L'Anse aux Meadows in the context of "Vinland"

The exploration of North America by Norsemen began in the late 10th century. Voyages from Iceland reached Greenland and founded colonies along its western coast. Norse settlements on Greenland lasted almost 500 years, and the population peaked at around 2,000–3,000 people. The colonies consisted mostly of farms along Greenland's scattered coastal fjords. Colonists relied heavily on hunting, especially of walruses and the harp seal. For lumber, they harvested driftwood, imported wood from Europe, and sailed to modern-day Canada.

Archaeological evidence indicates that the Greenland colonists used lumber and possibly iron ore imported from North America. Archaeologists found remains of one short-term settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows near the northern tip of Newfoundland. The remains of buildings excavated there in the 1960s dated to approximately 1,000 years ago. It was not a permanent settlement and lacked graves and livestock areas. The site was abandoned, seemingly deliberately, by 1145 AD with no valuables or tools left behind. Some wood fragments and nuts in the Norse remains were from plants not found in Newfoundland, but native to the continental mainland across the Gulf of St. Lawrence. No other settlements in Canada and no settlements on the North American mainland have been conclusively identified as Norse.

Viking expansion was the historical movement which led Vikings, to sail most of the North Atlantic, reaching south as far as North Africa and east as far as Russia, and through the Mediterranean as far as Constantinople and the Middle East, acting as looters, traders, colonists and mercenaries. To the west, Vikings under Leif Erikson (the heir to Erik the Red) reached North America and set up a short-lived settlement in present-day L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, Canada. Longer lasting and more established Norse settlements were formed in Greenland, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Russia, Ukraine, Great Britain, Ireland, Normandy and Sicily.

According to the Sagas of Icelanders, Norse sailors (often called Vikings) from Iceland first settled Greenland in the 980s.

L'Anse aux Meadows, an archaeological site on the northernmost tip of Newfoundland, and a second site in southwestern Newfoundland, are the only known sites of a Norse village in North America outside of Greenland. These sites are notable for their possible connections with the attempted colony of Vinland established by Leif Erikson in 1003.

Leif Erikson, also known as Leif the Lucky (c. 970s – c. 1018 to 1025), was a Norse explorer who is thought to have been the first European to set foot on continental America, approximately half a millennium before Christopher Columbus. According to the sagas of Icelanders, he established a Norse settlement at Vinland, which is usually interpreted as being coastal North America. There is ongoing speculation that the settlement made by Leif and his crew corresponds to the remains of a Norse settlement found in Newfoundland, Canada, called L'Anse aux Meadows, which was occupied approximately 1,000 years ago.

Leif's place of birth is unknown, although it is assumed to have been in Iceland. His father, Erik the Red, founded the first Norse settlement in Greenland, where Leif was later raised. Following his voyage to Vinland and the subsequent death of his father, Leif became chief of the Greenland settlement. He had two known sons: Thorgils, born in the Hebrides; and Thorkell, who succeeded him as Greenland's chieftain.

St. Anthony is a town on the northern reaches of the Great Northern Peninsula of the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. St. Anthony serves as a main service centre for northern Newfoundland and southern Labrador. St. Anthony had a population of 2,180 in 2021, compared with 2,258 in 2016, 2,418 in 2011, 2,476 in 2006 and 2,730 in 2001.

L'Anse aux Meadows, which was designated a National Historic Site of Canada in 1968 and a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1978, is located 40 km from St. Anthony. St. Anthony is the largest population centre on the Great Northern Peninsula.

Pre-Columbian transoceanic contact theories, many of which are speculative, propose that visits to the Americas, interactions with the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, or both, were made by people from elsewhere prior to Christopher Columbus's first voyage to the Caribbean in 1492. Studies between 2004 and 2009 suggest the possibility that the earliest human migrations to the Americas may have been made by boat from Beringia and travel down the Pacific coast, contemporary with and possibly predating land migrations over the Beringia land bridge, which during the glacial period joined what today are Siberia and Alaska. Apart from Norse contact and settlement, whether transoceanic travel occurred during the historic period, resulting in pre-Columbian contact between the settled American peoples and voyagers from other continents, is vigorously debated.

Only a few cases of pre-Columbian contact are widely accepted by mainstream scientists and scholars. Yup'ik and Aleut peoples residing on both sides of the Bering Strait had frequent contact with each other, and European trade goods have been discovered in pre-Columbian archaeological sites in Alaska. Maritime explorations by Norse peoples from Scandinavia during the late 10th century led to the Norse colonization of Greenland and a base camp L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, which preceded Columbus's arrival in the Americas by some 500 years. Recent genetic studies have also suggested that some eastern Polynesian populations have admixture from coastal western South American peoples, with an estimated date of contact around 1200 CE.

The history of Newfoundland and Labrador covers the period from habitation by Archaic peoples thousands of years ago to the present day.

Prior to European colonization, the lands encompassing present-day Newfoundland and Labrador were inhabited for millennia by different groups of Indigenous peoples. The first brief European contact with Newfoundland and Labrador came around 1000 AD when the Vikings briefly settled in L'Anse aux Meadows. In 1497, European explorers and fishermen from England, Portugal, Spain (mainly Basques), France and Holland began exploration. Fishing expeditions came seasonally; the first small permanent settlements appeared around 1630. Catholic-Protestant religious tensions were high but mellowed after 1860. The British colony voted against joining Canada in 1869 and became an independent dominion in 1907. After the economy collapsed in the 1930s, responsible government was suspended in 1934, and Newfoundland was governed through the Commission of Government. Prosperity and self-confidence returned during the Second World War, and after intense debate, the people voted to join Canada in 1948. Newfoundland joined Confederation in 1949.