With the use of satellite imagery, archaeologists claim to have identified a site at Point Rosee in Newfoundland, Canada, that could probably be the first new Viking site discovered in North America in the past over five decades.

Archaeologists believe the newly discovered site has the potential to rewrite history, particularly the portion before the time of Christopher Columbus when Europeans explored North America.

Prior to this, it was in the 1960s that the only other Viking site in North America was found at L’Anse Aux Meadows on the northern tip of Newfoundland, about 300 miles from Point Rosee.

The archaeologists based their investigation—it will feature in Vikings Unearthed, a special of PBS’s NOVA science series, co-produced with the BBC—on satellite imagery, magnetometer surveys, and a preliminary excavation of the site, located in southern Newfoundland.

A team led by American archaeologist Sarah Parcak made the discovery through cameras installed some 400 miles above the Earth. Besides Parcak, the project had co-director Gregory Mumford, an associate professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and Frederick Schwarz, of Black Spruce Heritage Services; Douglas Bolender, an archeologist at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and historian Dan Snow.

“This is going to take years of careful excavation, and it's going to be controversial”, Parcak says. Emphasizing that the finding may, in fact, bring forth more queries than answers, the US archaeologist says but that is what new discoveries are meant to do.

Experts in the field are now expected to conduct further excavation and analysis of the site. “If confirmed as Norse by further research, the site will show that the Vikings travelled much farther in North America than previously known, pushing the boundary of their explorations over 300 miles to the southwest [of L’Anse Aux Meadows]”, explained NOVA, in its press release.