[HN Gopher] A Bead Too Far: Rethinking Global Connections Before...
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A Bead Too Far: Rethinking Global Connections Before Columbus
Author : themgt
Score : 62 points
Date : 2025-05-23 14:22 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (peterfrankopan.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (peterfrankopan.substack.com)
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Seems plausible to me that beads could've reached the Americas
| before Columbus, although the dates seem AWFULLY close to
| Columbus. Error bars on measurements like this seem like they
| almost certainly overlap 1492. +/- 30 years (or more) seems
| pretty typical for that age of sample.
| https://radiocarbon.pl/en/uncertainty-of-radiocarbon-date/
| chilmers wrote:
| Seems at least one scholar was extremely skeptical of these
| claims. Says these types of bead weren't even manufactured in
| Venice until circa 1560:
| https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-antiquity/a...
| mmooss wrote:
| > the dates seem AWFULLY close to Columbus
|
| What would that matter? Columbus was nowhere near Alaska.
| esperent wrote:
| Suppose that beads became a hot trade item. How fast could
| they have been traded from the Caribbean to Alaska?
|
| It seems like 30 years is a reasonable time for that.
| gus_massa wrote:
| In that case, I'd expect to find a few beads in the middle.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Maybe we will.
| mmooss wrote:
| That's the opposite of evidence; there's a very good
| reason it has no standing in science.
| rezmason wrote:
| > ...[A]t the Ust'-Polui site near Salekhard, on the Ob River,
| archaeologists have found beads... believed to have originated in
| the Roman Empire or from Parthian production centres
|
| Aw man, I would set a one-way time machine to a 2nd Century
| Parthian bead production center for the ASMR alone. If I ever got
| bored I could just hitchhike to Alaska.
| alephnerd wrote:
| The Venetian beads discovery is controversial (I think one of the
| reviewers argued that those style beads only began being
| manufactured in the 16th and 17th century), but smelted alloys
| have been discovered for sometime in older Inuit sites [0].
|
| That said, communities like the Yupik have constantly travelled
| across the Bering and all the way in Uelkal, but I'm not sure we
| can treat the Inuit in the same context as other First Nations
| with regards to Pre-Colombian exchange.
|
| Though, that said as well, if there were trade connections, it
| was most likely extremely limited. Even Hokkaido wasn't truly
| settled and colonized by the Japanese until the 1860s, and
| there's a reason Tungusic peoples like the Jurchen and Manchu
| preferred migrating south into China and Korea instead of
| northward - it was inhospitable land whose inhabitants were
| viewed as "barbarians". Sort of similar to how the Greeks and
| Romans didn't explore far beyond Crimea into Central Asia due to
| various Indo-European nomadic tribes that they'd view as
| "barbarians", and relying on second hand information.
|
| Also, the distances are massive - Chukota to the Amur is the same
| distance as Paris to Baghdad, except with a fraction of the
| population density.
|
| Loved visiting the Bering Land Bridge Natural Preserve outside
| Nome though. It was exhilarating. I always wanted to do something
| similar in Chukota or Sakha as well, but can't with the current
| political climate. At least I've been able to scratch my
| ethnographic itch about Paleo-Siberian and Northern Pacific
| communities when visiting Fairbanks, Seattle, or Hokkaido on
| occasional visits.
|
| Highly recommend reading "The Shaman's Coat: A Native History of
| Siberia" by Anna Reid as well. It's what stoked a lot of my
| interest in Paleo-Siberian peoples. Scratches a similar itch to
| thinking about Inner Asian communities and the ancestral
| Puebloans.
|
| [0] -
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03054...
| aetherson wrote:
| We also have some circumstantial evidence that trade across the
| Bering strait was very limited or non-existent in that it
| didn't appear to introduce Eurasian diseases to North America.
| ETH_start wrote:
| Correct, the Bering Strait and North Atlantic before the age
| of sail permitted only low-bandwidth exchange between Eurasia
| and the Americas, due to the low population densities and
| harsh low-resource environments at those northern latitudes.
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