NORSEMEN IN NORTH AMERICA— BR0NDSTED 389 



enough, the tower is ahnost blind on the north (inland) side, whereas 

 there is a good view in the other directions, out over the sea. As it 

 stands, the tower seems to presuppose a pacified hinterland on the 

 north. 



In recent times a fourth theory has been advanced : Newport Tower 

 was a sort of mercantile offvce building, a medieval storehouse whose 

 arcaded ground floor is nothing but a symbol of trade from Hanseatic 

 days (see Th. Fliflet, in Nordisk Tidende, April 1949). 



Wlien was Newport Tower built? Archival documents take us 

 back to 1677, and, in addition, Frederick Polil and Hjalmar Holand 

 have submitted two literary evidences — the Wood map (1634) and 

 the Plowden petition (shortly before 1632; see Holand, "America: 

 1355-1364," p. 31 et seq., 1946) — which make it probable that the 

 tower was in existence prior to 1639, the foundation year of the town 

 of Newport. 



This is all that literary sources can tell us, so let us return to the 

 archeological, i. e., William S. Godfrey's excavations in 194&-49. What 

 did they reveal ? In 1948 nothing decisive, but in 1949 the following 

 (see Godfrey, Archaeology, Summer 1950, Spring 1951 ; and American 

 Antiquity, October 1951). 



A culture deposit which, by the small objects it contained, was 

 datable to colonial times, extended in under the foot of one pillar (but 

 over the foundation stones), and there, under a pillar, was found a 

 piece of gunflint and a fragment of a clay pipe. From this Godfrey 

 concludes that "this layer was partly deposited before the first stones 

 of the tower columns were put in place." Furthermore, in the earth 

 filling the annular trench in which the pillar foundations are laid, 

 and which Godfrey assumes was dug before the building of the tower, 

 a glazed sherd (perhaps seventeenth century), and, on the bottom of 

 the trench, the imprint of a square boot or shoe heel, and under it, 

 in a depressed concavity, two small clay pipe fragments were found. 

 Godfrey concludes : "Either Governor Arnold built the tower, or one 

 of his contemporaries did." 



These conclusions are somewhat controversial, however. Frederick 

 Pohl and Hjalmar Holand point out that the former owner of Newport 

 Tower, Gov. Will C. Gibbs, had an excavation made right to the 

 bottom of one of the pillars; might the shoe imprint not originate 

 from that excavation ? And, in point of fact, neither glazed sherds 

 nor square shoe heels are necessarily post-Columbian proofs. But if 

 Godfrey succeeds, first, in dismissing the possibility of recent inter- 

 mixture, and, second, in dating the named small finds to colonial days, 

 then I consider that the proof against the medieval origin of Newport 

 Tower will have been secured. 



