A UCLA-led team of archaeologists has discovered a 1000-year-old Viking Age farmhouse in north Iceland that may have belonged to Snorri Thorfinnsson, the first European born in the New World and the son of prominent figures in Viking sagas.

The long and narrow structure, built of turf and buried by windblown soil, is located in a flat grass field about 150 yards east of a museum that explores 18th-century rural Icelandic life as well as the history of the farm’s earliest recorded occupants, Thorfinnsson and his parents, Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir and Thorfinn Karlsefni.

“When we realized the size and the age of the structure, we got really excited, but we didn’t dare hope it was anything more than a very old cow barn,� said John Steinberg, the principal investigator on the excavation and a research associate at UCLA’s Cotsen Institute of Archaeology. “But now it looks as though we may really have found this farmhouse that’s been the stuff of legends for nearly a millennium.�

“At the very least, research on the house will help to illuminate a significant yet poorly understood period in Icelandic history during which the Viking Age was coming to an end,� said Elisabeth Ward, a Smithsonian researcher and a member of the excavation team.

Steinberg and 14 other team members have been working near the Glaumbaer Folk Museum, just outside the seaside village of Saudarkrokur, for the past two years. Using advanced remote sensing equipment in an approach designed to detect houses with turf walls and sod roofs, they identified the perimeters of the almost 1,500-square-foot structure last year.

Returning to the site this summer, the archaeologists excavated the telltale signs of a Viking Age farmhouse: five-foot thick turf walls, raised benches, and a long narrow floor of compacted earth and charcoal. They also unearthed loom weights, a spindle whorl and an embroidery tool. The preliminary excavations, completed last month, confirmed the structure as a main dwelling area and revealed at least three phases of the building with a final phase radiocarbon dated to between 976 and 1042.

According to Viking lore, Thorbjarnardottir and Karlsefni traveled in 1004 to North America following Leif Eriksson’s voyages there. Their son was born a year later in a place they called Vinland, the precise location of which has never been determined but is believed to be somewhere in the Canadian province of Newfoundland. “The Vinland Sagas,� written some 200 years later, describe the family as the first Europeans to attempt permanent settlement in the New World. After three years in North America, the pioneers returned to Iceland and settled in Glaumbaer, where, according to the sagas, they prospered in part by selling items acquired in the New World to Europeans.

In its final phase, the newly discovered house is at least 95 feet long, with an internal roofed area of about 175 square yards. A floor measuring 85 feet long by approximately 5 feet 7 inches wide was found in the house’s long central core, and it was surrounded on either side by 6-foot-wide raised sleeping benches and activity areas. A thin volcanic ash layer from the 1104 eruption of Mount Hekla covers these remains, confirming that the structure was occupied between 1000 and 1100.

“We can’t be certain of the name of the home’s owners, but its age and location are certainly consistent with the Saga description of Snorri’s farm,� said Steinberg, a lecturer at UCLA and at California State University, Northridge.

The main structure was surrounded by numerous outbuildings over an area of about a football field. These buildings have not yet been excavated.

The newly discovered house is similar in layout and size to wooden structures found within such Viking Age forts as Trelleborg in Denmark. Although longer than any of the three Viking Age turf dwellings at L’Anse aux Meadows, a Canadian National Historic Site in Newfoundland, the Glaumbaer structure has the same proportions and general layout. Researchers believe that the relatively large size of the newly discovered structure reflects the substantial wealth made by the family during their voyages.

However, the main structure at Glaumbaer is longer than any of the structures found at Trelleborg or L’Anse aux Meadows, and the researchers believe the size may reflect the substantial wealth made by the family during their voyages.

“The possibility that one of these buried structures could have been built by the same people who traveled to the new world is very intriguing,� said Ward, who served as the assistant curator of “Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga,� an ongoing traveling exhibition organized by the Smithsonian Institution.

Researchers had long believed that the original farmhouse had stood on the site of the Glaumbaer Folk Museum, which is housed in one of the oldest standing turf houses in Iceland. Designated a museum in 1948, the structure stands on a ridge.

“We had always assumed that the original house must be under the standing modern turf house, in the very same spot and therefore mostly destroyed,� said Sigridur Sigurdardottir, the museum’s director. “But now we have found out it was in our museum hay field all along, just under the surface.�

What appears to be the original farmhouse was found in a low-lying area below the current museum by using geophysical sensing equipment that sends electrical currents through the ground. Unlike the surrounding terrain, turf walls — made of peat moss bricks — resist electric current, allowing researchers to detect sites not visible on the surface.

“As an added benefit, the houses found by this remote-sensing method are well preserved,� said Gudmundur Olafsson of the National Museum of Iceland, who has excavated at Eirkstadur, the supposed first farm of Erik the Red (Leif Eriksson’s father), and has assisted the American team’s excavation at Glaumbaer.

The 1000-year-old farmhouse at Glaumbaer appears to be the oldest of several Viking Age structures identified by the archaeological team in Skagafjord, a glacial valley that looks out on the Arctic Ocean, but kept temperate by a drift of the Gulf Stream.

Excavations into a garbage pile beside the Glaumbaer museum revealed the site’s occupation began about 1100, immediately after the abandonment of the newly discovered structure. Although Snorri Thorfinnsson is said to have lived a long life, the researchers now believe he must have died before the move up hill to the location of today’s turf house museum.

“Relocating the main farmhouse from low-lying areas to higher ground around 1100 is consistent with a general reorganization of settlement as Iceland moved from a collection of chiefdoms to a more formal state,� Steinberg said.

Thorfinnsson’s mother, Gudrid, and her family figure prominently in the exhibition “Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga,� which began touring North America in 2000 in conjunction with the 1000th anniversary of Viking settlement in North America. Having already enjoyed runs in New York City, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., the exhibition is on view through Oct. 14 at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Ottawa. It will be on view from Nov. 23 to May 18, 2003, at the Science Museum of Minnesota in Minneapolis.

The Skagafjordur Archaeological Settlement Survey and the Glaumbaer excavation were funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Fund for Anthropological Research. The survey was conducted in conjunction with the Holar Research Project and the Glaumbaer Folk Museum. Scholars from Northwestern University; University of California, San Diego; and Pennsylvania State University also participated in the research.

Further excavations at the site are planned.