WE WOULD KNOW IF RAGNAR LOTHBROK'S SONS GOT TO THE UPPER PENINSULA.

There's new evidence of globalization before the Age of Steam nailed to Newmark's Door.  "Centuries before Columbus, Vikings came to the Western hemisphere. How far into the Americas did they travel?"  We have pretty good evidence of Viking settlements in Newfoundland (insert joke about sundials carved a half hour off here).

Digging at the site for seven summers from 1961 to 1968, the [Norse archaeologists Helge and Anne Ingstad] concluded that it was indeed a Viking settlement. The excavators found evidence of iron-working: a work shed with an anvil and a large stone, iron fragments, and slag. The working of gold, copper and arsenic occurred elsewhere in the Americas in the year 1000 but, because no one else in the Americas worked iron, the archaeologists reasoned that outsiders – quite possibly the Norse – had to be doing the smelting.

And that, dear reader, suffices to establish my claim.

By travelling on trade routes from [another dig in Maine] Goddard site westward, into North America, the Vikings might have made their way deeper into the interior of the continent than people realise. Their possible routes reveal something important about the extent to which the Americas were connected in the year 1000, long before Columbus’s 1492 arrival in Hispaniola. They might have even reached as far as Mexico.

The most likely route to Mexico from the Goddard site ran through the Mississippi Valley. It would have been a long and difficult journey, and no evidence survives of anyone – or any single object – making the entire trip, but ongoing excavations and breakthroughs in scientific testing have demonstrated that a continent-wide trade network connected the major settlements of North America.

The connection between the upper Great Lakes and Mexico is well known, there are the Mississippian settlements including Cahokia and Aztlan, and ... sheer serendipity ... a museum docent in Longview, Texas, who was working with some grade school kids the day I dropped in on their historical museum ... had a few moments to confirm the existence of such a trade route from the Lakes to south of the Rio Grande.

Excavations at Cahokia have produced solid evidence of long-distance trade. Mica, a flaky mineral that catches the light, came from the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina, and copper was sourced from Lake Superior. The Cahokians also imported conch and whelk shells from the Gulf of Mexico.

Archaeology rarely reveals exactly how or in what way one society influenced another. Scholars have long wondered whether the Cahokians and the Maya had any direct contacts; the intensive cultivation of corn, which originated in Mexico, underlay the Cahokia population explosion of 1050 CE, and its open plazas and mounds, as well as its satellite towns, resemble similar earthworks in Maya cities.

What does that have to do with Vikings? Not much, and the article shifts focus to drawings of planked sailing ships in Mayan buildings, and speculation about longships blown far off course.  On the other hand, if a Viking had accompanied a Skraeling on walkabout into the interior, and gotten to the Copper Country, he would almost surely have recognized the red rocks that were near the copper mines.