L'Anse aux Meadows is an archaeological site, first excavated in the 1960s, of a Norse settlement dating to approximately 1,000 years ago. The site is located near St. Anthony on the northernmost tip of the island of Newfoundland in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador.

With carbon dating estimates between 990 and 1050 CE (mean date 1014) and tree-ring dating of 1021, L'Anse aux Meadows is the only undisputed site of pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact of Europeans with the Americas outside of Greenland. It is notable as evidence of the Norse presence in North America and for its possible connection with the accounts of Leif Erikson in the Saga of the Greenlanders and the Saga of Erik the Red, which were written down in the 13th century. Archaeological evidence suggests the settlement served as a base camp for Norse exploration of North America, including regions to the south.

Spanning 8,000 hectares (31 sq mi) of land and sea, the site contains the remains of eight buildings constructed of sod over a wood frame, with over 800 Norse objects unearthed, including bronze, bone, and stone artifacts, and evidence of iron production. The site was designated a National Historic Site of Canada in 1968 and a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1978, and is managed by Parks Canada.

L'Anse aux Meadows is a French-English name which can be translated as "Grassland Bay" (lit. "the bay with the grasslands"). How the village acquired this name is debated. L'Anse aux Meadows might be a corruption of the French L'Anse aux Méduses (Jellyfish Cove). A more recent conjecture derives it from L'Anse à la Médée (Medea Cove), as it is marked on an 1862 French naval chart, with Medée or Meduse possibly the name of a French naval vessel. The English name "Meadows" may have occurred as folk etymology referring to the meadowy open landscape around the cove.

Before the Norse arrived in Newfoundland, there is evidence of occupations by five Indigenous groups at the site of L'Anse aux Meadows, the oldest dated to roughly 6,000 years ago. None were contemporaneous with the Norse occupation. The most prominent earlier occupation was by the Dorset people, who occupied the site about 300 years before the Norse. Radiocarbon date ranges for these groups are c. 4000 – c. 1000 BCE for the Maritime Archaic tradition, c. 1000 – c. 500 BCE for the Groswater tradition, c. 400 – c. 750 for the Middle Dorset, c. 800 – c. 850 for the Cow Head Group and Beaches traditions, and c. 1200 – c. 1500 CE (after the Norse) for the Little Passage tradition.

The Norse settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows has been dated to approximately 1000 CE (carbon dating estimates 990–1050, with a mean carbon date of 1014), an assessment that tallies with the relative dating of artifact and structure types. A 2021 Nature study, using radiocarbon analysis of three separate tree ring samples and evidence from the anomaly in atmospheric ¹⁴C concentrations in the year 993, pinpointed 1021 as a date of Norse activity at L'Anse aux Meadows.

Anthropologist John Steinberg has suggested the site may have been "occupied at least sporadically for perhaps 20 years" by the Norse. Eleanor Barraclough suggests the site was not a permanent settlement but a temporary boat repair facility. She notes there are no findings of burials, tools, agriculture or animal pens—suggesting the inhabitants abandoned the site in an orderly fashion. According to a 2019 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America study, there may have been Norse activity in L'Anse aux Meadows for as long as a century.

There is no way to know the site's population at any given time, though the dwellings could accommodate 30 to 160 people. The entire population of Greenland at the time was about 2,500, meaning that the L'Anse aux Meadows site was less than 10 percent of the Norse settlement on Greenland. Julian D. Richards notes: "It seems highly unlikely that the Norse had sufficient resources to construct a string of such settlements."