▲ 89 points
back
80 comments
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.
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.
Not just generic evidence: Polynesian peoples almost certainly imported sweet potatoes to Oceania and east Asia hundreds of years prior to Columbus. In fact, the proto-Polynesian word for sweet potato is likely a Quechua loan word
>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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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,”
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.
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...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Meta: this was posted 9 days ago [1], with some discussion then.
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.
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.
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?
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.
>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.
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.
"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.
Thanks for pointing that out. I missed that part.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Journalism, oddly, doesn't report or even attempt to determine "facts", it reports what people say about things.
Maybe it's just filler to make the article longer.
> 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
If we speculate about routes for the beads from the Atlantic instead of from Siberia, there are at least four vage possibilities:
a) A route from the Caribean European settlements established after 1492
b) A route from New Foundland fishermen bases established around 1500.
c) A route from the New Foundland Viking bases from the early 1000s.
d) A route from Norse Greenland (980s to late 15th century).
Possibilities a) and b) are likely too late regarding the dating. Possibility c) is too early (no Ventian beats in the early 1000s). But d) seems to me at least as plausible as a Bering Strait route.
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.
To Alaska???
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?
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.
>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...
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.
> 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.
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.
I find the placement fine. How would you write it?