Core Team Members
Birgitta Wallace
Research Director for Where Is Vinland?
Photographer: Rob Ferguson
Born in Sweden to Swedish and Danish parents, Birgitta Wallace received her Filosofie Magister in Nordic archaeology and Anthropology from University of Uppsala. Her main research interest is the West Norse expansion into North America. Before coming to Canada in 1975 to join Parks Canada as an Atlantic Region archaeologist, she worked at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, PA, where she conducted a systematic survey of all alleged Norse sites in North America. Now retired, Birgitta continues to be active in Norse research.
Birgitta gained most of her excavation experience on Iron Age sites in Sweden and Norway. She has also worked in Israel, on petroglyph sites in the Upper Ohio Valley, Aboriginal and early French sites in the Maritimes, and L’Anse aux Meadows National Historic Site in northern Newfoundland, where she worked with both the Norwegian expedition and the later Parks Canada excavations, eventually assuming responsibility for the analysis of all the archaeological material. She has lectured widely on the Norse in North America to professional and public audiences, served as consultant on numerous television productions, and contributed to several encyclopaedias. She has been curator on numerous international exhibits, among them the blockbuster millennium exhibit Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga for the Smithsonian Institution. She is the author of more than sixty articles on matters concerning the West Norse and Vinland, and her book Westward Vikings: the Saga of L’Anse aux Meadows, originally published in 2006, is now in its second printing.
