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The Ottawa Citizen

American and Icelandic scientists excavate a site in Iceland believed to be the farm house of Snorri Thorfinnsson, a Newfoundland-born Viking who later moved to Iceland. Scientists used advanced remote-sensing equipment to detect the early homes of turf and sod.

The Ottawa Citizen

The sculpture, The First European Woman to give Birth on North American Soil, was given to Canada by Iceland in 2000 and is on exhibit in the lobby of the National Archives of Canada at 395 Wellington St. The sculpture of Snorri and his mother was made by the late Icelandic artist Asmundur Sveinsson.

The Ottawa Citizen

Whatever happened to Snorri?: This is an Icelandic artist's portrayal of Snorri Thorfinnsson, shown in a detail from a sculpture that stands in the lobby of the National Archives of Canada on Wellington Street.

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Scientists are to announce today a major archeological find in Iceland that is expected to provide long-sought information about the Newfoundlander who was the first European born in the Americas.

Snorri Thorfinnsson was a Newfoundlander of Viking extraction. He was also, you might say, the first non-aboriginal person born in Newfoundland who went "away" to seek his fortune. And find a fortune he did. In Iceland. With his Viking relatives. Selling Newfoundland plunder.

A team of archeologists, under the auspices of the University of California in Los Angeles, is to announce today the discovery of what is believed to be Snorri's Icelandic farmhouse. The find is about 150 metres from the Glaumbaer Folk Museum, just outside the north Icelandic seaside village of Saudarkrokur.

According to Icelandic sagas, Snorri was born most likely at or near L'Anse-aux-Meadows, Nfld., shortly after 1000 AD. The exact date is in dispute, but there appears to be no argument that Snorri was the first European born in the New World. That was almost 500 years before Columbus set sail for China and bumped into the Americas.

Snorri's parents were Vikings who had travelled from Iceland to join Leif Ericsson's Vinland colony in Newfoundland and Labrador. The fledgling community at L'Anse-aux-Meadows was abandoned after a few years, and Snorri's parents returned to Iceland with their young son and became rich -- largely because of New World goods they traded to Europeans.

Snorri was a farmer in his adult life, and it is his farmhouse the American scientists believe they have discovered.

According to information released by the University of California, Snorri's house was a long and narrow structure built of turf, buried by windblown soil and located on a flat, grass field.

The nearby Glaumbaer Folk Museum explores ancient, rural Icelandic life, including the history of the farm's earliest recorded occupants, Snorri and his mother, Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir, and his father, Thorfinn Karlsefni. Both of Snorri's parents are among the most famous, swashbuckling adventurers of the Viking era. In later life, Gudrid found religion in a big way. There have even been attempts to have her canonized.

"When we realized the size and the age of the structure we got really excited, but we didn't dare hope it was anything more than a very old cow barn," said John Steinberg, the principal investigator on the excavation and a research associate at UCLA's Cotsen Institute of Archaeology. "But now it looks as though we may really have found this farmhouse that's been the stuff of legends for nearly a millennium."

One of the other scientists involved in the project is Elisabeth Ward of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Ms. Ward was one of the main curators of the Vikings exhibition currently on view at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Gatineau. The accompanying exhibition catalogue makes various references to the exploits of Snorri and his parents.

"At the very least, research on the house will help to illuminate a significant, yet poorly understood, period in Icelandic history during which the Viking Age was coming to an end," said Ms. Ward.

A statue of Snorri and his mother was given to Canada by Iceland in 2000 and is currently on exhibition in the lobby of the National Archives of Canada building at 395 Wellington St. The sculpture was made by the late Icelandic artist Asmundur Sveinsson, and is called The First European Woman to give Birth on North American Soil.

The UCLA team has been working near the Glaumbaer Folk Museum for the past two years. Using advanced remote-sensing equipment in an approach designed to detect houses with turf walls and sod roofs, the scientists identified the perimeters of the almost 134-square-metre structure last year.

Returning to the site this summer, the archaeologists excavated the telltale signs of a Viking Age farmhouse: 1.5-metre-thick turf walls, raised benches, and a long, narrow floor of compacted earth and charcoal. They also unearthed loom weights, a spindle whorl and an embroidery tool. The preliminary excavations, completed last month, confirmed the structure as a main dwelling area and revealed at least three phases of the building, with a final phase radiocarbon dated to between 976 and 1042.

According to Viking lore, Thorbjarnardottir and Karlsefni travelled to North America following Leif Eriksson's initial voyages there. A UCLA news release says Snorri's parents landed in 1004, but some other scientists add or subtract a few years to that date. Snorri was born within a year of the landing.

After three years in North America, the pioneers returned to Iceland and settled in Glaumbaer. After Snorri's father died, his mother went to Rome on a Christian pilgrimage and later returned to Iceland to live a life of nun-like seclusion.

The house purported to be Snorri's is at least 28 metres long, with an internal roofed area of about 140 square metres. A floor measuring 25 metres long by approximately 1.7 metres wide was found in the house's long central core, and it was surrounded on either side by 1.8-metre-wide raised sleeping benches and activity areas. A thin volcanic ash layer from the 1104 eruption of Mount Hekla covers these remains, confirming that the structure was occupied between 1000 and 1100.

"We can't be certain of the name of the home's owners, but its age and location are certainly consistent with the Saga description of Snorri's farm," said Mr. Steinberg, a lecturer at UCLA and at California State University, Northridge.

The main structure was surrounded by numerous outbuildings over an area of about a football field. These buildings have not yet been excavated.

The newly discovered house is similar in layout and size to wooden structures found within such Viking Age forts as Trelleborg in Denmar, according to a UCLA news release.

Although longer than any of the three Viking Age turf dwellings at L'Anse-aux-Meadows, a Canadian National Historic Site, the Glaumbaer structure has the same proportions and general layout. Researchers believe the relatively large size of the newly discovered structure reflects the substantial wealth made by the family during their voyages.

The 1,000-year-old farmhouse at Glaumbaer appears to be the oldest of several Viking Age structures identified by the archaeological team in Skagafjord, a glacial valley that looks out on the Arctic Ocean, but kept temperate by a drift of the Gulf Stream.