Word: greenland
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...broad outlines of Viking culture and achievement have been known to experts for decades, but a spate of new scholarship, based largely on archaeological excavations in Europe, Iceland, Greenland and Canada, has begun to fill in the elusive details. And now the rest of us have a chance to share in those discoveries with the opening last week of a wonderfully rich exhibition titled "Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga" at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington...
...ranges towering in the distance. This "green land," he decided (in what might have been a clever bit of salesmanship), would be a perfect place to live. In 985 Erik returned triumphantly to Iceland and enlisted a group of followers to help him establish the first Norse outposts on Greenland. Claiming the best plot of land for himself, Erik established his base at Brattahlid, a verdant spot at the neck of a fjord on the island's southwestern tip, across from what is now the modern airport at Narsarsuaq. He carved out a farm and built his wife a tiny...
...remains of this stone-and-turf building were found in 1961. The most spectacular discovery from the Greenland colonies was made in 1990, however, when two Inuit hunters searching for caribou about 55 miles east of Nuuk (the modern capital) noticed several large pieces of wood sticking out of a bluff. Because trees never grew in the area, they reported their discovery to the national museum. The wood turned out to be part of an enormous Norse building, perfectly sealed in permafrost covered by 5 ft. of sand: "definitely one of the best-preserved Norse sites we have," says archaeologist...
...appeal of an afternoon at a seedy OTB outpost, read on. For Jane Smiley's Horse Heaven (Knopf; 561 pages; $26) turns out to go down quite easily--more like a pitcher of mint juleps at the Kentucky Derby. Smiley, who has already given us an epic about Greenland, an academic comedy set in the Midwest and historical fiction about abolition, has as great a range and as much intellectual curiosity as any novelist writing today. In her latest book, she takes on a fresh topic and once again winds up in the winner's circle...
...know Greenland is smaller than it looks. And, thanks to advances in digital photocartography, you can be too. Or bigger. Or whatever. While the rest of the world is using scanners and code to make two dimensions look like three, to rotate molecular models, conduct on-line house-tours and reconstruct mid-air collisions, artists Lilla LoCurto and Bill Outcault have flipped things around: what would three dimensions look like if we wanted to make them only...