Recently I ran across a couple of articles on Sandhavn, the most likely location for the "Atlantic Harbor" reported as a Norse trading center on the southern coast of Greenland about 1300 AD. As you probably know, during the Middle Ages, the Vikings left their homes in Norway and Denmark to expand into the rest of Europe and eventually as west far as Canada.
Garšar, Brattahild and Sandhavn, Eastern Settlement, Greenland. Map by Masae, edited by Kris Hirst
A Norse (what Vikings are called outside of their homeland) colony led by Erik the Red landed on Greenland in 985 AD and built homes and farmsteads there. Archaeological studies have focused on the Eastern Settlement colony, including the elite residence of Garšar and the warehouses at Sandhavn, located on a sheltered bay near the Norse site of Herjolfsnes. Sandhavn (or something like it) was the name mentioned by the Norse priest Ivar Bardsson, who wrote in 1300 AD of a bay where the Norwegian merchant ships landed.
There are big stone ruins at Sandhavn, probably representing mercantile warehouses built by the Norse; but there are also, right next to the warehouses, a handful of Inuit houses, what the authors of the Sandhavn articles are calling "Thule". The Norse met the indigenous people of Canada and Greenland and called them "skraelings". The relationship doesn't seem by and large to have been a pleasant one: Sandhavn represents the first evidence of co-existing "skraelings" and Norse recorded to date.
Read more about:
- Sandhavn
- Garšar, home of Erik the Red's sister
- The Eastern Settlement
- Skraelings
- Guide to the Vikings
- Guide to the Thule
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