There is a lot of basically irrefutable evidence that Vikings had settlements in Pre-Columbian North America starting around 1000 CE, and that they made return trips to Iceland and more generally, to Europe.
There are ruins of a settlement in Vinland, and there is another such settlement in Eastern Canada as well.
There are people in Iceland with Native American mtDNA that can traced back genealogically, using Iceland's excellent genealogy records, to a single woman in the right time frame.
There are legendary history attestations of the trips in written Viking accounts from the right time period.
Now, there is a Walrus ivory trinket that made its was to Kyiv (a.k.a. Kiev) in the Middle Ages which has been identified by a recent paper as coming from a Greenland Walrus. The paper and its abstract are as follows:
Mediaeval walrus hunting in Iceland and Greenland—driven by Western European demand for ivory and walrus hide ropes—has been identified as an important pre-modern example of ecological globalization. By contrast, the main origin of walrus ivory destined for eastern European markets, and then onward trade to Asia, is assumed to have been Arctic Russia.
Here, we investigate the geographical origin of nine twelfth-century CE walrus specimens discovered in Kyiv, Ukraine—combining archaeological typology (based on chaîne opératoire assessment), ancient DNA (aDNA) and stable isotope analysis. We show that five of seven specimens tested using aDNA can be genetically assigned to a western Greenland origin. Moreover, six of the Kyiv rostra had been sculpted in a way typical of Greenlandic imports to Western Europe, and seven are tentatively consistent with a Greenland origin based on stable isotope analysis. Our results suggest that demand for the products of Norse Greenland's walrus hunt stretched not only to Western Europe but included Ukraine and, by implication given linked trade routes, also Russia, Byzantium and Asia. These observations illuminate the surprising scale of mediaeval ecological globalization and help explain the pressure this process exerted on distant wildlife populations and those who harvested them.
This post feels like two posts. One is about Vinland (Anse aux Meadows?); one is about Greenland. The evidence brought here is just Greenland.
ReplyDeleteMy intent is the frame the new paper with generalized background that is well accepted about pre-Columbian contact by Vikings with North America including Greenland, in order to emphasize that the evidence is robust and corroborative. I haven't really fleshed out the framing context because it is relatively uncontroversial and previously discussed.
ReplyDeleteFor what it is worth, however, in general, I try to be a "lumper" rather than a "splitter" in my posts in order to provide broader context than plain vanilla media reports do.
Greenland is not North America - the text does not match the header.
ReplyDeleteGreenland is totally part of North America.
ReplyDelete