“Vikings: the North Atlantic Saga” explores the little-known story of the dramatic Viking/Norse expansion across the North Atlantic from 850-1000, and their explorations and settlement in Greenland and Northeastern North America. Special emphasis is on fads and fallacies in popular beliefs about “Vikings” in North America as contrasted with new archaeological evidence from Arctic and Subarctic regions where Norse contacts occurred with Native Americans–both Inuit and Indian. Finally, the lecture addresses the likely cases of failure of the western Norse colonies and implications for future human arctic endeavors.

Bill Fitzhugh is the Director, Arctic Studies Center, and Curator, Department of Anthropology, at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian, Institution, in Washington. He has a B.A. from Dartmouth College where he is a Visiting Professor and a doctorate from Harvard University. He has been an Academic Trustee of the AIA. His fieldwork has been in such places as Labrador, Kodiak Island, and Frobisher Bay, Baffin Island, the Russian Arctic and Mongolia. He appeared in The Vikings. NOVA Online (www.pbs.org/nova/vikings.who.html) 2001. he has written extensively about the Inuit.