present, all this discussion and speculation and suspicion of forgery tends to obscure and even discredit the most important evidence of all, and that is the Icelandic sagas." "Gwyn Jones." "I am not perturbed by the crudity of the delineation of Vinland at all." "I am very surprised by the accuracy of the delineation of Greenland, especially the north and the north-eastern coast." "However, I think the real thing about this is that it doesn't matter so much about the Vinland Map, delighted though one is to see it, it doesn't matter about L'Anse aux Meadows." "I think that the historical case for the truth of the Norse voyages is absolutely proved from the sagas." "There is our conclusion from this programme - that it doesn't matter whether L'Anse aux Meadows is true or not, it doesn't matter whether the Vinland Map is true or not." "It is on the sagas that we know about the Norse in America and on the sagas the great romance and adventure of this North Atlantic story of the Norse in America remains to excite us." "Good night."