What Recent Excavations Tell Us about Norse Vikings and the Settlement of Vinland 

The Rooms Provincial Museum’s Curator of History Kevin McAleese will present a lecture titled “Finding Vinland…Then and Now,” on Monday, March 29, at 7 p.m. via Zoom, which will explore the history of the Norse Viking settlement in Vinland and what the recently discovered Viking artifacts can tell us about the historical settlement.

It has been more than 1,000 years since Vinland (present-day Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada) was settled by the Norse Vikings.  According to McAleese, the small Canadian province not only marked the final point of the Norse migration journey, which also included colonizing Iceland in AD 850 and Greenland in AD 985, but was the farthest they reached whilst expanding into the Western Hemisphere.  The lecture will explore the remarkable re-discovery of Vinland, particularly L’Anse aux Meadows, approximately 960 years after the Norse left, through archaeological research as well as recent excavations from Iceland, Newfoundland, and Labrador on sites that precede and follow the brief Norse settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows.  

McAleese has served as the curator of history at The Rooms Provincial Museum of Newfoundland and Labrador in St. John’s, Canada, since 1994. He received an M.A. in archaeology from Memorial University of Newfoundland, and a B.A. in archaeology from Simon Fraser University. McAleese has been conducting while also conducting archaeological digs, and editing and publishing books and articles on Viking and indigenous culture in Iceland, Greenland, and eastern Canada since the 1970s.  

The lecture is co-sponsored by the Human Arts Series and the History and Medieval and Early Modern Studies programs at Assumption. For Zoom invite, please contact jchlapowski@assumption.edu. The lecture will be followed by a question-and-answer session, as well as a virtual wine and cheese.