April 20, 2001 The farm under the sand Researcher challenges
conventional thinking on disappearance of Viking community n
1991, two caribou hunters stumbled over a log on a snowy
Greenland riverbank, an unusual event because Greenland is above
the tree line. Closer investigation uncovered rock-hard sheep
droppings. The hunters had stumbled on a 500-year-old Viking
farm that lay hidden beneath the sand, gift-wrapped and
preserved by nature for future archeologists. Gården under
Sandet or GUS, Danish for the farm under the sand, would become
the first major Viking find in Greenland since the 1920s. "GUS
is beautifully preserved because, once it was buried, it was
frozen," explains University of Alberta Anthropologist Dr.
Charles Schweger. "Things that are perishable and normally
disappear are found at GUS." A specialist in Arctic paleo-
ecology and geo-archeology, Schweger joined the international
archeological team that would spend the next seven years sifting
through sand at GUS. The famous Viking, Eric the Re