The Norse stayed at L’Anse aux Meadows for only 10 years before deciding around 1010 CE to return home. It’s not clear why they left: disputes with the locals might have prompted their decision. They could also have realised that the goods available in North America – primarily pelts and lumber – wouldn’t support a settlement in the long term.
Even after their departure, the Norse continued to return to the Americas, most likely to pick up lumber since no trees grew on Greenland and Iceland. On one Greenland farm, archaeologists have found textiles preserved in ice that contain the fur of brown bear and bison, both animals native to North America but not present on Greenland, which points to continued contact with the Americas in the centuries after 1000 CE.
Only one Norse object found in the Americas dates to after the Vikings’ departure: a single penny, found at the Goddard site in the town of Brooklin in Maine, facing Penobscot Bay. The penny was minted between 1065 and 1080, some 50 years after the Vikings abandoned the L’Anse aux Meadows settlement.
How did the penny travel to the Goddard site in Maine? Most likely the Norse brought it with them to somewhere on Labrador or Newfoundland when they came to cut down trees. The locals could have trickle-traded the coin from one place to the next, until it arrived at Goddard. Or possibly a Viking carried the penny to this, the southernmost point where archaeological evidence of the Norse has surfaced. (The Kensington ‘Viking’ runestone in Minnesota is definitely a forgery.)
The Goddard site consisted of a large pile of shells and refuse measuring about 12 inches (30 cm) at its deepest point. A preponderance of bones from seals and sturgeon showed that they were the main elements of the local diet. Cross-sections of 17 teeth from harbour seal, grey seal and sea mink revealed that these creatures had been killed between June and October. Apparently, Amerindians gathered at the site each summer to feast on seals and sea mink. They also traded various items.
Archaeologists found objects at the Goddard site that were made with 10 different minerals including cherts (a type of flint used to start fires or make tools), rhyolites and jaspers originating from all across the northeastern United States and Canada. This quantity of non-local material shows that Goddard was an important node on a trading network stretching from the Atlantic coast to Lake Ontario and what is now Pennsylvania.
By travelling on trade routes from the Goddard site westward, into North America, the Vikings might have made their way deeper into the interior of the continent than people realise. Their possible routes reveal something important about the extent to which the Americas were connected in the year 1000, long before Columbus’s 1492 arrival in Hispaniola. They might have even reached as far as Mexico.