Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
A Sifter of Viking Secrets
The world press gave scant attention to the death, in 1997, of Norwe-
gian archaeologist Anne-Stine Ingstad, but she was a pioneer, sifting
through the sandy soil above a Newfoundland beach to uncover the
remains of a Viking outpost.
She was the wife of Helge Ingstad, whose discovery of the site in
1961 produced the first conclusive evidence that Vikings had made a
North American beachhead 500 years before Columbus. Vikings sailed
from a colony in Greenland to reach the North American continent
(today's Canada). Icelandic sagas had described the voyages in detail,
and few scholars doubted that Leif Eriksson and other Vikings had
made such voyages and explorations. But until the Ingstads made their
startling discoveries, no hard evidence of a Viking presence existed—
only a spate of spurious artifacts.
The initial discovery was met with skepticism. But once Anne-Stine
Ingstad started to dig, most doubts evaporated. Her husband had used
vivid geographic descriptions in Icelandic sagas to find the camp
described by Eriksson and others. Once the site was discovered, she car-
ried out excavations over several months. In time, she uncovered the
foundations of eight buildings, including a large house almost identi-
cal to Eriksson's great hall in Greenland.
In 1964 she unearthed a tiny stone spinning wheel, suggesting that
female Vikings had used the camp. In 1980 UNESCO designated the
settlement, L'Anse aux Meadows, a World Heritage Site, along with
the Pyramids of Egypt and the Grand Canyon.
North Cape at Norway's Arctic tip, a $140-million bridge and tunnel was con-
structed to Mager Island, home to only 3,600 people (and more than that many
reindeer). An additional $135 million went into the earth in the mountains east
of Bergen to link the towns of Aurland (pop. 1,900) and Laerdal (pop. 2,250). Its
24km (16-mile) tunnel casts the previous world record-holder, the 16km (10-
mile) St. Gotthard tunnel in Switzerland, into a distant second place.
A more artistic bridge opened in December of 2001. The designer? None
other than Leonardo da Vinci in 1502. The 99m (330-ft.) laminated timber
bridge links Norway and Sweden over a highway at the town of Aas, 26km (16
miles) south of Oslo.
In 2001 Norway ranked first (with the U.S. in sixth place) as the best coun-
try in the world in which to live. The judge? The United Nations Human Devel-
opment Report. Australia followed Norway in second place, with both countries
moving narrowly ahead of Canada. The annual survey is based on statistical pro-
files of what people can expect in life beyond economic growth.
The year 2001 also was witness to the marriage of Crown Prince Haakon and
Mette-Mari Tjessem Hoiby, a single mom who lived with the royal before mar-
rying him. The couple's marriage raised some astonishment among Norway's
more conservative factions, since the father of Hoiby's child is a convicted
cocaine supplier, and she had been well known on Oslo's “dance-and-drugs
house party scene,” as one newspaper commentator put it. Some Norwegians
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