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Yes. Not sure why you're arguing about a side comment about transmission I made when we seem to agree on the main point.
I don't trust that Mann can back up all of his claims but agree with him on the main point that we need to revisit our preconception of pre-Columbian America. I actually thought 1493 was the more eye opening of his books.
A side point but I think 1493 covered, if anything, too much ground. It jumped around from China to Europe to Indonesia, etc. It reminded me of "If It's Tuesday it Must be Belgium."
It's a given that Africa and Asia largely held European invaders at bay; the Americas' and Australia's did not.
Let's say that Africa held the Europeans at bay much better than the Americas did, since Africa speaks more of its native African languages like Ethiopian than the Americas speak their own native languages like Mayan. I don't know of any American continential country where a native non-European language is the main language, except for maybe Greenland. Probably much of Greenland speaks Danish and Native Inuit. But both continents practically got colonised and retained native languages.
Here is a map of Africa on the eve of WW1. European powers controlled all the countries except for Liberia and Ethiopia at that point.
Quote:
In 1663, the English established a few trading posts on the Pepper Coast. No further known settlements by Europeans occurred until the arrival in 1821 of free blacks from the United States. ... From around 1800, in the United States, people opposed to slavery were planning ways to liberate more slaves and, ultimately, to abolish the institution. At the same time, slaveholders in the South opposed having free blacks in their states, as they believed the free people threatened the stability of their slave societies. ... The first ship of the American Colonization Society, the Elizabeth, departed New York on February 6, 1820, for West Africa carrying 86 settlers.[10][11] Between 1821 and 1838, the American Colonization Society developed the first settlement, which would be known as Liberia.[12] On July 26, 1847, Liberia declared itself a (free) sovereign nation.
Pretty cool history of Liberia from colony to independence, IMO. That is, it got first "Colonized" politically by a predominantly non-African nation of European descent (the US), but the basic purpose was to give the country political independence.
Well now days people do grow grapes in Newfoundland, but only in the warmest southern areas, L'Anse aux Meadows is at the most northern tip where trees can barely grow let alone grapes (which require large sturdy trees to climb as they have 50ft long canes that can crush a tree under its weight). And yes there was the medieval warm period but it wasn’t significantly warmer than today (we have fully recovered from the little ice age). So it’s possible that that “Vinland” was southern Newfoundland, and thus their main settlement would’ve been there, but if you are going to name a place after grapes, it must mean that they were easy to find, not some fringe case needle in the haystack, so I’m more inclined to guess at the most conservative Nova Scotia, but possibly New England with it’s higher prevalence there.
As far as the west east thing, well Newfoundland is pretty far east, all of North America is to the west of it, the most eastern point of Nova Scotia is to the west of Newfoundland.
Thanks for your feedback.
If you go straight south from Labrador like the two Viking Sagas about Vinland describe, the only realistic three choices of giant landmasses for landings are:
- Newfoundland's NW coast,
- the coast from Nova Scotia to New Brunswick, and
- the south shore of the St Lawrence River's outlet, at the Gaspe' Peninsula of south Quebec
Whereas the Sagas name a Peninsula called "Kjalarnes" as the Vikings' main spot where they found a mainland south of Labrador, each of these three real world locations has a peninsula with a coast to its west.
- the Great Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland
- Cape Breton Island (in Nova Scotia)
- the Gaspe' Peninsula
Sveinn Traustason considers Acadia Peninsula (NB) to be an option, and notes that the Greenlanders' Saga describes the Vikings finding shallows at Low Tide where their boats get grounded west of the Peninsula. He notes that out of these choices, "Of these only Acadia Peninsula has extensive shallows to the west on low tide."
SOURCE: https://www.modul.ac.at/index.php?eI...652157bdf9dd78)
But Acadia Peninsula is so tucked south of the Gaspe' Peninsula, that it makes me disinclined to consider it the Vikings' "Cape Kjalarnes."
I don't think the transmission of disease will get us anywhere. At best, the sagas tell us that they were there in some believable fashion, and we have evidence in Greenland that they visited somewhere on the coast of Canada. The settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows proves it. Everything beyond that has been speculation.
We tend to look at the Greenlanders' exploits in North America with the benefit of modern maps. That is sort of like looking at evidence with an outcome in mind. Looking at it from their perspective, they did not have a clear idea of what the layout was. We don't know what their concept of "mainland" was. The island of Newfoundland is bigger than Iceland. The sagas were recorded well after the fact. There are many small islands, coves, and fjords that they likely saw at a distance but very likely never set foot on them or sailed into. They were very few in number. They were probably limited to one boat from what we know.
When they made the risky crossing of the Labrador Sea, it was for an actual purpose. The Greenland settlements needed wood and they would have made multiple trips, maybe annually or every few years, for that purpose. That could have been a lot of trips never recorded, but for a specific purpose. There is evidence that they found iron ore and were able to do some metal working at Vinland. We need to find more actual evidence.
There might be more at L'Anse aux Meadows than we know according to some satellite images. The archaeology effort at Point Rosee seems not to have revealed anything of any real confidence of Norse activity but it injected new speculation and enthusiasm into the search. I haven't seen anything more recent than five years ago. Maybe someone else has. There was some interest and speculation about the area of Bay-Chaleur in New Brunswick. I think we would know if there were any actual indisputable finds.
In the Sagas I know that the Vikings guarded their iron tools and weapons, knowing their military values, in their dealing with locals. However I've been wondering why, as far as I know, there had been no known instance of transmission of metallurgy to the Americas or anywhere else really. Indigenous Americans learned to ride horses, herd sheep and even use tiles on roofs (in the case of the Inca rebels) but I don't know of any group that took up iron working. It is not an activity that requires a sophisticated state level society to sustain since the Zulus make their own iron tools and weapons so in theory it should have been possible for a few colonial defector or captive to pass on.
Let's say that Africa held the Europeans at bay much better than the Americas did, since Africa speaks more of its native African languages like Ethiopian than the Americas speak their own native languages like Mayan. I don't know of any American continential country where a native non-European language is the main language, except for maybe Greenland. Probably much of Greenland speaks Danish and Native Inuit. But both continents practically got colonised and retained native languages.
That's because of depopulation by disease.
Quote:
Originally Posted by rakovskii
Here is a map of Africa on the eve of WW1. European powers controlled all the countries except for Liberia and Ethiopia at that point.
Pretty cool history of Liberia from colony to independence, IMO. That is, it got first "Colonized" politically by a predominantly non-African nation of European descent (the US), but the basic purpose was to give the country political independence.
That's true, but the colonization was more colors on a map than true dominance.
I don't think the transmission of disease will get us anywhere. At best, the sagas tell us that they were there in some believable fashion, and we have evidence in Greenland that they visited somewhere on the coast of Canada. The settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows proves it. Everything beyond that has been speculation.
Butternuts were found at L'Anse aux Meadows. I don't know how far north Butternuts grew 1000 years ago, but we can tell that they got at least as far as that range. Today it's as far northeast as the Bay of Fundy (south coast of New Brunswick). Maybe then the Butternuts were on the NE coast of New Brunswick at the St Lawrence Bay.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SunGrins
We tend to look at the Greenlanders' exploits in North America with the benefit of modern maps. That is sort of like looking at evidence with an outcome in mind. Looking at it from their perspective, they did not have a clear idea of what the layout was. We don't know what their concept of "mainland" was. The island of Newfoundland is bigger than Iceland. The sagas were recorded well after the fact. There are many small islands, coves, and fjords that they likely saw at a distance but very likely never set foot on them or sailed into.
I agree about the big problem of looking at the evidence with an outcome in mind, which is why I suggest in my thread that we first list the directions to Vinland's places and then map them in a hypothetical way (instead of locking the destinations onto a real map at first), and only afterwards then compare our conclusions with real life coastlines and maps. https://www.city-data.com/forum/hist...anada-did.html
For instance, I think that many people start with the knowledge that the Vikings settled at L'Anse Aux Meadows, and then look at the Sagas with the outcome of Newfoundland as the Vikings' main site in mind.
I also agree with the problem that you posed about their concept of mainland. In both Sagas, they describe the following sequence:
Markland (Labrador)
||
\/
Island with Dew / Bear Island) (Small Islands: Belle Island, St. Paul's Island, or Magdalene Islands? Big Island: Newfoundland?)
||
\/
Sound/Strait
||
\/
Cape on the north side of Vinland / Cape Kjalarnes (Nova Scotia? Newfoundland?)
Reading this, I don't get a solid idea of whether it's talking about some small island like Belle Island, or a big island like Newfoundland.
On one hand, they call Iceland a "land", and Newfoundland is bigger than Iceland. On the other hand, they call Baffin Island a land too (Helluland) yet note that they (impressively) realize that it's an island. This realization is quite an achievement, probably for that time, since it's so big and it's north end is so far north. Baffin Island is even bigger than Newfoundland.
Certainly in the 10 years of living at L'Anse Meadows, they would have realized that it's an island. Plus, I really wouldn't be surprised if they did end up with a decent idea at least of the coastline. I imagine that they may have been able to plot basic coordinates on a primitive map, like where the biggest islands and rivers were south of Labrador. There are theories about Vikings having good navigation technology and skills.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SunGrins
They were very few in number. They were probably limited to one boat from what we know.
This is actually mistaken - they record voyaging to Vinland with like 100-160 voyagers, including a herd of cattle that included at least one bull. They had plans to settle there, as the cattle show. They describe different Viking leaders sailing on different concurrent expeditions, with more than one ship on at least one such expedition. So they had a fleet, but I'm not sure how many ships. A Viking ship would have about 40 sailors, and to give a very rough idea of the number of boats on Europeans' Atlantic expeditions: Columbus' first expedition had three ships; John Cabot's 3rd voyage started out with 5 ships leaving from England to explore the Americas' east coast.
The Sagas actually describe the Vikings making four different camps, which I marked with wooden houses on my two Saga maps:
- Leif's camp by the lake west of Kjalarnes (I guess it is somewhere in the St Lawrence Gulf on the coasts of Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, or New Brunswick that touch that Gulf)
- Straumsfjord south down the east coast from Kjalarnes (on the Atlantic coast somewhere between Cape Breton and Virginia, I suppose)
- the headlands south of Straumsfjord
- the camp one winter by the land of Hop (If the snowless winter is taken literally, it would seem to be between the Carolinas and NYC)
#1 and #2 on that list seem to be the two spots that scholars seem most interested in, and some scholars seem to conflate the two camps.
As for discoveries, there actually have been quite a number of sites and artifacts that are seemingly or possibly Viking in New England and up to the St Lawrence Bay. Typically the problem with these findings is dating and confirmation, so that the scholars aren't sure if the findings are authentic Viking artifacts, authentic pre-Columbian or colonial European artifacts, or hoaxes.
Suppose that you were digging for fun on a rocky beach in Maine or Iceland and found a runestone. One would want to date it, but this seems hard to do. You might guess its age from the amount of sediment that it's under, but that kind of estimate could be tricky.
In the Sagas I know that the Vikings guarded their iron tools and weapons, knowing their military values, in their dealing with locals. However I've been wondering why, as far as I know, there had been no known instance of transmission of metallurgy to the Americas or anywhere else really.
It sounds like you are talking about a blacksmith shop or kiln. Some Native peoples of North America did have copper alloying (like the "Old Copper Culture"), and there were also regional instances of iron work in the Americas.
It sounds like you are talking about a blacksmith shop or kiln. Some Native peoples of North America did have copper alloying (like the "Old Copper Culture"), and there were also regional instances of iron work in the Americas.
The kind of limited use of iron seem limited to fashioning found pieces of iron pyrites into objects. It is surprising that they are not smithing them properly since they already knew how to work copper. All it should take is one prisoner or defector with the knowledge but for some reason it hasn't happened in hundreds of years.
The kind of limited use of iron seem limited to fashioning found pieces of iron pyrites into objects. It is surprising that they are not smithing them properly since they already knew how to work copper. All it should take is one prisoner or defector with the knowledge but for some reason it hasn't happened in hundreds of years.
Right. There were a long, significant number of many what you called "defectors" and captives/slaves in the years before European colonial/US conquest that I can think of. The movie "Dances with Wolves" has this theme. The Roanoke colony probably ended up with a major portion of colonists who went to live with the Indians voluntarily or were captured and enslaved. One of the reports that the Jamestown colony got was of a couple white people (maybe Spaniards) who were living supposedly as slaves in an Indian village to the south of Jamestown, and who built a house or did toolmaking there (maybe not "metallurgy"), I don't exactly remember.
For kiln ironmaking, one would have to tstart by getting the iron in a worthwhile supply, like by mining. Indians did some mining like for gold and copper, but with ironmaking, there are added steps. You would have to be mining the iron with kiln toolmaking in mind, whereas with the gold and copper, it's much simpler to form them into tools. So for ironmaking, you are going to go to an Indian village and tell them how to search for iron, then how to have a labor force of like 20 people digging it out of the ground, then give them orders on how to make stone kilns, etc. By 1700, it will probably just be easier and more advantageous for an Amerindian tribe to assimilate or to raid colonial outposts for guns or trade for guns than to do the long process of ironworking, which will still just get you to iron swords instead of guns.
Recall how long it took Afro-Eurasians to go from the Copper Age to the Iron Age even when they had already invented writing and were living with a larger total civilized population than the Amerindians were. The Afro-Eurasians had a whole indirect network of civilization running from Spain or Italy to China. If someone in ancient or medieval China figured out how to make gunpowder or iron, for instance, the knowledge could indirectly travel across to Europe. With the Amerindians, the main pre-Columbian civilization network was from Mexico to northern Chile.
If there were cases of ironworking by Amerindians after European colonization in their environs began, it would seem more natural for it to be tribes that were assimilating, interested in other European inventions like writing, clothe-making, etc. Those kinds of tribes would probably pick favorable colonial powers as allies and start assimilating and integrating naturally and gradually.
Last edited by rakovskii; 08-02-2023 at 02:56 PM..
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