Les,
"Later excavations by Bengt Schoenbak and Birgitta Wallace for Parks Canada revealed more about the purpose of this settlement and the type of activities that took place here. Their work produced further evidence of wood-working and iron-smelting, suggesting that the main activity at the site was repairing damaged vessels or constructing new ones from wood obtained in the nearby forests. Butternuts and worked pieces of butternut wood-a tree that was not native to Newfoundland but was present one thousand years ago in northern Nova Scotia and New Brunswick-were also found. This discovery indicates that the people who lived at L'Anse aux Meadows had traveled further south into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and had brought back nuts and wood native to those southern areas and were sampling the region's resources as described in the sagas. These finds suggest that the L'Anse aux Meadows site was a base-camp or gateway to the rich lands around the Gulf of St. Lawrence, which is likely the Vinland of the sagas."
http://naturalhistory.si.edu/vikings/voyage/subset/vinland/archeo.html