Guided by ancient Norse sagas and modern satellite images, searchers claim to have discovered what may be North America’s second Viking site.

Archaeologists have found a stone hearth used for iron-working hundreds of miles from L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland. It may rewrite the history of the Vikings. Or that of the Basques?

The treasure found is a stone hearth used for working iron. However, the site – Point Rosee – lies very near the Channel-Port aux Basques, and may perhaps as well be the result of iron-forging carried out by Basque and Portuguese fishermen, who famously fished the Grand Banks in the 15^th century before Columbus set sails. Fishing cod is a business, which needs near-by ports, where fish can be dried. Presumably the fishermen had medieval landing-places on the shore. The have just not been found yet. It is known that the Christian I, king of Denmark sent an exhibition West in 1472 to explore the fishing waters around Iceland and Greenland and perhaps proceed further west. The exhibition was financed by the Danish King and manned by a couple of German admirals (Pining and Ponthorst).

However, archaeologists, who have examined the stone hearth claims that the technology seems to be decidedly “Viking”.

“The sagas suggest a short period of activity and a very brief and failed colonization attempt,” says Douglas Bolender to National Geography, an archaeologist specializing in Norse settlements. “L’Anse aux Meadows fits well with that story but is only one site. Point Rosee could reinforce that story or completely change it if the dating is different from L’Anse aux Meadows. We could end up with a much longer period of Norse activity in the New World.”

According to him, the evidence is promising. The turf structure that partially surrounds the hearth is nothing like the shelters built by indigenous peoples who lived in Newfoundland at the time, nor by Basque fishermen and whalers who arrived in the 16th century. And, while iron slag may be fairly generic, “there aren’t any known cultures—prehistoric or modern—that would have been mining and roasting bog iron ore in Newfoundland other than the Norse,” says Bolender to National Geographic. Although Norse people knew of mining and mined some iron ore in a variety of locations throughout Scandinavia, most Viking era iron was smelted from bog iron. However, the knowledge of how to extract bog-iron was not “lost” in later Scandinavia. The technology continued to be used into the later Middle Ages and must have been known by Scandinavian seamen and fishers, used to repair their ships in far-away corners of the world.

The jury is decidedly still out!

The site of the discovery, hundreds of miles south of L’Anse aux Meadows, was located by archaeologist Sarah Parcak, a National Geographic Fellow and “space archaeologist” who has used satellite imagery to locate lost Egyptian cities, temples, and tombs.

Information of how the new site compares to the identified forge at L’Anse aux Meadows has not as yet been published.