[HN Gopher] Blue beads could be the oldest evidence of European ...
___________________________________________________________________
Blue beads could be the oldest evidence of European goods in North
America
Author : Thevet
Score : 80 points
Date : 2021-02-15 03:48 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (gizmodo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (gizmodo.com)
| unwind wrote:
| Meta: this was posted 9 days ago [1], with some discussion then.
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26053821
| davidw wrote:
| And 11 days ago when it came out, with no discussion.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26033759
|
| It's pretty amazing to think of something traveling from Venice
| all the way to a place that's very remote in this day and age.
| [deleted]
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| It's not necessary for a Venetian to go to Alaska, for the trade
| beads to end of there. It's only necessary for neighbors to trade
| with neighbors, and they can diffuse around the globe. Like an
| ancient game of Telephone.
|
| Long-range traders can give the process a jump start, but the end
| result can be indistinguishable from diffusion.
| danans wrote:
| In addition to random diffusion, big empires between Venice and
| Alaska, including Persia, India, China, and the Mongols in
| Central Asia served as cultural "repeaters". Valuable artifacts
| might have actually been actively promoted in trade and taken
| on newer and greater significance as they changed hands.
|
| Other even more ancient artifact transmissions across long
| distances include the Pompeii Lakshmi (first century CE) [1],
| and Greco-Roman glassware found in Southeast China (third
| century CE) [2].
|
| The bigger surprise is that this trade took place across the
| Bering Strait, a very forbidding natural obstacle. But then
| again, the Yupik peoples have historically spanned the Bering
| Strait though to central Alaska [3], so they are a probably
| final link for the artifact between Eurasia and North American
| populations.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pompeii_Lakshmi
|
| 2.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serica#/media/File:Green_glass...
|
| 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yupik_peoples
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| I disagree that it would be indistinguishable. You need to
| chain together a long series of probabilities that leads to
| exponentially less product arriving through diffusion than
| through long-range traders, and a clear trail would result.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| The typical approach to direct contact is to look for the
| signs of the people making the journey (genetic, linguistic,
| and cultural transmission). If you don't have these, they're
| often practically indistinguishable because the
| archaeological record inherently tends to be spotty, without
| continuous data points for uncommon trade goods. Moreover,
| the Asian northeast is vast and only lightly surveyed.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| You only need time. The probability of any individual product
| arriving is indeed small. The probability of _some item_
| arriving is certainty, given enough time.
| twiceinawhile wrote:
| This transfer of beads happened during the time of the mongol
| empire which stretched from deep within europe to china and all
| the way to the eastern siberia.
|
| It is no secret that the mongol empire was one of the greatest
| facilitator of cultural and economic diffusion. Generally the
| idea was that goods and ideas flowed from the east to the west,
| but certainly some from the west flowed to the east and
| eventually to alaska.
|
| It would be interesting to know if anything from alaska made
| its way westward.
| sambroner wrote:
| This is a really interesting point that seems to be overlooked,
| but is unbelievably interesting. My understanding is that there
| was neighborly trading over the Bering strait and from
| Newfoundland to Greenland...
|
| It makes me wonder, could a merchant sailor in a pub in England
| have heard a story from the a friend of a friend of a friend
| about the North American coast?
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| Marco Polo (1254-1324), who was on a Venetian trading expedition
| to China in the late 13th Century, related accounts from other
| traders that certainly sound like they were in contact with
| Arctic peoples, e.g, stories of "immense white bears" and
| "sledges" that were drawn across the ice by teams of dogs.
|
| So if the Polo family (and others) were trading Venetian goods
| into China, and other traders were trading Chinese goods into the
| Arctic, it's not really too surprising that some of those
| Venetian trade goods wound up in Alaska.
|
| It's very cool that they've found physical evidence though!
|
| Edit:
|
| This part:
|
| "A growing body of evidence from the Bering Strait region
| indicates that the movement of non-native materials from
| northeast Asia to northwest Alaska has been occurring via
| undefined routes since the first millennium AD, if not longer."
|
| ignores the fact that Native Alaskan and Siberian peoples were
| regularly crossing the Bering Strait long before Europeans
| arrived on the scene. Not only did they have excellent boats
| (good enough to hunt whales!) but in the winter you could just
| travel across the ice. There's not really much of a mystery here
| about how trade goods could have flowed.
|
| The same is true of the popular "land bridge" story, by the way.
| While a temporary land bridge may well have had some influence on
| the population of the Americas, the fact remains that indigenous
| peoples were perfectly capable of crossing the Bering Strait.
| Before the Cold War intervened, many Alaska Natives had family in
| Siberia, and vice versa. No land bridge needed.
| throwaway2048 wrote:
| There is a long standing stance in anthropology and archeology
| that native peoples of the Americas had virtually zero contact
| with groups outside of their immediate surroundings.
|
| I find it extremely condescending and stupid.
| aksss wrote:
| There's a lot of evidence indicating little to no contact and
| a paucity of evidence suggesting otherwise. So much so that
| "a" find like this is big news - a bead from the 15th
| century. It would not be big news if these things were found
| regularly, and they haven't been, and people have been
| looking in earnest.
|
| I don't understand why you would find the conclusion to be
| insulting or condescending. Do you feel some bias has covered
| up information or that there is a wealth of contact indicia
| as yet unfound?
|
| At the time of European contact, the written and
| archeological records both seem to agree that the indigenous
| population in North America was a Neolithic one. Some regions
| West of the Mississippi (out in the dry plains) were even
| Paleolithic. Even while there is evidence suggesting the
| Chinese made it to Alaska, and the Vikings to the East Coast
| much earlier than Columbian contact, it obviously was too
| expensive to stay. While trade goods trickled out to these
| far ends of the network, their paucity indicates that there
| was little worth trading for that far out that couldn't be
| found elsewhere for less. In other words, even _if_ western
| and eastern civilizations knew about the Americas an eon ago
| or more, the trade routes weren't valuable enough on the
| balance to maintain.
|
| I suggest you think of this as a highly valuable distinction
| for the study of mankind. The indigenous populations of the
| Americas were human, the same as you and I today. They were
| wicked smart, capable, and well-adapted to living in insanely
| hostile conditions. Their until-recent isolation helps inform
| the understanding of all human societies in time. It further
| enables every human on earth confront themselves. Two books I
| would recommend to stir a fascination with these early
| cultures: Thundersticks by David Silverman, and Empire of the
| Summer Moon by S.C. Gwynn. These contain accessible
| descriptions of life before the 19th century Plains Indian
| Wars, which dominates a lot of people's ideas about the
| indigenous Americans. In fact, European contact goes back
| another three _centuries_ and there's some fascinating,
| wondrous history and insight in those earliest periods of
| contact.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| Yes, it's condescending because we're rapidly learning the
| only reason we didn't find the evidence is we weren't
| looking for it. Genetics in particular has established
| there was contact between Oceania and South America for
| something like 500 years before Columbus.
|
| Your description of native Americans as Neolithic or
| Paleolithic is more of the same problem, including the view
| that there's some sort of ladder of categories
| civilizations climb. We again know conclusively by the
| evidence this is wrong, that ancient cultures were a web of
| diffusion and adoption of different technologies and
| practices, where things were always adapted to the local
| context. In particular we're finding much more physical
| evidence of wide scale deliberate changing of the Amazon
| landscape to better suit the people living there. Going
| back even further, there's a growing body of evidence of
| exchange of technologies between ancient hominid species as
| well.
|
| Basically there's a whole lot more to this subject and
| story, and plenty of evidence out there to find and learn
| from, but the narrative of linear development and diffusion
| of civilization has hindered that. Likewise the idea that
| the only evidence of ancient civilizations that counts as
| advanced are greek/roman style constructions.
| aksss wrote:
| Neolithic and paleolithic have definitions concerning
| material science and agricultural development. I think
| you are assigning a good/bad valuation to the terms that
| doesn't have anything to do with science. This is what
| I'm suggesting you recalibrate dispassionately. That
| other people are unfamiliar with the proper understanding
| of these terms is no excuse to acquiesce to ignorance.
|
| >exchange of technologies
|
| This is not a new insight, but a primary focus of
| archeology and anthropology in any theater.
|
| >we're rapidly learning the only reason we didn't find
| the evidence is we weren't looking for it
|
| Despite my quibbles with your gratuitous use of the
| pronoun "we", I think _you couldn 't be more wrong_
| unless you're talking about more than a century ago.
| Particularly since the discovery in Clovis (1930s?), the
| archeological community has been rabidly (if not rapidly)
| looking for new clues as to how people came to, adapted
| to, and dispersed into the Americas, with very few
| theories discarded out of hand. The reality is that there
| is very little evidence to back up the various hypotheses
| that stray too far outside of the accepted conclusions
| today, but generally everybody is almost _too_ eager to
| find evidence that would upset existing assumptions (i.e.
| reckless, see _Ancient Aliens_ ).
|
| > only evidence of ancient civilizations that counts as
| advanced are greek/roman style constructions
|
| Let's add the cultures from the Middle East (e.g.
| Persians), Eastern Asia (e.g. China), and parts in
| between, areas which were not coincidentally all
| connected by land. This, of course, all depends on
| understanding the context around "advanced". Typically
| when that word is used to characterize a civilization, it
| does imply a linear maturation of energy source and
| material science _capabilities_ enabling new technologies
| that feed benefits back into that society for growth -
| things like employing the wheel, the lever, the screw,
| beasts of burden, plows, wind, etc for productivity
| gains, insulation from seasonal variation, defense,
| medicine, etc. The United States is a more advanced
| civilization today than it was two centuries ago, as are
| many (not all) civilizations on Earth today, though this
| pace of change is (to our knowledge) unprecedented since
| perhaps the Han dynasty.
|
| This view certainly does hinder many people's
| _appreciation_ of how obstacles were overcome in
| societies that were less "advanced" (in the above sense
| of the word). But at the end of the day it doesn't grant
| those societies capabilities the evidence shows to be
| absent. It also doesn't make me any less fascinated in
| the societies in the Americas or less open to new data.
| On the contrary, in a way these societies are all the
| more fascinating because they put us closer to
| understanding what the human experience was like in those
| conditions.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| As a (former) archaeologist, you're using both terms
| incorrectly. Paleolithic refers broadly to lithic eras
| prior to the start of the Holocene. It is not applicable
| to anything after that and I suggest perusing the
| relevant wiki page [1] for later periodizations.
| Neolithic is also strictly improper as a descriptor of
| the Americas, but it gets some use in comparative work
| and people will "know what you meant". Similarly, most
| historians and archaeologists would protest using the
| term "advanced" unqualified. It's a bad word with lots of
| incorrect connotations, especially in the public mind.
|
| My rule of thumb is that you should avoid comparing
| societies that are thousands of years apart if at all
| possible. They're probably not comparable.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_archaeological_
| periods...
| konjin wrote:
| The reason for this is that when they did have contact they
| all died. The natives in America were vastly more inbread
| (which really is saying something) than the Europeans who
| came in. They had so little genetic diversity that when one
| died to say small pox they all would then be susceptible to
| the same strain.
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15485351/
| lostlogin wrote:
| > They had so little genetic diversity that when one died
| to say small pox they all would then be susceptible to the
| same strain.
|
| That's not a sign of inbreeding. We aren't dying of covid
| in vast numbers because we are all inbred (no 'a').
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| That's not inbreeding, that's founder effects. Europe and
| Asia have the same issue compared to Africa, which is why
| Native Americans have an exceptionally severe case of it.
|
| Secondly, your characterization here shows a really
| fundamental misunderstanding of the literature. To quote an
| actually relevant paper [1]:
|
| > The difficulty of finding incontrovertible evidence to
| support genetic hypotheses has resulted in a variety of
| alternative perspectives which de-emphasize the genetic
| hypotheses as missing key points.
|
| [1] https://doi.org/10.1038/srep14032
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| >That's not inbreeding, that's founder effects
|
| Isn't this a simple matter of WHAT versus WHY (i.e. they
| were inbred because of founder effects)
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| No, founder effects are basically sampling bias. You can
| still have people that are genetically distant
| reproducing (and in fact, the popularizer of this
| particular vein of theories in Brazil, Francis Black
| suggested mandating exactly this to much criticism), but
| the overall population diversity will remain low.
| However, founder effects can be associated with
| inbreeding if it's a sufficiently small population. I'd
| imagine this probably wasn't a major factor for early
| Americans, as the effective population size (note, not
| actual population size!) was on the order of thousands.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Thanks for the explanation, but I'm still not sure I
| follow how they are different.
|
| Does it not count as inbreeding if mating is occurring
| between distant relations which have low genetic
| differences due to low variability in the total
| population?
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Imagine that the base population has alleles A-Z, all at
| equal frequency. A small population splits from the base
| population and becomes isolated. Because they're a small
| sample of the whole, they only have alleles A-M. This is
| the founder effect. Inbreeding would be A-A pairings
| (which may be more likely depending on population
| structure, frequencies, and size), but are not
| _necessary_.
|
| In practice, there's a huge array of complications on top
| of all this that affect frequencies. That's the basic
| idea though.
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| It seems to be true, with virtually nothing in the way of
| technological and cultural diffusion between the high
| population density regions of the Old and New World.
|
| Arctic peoples seem to have traded across the Bering Strait,
| as this article describes, but this was a very small volume
| of trade, owing to the low population densities on both sides
| of the Bering Strait and the areas adjacent to them.
|
| The only contact the peoples far from and on the opposite
| sides of the Bering Strait would have had was indirect,
| through a trickle of traded items that made it across the
| strait and passed through numerous hands across vast
| distances to reach them.
| chmod775 wrote:
| >Before the Cold War intervened, many Alaska Natives had family
| in Siberia, and vice versa. No land bridge needed.
|
| You lost me on this sentence. How is Alaska Natives having
| family across pond in modern times related to land bridges 2000
| years ago and what did the Cold War do to those families?
|
| I just don't understand. What am I missing?
| throwanem wrote:
| Not OP, but your quote directly follows this:
|
| > While a temporary land bridge may well have had some
| influence on the population of the Americas, the fact remains
| that indigenous peoples were perfectly capable of crossing
| the Bering Strait.
|
| Crossing in _boats_ , that is, not via land bridge. One
| assumes the Cold War made this crossing no more physically
| difficult, but politically impossible due to the mutual
| suspicion (especially of espionage on the part of the other)
| between the two powers whose territories it involves.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| > One assumes the Cold War made this crossing no more
| physically difficult, but politically impossible due to the
| mutual suspicion
|
| Exactly so. While there's reluctance to admit it (even now)
| there are stories that some Alaska Natives maintained
| contact with their friends and relatives in Siberia, even
| during the Cold War. I can certainly believe it. There's a
| lot of lonely coastline in that area, and not much
| monitoring -- certainly not back then.
|
| But yeah, the main thrust of what I was saying was that the
| indigenous people had boats capable of making the crossing
| long before Europeans arrived on the scene, so the "land
| bridge" idea is not the pat explanation that many seem to
| think it is. The "land bridge" may have existed, and was
| probably used when it did exist, but it's clearly not the
| whole story.
|
| We know that Alaska Natives were making this trip, and even
| longer ones, regularly before the arrival of Europeans.
| Heck, the Tlingit in Southeast Alaska were running water-
| based slave raids as far afield as California before the
| Europeans arrived.
| roywiggins wrote:
| There's even a special visa waiver for people with family
| across the Bering Strait: "the program allows indigenous
| residents from both sides of the Bering Strait to visit
| for up to 90 days without a visa. Travelers must have
| documented invitations from family or other residents
| living on the other side."
|
| https://apnews.com/article/5e16cfadd90c478d80a374ef1cd99c
| 2d
| fogihujy wrote:
| Yeah, the physical evidence is the cool part; we know people
| went from A to B even back in those days, but this show just
| how massive the ancient trade networks were.
| [deleted]
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| This is a great point. There's a sadly consistent theme of
| simply underestimating native peoples throughout history.
| Polynesians were in contact with south America for centuries
| before Columbus for example. Their naval technology was capable
| of reliable navigation over vast distances in the pacific.
| There's genetic evidence that people went back and forth
| between SA and Oceania with some regularity, a feat more
| impressive than crossing the Atlantic, but you almost never
| hear it talked about.
| Camillo wrote:
| > Somehow, these blueberry-sized beads made their way from what
| is now Venice, Italy, to the Brooks Range mountains of Alaska at
| some point during the mid-to-late 15th century, according to new
| research published in American Antiquity.
|
| They somehow managed to put the "what is now" hedge in the worst
| possible place in that sentence.
| dmos62 wrote:
| I find the placement fine. How would you write it?
| vijayr02 wrote:
| Not OP - I don't think this statement needs that phrase.
| Venice was Venice 500 years ago.
| dmos62 wrote:
| Haha, missed that.
| laurencerowe wrote:
| While Venice was Venice, Italy wasn't yet Italy.
| BerislavLopac wrote:
| It was. "Italy" (Italia to the natives) is both the name
| of the modern country (which didn't exist back then) and
| the peninsula (which did).
| Tade0 wrote:
| At the time Venice was the capital of the Republic of
| Venice, so its inhabitants would think of themselves as
| first and foremost Venetians.
|
| Also Venice isn't located strictly on the peninsula.
| dragandj wrote:
| But, the sentence says "what is now Venice". It's Venice
| now, ant it was Venice then. It's been Venice for the
| past 1000 years. I guess that it wasn't "Venice, Italy",
| but "Venice, The Venetian Republic" then, but I ascribe
| this oddity to there being "Paris, Texas" for the USA
| audience while the rest of the world knows that when you
| say Paris, you mean the capital of France and not "Paris,
| the nail salon down the road". Likewise, 500 years ago,
| it wasn't "Venice, the Venetian Republic" since anyone
| who would understand what Venice or The Venetian Republic
| is, would not need any qualifying of Venezia, or whatever
| local name they used for that city.
|
| Anyway, the OP referred to the weirdest place in the
| sentence for that qualification because nothing else was
| qualified (was Alaska even Alaska back then? ;)
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Yeah - why there and not "what is now the Brooks Range
| mountains in what is now Alaska"? Venice was still Venice even
| back then. Especially back then when it was a major
| international player, not a damp place populated with tourists.
| mellavora wrote:
| Hey, the Brooks range is not populated with tourists! But you
| are right about the damp.
| aksss wrote:
| Haha, I think he meant Venice but I honestly thought GP
| meant Brooks on first read. But even at its moments of
| greatest population the Brooks Range was never a major
| international player except in terms of historical
| significance to the peopling of North America. See:
| https://www.blm.gov/programs/cultural-heritage-and-
| paleontol...
| shmerl wrote:
| _> Christopher Columbus reached the Americas in 1492. Dating
| these beads to the pre-colonial era is thus very significant._
|
| Vikings were there way before that:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinland
| mymythisisthis wrote:
| Fishing fleets had been trading with people in the Arctic for
| some time. The joke is that when John Cabot 'discovered' N.
| America, he had to sail around all the fishing boats to get to
| shore.
| [deleted]
| jmartrican wrote:
| They date the twine used, not the actual beads themselves. It
| could be the case that the beads were put on some old twine. Or
| that the twine and beads were old, but landed in Alaska at a much
| later time.
| goda90 wrote:
| "This date range was subsequently affirmed through the testing
| of charcoal and caribou bones found at the three sites."
|
| Looks like they compared to the site as well, confirming the
| beads were there in pre-columbian times.
| jmartrican wrote:
| Thanks for pointing that out. I missed that part.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >It could be the case that the beads were put on some old
| twine.
|
| The inverse is far more likely. Twine is basically a consumable
| whereas being non-reactive to most of the things people come in
| contact with is all but a requirement of jwelry.
| Archelaos wrote:
| The article states that the twin was not directly associated to
| the beads (so no putting them on some old twine), but was from
| the accompanying bangle (probably item "o" in the image), which
| was dated 1397-1488 and "was subsequently affirmed through the
| testing of charcoal and caribou bones found at the three
| sites". This is a typical situation when dating items
| indirectly from their find context. The standard counter-
| argument is, of course, that the item was added at some other
| point in time to its find context. So in this case the counter-
| argument would be that the beads had been added at least a few
| decades later, while anything else that had been dated is from
| 1488 or earlier. (A few decades, to allow for some time for
| their journey from the Atlantic coast to Alaska.) How likely or
| unlikely is that?
| jmartrican wrote:
| Thanks for clearing that up. So the question is, which
| direction did the beads take to arrive there... from the
| Atlantic route (which is cool but not ground breaking), or
| from the Pacific, which is way more interesting in
| significance.
| naebother wrote:
| I wonder if you can narrow down what types of fiber the twine
| was made out of and rule out plants native to North America?
| aksss wrote:
| "probably the inner bark of a shrub willow"
|
| https://news.uaf.edu/blue-beads-in-the-tundra/
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Most plant families in the arctic are fairly cosmopolitan and
| exist on both sides of the strait. This particular twine is
| thought to be from a willow species, which is a particularly
| widespread family up there.
| credit_guy wrote:
| You can't date the beads themselves. Or you could, but you'd
| get the date when the rock formed, which is potentially a few
| million years ago, not the date when the beads were polished by
| some jewelers into their current shape. With the twine, you get
| the date when the carbon was metabolized, which is when the
| plant or animal where the fiber came from was alive and
| breathing. This is very close in time to the date when the
| fiber was actually twisted to form the twine, and to the date
| the twine was coupled with the beads to form a necklace or
| pendant.
| BeefWellington wrote:
| What's interesting about this is that this article suggests
| nobody else from Europe set foot* in North America before
| Columbus, but the Norse had a settlement in Newfoundland in
| approximately 1000CE^[1] and are known to be prolific global
| traders.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Anse_aux_Meadows
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I don't think it makes that suggestion at all. In fact, it is
| specifically about evidence of pre-Columbus artifacts
|
| >Much of the public imagines Columbus as the only (or first)
| connection between the old and new worlds, yet there are many
| instances of cultural connectivity in the Bering Straits region
| --and this is one
|
| The discovery and article highlight a more nuanced discovery:
|
| >the first documented instance of the presence of indubitable
| European materials in prehistoric sites in the Western
| Hemisphere as the result of overland transport across the
| Eurasian continent,"
| aksss wrote:
| What's fascinating to me about this is how often the Brooks
| Range keeps popping up in the critical archeological record. I
| used to assume that people who come from Siberia to North
| America are crossing the land bridge and taking a direct route
| southeast to more temperate climates and to get back to the
| coast asap. However, it makes a lot of sense that they'd stick
| between the major river and the caribou herds to sustain them
| in travel east and west. Travel would have been easier, food
| more plentiful, even if somewhat (okay, significantly) colder
| than the South Central coast line. The South Central and South
| East coastlines are arguably less hospitable without
| specialized knowledge of watercraft and saltwater fishing and
| hunting skills.
| loufe wrote:
| I sometimes wonder what the value of lines like this are.
| Should't the reader be convinced of the magnitude of the find by
| the facts and the way they're presented, themselves, without
| having to throw some distant third party in for props?
|
| > Ben Potter, an archaeologist from the Arctic Studies Center at
| Liaocheng University in China who's not involved with the new
| study, said it's a "very cool" discovery.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Journalism, oddly, doesn't report or even attempt to determine
| "facts", it reports what people say about things.
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| Following a 'we report, you decide' principle seems like it
| would invite the least bias.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Yes, that's the theory, although anybody half competent can
| cherry-pick the interviewees and the quotes to match what
| they think the story "ought" to be.
| goodcanadian wrote:
| My wife had one of her research projects get some media
| attention. For one interviewer, she wouldn't give the quote
| that they wanted (essentially a value judgment that her
| research couldn't possibly answer), so they got the quote from
| someone else who had nothing to do with the project. I can't
| say that is what happened here as the quote seems quite
| innocuous.
|
| Alternatively, they do sometimes want to get a view from
| someone unrelated to the project in order to get a feel for how
| important/interesting the result truly is.
| thgaway17 wrote:
| It's to demonstrate that other experts in the field, who don't
| have a connection to this particular study, found the results
| significant. Seems useful to me.
| wtetzner wrote:
| Maybe it's just filler to make the article longer.
| jhoechtl wrote:
| Is it impossible that an early western settler brought these
| artifacts when they were already old?
|
| Like me carrying a roman coin and loosing it in today Siberia for
| example?
| konjin wrote:
| >Venetian glass trade beads in radiocarbon-dated contexts that
| predate Columbus's discovery of the Western Hemisphere.
|
| https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-antiquity/a...
| scribu wrote:
| European settlers reached Alaska only in 1741, so the organic
| material around the beads - which is what was used for carbon
| dating - would have had to survive wear and tear for centuries.
| Not very likely.
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| There was also almost certainly trade between the New and Old
| World by way of the Norse settlements in Greenland and Iceland,
| which knew about the North American mainland, and very likely
| visited the Labrador region for lumber.
|
| The short-lived Norse colony built in L'Ance aux Meadows,
| Newfoundland in 1000 AD had an iron forge [1], which would have
| produced items in high demand among the indigenous people of that
| region. It seems unlikely that there wouldn't have been sustained
| trade once demand for these types of items had been established.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Anse_aux_Meadows
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| To Alaska???
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| No, it seems the beads came across the Bering Strait. I don't
| see why Venetian beads entering North America from the
| Maritimes would head north west across the tundra to Alaska
| instead of south and south west toward more populated
| regions.
|
| Plus by the 13th and 14th century, when Venetian trade was
| rising, the population of the Norse colony in Greenland was
| dwindling and the colony was approaching its end, due to
| cooling climate.
| technicalbard wrote:
| If the Vikings had brought the beads to Greenland or
| Labrador and trader with the Inuit, the Inuit could have
| traded those beads across the arctic of Canada in a couple
| of hundred years - EASILY. Remember that the Inuit of North
| America only entered from Asia in the last 4000 years or
| so, and speak a language that is closely related to
| languages in Siberia...
|
| So these beads could have come to Alaska from east OR west.
| We will probably never know for sure.
| yongjik wrote:
| I'm not so sure about the "easily" part: from [1], most
| part of Greenland was colonized _after_ Vikings settled
| on Iceland. So I 'd imagine it wasn't exactly a leisurely
| trip from there to Alaska.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thule_people
| aksss wrote:
| It would have been a series of trade network hops, not an
| express route by one guy. So traded from one village to
| the next over and over westwards. Going from Venice over
| the Silk Road and up through Siberia and into Alaska, or
| up through Eastern Europe into northern Asia and across
| Siberia, probably would have involved fewer exchanges
| though, I'd guess. Either way, that bead is a looong way
| from Venice. :D
| aksss wrote:
| Alaska was peopled in the Holocene (>10k years ago). But
| yeah, i think you're right: I tend to think of the
| particularly coastal Arctic people's across AK/Canada as
| having more consistent inter-tribal contact and periodic
| aggregation than between Arctic and more Southerly
| tribes. Not crazy to think trade goods could flow between
| the indigenous people of the east and west coasts of the
| Arctic, albeit slowly. I think far, far more likely that
| this item would have come to Alaska via Siberia though,
| if for no other reason than proximity. Fascinating to
| think of the story of that bead. Blows the mind.
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