<P> For centuries it remained unclear whether the Icelandic stories represented real voyages by the Norse to North America . The sagas first gained serious historic respectability when, in 1837, the Danish antiquarian Carl Christian Rafn pointed out the possibility for a Norse settlement in, or voyages to, North America . North America, by the name Winland, first appeared in written sources in a work by Adam of Bremen from approximately 1075 . The most important works about North America and the early Norse activities there, namely the Sagas of Icelanders, first reached written form only in the 13th and 14th centuries . </P> <P> Evidence of Norse west of Greenland came in the 1960s when archaeologist Anne Stine Ingstad and her husband, outdoorsman and author Helge Ingstad, excavated a Norse settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland . The location of the various lands described in the sagas remains unclear, however . Many historians identify Helluland with Baffin Island and Markland with Labrador . The location of Vinland poses a thornier question . Most believe that the L'Anse aux Meadows settlement represents the Vinland settlement described in the sagas; others argue that the sagas depict Vinland as warmer than Newfoundland and therefore lying farther south . </P> <P> In 2012 Canadian researchers identified possible signs of Norse outposts in Nanook at Tanfield Valley on Baffin Island, as well as on Nunguvik, Willows Island and Avayalik . Unusual fabric cordage found on Baffin Island in the 1980s and stored at the Canadian Museum of Civilization was identified in 1999 as possibly of Norse manufacture; that discovery led to more in - depth exploration of the Tanfield Valley archaeological site . </P> <P> Archeological findings in 2015 at Point Rosee, on the southwest coast of Newfoundland, were originally thought to reveal evidence of the location being a bog iron - smelting site and therefore a possible second 10th century Viking settlement in Canada . The possible settlement was initially discovered through satellite imagery and magnetometer readings and archaeologists have begun excavating the area . Dr. Birgitta Linderoth Wallace, an expert on the Viking settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows, is unsure of the identification of Point Rosee as a Norse site . </P>

Where did the vikings first settle in north america