Discovery at Canadian Museum of Civilization suggests the Norse visited Baffin Island in the Middle Ages
Hull, Quebec, December 1, 1999 — A three-metre strand of spun yarn is attracting the attention of researchers at the Canadian Museum of Civilization (CMC). The yarn lay frozen beneath the Arctic tundra of Baffin Island for almost 800 years, and then in the museum's collections for the past fifteen years, before being recognized as an artifact that may tell a remarkable story — that the Norse visited Baffin Island in the thirteenth century, three hundred years after they abandoned their attempted settlement in Vinland.
The yarn was found in 1984 at an archaeological site called Nunguvik, near the northern Baffin Island community of Mittimatalik (Pond Inlet). It was excavated with the help of Inuit assistants by Father Guy Mary-Rousselière, the parish priest at Mittimatalik, who sent the artifacts he collected to the Canadian Museum of Civilization. Tragically, Fr. Rousselière died in a house fire at his Mittimatalik mission in 1994, before he could fully analyze the collections.
The Nunguvik site was occupied by Dorset Palaeo-Eskimos who lived in the eastern Arctic from about 500 B.C. to A.D. 1500, at which time they disappeared from the archaeological record. Like other Aboriginal peoples of northern North America, their clothing was sewn from animal skins, and they did not spin wool or weave cloth. The yarn, therefore, came from elsewhere.
Patricia Sutherland, Associate Curator with the Museum, recognized the significance of the yarn while working on the report Fr. Rousselière had left uncompleted at the time of his death. Sutherland had worked on an archaeological excavation of a medieval Norse farm in Greenland called Gården Under Sandet and noted that the yarn looked similar to specimens recovered from that site. Penelope Rogers, a specialist from England who has studied textiles from Greenlandic Norse sites, identified the artifact from Nunguvik as yarn spun from the fur of Arctic hare, also containing a few goat hairs. She confirmed that it was practically identical to a specimen she had examined from the Norse farm Gården Under Sandet.
Although Norse material is occasionally found in the remains of early Inuit settlements, suggesting some amount of contact between these two peoples, we know very little about contact between the Norse and the Dorset people who inhabited the Arctic before the arrival of the Inuit. Only a few small pieces of smelted metal have been identified from Dorset sites, and these may have reached the area through long-distance trade. Yarn likely would have been valued only as a curiosity and being more fragile than metal, probably would not have survived a process of long-distance trade. This humble artifact may hint at a direct visit by a Norse ship to Baffin Island.
Other evidence from the site includes pieces of wood identified as pine which grew in temperate regions, containing holes which appear to have been made by iron nails and radiocarbon dated to the end of the thirteenth century, the same period as the textile from Norse Greenland. Sutherland is now examining the entire collection from Nunguvik in hopes of finding further hints of a Norse venture to Arctic Canada.
Sutherland reported on her findings today (Wednesday, December 1, 1999) at a conference at the Danish National Museum in Copenhagen entitled Identities and Cultural Contacts in the Arctic.
The Norse finds from Nunguvik are part of a larger CMC collection of Norse-related material from sites in the Canadian Arctic. Many of these artifacts will be displayed in a major upcoming exhibition from the Smithsonian Institution called The Norse in North America which will come to the Canadian Museum of Civilization in 2002.
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