Venetian glass beads may be oldest European artifacts in North America (2021) | Hacker News Reader

Venetian glass beads may be oldest European artifacts in North America (2021)

smithsonianmag.com

56 pointsthunderbong35 comments

> The researchers used mass spectrometry carbon-dating to analyze trace amounts of twine discovered alongside three of the beads and date the artifacts’ creation to between roughly 1397 and 1488.

> When the archaeologists realized how old the beads were, “[w]e almost fell over backwards,” says Kunz in statement. “It came back saying [the plant was alive at] some time during the 1400s. It was like, Wow!”

> If confirmed, the scientists’ discovery would indicate that Indigenous North Americans trading in northern Alaska wore European jewelry decades before Christopher Columbus’ 1492 landing in the Bahamas.

Can I be skeptical for a moment? Even if the carbon dating is accurate (I go back and forth between "amazing what a bit of twine can tell us" and "can a bit of twine really tell us that"), wouldn't it also be possible that the thing wasn't made until 1488 and hung around in Europe for awhile before making its way over? Could it have been an antiquity that was brought by Russian fur traders?

I know this has "just asking questions" vibes, but I think my point is just that, even though the language in the article appropriately hedged, we probably have a tendency to not read it that way.

It's a fair question, and it's worth reading the full paper for details on the three sites in Alaska (some distance from where Columbus et al landed), the relationships between bead groups found, the layering of the sites, and the age and type of twine:

    Furthermore, the twine was a short-lived material—possibly one made from the inner bark of a shrub willow (Burch 2005:187) that was likely replaced regularly, so there would be no significant time lag between when the twine plant was photosynthesizing and when it was used to hold the ornament together.

So, the reasoning goes that the beads are older than the twine, the twine was used to bind several objects including the beads together within a year (? say) of being 'lost' and left in a layer, and the twine predates 1488 and is in a remote interior part of Alaska.

Full paper here:

Kunz, M. L., & Mills, R. O. (2021). A Precolumbian Presence of Venetian Glass Trade Beads in Arctic Alaska. American Antiquity, 86(2), 395–412. doi:10.1017/aaq.2020.100

https://sci-hub.ru/https://doi.org/10.1017/aaq.2020.100

Nice context, thank you.

No, they are not.

This is from 10th or 11th century and full of artifacts (though maybe most of the artifacts were created in situ): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Anse_aux_Meadows

The head differs from the article. The article says "among the oldest."

Amazingly the article title itself says “May Be Oldest European Artifacts” but then the body of the article says “among the oldest European-made”!

Flagged for that reason.

> Flagged for that reason.

The submission, of course. :)

> “This is 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,” add the authors."

The 15th century is pre-history?! My garden wall is older than that (literally).

Then your garden wall is older than most

Locally it may be pre-history: nobody wrote down that the beads traveled across the Bering strait to the New World.

There's a lot of hedging and qualification in the article you're quoting. For one, it uses a writing-centric definition of "prehistory" that's pretty dumb. Better definitions don't have the problem of "prehistory" being in the 15th century.

This is not the oldest known artifact from Eurasia either. It's usually difficult to identify things as specifically from one side of the strait or the other, but we have a few examples (e.g. Chinese bronzes [1]) that are clearer.

These beads happen to be an incredibly distinctive artifact that show up basically everywhere the Eurasian trade network reached. We use similar diagnostic beads for Roman/postroman trade in the north sea.

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/bronze-buckle-show...

What other definition of prehistory is there? It literally means before written records.

For example, 1788 is considered the end of prehistory in Australia:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistory_of_Australia

Many archeologists (e.g. Renfrew) use a methodological definition. "Prehistory" in that definition isn't a specific period of time, it's just what you're studying whenever you apply certain types of methods.

Others (e.g. Peter Schmidt, Kehoe) argue that it's just a archaic term without any meaningful communicative value. Resolutions to this include just swapping "prehistory" for "history", or defining it arbitrarily as something like 5000 BCE.

The main result of all of these is to avoid the idea that some random dude shows up for a week, never to be seen again, and using that as the date when "history" starts. European contact in most of the Americas (or Africa, Australia, etc) took centuries from initial contact to full colonialism and the word "prehistory" carries a lot of negative connotations in English. Moreover, the term "writing" itself excludes a lot of written communication systems because it's typically defined only for systems that can record the complete breadth of verbal speech. A system that only encodes a domain of human communication (e.g. tax records and religious stories like Aztec script) is not "true writing" and hence "prehistoric".

“In Europe, 100 miles is a long way. In the US, 100 years is a long time.”

History is based upon written records, which is in contrast to archaeology which considers physical evidence. Another way to think of it is that archaeology can tell us what happened, why history helps us to understand why it happened (with a whole slew of caveats based upon the limitations of each field). So the distinction is important and the term pre-history is both context dependent and relevant.

It is quite possible that both parties exchanging beads were in the prehistoric period for that part of the world. Then again, maybe not. One party may have had writing. Even if they didn't, the oral histories should be close enough to the introduction of writing to be considered as reliable as writing.

600+ tribes in North America and there is no evidence of pre-contact written language for any tribe north of the SW desert border.

I appreciate how the author of this piece put the entire clickbait antidote right at the beginning of the story — what do these beads look like? Why were they there?

This also mean that maybe Chinese or other Asiatic people could have reached the (north) America before Europeans. Interesting.

It's possible that they not only reached it, but spread across both American continents before Europeans arrived.

There's also strong linguistic evidence of Polynesian contact with South America prior to European contact, and quite possibly contact with North America[0].

There's also some more recent genetic evidence[1].

0. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25132351 1. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/native-america...

FWIW the first chapter of "Hawaii" by James Michener gives a feel for the seafaring involved in populating the Pacific.

There is Viking settlement somewhere in North America from 11th century.

If I understand right, there is theorised to maybe have been one, the jury is still out on whether the tales of vikings reaching america are true and exactly what and where they reached.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Anse_aux_Meadows

Technically Newfoundland is an island, but I would call that North America

So are Bahamas, Cuba and Haiti.

Even Greenland usually counts as North America unless you explicitly exclude it, as the cited Wikipedia article does: "L'Anse aux Meadows is the only undisputed site of pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact of Europeans with the Americas outside of Greenland."

But they didn't exclude Icecland! To a geologist, perhaps even parts of Iceland count as North America: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_Ridge#/media/File...

The geology is just a happy accident of naming. Continents aren't defined by plates. Europe and Asia share a plate, except for a bit of western Siberia that's on the North American plate. The Americas have 3-7 different plates, but only 1-2 continents.

Continents aren't defined by anything.

https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Continents-Critique-Metageograph...

I'm in SE Canada a region called The Maritimes and supposedly there is evidence of Vikings visiting here. I'm West of Newfoundland but also an island. But Nova Scotia and even Maine in the US may have been visited by Vikings.

> Technically Newfoundland is an island

For anyone who says this I wonder if they are consistent with how they discuss continents:

- They take care to talk about the Caribbean as something in the waters near North America but not in North America itself

- They talk about Indonesia as something that is in the waters close to Asia and Australia—no need for “Oceania” obviously

- Madagascar as an island next to Africa

And so on and so on.

I have never seen anyone claim that this didn’t happen. In particular I have never seen evidence against L'Anse aux Meadows.

This was probably right until the 1960s or so, but there is conclusive evidence that they at least reached Newfoundland, and there is some other newer evidence of settlements on Baffin Island as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinland

Any accurately dated artifact?

Not only were the Vikings in North America that early, but they were trading with the locals[0]. This might seem moot at first blush, seeing as these beads were found in Alaska--3,000 miles away from newfoundland! But once you recall that both places fell within the range of the Inuit (who were masters of transportation over water!) the distance hardly seems like an impediment.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leif_Erikson#Norse_encounters_... [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuit

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