Although Christopher Colombus has been credited with discovering North America, others have laid claim to the distinction long before him. One legend says that the Welsh prince Madoc, for example, landed in the America over 300 years before Colombus. Still others claim that the Vikings landed and even established a settlement here. It’s this latter theory that’s gaining a little more credence thanks to an observation from space.

The Landing of Vikings in America - H.E. Marshall - Wikimedia Commons From IFLScience: On a remote, windswept headland 645 kilometers (400 miles) farther south-west than the only other known American Viking site, archaeologists think that they might have uncovered another Viking settlement on the southern tip of Newfoundland, one which if confirmed will once and for all prove that the Vikings, and not Christopher Columbus, were the first Europeans to set foot on and settle the North American continent about 1,000 years ago. To prove this theory, archaeologists would need to find evidence, not just that Vikings had once set foot here, but that they had actually established settlements, and that’s what exactly what they did.

Flickr Sarah Parcak is a Space Archaeologist at the University of Alabama - Birmingham, where she uses infrared satellite images to see things that the naked eye can’t, and hopefully find lost settlements in cities. She had previous success in mapping entire cities in Egypt and ancient Rome and now she was using it to try and solve the mystery of the Vikings. More from IFLScience By firstly looking at maps and seeing where would logically make a good site for a village, she then looked at the satellite images. By doing this, her attention was drawn to Point Rosee, which seemed to show that something had changed the chemical composition of the soil. This led her and a team to go out to the site and start excavations. And what they found could alter the history of the Vikings.

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Pixabay Under the surface, blackened stones and piles of charcoal seemed to indicate a hearth, and within it they found cooked bog iron. This is indicative of smelting, a technique that no other contemporary culture in that region was doing at the time it dates to, roughly a millennium ago. They have also uncovered what appear to be turf walls, like those seen in known Viking settlements in other parts of the northern Atlantic. If these findings are confirmed as more tests and excavations are carried out, it would be an incredible finding, and one that backs up the old Norse stories, which were until now thought only to be myth. The findings were revealed in the PBS documentary Vikings Unearthed, which also aired on the History Channel.

To learn more about Sarah Parcak, you can visit her at her website SarahParcak.com