All language subtitles for The.Norse.An.Arctic.Mystery.2012.WEBRip.x264-ION10

(serene music)

- [Voiceover] The history
books say that first contact

between Europeans and
Native North Americans

happened with Christopher
Columbus in 1492.

(serene music)

But what if they were wrong?

What if that contact
happened centuries earlier,

here in the Canadian Arctic?

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Two groups from opposite
sides of the world,

laying eyes on each
other for the first time.

- Looks like it's been
worse along here and here.

- [Voiceover] This Canadian
archaeologist has found

compelling new evidence of
a building, a trading post,

that was in use for centuries.

Her discovery could change history.

(serene music)

(light music)

- [Voiceover] What's that?

- [Voiceover] Bit of wood.

- [Voiceover] It's got a nice point to it.

- [Voiceover] The only time archaeologists

can dig into the Arctic soil

is during the short summer,
when the tundra thaws.

- [Voiceover] I'm being tormented to death

by these bloomin' mosquitoes, man.

- [Voiceover] This team is
braving the swarms of bugs,

because hidden in there is a story,

told in a jumbled multitude of parts.

- [Voiceover] At the base here?

- [Voiceover] Yeah.

- [Voiceover] This is the first
occupation level down here.

It's got lashing holes.

This piece has got lashing
holes, and the other one doesn't.

- [Voiceover] A piece of
elm in an arctic dig site.

- [Voiceover] Just so fragile.

- [Voiceover] Elm doesn't
grow anywhere near

the south coast of Baffin Island.

(light music)

- [Voiceover] More cordage. Oh, yes!

Look at it.

There's quite a bit of it.

- [Voiceover] Other archaeological
sites of this magnitude

in the Canadian north were
left behind by native people.

But the evidence mounting here

is leading to a radically
different conclusion.

The Norse were in North America

centuries before the arrival of John Cabot

or Christopher Columbus.

(serene music)

By the year 1000, the Norse
had ceased being Vikings,

marauding bands of vandals.

They were now businessmen,

and the North Atlantic was
where they plied their trade.

They pushed their trading boundaries

further and further west.

- The overall picture of
what we're getting here

is that the Norse were here
over a long period of time.

They had business to do.

They were exploiting resources.

That's why they were there.

This is the beginning of globalization.

This is the beginning of global economy.

They were going there so that they could

push into new areas and
exploit new resources.

(serene music)

Behind all of it is trade.

That has not been emphasized
in the past, particularly.

I think North America has
been seen as peripheral

because of a different kind
of approach to the questions

than what's being taken now.

All right, well, keep your eye peeled now

for things that are not the
little finished Dorset tools.

- [Voiceover] Dr. Pat Sutherland has spent

more than three decades
of her professional life

unraveling stories of the Arctic.

Dr. Sutherland has been
attempting to prove something

nobody else has ever managed to do,

show that the Arctic was linked

to an international trading network

as early as 1,000 years ago.

(light music)

Dr. Sutherland started
down this trail of inquiry

back in the 1970s, when she
made a remarkable discovery

up on Ellesmere Island.

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- The helicopter put us
down and we looked around,

and within about 5 minutes of landing

we picked this artifact
up off the surface.

I have to admit that not knowing very much

about the Norse at that time,

I didn't know what it was.

- [Voiceover] It was new to her.

She was searching for arctic native sites,

artifacts made of bone and antler.

- If you think of scales of justice,

it's broken, of course.

There's another piece coming out here,

like this one, with a finial and a hole.

Then you have chains coming
down and pans on either side.

Then you'd have another part
to the balance to hold it.

Every Norse trader, professional trader,

carried one of these balances.

In Scandinavia they were used for

weighing out silver primarily.

- [Voiceover] A scale, a business tool,

that once belonged to a Norse trader.

Pat Sutherland ruminated
over that scale for years.

How did it get there?

Who did it belong to?

What did it mean?

- The balance shows the intent to trade,

minimally, the intent to trade.

We had somebody on the Norse ship

who was essentially a professional trader,

and they went up there, presumably,

with the intent to trade.

Here's an assortment of tally sticks here.

This one, you can see the
notching on the surface here.

If I give you a whet stone and some metal,

and you give me a walrus tusk,

then we notch it off as one transaction.

This is a way of keeping record.

Then it's split down the middle,

and you take a record and I have a record.

That's basically how they work.

- [Voiceover] She kept digging, literally,

and the clues led her here,

to this site on the south
coast of Baffin Island.

It's a site that had originally
been unearthed in the 1960s.

- The site was first
discovered and investigated

by an archaeologist from
Michigan State University,

Moreau Maxwell.

(light music)

He's passed on now, but he
was here in the '60s and '70s

working in this little valley.

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When he came, he was the first
archaeologist in this area,

so he would have done an overall survey

of the islands, the Cape.

He talked to people in the community.

Where are there remains
of old settlements?

How long was it occupied?

Who was here?

What were they doing here?

That's what we always do.

Time and space, we look at
time and space distributions.

He focused on this area because he was

finding a lot of material.

(light music)

He said first and foremost
it was a very complex site,

possibly the most complex
site in the Eastern Arctic.

He said it was Dorset.

To understand who the Dorset people were,

you need to understand that
there were different phases

of human occupation in the Eastern Arctic.

Today there are the Inuit.

They descended from another
group called the Thule people,

who migrated in from
Alaska about 800 years ago.

But before the Thule, it was
the Dorset who ruled the Arctic

for more than 3,000 years.

Back in the '60s, Moreau Maxwell
named the excavation site

after a small carving he found of a bear.

Nanook is Inuktitut for polar bear.

He was searching for signs
of the Dorset people,

and there were some
here at the Nanook site.

But the Dorset artifacts were mixed in

with a lot of others that
didn't fit the pattern.

In Maxwell's day, there wasn't even a hint

in archaeological circles that anyone

except the Dorset and the Thule

could have been in the Canadian north

so many centuries before Columbus.

So in Maxwell's opinion,
this site had to be Dorset,

regardless of the incongruity
in some of his finds.

But when Pat Sutherland decided to take up

the Nanook work where Maxwell left off,

those incongruities piqued her interest.

- When we got here there
was one stretch of wall,

stone wall that was exposed,

and it was two courses high,

and the rocks were extremely regular.

It did not look like the
wall of a Dorset structure.

- [Voiceover] There were several artifacts

in the Nanook site record that seemed

more Norse than Dorset,

pieces of exotic wood,
bits of hand-spun cord,

whet stones for sharpening metal knives,

and tally sticks that were
used to keep track of trade.

With the Norse in mind, Dr.
Sutherland took a step back

and started to reconsider
the area as a whole.

- There's lots of sod here for building.

The Norse certainly used
sod as insulation material

and for wall building and roofing

and so on in their structures.

Also, it has a very nice little harbor.

The harbor is narrows
and is quite sheltered

on the inward portion of it,

and it would be long
enough to shelter a boat

of the size that the
Norse were sailing in.

Those are two of the factors.

The other thing I think might have been

the resources that were available here.

The Norse were certainly
interested in furs,

as well as other
resources that this region

would have to offer.

Well, bag it as possible hide.

- [Voiceover] Dr. Sutherland
had seen Dorset sites

from Ellesmere Island down to Labrador.

She was convinced Nanook wasn't Dorset.

- [Dr. Sutherland] I'll
have to have the conservator

clean it up when we get back.

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The Dorset were highly mobile,

and lived in skin tents weighted
down with a ring of stones.

In the winter, they would dig in

and make something more substantial.

But not as substantial as this.

The stone walls seem to mark out rooms.

There was wood from Europe,

small bits of tools the Dorset never had.

To Dr. Sutherland, Maxwell's
evidence was saying

that this site was European.

It wasn't that she was
proving Moreau Maxwell wrong.

In fact, he was one of Pat's mentors.

Pat was building on Maxwell's work

by considering the
evidence she had at hand

with a new mindset.

- [Dr. Sutherland] What
have you got? Stone tools?

- [Voiceover] No, wood, I think.

- Okay.

Science is self-correcting.

Twenty years from now, some of the stuff

that I've had to say may not hold water.

But it's going after the
new knowledge, iI think.

Oh, that's nice.

It's ivory.

- [Voiceover] Going after new knowledge

has been difficult, however.

Moreau Maxwell overturned the layers

of the Nanook site with his digging.

Old Dorset items are now
found closer to the surface

than newer Norse artifacts.

- Oh, nice bird bone there.

It's a very complicated site.

I gave a talk, a paper, at a
conference a few years back.

Most people said that they wouldn't

touch that site with a 10-foot pole,

because it's just so difficult.

It's so challenging.

There's sea mammal bone,
and there's a chert flake.

It's going to take quite some time yet

to unravel the cultural sequence

and the events of occupation,

and the architectural features, too,

because a lot of it was
cut away in the '60s.

We're basically putting together

small pieces of a very large puzzle.

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- [Voiceover] The Norse
saga spoke about lands

to the west of Greenland.

One of them they called Helleland.

Dr. Sutherland believes that
Helleland was Baffin Island.

Scottish archaeologist Dr. Mary McCloud

says that to understand how
the Norse got to Helleland,

it's important to look at
the world in a different way,

not as pieces of land,
but as highways of sea.

- The world had a different shape then.

It was linked by water
rather than divided by water,

and all these communities
were tied together

by this wonderful - this link of ships

moving around the North Atlantic,

and moving through the river systems

of Russia and the Black
Sea and the Mediterranean.

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They were a very maritime people.

From around about 800 they were
effectively island hopping.

The first evidence we have
of North Atlantic colonies

out with Scandinavia is
probably in Shetland,

the northernmost of the
Scottish island groups.

Then we have settlement
heading south from there

to Orkney, the north of
Scotland, western isles,

down into Ireland, and heading north,

going up to the Faroes,
Iceland, Greenland,

and then over to the
coast of North America.

- [Voiceover] Rest.

- [Voiceover] Wait.

- [Voiceover] All of that movement

required dependable transportation.

In Roskilde, Denmark,
historians and sailors

at the Viking Ship Museum figured out

how their Norse ancestors navigated

back and forth across the North Atlantic.

- Sailing a ship like
this to Baffin Island

from Scandinavia, of course,
it depends on the weather.

But, I don't know, two weeks, three weeks,

depending on the weather.

If you're a fisherman,

and you start off the coast of Norway,

after a couple of years you will find

both the Shetland Islands.

You will find the Faroe Islands,

and you can see the clouds building

over the mountains in the
distance from Iceland.

Of course, you'll sort of feel,

oh, there's something over there.

Let's go look for it.

Bit by bit you will build the experience

that after a couple generations
there will be no problem

actually by island hopping
sort of finding new ways.

- [Voiceover] This ship is called the Otar

after a walrus hunter
from the Norse sagas.

Danish archaeologists recovered

the wreck of the original Otar

from the bottom of this fjord.

They took measurements
and studied the design,

and decided to make
their own working model.

- [Captain Jessen] The boat
handles actually quite well.

We've had it in some pretty
bad weather in the North Sea,

and it is like a cargo
ship, so it's a bit like

comparing a cargo truck with a sports car.

We have 16 tons of ballast.

I can show you by opening up here.

We actually have rocks down here.

It's just loose planks as well.

We've got 16 tons of rocks down here.

This is actually knee deep in rocks

just to keep us steady in the water.

If you don't have this
ballast to keep you steady

in the water, you will capsize.

(light music)

[Voiceover] It seems that rocks

weren't the only things below decks.

The ships carried rats as well.

(light music)

How do we know?

Because Dr. Sutherland found
signs of rats at Nanook,

and rats are not indigenous
to Baffin Island.

- We have rat remains,
microscopically identified.

There are about four to
five fragments of rat pelts.

They would simply not have survived

in small Dorset dwellings.

But in a European dwelling,
a larger dwelling,

They could certainly hide and
have their own little spaces

without being noticed.

That's what we call proxy
evidence for European architecture

when we have something like rat remains.

- [Voiceover] From that
building on Baffin Island,

the Norse could sail
forth and collect timber,

minerals, and incredibly valuable goods

from along the Canadian coast,

south as far as Newfoundland,
north to Ellesmere.

It gave them an advantage
in the European marketplace.

- To put things in context,

a polar bear hide was
a gift for an emperor,

and a pair of walrus tusks was

an appropriate gift for a king.

So that's the value that
was put on these things

as they moved further south into Europe.

That's why they were such
a high status type of thing

for a person to be able to trade.

- [Voiceover] Now it isn't news

that the Norse had visited Canada

before John Cabot or Christopher Columbus.

In the 1960s, archaeologists uncovered

a Norse site in
Newfoundland that dated back

to the 11th Century.

L'Anse aux Meadows was
an important discovery,

the first evidence of the
Norse crossing the Atlantic

and arriving in Canada.

But L'Anse aux Meadows
was not a trading post.

It was a ship repair station for boats

cruising the coast of North America,

and it was only used for about a decade.

- We have no archaeological
evidence whatsoever

from L'Anse aux Meadows for contact

with the people, the aboriginal people,

who were living in that
region at the time.

Here's the point that just popped out.

- [Voiceover] Unlike
here at the Nanook site,

where native hunting tools come out of

the very same earth as European artifacts.

- Woo, this is really nice.

In a previous season we
found traces of skins

with end scrapers and needles,

and what we would consider
to be women's tools,

processing hides, in other
words, processing skins.

- [Voiceover] The evidence at Nanook

seems to be saying that
the Norse and the Dorset

encountered each other on
this Baffin Island cape.

(light music)

The Norse likely spent a lot of time here.

They would have tread carefully,

so they could open up lines of trade.

(light music)

- Trade takes on the form of

many different kinds of interactions.

There's even things called silent trade

where you leave out something

that you want the other party to have,

but you know, you're not quite sure,

whether it's going to be a
positive connection or not.

Then you come back two weeks later

and see if anything is there,
and it goes on like that

until each party gets
what they really want.

(light music)

- [Voiceover] Whatever happened here,

it wasn't a one-time thing.

This site has too many layers,

seems to have been used
for too many years,

to have just been a
simple, temporary shelter.

- The Norse venture to North America

was not a flash in the pan.

I think we've got good indications now,

signals from throughout the Arctic,

both from Dorset localities,
and Inuit localities,

that there was a dynamic happening here.

- [Voiceover] We don't
have a deep knowledge

about the Dorset.

But by examining their
relationship with the Norse,

Pat Sutherland is hoping
she can find a window

peaking into who these
mystery people were.

- [Dr. Sutherland] A large
concentration of cordage.

This seems to be a single
strand that's ended up

in amongst this ...

- [Voiceover] The only time
Pat Sutherland and her crew

can do archaeological work up here

is during the short Arctic summer.

The weather is cool and the days are long,

but the mosquitoes are
abundant, and they're huge.

- Everybody's complaining about
it, so they're pretty bad.

Yes, today I think we're
getting more mosquitoes

on this site as opposed to the other one

because the mosquitoes may be breeding

in all this water that's still n the site.

They're relatively bad today, I'd say.

- [Voiceover] The mosquitoes
aren't the only thing

they have to worry about.

The team employs a bear monitor

to watch over their every move

during the work day at the Nanook site.

Dr. Sutherland's camp is electrified

to dissuade polar bears from coming in

and snooping around.

There haven't been any
bear sightings this year,

but it's important to
take every precaution.

So when Pat Sutherland
decides to venture out

past the camp and the dig site,

she does so with an armed guard.

(serene music)

These walks are important,

because arctic archaeology
starts with a traverse.

That's when the evidence
first reveals itself.

- [Dr. Sutherland] When
did you first locate this?

Yesterday?

- [Voiceover] Yeah, yesterday.

- [Dr. Sutherland] You
were coming up to camp?

Wow, Moe, okay. That's fantastic.

Do you want to take it very carefully

out of the position there?

Oh, that's a beauty.

Let's have a look here.

Very nice ground slate point,

with notching on the base of it,

right up on top of this hill.

Amazing.

Let's get coordinates on it.

[Voiceover] The Dorset have been described

as the mystery people of the Arctic.

They inexplicably disappeared
about five centuries ago.

- [Voiceover] 1-8-1.

- [Dr. Sutherland] 1-8-1.

[Voiceover] They may have been overwhelmed

by the arrival of the Thule,

who were a more aggressive,
territorial people.

But no one is really certain
what led to the Dorset demise,

and as a result, exactly who
they were remains a mystery.

- There are stories about
what these people looked like,

but the stories vary quite a bit.

Sometimes they're
described as tiny people.

Sometimes they're described as giants.

There are stories about them,

the ancient enemy, the Thule people,

driving the Dorset people away,

that they were not
aggressive people at all.

People today still will repeat
and tell you these stories.

They still continue on in the
oral history of the Inuit.

But we have very little
archaeological evidence.

(serene music)

- [Voiceover] Perhaps the best window

into the lost Dorset
cultures exists in their art.

(serene music)

- The art gave me a real ...

I think a better insight
into Dorset culture

than just looking at the stone
tools and the harpoon heads,

and probably gave me a
more open perspective

on the Dorset people and what

they might have been doing here

and how complex their culture
might have really been.

This is a Dorset carving of a person

in typical Dorset dress.

You see the leggings, the
leggings here, the boots,

the double parka.

With the Dorset in contrast
to the Thule people,

they seem to have not worn hoods per se,

but collars, high collars that stood out.

Most of their representations
are like that.

But the clothing is there.

It's representing skin clothing,

leggings, parka, cammacks or boots.

This would have been used
in shammanick activities.

But you can see the shape
of the eyes here, the nose.

The teeth are accentuated because often

they would wear a set of
carved teeth in their mouths

to represent an animal.

(serene music)

This is a special piece for us

because all these antler wands

that have multiple faces on them,

with the exception of this one,

seem to be representations of real people

or perhaps ghost-like people.

In this instance, we've got
the typical Dorset face here.

But when you turn the
wand in this direction,

you see a very different face,

a very long, pronounced
nose, a strong eyebrow line,

and what appears to be a beard.

- [Voiceover] Two very distinctive faces

carved into the same piece of antler.

(serene music)

The wand could represent
two different people

existing together.

- It's art, so it's up to interpretation.

But I think, and this evidence
doesn't stand on its own,

but taken together with
all of the other evidence

that we have, I think
it's probably speaking to

encounters that were recorded in artwork.

- [Voiceover] Perhaps the Dorset

were as open to trade
as the Europeans were.

At least, that's what the mix of artifacts

at Nanook might suggest.

- Oh, that's a nice piece.

We're getting further samples of cordage,

which I've argued is Norse because

it was the first piece that
was found from North Baffin

and analyzed by textile
experts in England,

was identified as directly
comparable to yarn

from two textiles from Norse Greenland.

(serene music)

- [Voiceover] The earliest
sites in Greenland

date back to the 10th Century.

(serene music)

One of the consistent
archaeological markers

they find in Greenland is the cordage,

made with an ancient European
drop spindle technique.

(serene music)

- This is a European technology.

We've separated it all out
now to have it analyzed,

to look for presence of knots,

to look for direction of spin.

It's very consistent.

The textile analysts who've
looked at this have said

these pieces were spun by expert spinners.

That's the first piece.

- [Voiceover] The first piece of cordage

ever found in the Arctic was in 1984.

It was then stored and forgotten

at the Canadian Museum of
Civilization in Ottawa,

until Dr. Sutherland
rediscovered it in the shelves

and used it to compare to the cordage

she was finding herself.

- You can see that it
looks like string, really.

But the cordage is all made
out of wild animal hair.

It's really yarn, spun cordage or yarn,

that Norse women were spinning.

All of the cordage that
we've found on Baffin Island

is made out of wild animal hair,

principally arctic fox
and arctic hair fur.

(light upbeat music)

- [Voiceover] The town of Kimmirut

is up the coast from the Nanook site.

Kimmirut was the site of the very first

Hudson's Bay Company post
in the Eastern Arctic.

They set it up here because
of the abundance of furs,

mainly arctic fox furs,

and a willingness among the
local Inuit to do business.

(light upbeat music)

Pat Sutherland thinks
the scene was similar

centuries earlier.

The characters may have been different,

but the goal was the same.

People decided to bridge their

unfamiliarity with each other

in order to benefit from trade.

- This was a nexus.

The arctic a thousand years ago

was as complex and dynamic a place

as any other place.

- [Voiceover] It's
still difficult, though,

to interpret what this place
would have looked like.

To get a sense of the
structure the Norse built,

Pat needs to search for
more clues far from here,

on the other side of the Atlantic,

where the Norse came from.

(serene music)

The landscape of the Outer Hebrides

isn't that different from Baffin Island,

barren, wind blown, and beautiful.

(serene music)

The Norse lived in the
Hebrides for five centuries.

Explorer and outlaw Leif Erickson

was married to a local girl.

The place names here still
bear Scandinavian origins.

(serene music)

- This is sort of one edge of the world,

and the other is, you're
going to the other edge,

on Baffin Island, but
there's a connection.

It was connected, and it was connected

by means of islands.

The whole exercise of moving
west was island hopping.

(serene music)

Greenland was a small European nation

on the fringes of Arctic North America,

and the people were going out from there

to get resources.

(serene music)

This is a chapel, a church
if you will, church/chapel,

that's believed to date
to the 11th Century.

As you can see, it's quite tumbled down

and there's no roof left,

but you get a good view
of the stonework there.

The Norse were present from 800 AD on,

so they may well have used this church.

- [Voiceover] This is the Isle of Lewis,

the outermost of the Hebrides,

where the history goes
back through millenia,

from that tiny, broken down Norse chapel,

to the massive Iron Age brochs,

down through the ages to the
standing stones of Callanish,

after Stonehenge, the largest cluster

of standing stones in the UK.

It dates back 5,000 years.

- Well, we do see early sites
in Canada, too, of course.

In the Yukon, probably 18,000 years old.

But I think for most people in Canada,

that history isn't all
that visible to them.

Here it's palpable.

I think part of the appeal for me

is the environment that
we find these sites in,

and it has that remoteness, that isolation

that you see in the Arctic,

where people were living on the edge,

but for different reasons.

- [Voiceover] It was the architecture

that first brought Pat
Sutherland to the Hebrides.

She hoped there would be some clues here

that would help her understand

what that structure on Baffin
Island might have looked like.

The modern Hebridean homes bear the brunt

of the relentless wind.

In the adjacent crofts lay the
rocky ruins of old buildings.

Some of the ruined walls
just look like fences now,

or sheep paddocks.

But they are, in fact, the remains

of a centuries old design that
dates back to Norse times.

For generations, these stone
huts were what people lived in,

and Pat Sutherland believes
that these old buildings,

these "black houses" might resemble

what was built back at the
Nanook site on Baffin Island.

(serene music)

Dr. Mary McCloud lives
here on the Isle of Lewis.

Dr. Sutherland's colleague from Baffin

is an expert on the traditional buildings

of the North Atlantic.

- "Black house" was a phrase
that was coined in English

to talk about a poor house,

a house that was poorly made, badly made.

They're not actually poorly made,

but the folk who were living here

were very, very poverty stricken.

(serene music)

These buildings are shaped
by the local environment,

and they're shaped by the resources

that were available to people.

But the actual style of them,

and the sort of sub-rectangular shape,

that goes back to the Viking period,

so 1,000 years, 1,200 years
we're talking about here.

(serene music)

- [Voiceover] Some of these black houses

were still being lived in
as recently as the 1970s.

Families resided in one end,
and livestock in the other,

all under one roof.

(serene music)

Often, there were no chimneys.

The smoke simply ebbed out through

the timbers and the thatching.

- You can see that the
timbers that are required here

are not very long, in fact.

They're quite short.

They're clustered together.

We are talking on Baffin Island

about a definite absence of wood,

and in South Baffin it's not a place

where driftwood tends to collect.

The wood would have
been brought with them.

- The weight of the roof is absorbed

by the weight of the walls.

The downward thrust of the roof

is supported by the weight
of the walls underneath it.

The timber that's used
in the roof is often,

as Pat was saying, very light.

It's generally recycled.

If you look at old roofs,

you'll see quite a lot of them have,

for example, ship worm holes
in the timber, teredo holes,

which means that the timber was driftwood

that was picked up on the shore.

When folk were not well off,
they recycled the timber.

You also find that they used
whalebone if they could get it.

You get whale ribs used in a lot of roofs.

- [Voiceover] So is
this what the structure

on Baffin looked like?

Not entirely.

As Mary McCloud says, buildings like these

were made with the materials at hand,

and on Baffin, that meant dirt
and moss as well as stones.

No thatching.

But the structural idea
was very likely the same,

utilized as a trading post.

- Well, I think we've got indications

of early European architecture at Nanook,

so there was some kind of structure there

that they were operating out of

and living in for short periods of time.

There would probably be walrus tusk

brought to Nanook that the Norse

from Greenland and Iceland would want

to take back to Norway and elsewhere.

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- [Voiceover] For the Norse

who lived in the Greenland colonies,

walrus ivory was one of
the most valuable items

they could send back Europe.

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At the museum of Scotland,

a select few of the Lewis chessmen,

national treasures carved from
ivory in the 12th Century.

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The faces are Norse,
especially the beserker,

who plays the rook, his
teeth gnawing at his shield,

spoiling for a fight.

These ivory playing pieces
were lost for centuries,

only to turn up in 1831,
buried in a sand dune

on the Isle of Lewis.

It could be ivory that the Dorset people

took when they hunted the walrus,

and passed on to the Norse
as part of the trade.

The walrus tusks would have come

through the trade network

where they would be
carved into these pieces,

and then the pieces would be part of sets

that ended up here, that
were probably destined

for somewhere in Europe,
or even in the Middle East.

- [Voiceover] It's incredible to think

that an ancient people
from the Canadian Arctic

could have been part of an
international trade network.

The famous and historic Vinland map

shows the scope of the
Norse trading world.

They had a working navigable knowledge

of Europe, the Mediterranean,
and the Middle East.

But over here in the Northwest Atlantic,

there are only hints of Baffin Island.

It's no wonder.

The Norse were striking it rich,

and they wouldn't have
wanted to let everybody know

where they were getting their goods.

As Pat Sutherland and Mary McCloud say,

the black houses probably
provide an analog

for what might have been built on Baffin.

But there is one feature
that is exactly the same.

- Well, this is just a
drain that's running down.

It's an open drain in
the floor of the bier,

and any water that was moving
under the floor of the house

would actually come here and it would help

flush out the animal waste
towards the end of the house.

It's very common, particularly
in Norse and later buildings.

- It's much easier to see
and much more formalized,

but we do have a stone made with cobbles,

a stone floor drain at Nanook.

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It begins here at what
we think is a small wall

going across over to where Moe is working,

and it cuts around this
piece of degrading bedrock.

They avoided it and curved the drain,

and it heads up into the
other part of the site.

I've seen a lot of Dorset
sites throughout the Arctic.

We've never, ever found a drainage feature

or a house drain or a
floor drain, if you will,

in a Dorset structure,

nor in an ancient Inuit
structure for that matter.

It's outside the range of variability

for Dorset architectural features.

Drains are common in Norse sites,

but they're also common in
later European sites, too,

so it really is almost a
signature of European occupation.

- [Voiceover] But how long
ago did that occupation occur?

It's turned out that
getting radiocarbon dates

from Norse finds in the
Arctic has been difficult.

They are all over the time scale.

Radiocarbon dating measures the
decay of carbon in artifacts

to determine their age.

Some of those ages are too early,

back to the year 870.

That is about 100 years before the Norse

had even arrived in Greenland.

- [Voiceover] Shard pieces that I thought

you might be interested
in, that one and this one.

- [Voiceover] Part of the
problem is marine animal fat.

- [Dr. Sutherland] That's burned seal fat.

- [Voiceover] Want me to bag that?

- [Dr. Sutherland] Yeah.

- [Voiceover] In archaeological sites,

fat from butchered whales,
walruses, and seals

can set the radiocarbon
dating scale off by centuries.

- [Dr. Sutherland] This is
another chunk of seal fat.

- [Voiceover] That's
because of the way carbon

is absorbed by organisms in the water,

as opposed to organisms on land.

The Nanook site is soaked.

It's like a soup.

The old remains of rendered animal fat

have coated everything.

- The artifacts from the
Helleland project are suggesting

a period between 1250 and 1350.

But I think there's going to be,

when we finish with the unraveling

all the problems with
the radiocarbon dating,

or at least getting
further ahead with that,

there will be something earlier.

We should measure this in,

and then I'd like to pick it
up and put the pieces together.

It's primitive, but it
looks like it's been worked

along here and here.

- [Voiceover] In order
to zero in on dates,

Pat Sutherland has compared
the artifacts found at Nanook

with ones found in Greenland and Europe.

If the artifacts are
similar in material, design,

and execution, she can determine

the period in which they were made.

That gives her a clearer timeline.

- I think we can probably
talk about the possibility

of this area having been utilized

over a period of four centuries.

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- [Voiceover] Four
centuries is a long time.

Does that mean the Norse could
have actually lived here?

At least seasonally?

Could this be the first European dwelling

on North American soil?

To try to figure that out, Dr. Sutherland

will need to go deeper into the artifacts

than she has ever gone before.

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This is a scanning electron microscope

at the Geological Survey
of Canada in Ottawa.

Pat Sutherland is using it
to analyze the artifacts

in intense detail.

That is a hone that they are
putting into the chamber,

a stone tool used for
sharpening knives and axes.

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- This section was excavated in the 1960s.

When we went back, we
came up with this piece,

and where are we here?

It's a direct fit.

That's Norse.

The squared tapered style, you could go to

any sites in Scandinavia
for the Viking age

and the medieval Norse, and you would find

hones just like that.

KDDQ9-618 is the sample number.

That's from the Nanook site.

- [Voiceover] Under the microscope,

the surface of the Norse hone

becomes a geography unto itself,

a terrain interrupted at
intervals by these blotches,

traces of smelted metal.

- [Voiceover] This is 21 microns.

- [Dr. Sutherland] 21 microns?

- [Voiceover] Yeah.
- [Voiceover] Got it.

- [Voiceover] In the wet
and acidic environment,

iron tools would rust away and disappear.

- Yeah, that's iron oxide there.

- Okay.

- [Voiceover] But tiny traces
of metal can still survive.

As the microscope traverses the surface,

Pat Sutherland asks geologist
Pat Hunt and Peter Thompson

to tell her if there is any
evidence clinging to the hone.

- [Dr. Sutherland] So
one is the iron oxide,

number one, and number two is the tin.

- Pure tin is not a common
constituent of this rock.

It's definitely exotic.

- [Voiceover] The hone is made from stone,

probably quarried on Baffin
Island, or possibly Greenland.

Neither iron oxide nor tin is part of

its constituent qualities.

But tin is present in copper alloys,

the kinds of alloys people use to make

certain kinds of knives
and other metal tools.

There's a very good
chance the tin got there

when someone was sharpening
something on the hone.

- [Dr. Sutherland] If
you can give me a size

when it's convenient, Pat?

Thank you.

- [Voiceover] The SEM team prepares

to take measurements in microns.

Microns are fractions of millimeters,

tiny, but in this hyper enlarged world,

they are huge swaths of
evidence for Pat Sutherland.

- [Dr. Sutherland] Looks
pretty substantial, 20 or so?

- [Pat Hunt] 63.

- [Dr. Sutherland] Oh, my goodness, okay.

- [Pat Hunt] 63.2.

- The results have been spectacular.

We've got meteoric iron, smelted iron.

We've got copper alloys.

We have something called bismuth,

which is often found
in metal working areas.

It can be used as a flux, if
you're working with metals.

It's the same, the readings are similar,

to what we're getting off the hones

that actually come out of
Norse sites in Greenland

It certainly substantiates that there were

Europeans on this site,
no question about that.

But I think we've got
that with the whetstones

and all kinds of other evidence.

- [Voiceover] The evidence
is almost overwhelming.

The rats, the tools, the
Dorset art and hunting points,

the spun cordage, the
exotic wood, and the hone.

- [Dr. Sutherland] There's
lots of bright spots there now.

- [Voiceover] Add that to the excavations

and the traces of architecture,

what we know about the
Norse black house design.

And then consider the walrus
ivory and the animal furs,

and remember that the Vinland map

shows where Helleland is.

The story that Pat
Sutherland is telling us now

is the sum of a series
of small, considered,

deliberate scientific steps.

- Taking all of the different
lines of evidence together,

it would appear that the early Europeans

who were there interacting with the Dorset

were on the ground and in place

and staying for a certain period of time.

- [Voiceover] So what
did this place look like

during the time the Norse and the Dorset

were interacting here?

No one knows for sure,
but here is an idea.

A structure, similar
to those black houses,

with a mossy roof and low stone walls,

made with materials at hand.

It would have been sturdy
enough to provide shelter,

even over winter if need be,

a place where the Norsemen
welcomed the Dorset in trade.

Pat Sutherland and her colleagues believe

the pieces of the Nanook
story are coming together.

- It's about the discovery.

It's about the journey.

It's not really about
the big eureka moments.

It's about the process and
just working away at a puzzle.

Even if we aren't fitting
the pieces entirely together,

we're starting to see,
get glimpses of a picture

of what was going on there.

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- [Voiceover] Historians
and archaeologists

have suspected for years that there were

Europeans making contact
with North Americans

long before Columbus or Cabot.

Now Pat Sutherland has
that body of evidence

that shows the Norse were the first,

even if they were a little
secretive about it at the time.

- I think they painted a
picture in the accounts,

and in going home and
talking about Helleland,

probably as a place that
you don't want to go there.

Because trade was controlled by

relatively few individuals, chieftains,

and they wouldn't want
the whole world to know

that Helleland was where it
was at, in terms of trade.

(serene music)

I think we've only just
begun to delve into

what the Norse were doing there,

and we've just got the
beginning of the story.

(serene music)

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