DID THE VIKINGS SPREAD CIVILIZATION TO AUSTRALIA? I have posted a number of times on the issue of whether the Vikings were raiders or traders. Although I have told the kids that the Vikings were engaged in spreading civilization, I posted here recently, on how Professor Tom Shippey concludes that: “the societies of Scandinavia were just unusually aggressive, even by the high standards of Roman and post-Roman Europe.â€
Ruth Ann Baumgartner, via Facebook, called my attention to a discovery of what appears to be an eleventh century Viking settlement on the Northern Coast of Western Australia. This article by Barbara Johnson on the worldnewsdailyreport site quotes Professor Allison Fletcher that “these people were almost certainly Norsemen. The various dating analysis have shown that the site dated from around 1000 AD, precisely at the time of ‘Viking expansion’. The architecture and the various objects found on the site are all consistent with other Norse colonies or trading posts.â€