Sailing the fjords like the Vikings yields unexpected insights | Hacker News Reader

Sailing the fjords like the Vikings yields unexpected insights

arstechnica.com

153 pointspseudolus57 comments

> In terms of the results themselves, the boats are extremely seaworthy crafts. When you get in them for the first time, you don't think that, because they're very, very light. They feel very flimsy, and they're very low in the water compared to a modern sailing boat. So you feel really in touch with the wave, which is kind of scary. But because they're so flexible and because of the way they're rigged, they're actually really stable, even in big waves.

> "We kept going out thinking, 'Oh, this is maybe the limit of what this boat can tolerate,' and then it would be fine, and we'd be, 'Okay, let's go a little bit in slightly bigger waves with slightly stronger wind,'" Jarrett continued. "So I think our comfort zones definitely visibly expanded during that period. And I had the chance to work with the same crews over three years. By the end of those three years, we were doing stuff that we would never have been able to do at the beginning."

Sounds like they had fun.

When is the last time someone used a vessel like this to sail to Iceland? I’d pay for someone to do that. Amazing what our ancestors accomplished.

There was an archaeologist who drowned last year during an attempted crossing from the Faroe islands to Trondheim.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cnvyge44nppo

https://www.oldsaltblog.com/2024/08/american-archeologis-die...

2016?

https://www.drakenhh.com/expedition-america-2016

Not exactly the same type, but a recreation of a viking longboat.

Look up the book called the Brendan voyage. Leather boats from Ireland to Newfoundland. They run into trouble around the ice floes. Great book.

This might not be the most scientific take, but the description reminds me of the Elvish boats of Lothlórien.

Did Tolkien possess advanced knowledge of viking seafaring?

He was very knowledgeable about history and that informed a lot of his writing, so it's quite likely.

Much respect to this man as a fundraiser. He convinced people to pay him to play Viking and go sailing as his job. Could be grants or private fundraising or both.

It illustrates how one monetizes a PhD in a subject overtly noncommercial like archaeology. Plenty of people have sailed in these waters, maybe even played at being Vikings. But with a doctorate in the field, one is able to make the case that doing so will be Real Science because you have developed expertise in that knowledge domain, and research skills to fit whatever you find into the broader scientific context.

I’m not being dismissive, by the way, it’s a fantastic idea to explore for new archaeological finds. And it is absolutely true that academics need to have as much hustle as entrepreneurs to find funding.

I can't help but be remembered of the discovery of the HMS Terror, one of John Franklin's missing ships. It was announced that it was discovered conveniently located in what was already called Terror Bay, and that the ship's masts were even sticking out of the water. The local Inuit of course knew it was there.

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

This story reminds me of another told by a keynote speaker at a CERF conference. IIRC, the story goes that US government scientists on the west coast were trying to figure out where the salmon spawned in a certain region and thus conducted a comprehensive study. As outreach afterwards, they held a town hall meeting to inform the locals — including a panel with elders from the native community — of their findings. After listening quietly to their announcement, one of the elders asked, "Do you know what the name of that place means in English?" The scientist didn't. "It means, where the salmon spawn."

a true scientist: He even fashioned rudimentary blades out of his own frozen feces to test whether they could cut through pig hide, muscle, and tendon ... it did not work.

bored and shored? board boats of boards o'er fjords. might strike a chord, see a fnord, expand your gourd

Eminem? Is that you?

I'm Eminem and my wife is also Eminem.

There’s an old NOVA episode “This Old Pyramid” that applied experimental archaeology to the Egyptian pyramids: exploring how the pyramids were built by actually building one.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1460448/

Going even further back in time, Kon-Tiki back in 1947 demonstrated it was indeed possible to travel on a balsa wood raft to get from South America to Polynesia, settling that part of the debate.

Of course, Heyerdahl's diffusion model was completely wrong, but that's a different topic.

Incomplete, perhaps, and vastly oversimplified, but not "completely wrong"; the more genetic evidence we get, the more it appears that ancient people moved around much more than we used to think.

https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(14)...

That's not Heyerdahl's diffusion model. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Heyerdahl

> The expedition was supposed to demonstrate that the legendary sun-worshiping red-haired, bearded, and white-skinned "Tiki people" from South America drifted and colonized Polynesia first, before actual Polynesian peoples. His hyperdiffusionist ideas on ancient cultures had been widely rejected by the scientific community, even before the expedition ....

> Heyerdahl's hypothesis was part of early Eurocentric hyperdiffusionism and the westerner disbelief that (non-white) "stone-age" peoples with "no math" could colonize islands separated by vast distances of ocean water, even against prevailing winds and currents. He rejected the highly skilled voyaging and navigating traditions of the Austronesian peoples and instead argued that Polynesia was settled from boats following the wind and currents for navigation from South America. ...

The genetic evidence does not support his theory.

Nor is it right to attribute the idea of a possible connection to Heyerdahl. Nordenskiöld wrote about "'Oceanian' Cultural Elements in South America" in 1931, https://archive.org/details/09-comparative-ethnographical-st...

> As is well known, we find in South America quite a number of culture elements of which parallels are found in Oceania.1 These we may call ’’Oceanian’’, although this certainly does not imply any proof that they have been imported into America from Oceania. These “Oceanian’’ culture elements may derive their origin from the crew of some weather-driven vessel, because the possibility of such having landed upon the coasts of America is not entirely to be disregarded, as Friederici has fairly convincingly shown.

> [p24]... Friederici has pointed out that there is much which speaks for the theory of weather-driven Oceanian vessels having reached America but nothing of their returning whence they came, or of Indians sailing westward and reaching any Oceanic island. It is important to note that all islands off the South American coast that cannot be seen from the mainland, such as the Galapagos, Juan Fernandez, etc., at the time of the discovery of America were uninhabited and, judging from everything, always had been so.

(I think the Friederici reference is "Zu den vorkolumbischen Verbindungen der Südsee-Völker mit Amerika" - "Regarding the pre-Columbian connections of the South Seas with America", 1929. Heyerdahl was born in 1914, so about 15 years old.)

As I recall, the prevailing hypothesis was that any contact came likely from the Pacific. Heyerdahl didn't believe that was possible, and it must have been the other way. People argued that South Americans didn't have the sailing ability to reach Polynesia. Heyerdahl demonstrated that opposing argument was incorrect, by doing it. That doesn't mean it must have happened.

So, no, Heyerdahl's hypothesis is completely wrong, and the new evidence we have more strongly support older hypotheses by others, which Heyerdahl disagreed with.

Floating the Grand Canyon on a tule reed raft is another example of testing the methods to see if something was possible.

https://lakepowellchronicle.com/stories/rafter-recounts-unus...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyjPX06Xeos

The follow-up attempt in 1999 where the team succeeds in raising a large obelisk by slowly draining sand out of a pit underneath it is a great watch.

Reminds me of the “Stonehenge in my backyard” guy.

https://youtu.be/jD-EMOhbJ9U

My proudest moment (perhaps) was changing a tire without a jack a hundred miles from anywhere. I couldn’t raise the car, but I could lower the ground!

Got a video of that?

You might be interested in Guédelon Castle - a project to build a 13th century castle in France using our best guess at the resources and knowledge available at the time.

There is an excellent documentary series about it, Secrets of the Castle [1], with historian Ruth Goodman and archeologist Peter Ginn taking part in the building and upkeep. Very old-fashioned but highly rewarding stuff, as are all their series, such as Victorian Farm.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secrets_of_the_Castle

I do believe the Absolute History channel on youtube has their series now, if you want an easy to stream source.

They should mention Helge/Anne Ingstad who did the original thinking and sailing like a viking to help find https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Anse_aux_Meadows in Newfoundland!

> You are able to ask very different questions the minute you walk away from your desk and get on a boat

Indeed. Read this as I am heading out to sail my Skerry.

A man of culture! Where do you sail yours? I'm not much of a sailor yet, so the Skerry feels plenty... scary... even in 10 knot wind inside a breakwater at Alameda

The Skerry has only seen the Willamette and Columbia rivers so far, but Puget Sound is calling…

So not really like Vikings, but like Jekt traders. It looks like there is little written about the Jekt trade in English.

Yes and no, as the article says:

> "The Viking Age ends in the 11th century, and we're talking about boats from 800 years later," he said. "But the construction techniques and the way they are rigged and their general performance characteristics are similar enough. Because this is a project about voyages and not a project about boat building, it seemed like a defensible analogy."

His guess - whether right or not - is that this ship-structure is similar enough that it serves as a possible way to identify possible Viking era landing places.

Boat designs change very slowly, so I would bet on his guess. Most changes would be in improvements in smaller technologies, e.g. improved nails, than in major hull shape changes. As I understand it, Vikings did use barge-like boats, but they mostly used the longboat form, and the major change to long boats is to make them longer to carry more, which doesn't change the draft that much.

To my mind, the greater change would have been to sea levels from the 11th century to now, which would alter landing spots more than the boat design.

> Others have tried to cook like the Neanderthals, concluding that flint flakes were surprisingly effective for butchering birds, and that roasting the birds damages the bones to such an extent that it's unlikely they would be preserved in the archaeological record.

I found this statement a bit alarming, as flint flakes being quite effective in butchering is quite well known — anyone who has practiced or studied “primitive living” ( that term doesn’t feel right…) would know.

However, that was not an explicit conclusion in the referenced paper, just by arstechnica. Not even a gripe, though, very interesting article!

Flint fractures conchoidally to produce edges as sharp as 30 angstroms - sharper than modern surgical steel which typically reaches only about 300-600 angstroms.

They're probably looking for something more specific than "can make something that works well enough for youtube", like seeing if an exact copy of flint found in a site yields the same leftover marks as found on other bones in the site, or something.

Also, it's one thing to say that with modern techniques and design that flint flakes work for the purpose intended, it's quite another to say flint flakes as they would have been made in the neolithic can be used in specific ways not necessarily by design, and then collect and write up all the findings in an academically rigorous way.

There's plenty of research on things that "everyone knows" which turn out to be not true, so validating these ideas is still worthwhile science.

There's recent evidence from mouse DNA, sheep shit silt and pollen, that the Vikings reached the Azores some time around 800 AD:

https://www.science.org/content/article/vikings-paradise-wer...

Watch out for fulings on the plains!

And deathsquitos!

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