[The Vinland Narrative has been re-installed on the website out of courtesy to those schools and colleges using it as an active resource, July 2010.  They are listed near the bottom of the page.  A note concerning this important alteration in concept will be found at the introduction.]

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Vinland Rediscovered!

Evidence of Ancient Viking Presence in America

 ---- in New England . 

 

New findings, new material, new insights !  Discovery in 1963 of valid artifacts at the site of L’Anse aux Meadows on Newfoundland in Canada wrought firmly into historical record the earliest recorded discovery of America by Greenlandic and Icelandic Scandinavian navigators near the year AD1000. It had since been thought that this Canadian site must have been the one landed by world renowned Leifur Eiricksson. However, over the years, more recent archeological discoveries at that site indicate that Eiricksson's legendary Vinland must have been further south, somewhere in lands where days were longer and both grapevines and butternut plants thrived. The premise of this work, this website, and this new book holds that the true and actual site has been discovered in an area meeting those conditions. Moreover, the premise offers for your consideration a proof in science - a science perhaps even stronger than material artifacts. Artifacts, no matter how evidence may appear certain, can always be argued, but genetics, with its newfound mathematical precision, is near certain.

Seekers of history, truth, and mystery of humankind have been enlightened by this ten year old website which has now been replaced by a book, rewritten, smoothed, and edited by Diane Holloway, Ph.D. The book is s handier and more accessible means of access to this complicated subject.

 

"Rediscovering Vinland, Evidence of Ancient Viking Presence 

in America"

 -- by Fred N. Brown III.  Advancements in research and supporting material make the book a more interesting read and reference for the historian.  It is particularly improved with more specific local historical anomalies in close support of the theme of this program. Obtain the work as follows: hyperlink to;   <     iUniverse.com    >, find/copy title [    Rediscovering Vinland , Evidence of Ancient Viking Presence in America   ], author [    Fred N. Brown III    ], or  [    978-0-595-43680-4    ] hard copy at US$24.94. Also available in - a bargain – eBook [    978-0-595-88008-9    ] US$6.00.

Would you prefer to be aboard our exploratory “ship”, or would you follow - unheeding - in our wake?

 Northseamen effecting a landing in Normandy, precisely as in Vinland, 66 years before. From Bayeaux Tapestry. Beaching a ship of this size is far more than a process of simply driving ashore; it is more science and skill than the landsman might imagine. Note sail "luffing", anchor man, lookout, oarsmen "backwatering,", sounding" pole" or, perhaps, another anchor line. The designer of this famous tapestry must have been intimately familiar with day to day seamanship.

The new book, “Rediscovering Vinland ----“, replaces an original, now revised  website improving and developing the theme by:

Presenting the Vinland Sagas in a chronological, narrative form, (removed form the website). This structured mode, seldom or never attempted before, has been in the public domain for over 20 years with no refutations so far offered. It has been accepted as reasonably valid in the National Library of Iceland. It is a dramatic and enthralling sea story – now far removed from "myth" - but found essentially true.

New insights from this narrative enable finer delineation not only landfalls and environs of “greater” Vinland and its coastline and landfalls, it adds further prospects and descriptions of Leifur Eiricksson’s landing site itself (“Leifsbudir”).

A narrowly circumscribed geographic site has been discovered and matched to Saga descriptions with numerous positive analogies. Another page (below) enables the reader to access this terrain through Google Earth®. Now see it for yourself in a way that has heretofore been impossible! In the same manner you can trace landfalls of the coastline as well as numerous artifacts discovered from colonial times. (pages below)

Found in early colonial literature is that this area of recent discovery has actually been thought to be the target site by educated early European settlers. Quantitatively, well over half of all numerous Vinland researches have located Leifsbudir in New England , many along the southern New England coastline, and several within a few miles of this proposed discovery in Rhode Island. Dr, Helge Ingstad himself, ultimate discoverer of the site at L’Anse aux Meadows, commenced his search within seven miles of the one herein described.

Archeological survey of the watercourse actually declares an incursion, said to be by “---an advanced culture” to the site, and establishes by scientific methods its date, “---about a thousand years ago”, precisely the period that the Vinland adventure occurred.

Decades of search for a “proof” have succeeded in discoveries within unrelated but reputable scholastic papers. Read the result below -- a premise describing a genetic factor within the aboriginal human population – something even more astounding yet more positive a proof than any material artifact.

While almost unbelievably astonishing, this determinant is far from an unlikely or unusual cultural factor by either of the two contributing “races”.  It is difficult to rationally overturn prior established opinion that Vinland Vikings had been driven away and Vinland entirely abandoned, yet, Genetics is now one of the “hardest” of sciences and its truths essentially incontrovertible.

“Rediscovering Vinland ----“ advances research into the native Narragansett Indian culture and finds in their mores, language, and culture - just as the original settlers of Rhode Island had - numerous indications that their parentage had originated in icy Northlands. Roger Williams, prominent settler and founder of the city of Providence in Rhode Island, was an educated Englishman, from youth familiar with the halls of England’s Parliament, graduate of Cambridge University, friend and champion of the Narragansett Indians who had saved his life and granted his colony to him, in 1643 published thus: “Wise and Judicious men, with whom I have discoursed, maintaine their Originall to be from the Northward -------- to draw their line from Iceland, because ------ etc.“   

This remarkable  statement is dated a mere 23 years from the the Pilgrim landing at Plymouth Rock. Might not this quotation – alone - stimulate your interest in the area for discovery ?

   

A PRE-HISTORIC EUROPEAN CONTACT ON MAINLAND NORTH AMERICA

AN ASSERTION;
-- based on archaic literature and concurrent scientific discoveries.

To disciples of Science, Discovery, and History, greeting: 

Accredited archeologists, over a thirty five years ago, discovered and reported in a respected scholastic journal a factor both newsworthy and perplexing - unaccountable anomalies in certain American Aborigine cemetery exhumations. At a site on North America's east coast, the findings reported atypical manifestations on skeletons, occurrences of which can be understood as immunology adaptation or as an acquired genetic trait. The attribute, appearing among a limited human population of about 1660AD, is one that can be developed genetically only by evolution of defense processes in reaction to a public and personal toxin (a mycobacterium pathogen) over a markedly extended interval of a scale of many centuries. The factor of indication has been a subject of interest and remark among scholars and medical investigators for centuries and at this writing I am not aware of its presence anywhere else upon either American continent. (see notes, below).

The attribute as reported is both prevalent and proportionate within the group sufficient to indicate that it was a constituent of the entire population. Geographic considerations and known demographics indicate that it was not a chance occurrence or mutation within a single individual or family. Invisible in life, undetectable except by statistical result or laboratory examination, the trait must have been transmitted in the period of interment by social cohesion.

Nexus' for the assertion:

Note:  In preparing and editing for the new book, "Rediscovering Vinland,  Evidence of Viking Presence in America", it became somewhat of a challenge to describe this anomaly in easily understood terms.  In brief it concerns the science of human genetic immunities which is an advancement of the usually understood factor of bacterial/antibody conflicts.  The latter are of more immediate importance to individuals contracting disease of any sort.  But genetic immunity is more of a factor of inheritance and more of note for survival of a populace.  Many confuse this issue and it is this factor of evolution where more "vital" individuals survive and transmit perhaps complex defense mechanisms to their offspring. Individuals might survive in terms of weeks or months whereas genetic immunities become permanently ingrained within a population over time.  It is this time differential that constitutes the factor that we present as proof of European visitation at Pettaquamscutt and  environs as discovered in archeological site RI1000.  The Native Americans in this district were demonstrably at absolute genetic variance in this particular.  They were distinct from all other groups all across the country and into Polynesia.  The distinction - the ability to resist tuberculosis if contracted - could neither evolve nor develop in the span of time from AD1492 to AD1660.

When any species population is afflicted with a toxin, bacterial or material, given survival of some and enough time, the population will, for survival, adapt physiological defenses to the toxin. When these defenses are successfully established within individuals of a population, those individuals then are successful in transmitting these defenses to their progeny, regardless of how simple or complex the defense mechanisms may be. Once this occurs, those defenses become factors of heredity specific to a group, abiding thereafter fixed in laws of genetics.

Such a toxin to humankind is tuberculosis, which is dependably believed to be a transmutation of a bovine form of TB. Hence, Eastern Hemisphere populations commenced evolving their defenses at some antediluvian period of cattle domestication, while Western Hemisphere populations, isolated, and not practicing domestication of animals, did not do so. Consequently, when the two populations came into contact post 1492, American Indigenes demonstrated a marked susceptibility to tuberculosis, as well as extreme sensitivity to other European diseases. Combined, the onslaughts of diseases to which they had had limited or no previous exposure devastated individuals speedily and populations monstrously - epidemically. This differentiation in personal and public syndromes, remarked from earliest recordings, is categorically established in medical and colonial literature.

Old World tuberculosis pathology is typified by generally endemic conditions, lengthy survival and appearance of secondary symptoms in certain hardy victims who, genetically "sophisticated", withstand a normally fatal lung affliction long enough to inhibit the disease, whereupon it attacks other parts of the body. Attachment of TB lesions upon hard tissue (ribs, spine, pelvis) is one such diversion; a syndrome unrecorded for any Western Hemisphere Indigene until this reporting of the newsworthy occurrence in archeological site RI 1000 in southern New England. Presence of lesions on bones, by appearance alone, indicate a measure of survival and, therefore, manifest extended histories of exposure and endurance resulting from genetic evolution, the explanation for which must be sought in that science. Since the ocean barrier had been as impermeable to a genetic trait as to bacteria, it must have been carried into the area by the only genetic entity possible - humans themselves.
The population among whom the "resistance" trait was detected, first described in 1524, numbered at earliest recordings at least 15,000 persons bearing similar physical and anthropological characteristics. Such a populous group could not have been transported or expanded without notice or nascently evolved in 168 years from 1492 to 1660. Therefore, the transportation of the gene and the entity so carrying must have occurred prior to 1492 and the populace corporeal, genetically integral, throughout an unknown interval. Since it is difficult to imagine such a sizable populace to have crossed the Atlantic even earlier, the presumption follows that a small group reached this area long ago, intermarried with natives, and then burgeoned to reported levels, most carrying genes of a previously evolved - elsewhere - relative immunity to TB.

A conceivable alternative that has been examined is the possibility of a prehistoric individual or group coincidentally or accidentally acquiring the immunity by chance mutation without contact with the disease. The prospect is infinitesimally small in accepted genetic doctrine and is further negated by the fact of the two population having many other traits and attributes in common. Further, it is more than likely that the relative immunity is quite complex, not relying on a single gene but upon interdependent combinations, much more improbable than an already tenuous single mutation.

This self evident trace, subtle yet unambiguous, advocates a credible inference: that progenitors of this North American group must assuredly have, at some phase of their history, resided where the toxin, or a population already exposed, had existed; had been endemic; in the Eastern Hemisphere. Justifiable prospects are thus implemented that ancestors of these people must have previously resided in or visited the Old World and then migrated to the New World, carrying and retaining, in congruence with genetic laws, these defenses - in reserve, so to speak - that must have evolved from an even more remote epoch of their history. Their era of transportation must have elapsed sufficiently to permit expansion and assimilation of a presumed small group of invaders into a large and dynamic mixed population of some 15,000/30,000 at time of a census of about 1670AD. By 1660AD, the trait necessarily had commenced its incremental development among this demarcated society many centuries prior, a circumstance coercing an inescapable conclusion of certain pre-Columbian physical transportation of a human genetic factor - and its bearers. How, then, did this ephemeral yet sovereign vestige cross an ocean to appear in this extraordinary population within an area but 15 miles square?

It had long been thought that tuberculosis had been absent from the Americas prior to 1492, and that this was the cause of the remarkable disparity in patterns of pathology. A single mummified individual, (see below for additional information) deceased at pre-Columbian dating in the altiplano of Peru, was recently reported to have suffered a lesion of a strain of TB similar to the European type in a lung - a typical "naive" response but thereby proving presence of TB in the New World. This is relevant to this discussion by reason of supporting it, for it enjoins us to immediately differentiate between toxic effects and responses to them. Were we speaking of the contagion, then the known rapidity of transmission and population debilitation would provide us with but meaningless guidelines. Contagions could and did spread with such speed as to seriously reduce or even annihilate multitudes shortly after a first contact with explorers. Even at immediate settlement a few years later by newcomers, a pattern of depopulation was noted tragically repeated time and time again all the way into Pacific archipelagoes throughout the so-called "age of discovery". But the discussion concerns not the contagion but biological reactions to it, dynamics of which, in timing, are very different perspectives than simple disease immunology. The defenses to TB require centuries of endemic/epidemic cycles to become fixed within a population and, once fixed, are transmissible only so quickly as a host can reproduce. We now see in this Peruvian individual that, since the response had been typical "naive" pathology, the victim had not possessed the defensive trait in either hard or soft tissue, and, so far as is known, neither has any other American Aborigine displayed it even to our own time (to the best of my knowledge, but see below). It seems probable that the TB encysted in this mummy must have been more or less restricted to Peru and not endemic even so near as Mexico, for shortly after the invasion by Cortez, those huge populations there "crashed" as well.

Whether the TB had been present post-Columbus or pre-Columbus, the pronounced variance in genetic development of acquired immunities between the natives and the colonists remains evident. It had been thought impossible in all American Aborigines, with this sole exception on the American Continents among this singular and extraordinary group whose ancient cemetery was accidentally uncovered and exhumed as site RI1OOO, doubtless not relying on single genes but complex co-relations. The scholars of record not only did not address the possibility of pre-Columbian interchange, they refused the idea when suggested by a respondent.

The portent being absolute as science permits, its consequences obligating public discourse, this studied premise that interchange before 1492 is advanced.

Difficulty of transoceanic transit merits addressing proximity as being a prime factor of consideration:

The nearest known populations ever of archaic Old World residents to the subject group were Scandinavian/Gael colonists and settlers of Iceland and Greenland. Were the transportation from Asia, the trait must certainly have appeared at other places between the Pacific Ocean and North America's east coast. More abstruse lines of reasoning place onus' on speculations of distances and population diffusions from increasingly questionable purviews.

As critical a factor for consideration is nautical capability:

Seamen of Iceland and Greenland certainly did have sufficiently advanced and amply demonstrated nautical proficiencies for at least a millennium (before present) sufficient to reach the district under study. They perhaps were the only people of Atlantic environs until about 1350 with deliberate, as opposed to accidental, capability of such rigorous voyages. Pan-oceanic pioneering by their early maritime culture is amply reported from about 800AD. Burdens of debate delegate demonstration of sufficient seafaring capability to other populations.

Recently published study of certain environs of the genetic discovery and the most likely site of invasion within the target population's rather constrained and surprisingly densely populated territory brings to light disclosure of an alien infusion into the locality by an "advanced" culture. This is dated as having taken place "about a thousand years ago"' imparting latterly unearthed and objectively reported anthropological revelations.

Study of these Indigenes, Narragansetts of Rhode Island, finds recorded by earliest colonial (English) settlers a compendium of genetic, anthropological, social, and linguistic anomalies unique and at variance to even immediate neighbors. So striking were these observations that at least two educated and observant colonial Governors, one English and one Dutch, both in intimate contact with the group earlier than 1643, speculated that forebears of the heretofore presumed aboriginal society had originated not only in Europe, but in a specific country - Iceland!

Study of literature of Iceland and (medieval) Scandinavian Greenland finds respectable documentation of four distinct expeditions and emigrations by over two hundred persons, male and female, from Iceland and Greenland to a district they called Vinland. This land of legend has been chronicled as matching geography, range, topography, climate, daylight duration, flora and fauna, that district wherein the population bearing the trait resided, and that these expeditions took place between about AD 986 and 1030, coincidentally just about a thousand years ago.

More compelling in its own sciences than a material artifact in archeology, this signal verity of genetic affiliation with a specific congruent European pathology is here supplemented for this course of inquiry by these concrete literary and analytical discoveries. The aggregated argument seems persuasive enough to impel cognitive and critical thinkers alike towards an irrefutable deduction: that the aboriginal population of the district and populations of Iceland and Scandinavian Greenland are related; that they share coincidental ancestry; that 18 to 24 generations of commingling in 660 years seems sufficient for practicable integration; thus, that the New World mixed population bearing this demonstrable genetic trait are descended in part from those Iceland and Greenland explorers and emigrants whom we might refer to as the Vinland Voyagers.

Merciless, relentless and ravaging scourge that tuberculosis has been to humanity through the ages, the iniquitous disease is here perceived contravened by a benevolence - a balance - a salvation of species provided by nature in such a way as to edify we who celebrate the unfolding of the cosmos. Illuminated, we are endowed with richened and redeemed Icelandic literature, resolution of a majestic and mystical epic, and sharpened insights into the drama, adventure, and perpetuating biography of man! At long last, Vinland is recovered.


Frederick N. Brown 3rd. (c) copyright, Summer, 1997, Revised, 1998, Revised 1999; addendum, 2004., complete revision, 2009

<Attribute text to: Voyage of Wave Cleaver, Inc. --------- Frederick N. Brown > ---------