How far into the Americas did the Vikings travel?
aeon.co
aeon.co
Also, for a while there was another potential Viking site in the Americas at Heavener, Oklahoma. Formerly a state park, now a city park, there is a runestone and others have been found within a few tens of miles of Heavener.
Once thought to be possible evidence of Viking excursions into Oklahoma, the Heavener Runestone may in fact be a marker laid out by one of the members of the Rene Robert Cavelier De La Salle expedition's attempt to reach French settlements northeast of Texas in 1687.
This website has a horrible, no good, very bad layout and is difficult to read but it weaves a very interesting historical tale that explains the Heavener Runestone and others found nearby in Oklahoma.
[Heavener Runestone - Heavener Oklahoma](http://heavener-runestone.com/)
If you have a while and enjoy some archaeological and historical intrigue this is the place to get your fix today.
I visited the site using Firefox with Https Everywhere and microblock Origin and other than the lack of https the site is largely free of objectionable things. It could use a serious rebuild though as the story woven is compelling when the evidence is presented and so thoroughly researched.
Makes more sense than Vikings.
Carved rocks are somewhat too convenient of fodder for mysteries like this, because they're just so difficult to date. I think that the most plausible hypothesis for the Heavener inscription, though, is that it really is of Scandinavian origin. But that it dates to the 19th century, not the 11th. This is based on three things: The only thing about it that looks remotely medieval is the simple fact that it's using a runic alphabet (the vikings liked to decorate their runestones), and it is reportedly somewhat nonsensical in Old Norse but reasonably straightforward to read in a modern dialect, and we know from the historical record that there were Swedes (IIRC) living there around then.
Automatically assigning them to a 19th century origin date based only on the presence of Scandinavian immigrants in the local area totally ignores the historical evidence that the author of that site dug up and laid out in that horrible format.
I suggest that you read through the entire page to the end. It will be a slog but it offers a much more believable origin story than that of Scandinavian immigrants carving a few stones and scattering them at widely spaced locations on the landscape.
The French had a much friendlier relationship with Native American tribes and had explored a lot more of North America before the first settler ventured west from the colonies to see what lay past the Cumberland Gap. I am obviously more inclined to believe the author's (taking him at his word) well-researched account of events leading up to the inscribing of the stones in Oklahoma since they fit closely to historical documents and accounts taken from eyewitness records.
The whole story of La Salle's attempt to reach French settlements so that he can save those left behind in Texas is well known from contemporary Spanish and French records. The accepted story that La Salle was murdered by his own men in Texas probably needs to be discarded since, as this author documents, the route they took, the terrain they encountered, the distance they travelled and the azimuth do not agree with an end point for the murder occurring anywhere in Texas. It does however closely agree with that murder having occurred in Oklahoma or far west Arkansas.
One could start with the story from the Great Lakes about the possible Viking landing that ended with them retreating back to Norway after a battle with Native Americans cost them several members of their band. (Kensington Runestone story). All you have to do is leave one guy behind who falls in with a friendlier group of Native Americans and spends the rest of his life wandering the trade routes with that group until he ends up in Oklahoma and stakes a claim to that valley. Helps to explain blondes among the Mandan tribes too if you wanted to take it that far. Maybe someone has already written this tale.
- loads immediately
- font size that's readable when zooming to fit the paragraphs width to the screen of phone
- no auto playing video
- no various modals popping up
- no need to click extra things to expand texts
I have no idea what you're talking about, this is one of the more readable websites on my phone
I visited on a desktop and in that visitor mode the reader sees a wide bar of rock on each side of a compressed text field amounting to ~60% of the screen width. The story is told in the remaining ~40% of the screen between the two grey bars on the rock border. Inside that ~40%, the actual text field uses ~2/3 of the width to tell the story and deliver the photos, etc.
Only ~25% of the screen width is used to tell the story and as a result the user spends a lot of time scrolling through the story unnecessarily. Making effective use of screen real estate wasn't one of the things the site is optimized for.
All that noted, it is still quite worth reading the story. The author has included a long bibliography of sources at the end and the story, though repetitious in spots, ends up being believable as he has related it.
1) for any single artifact X, the chance that X is found at the innermost point that vikings reached is low, given the large number of artifacts they would have generated
2) the exact number of discoverable artifacts is unknown, and the majority of this number must be undiscovered so far
Archeologists' failure to think this way has always baffled me. Bayesian archeology should be a thing
3) Artifacts can be (and often were!) traded between different places, so presence of an artifact associated with a culture may be indicative of trade and not physical presence of the artifact.
The story about the sailboat trip to find the camp on the beach shows that they are plenty willing to investigate assumptions based on evidence they do have. With ~0 evidence to go on and a continent to search, what more would they do?
So, you take a relatively lightweight piece of evidence that they made it even that far, stick it together with an enormous prior that they didn't, and, well, per Bayes' Rule, that artifact doesn't really shift the posterior probability by much. And, if Bayesian thinking can't even convincingly get you that far, it certainly can't get you any further.
I've learned you have to distinguish between what is known to be true with near certainty, what is considered plausible, and what is at the edge of possible. The history books focus on the first, but that doesn't mean archeologists aren't thinking about the 2nd and 3rd. Speculation on what is possible is what helps them decide what projects to attempt.
As others have said though, it's not an appropriate evidentiary standard for declaring things publicly. That may be where the confusion is coming from.
And wishing that another field used legitimate statistics is hardly 'dismissive'. Its a reasonable question. The answer might be "because they don't know how".
This is a field where favored practices in machine learning come and go at a furious pace, often based on the results of a single paper that didn't even attempt to isolate the new idea they're presenting as the primary cause of their result, as opposed to the 10 other variables they mention in the paper and that everyone knows can make a big difference, but that they didn't bother to control for. Other fields might not be uniformly meticulous about isolating confounding variables, but at least there's a common understanding that it's good to try.
1) Vikings were definitely at point X.
2) Vikings did not get further than point X.
Yes, due to the likelihood of undiscovered evidence, you can assume that things happened for which we don't have concrete evidence. You just can't determine exactly what those things are, so there isn't really anything interesting you can say about it.
I don't think archaeologists ever make claims like "People X never reached Z" when Z is an easy 50KM journey from Y, where People X were known to have been, without pretty convincing evidence to the contrary (e.g. a mass grave containing the entire estimated population, showing they all died pretty much on arrival)
Your claim that archaeologists don't think that way is bogus. How do you think they decide where to look for new evidence? A lot of archaeology may be driven by building works needing to prove they aren't going to destroy a Roman villa, but plenty is still driven by academics thinking that a particular meadow has a good chance of containing artefacts.
That makes me think they made it up the St Lawrence to at least where Quebec City is now, or south of the gulf of St Lawrence down the coast Nova Scotia or further to Maine, etc.
FWIW Vinland is a great name for the eastern half of North America. We have dozens of wild grape species and it is the centre of diversity for the genus and so probably its place of evolutionary origin. Take that Bordeaux wine snobs!
Taking a boat or canoe up a river and you'd see thickets of them, climbing all over the trees.
Morphologically they're pretty much identical to European vitis sylvestris/vinifera, just a droopier growth habit. It's only once you taste them that you'd notice a difference.
It's sad we'll never know for sure. For much of our history, the Nordic countries have been exceptionally bad at writing things down. :/
Also, the northernmost extent of vines depends on the climate of the time, which may well have been quite a bit warmer than today's, in Nova Scotia.
Vinis vitifera has been cultivated exclusively (or, nearly so) on New World rootstocks, since the dawn of the 20th century.
Makes me proud the Scots first thought was whether they could get drunk
> Could the Vikings who left a settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows have made it to the Yucatán Peninsula – some 3,700 miles (c6,000 km) south of where the Viking penny surfaced at the Goddard site? One of the murals at the Temple of Warriors, painted around 1000 CE, depicted a naval battle scene showing blond-haired men being thrown into the water.
Do 1000yr old murals retain their color enough to be able to tell that the subjects originally had blonde hair?
1000yr old books do for the most part. Silver pigment will have turned grey, but other high quality pigments were often based on minerals that are still vibrant to this day. (Cheap pignents on the other hand were often organic, which would often not have lasted).
That said, once you have looked at a picture of the mural, I strongly doubt you'll come away thinking that it's a picture of Vikings.
Nature is trying much harder to destroy anything of archeological significance in the jungles of central and South America and the Atlantic coast of the Northeast US and Canada. We're just never gonna have great information about these societies because a much larger fraction of the stuff they left behind will be gone.
It isn't, it's gone. The image in the article is a watercolor reproduction made in the 1920s-30s. And even when they found it, it was as deteriorating fragments on the floor, which were subsequently lost to a hurricane.
Conceivably the Norse 'penny' reached Maine as a trade object. Etc. fun stuff to think about.
The unforgivably outdated info is the part about mesoamerican nobles living in Chaco. That's a super old and kind of racist narrative you typically see from people writing in like the 30s-50s. You'd have to ignore half a century of exploration into the emergence of political complexity in the SW to believe it.
Wait what? You lost me here. The article clearly attributes the settlement of Chaco Canyon to the Ancestral Puebloans, which seems to be the current mainstream belief at least as Wikipedia presents it. It notes one skeleton with notched teeth, but doesn't seem to say anything about it being indicative nobility. With respect to that practice in Mayan culture, Wikipedia says "Overall, little evidence for the relationship between socioeconomic status and types of dental modification exists."
Granted, it's been a few years since I've worked on a Chaco project specifically, but I'm pretty confident in my understanding here.
I do find it difficult to understand how any academic could believe Pueblo people weren't (culturally predisposed?) to building Chaco Canyon when we have cities like Taos practically next door.
Besides as any anthropologist would tell you, taking people purely at face value can hide some very complicated relationships. Some Navajo/Diné will tell you a lot of the ruins are their ancestors', for example. Some Hopi reportedly disclaimed Chaco to early archaeologists, calling it a bad place because they didn't want to claim descent from the political system. Something similar occurs with O'odham peoples and Hohokam structures.
> ...they asked the locals about possible Viking remains. One man showed them some grassy mounds on a beach [...] The structures turned out to be the collapsed remains of eight sod buildings originally held up by wooden frames.
What are the odds of grassy mounds surviving for one thousand years on a beach?!
This conflicts with my mental model of how mutable the world is. I would have imagined that the site would have been turned over many hundreds of times by storms, winds, or surges.
I understand ancient sites that last for thousands of years in the desert, or a cave...In ancient sites in the jungle, a thousand years worth of trees will grow over pyramids, breaking them down but leaving the stone materials more-or-less in place (though terribly weathered) and that seems like a much less hostile environment than a beach.
There is also the "News Fallacy" to be aware of: The news only report on unusual things. It's easy to start thinking they're very common, since they dominate reporting.
I've been to a number of iron age sites that are more intact than L'anse aux Meadows was when it was first excavated. I don't see why it shouldn't have been in the state it was in.
And it being an almost sub-arctic location growth, decay etc. would be a lot slower. It's cold and maritime.
Also not a terribly pleasant place. Exposed and cold; I remember watching an iceberg float off the coast a few hundred feet from the site. It was August.
This actually never occurred to me, and it’s interesting that these famous seafarers would have resource constraints for building boats.
For similar reasons North American timber and fish were very much in high demand during the colonial period.
To me, the most surprising thing I have learned about Viking ships and resources is that the _sail_ not the boat was the real constraint: A sail would take an entire village several years to make, while a ship crew could complete a ship in less than a month.
I have heard stories of ship crews deliberately wrecking the ship in a place where they could recover the sail, rather than risk loosing the sail in an uncontrolled wreck. Don't know if there is any truth to this.
That said, the article tends to actually instead spend more of its time talking about the well-accepted vast American trading networks. Sprinkling in the speculation of Viking voyages that aren't supported by anything more than a rosy interpretation of some data that requires some contexts that are slightly sketchy really does a disservice to the rest of the article. (If you're going to claim that a painting postdates the structure by a hundred years, I'm really doubtful of that unless you show that it's painting over something else, or otherwise demonstrate some reason why the wall covering would have needed to be changed).
Or you could just not mention the context of the evidence. It's not like most readers are going to bother following up checking it for themselves to see what it really says.
The article seems highly suspect to me, a few hours ago I noted that it contains inaccurate statements about historical metalworking. That I caught that mistake makes me suspect there are other errors I didn't catch. But to insinuate some white supremacist motive without evidence doesn't make any sense to me.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headli...
Do we know what stature albinos had in Maya culture? Were they venerated or seen as outcasts?
https://www.ancient-origins.net/history/pre-columbian-murals...
Trying to apply legal concepts to unclaimed barren islands not subject to any legal system does not work.
"Bigger army diplomacy" is the rule, not the exception. Weapons usually beat legal documents and concepts
BBC quotes an expert (https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26431858):
> The correction to "cuddly" Vikings had gone too far, says Prof Simon Keynes, an Anglo-Saxon historian at Cambridge University. "There's no question how nasty, unpleasant and brutish they were. They did all that the Vikings were reputed to have done."
> They stole anything they could. Churches were repositories of treasure to loot. They took cattle, money and food. It's likely they carried off women, too, he says. "They'd burn down settlements and leave a trail of destruction." It was unprovoked aggression. And unlike most armies, they came by sea, their narrow-bottomed longships allowing them to travel up rivers and take settlements by surprise. It was maritime blitzkrieg at first.
> Worse was the repeat nature of the raids. The Vikings, like burglars returning over and over again to the same houses, refused to leave places alone.
Simon Keynes appears to be a reliable source, an expert at a prestigious university free if scandal. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Keynes
But let's find another. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/sorry-the-vikings-really... quotes David Dumville (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Dumville) and Stefan Brink (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan_Brink)... Seems like two more reliable sources to me.
So, basically, you were downvoted for being wrong. People downvoted without replying because it was obvious that you were wrong, but they couldn't work up the effort to provide you with references (as I've done here).
Also, you're not supposed to complain about votes.
The Thule people of Greenland arrived in 1300-1400, after the vikings had arrived.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Greenland#:~:text=A....
I was writing things I find interesting from a social development perspective, and a historical information perspective, but there was nothing political implied about what I said. Nor did I make any sort of far fetched claims, I claimed that Iceland and Greenland were uninhabited when the Vikings arrived, and that claim is true. And the point I was making is how much of an outlier that is, I understand that contact is usually followed by violence, that's why I pointed out how unusual that situation was.
I think that this is the result of people assuming political intent where there is none, reading into what I wrote things that weren't there, and basically just failing to be open minded in terms of exploring little known corners of history. The knee jerk downvote reflex is toxic and I think it's acceptable to talk about that.
I understand that in this day and age everything gets transmuted into politics but in this case I’m just a history nerd relaying something fascinating I know and to get this instant negative response is.. well it’s discouraging and frustrating. We’re all hackers here; don’t we want to learn new things and not just have our biases confirmed? Seeing the Vikings in their aspect as explorers rather than warriors is an aspect that isn’t often talked about. Of course they were warriors too, I don’t want to paint them as perfect people.
Oh whatever, I’m just shouting into the wind.
> Pretty peaceful overall for people who have a reputation for being barbarians.
There are a lot of reasons for the abandonment of the Greenland colonies, including a changing climate hostile to subsistence farming and domestic squabbles back in Denmark leading to a lack of supply ships (the colonies were not fully self-sustaining). Actual records of the end of the Greenland colonies have not been found and probably won't be because those supply ships that did not get sent out also never returned.
The European settlers were later replaced by Inuit migrants, who eked out a maritime existence instead of a pastoral one.
> In 1960, the Norwegian explorer Helge Ingstad and his wife, the archaeologist Anne Stine Ingstad, set out to find these places
I'm imagining a kind of mashup where these Norwegian explorers end up in some kind of urban New Jersey setting along the lines of the Daniel Pinkwater books.
"offerings"?
"According to post-Conquest sources (Maya and Spanish), pre-Columbian Maya sacrificed objects and human beings into the cenote as a form of worship to the Maya rain god Chaac. Edward Herbert Thompson dredged the Cenote Sagrado from 1904 to 1910, and recovered artifacts of gold, jade, pottery, and incense, as well as human remains.[2] A study of human remains taken from the Cenote Sagrado found that they had wounds consistent with human sacrifice."
The expedition just happened to be conceived and lead by a Norwegian.