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Book Reviews 213
The discovery in 1960 of the Norse site at l'Anse aux Meadows
and the completion of nine seasons of exploration and
excavation in 1968, brings to an end one significant phase in Helge
Ingstad's achievement, signalised by the award to him of an
honorary degree of Memorial University in May 1970 for his
services to Newfoundland history. A good deal is now known
about what went on during these years, but it will not be fully
understood until the definitive excavation reports appear and are
digested by the experts in this difficult field. Though I have not
been to the site, I have been fortunate enough to have been in
touch with what was going on through Ian Whitaker and Henry
Collins who have, and also E. E. Seary, Agnes O'Dea, and the
late R. A. Skelton, who passed on materials and answered queries.
More recently I have had a chance to talk to Tom Lee at Laval
University about the stillvery mysterious structures, with at least
some Norse affinities, which he has excavated in the Ungava
Peninsula. A very tentative discussion of some of the problems
associated with these discoveries and excavations may be worth
while.
Helge Ingstad's Land under the Pole Star, published in England
in 1966, seven years after its appearance in Norway, dealt with the
prelude to his Newfoundland discovery with a note only on the
location of the site and of the first five seasons' work on it. The
present book, Westward to Vinland, has suffered a similar time-lag,
having been published in Norway (as Vesterveg til Vinland) in
1965. This does cover the discoveries of 1960-64 in some detail,
though without technical information on excavation, and refers
incidentally to some discoveries of the seasons 1965-68 of which
there has not yet been any systematic treatment. Ingstad is an
experienced traveller and travel-writer. His earlier book gave
a very thorough, though highly personal, view of the Norse
Greenland colony and its broader setting; his second book takes
some time to focus on the northern tip of Newfoundland where he
finally settled on L'Anse aux Meadows as the probable site of a
Norse settlement and appears to have been well vindicated in the
result. He was, in 1960, hot on the heels of the eminent Danish
archaeologist, jorgen Meldgaard, who had been over the same
ground a short time before him. Ingstad is not a professional
archaeologist, though his wife, Anne Stine Ingstad, has had an
archaeological training and has usually been in charge of digging.
He is a great specialist on life in the Arctic and a considerable,
though somewhat amateur, historian. It is necessary to
mention these points because Ingstad has been criticized on a
number of grounds, notably that he pushed ahead with excava-