01/04/2025
We are back, this fine April Fool’s Day, for another edition of Great Hoaxes in Scandinavian Archaeology! And once again, we’ll be returning to North America for today’s episode.
In 1936, the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada received a visit from a prospector by the name of James Dodd, who had some unusual iron pieces to sell. According to the prospector, he had come across them all buried near Beardmore, Ontario, several years prior. Imagine the curators’ surprise when those pieces turned out to include the head of a Viking axe, a broken Viking sword, and a small iron bar which might once have belonged to a shield.
Dodd fetched a handsome sum of $500 CAD for his find, and when the museum curator contacted archaeological colleagues in Europe, they all attested that they did, in fact, appear to be bonafide Norse weapons.
The story caught the attention of a local journalist, who ran as fast as he could with it and began to present wherever he could on the incredible find of a Viking grave in Ontario. The Norse settlement of L’Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, had not yet been located, but there had long been speculation that the Vinland of Norse sagas was to be found in the North American east coast, and these findings—the Beardmore relics, as they came to be known—whet people’s curiosity for this idea.
So—where, you may ask, is the hoax here? The twist is that in this case, it is not the authenticity of the findings that is in doubt. But even early on, archaeologists were sceptical about the museum’s decision to simply take Dodd’s word on where they were found—particularly as he hadn’t quite been able to keep his story straight. Such an amazing find demanded some pretty convincing evidence, which Dodd had not provided. Even the European archaeologists who attested that the photographs looked genuine could not rule out that they were well-produced fakes that had been artificially “aged”, since they could not examine them personally.
When the heat from the archaeological community became too much, the museum returned them to its archive and rebuffed any requests to examine them. The game was finally up when Dodd’s son, Walter, came forward some twenty years later to testify that his father had found them, not in the ground while prospecting, but in someone’s basement in Port Arthur, modern Thunder Bay, Ontario.
After investigation, it has since been shown that they likely came from Norway in the 1920s—thus, the sword, the axe, and even the difficult-to-identify bar are now all generally accepted as the genuine article, but they were almost certainly not put in the ground by a Viking explorer in Ontario.
This story serves as a cautionary tale demonstrating an important principle of archaeology: that the context in which an object was found (what we call provenience (archaeological context)) is just as important as the object itself! Without documentation (that is, better documentation than “trust me, that’s where I found it”), an object is severed from its own history and our ability to learn from it is seriously hampered. So, if you do stumble upon what you suspect to be an archaeological artefact—as tempting as it is to pick it up—the best practice is to call the local museum and get an expert on site.
EPILOGUE: Only shortly after the revelation of the Beardmore relic hoax, L’Anse aux Meadows was discovered and provided concrete proof of the Norse presence in North America. In the 1970s, a remarkable find of early medieval Scandinavian artefacts—including a fragment of chainmail—were found on Ellesmere Island, the northernmost island in Canada. These provided proof that Norse artefacts did indeed travel far beyond the Norse settlements in Newfoundland and Greenland, though it remains a mystery whether they were carried there by Scandinavians themselves or by Indigenous people via contact. The Ellesmere artefacts also challenge the conspiratorial idea that archaeologists would have any reason to “suppress” the Beardmore relics, if the authenticity of their discovery could be proven. Alas for them.
Copyright © 2025 Christopher Nichols / Scandinavian Archaeology – Posse Publishing
Images: McGill-Queen's University Press, Copyright © 2025 Lovisa Sénby Posse / Posse Publishing, Jan Demiralp on Unsplash, Cristian on Unsplash, Trnava University on Unsplash, Dylan Kereluk / Wikimedia commons.