Benedicte ingstad biography sample

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In 1960, Helge Ingstad and Anne Stine Ingstad made a discovery that rewrote the history of European exploration and colonization of North America – a thousand-year-old Viking settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland. In A Grand Adventure, the Ingstads’ daughter Benedicte tells the story of their remarkable lives spent working together, sharing poignant details from her parents' private letters, personal diaries, their dinner table conversations, and Benedicte’s own participation in her parents' excavations. Following young Helge Ingstad from his 1926 decision to abandon a successful law practice for North American expeditions through Canada's Barren Lands, Alaska's Anaktuvuk Pass, and the mountains of northern Mexico, the story recounts his governorship of Norwegian territories and marriage to Anne Stine Moe. The author then traces Helge and Anne Stine's travels around the world, focusing in particular on their discovery of the Viking settlement at the northern tip of Newfoundland. With Anne Stine as the head archaeologist, they excavate these ruins for eight years, while weathering destructive skepticism from academic peers, until indisputable evidence is unearthed and their find is confirmed. A remarkable look at a personal and professional relationship, A Grand Adventure shows two explorers' unrelenting drive and unfailing courage.

A Grand Adventure: The Lives of Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad and Their Discovery of a Viking Settlement in North America is not just grounded in biography, but in social history and archaeology. It is a story that has great piquancy since it is told by the Ingstads’ daughter, Benedicte, professor emerita of medical anthropology at the University of Oslo. The volume chronicles the events that led to her parents’ discovery of a centuries old Viking settlement in the northern region of Newfoundland, at L’Anse aux Meadows, made public in 1961. But alongside that story we are treated to an insider’s view of the relationship of the Ingstads as a married couple and as professional colleagues, and how societal pressures of that period affected them. Additionally, we are given a revealing picture of the world of archaeology in the middle of the 20th century and how the Ingstads and their work were regarded in academia, and the established archaeological community, worldwide.

The book is based on source material in the possession of the author: forty shelves of boxes of archival data, diaries, unfinished autobiographies by both Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad, and documents from the National Museum in Iceland, the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, and Memorial University of Newfoundland. Woven into these tangible sources, however, are the intangible—memories and perceptions based on the author’s lived experience. A Gran