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I wonder if they have any idea why this Viking presence isn't accounted for in stories / oral histories of the indigenous peoples. Did the Vikings just wipe out all that they came in contact with? Did those tribes truly never have contact with other tribes (to the point were a tribe that didn't directly meet with Vikings, could wonder what happened to some other tribe that the Vikings wiped out)?
[A little off-topic, but I wonder if he gets sick of the "The Island of Doctor Moreau" references (or if it actually isn't a common occurance).]
I don't know if you mean in Arctic Canada specifically, but in Greenland the Inuit certainly have orally transmitted memories of contact with the former Norse population. In 1721 the Norwegian Lutheran missionary Hans Egede went to Greenland in search of the lost Norse colonists, and instead met the Inuits who showed him the ruins of the Norse villages and told him the oral histories of alternating periods of fighting and friendly relations between their ancestors.
From the Wikipedia article on the Eastern Settlement (the largest of the Norse Greenland settlements): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Settlement
"In the Greenlandic Inuit tradition, there is a legend about Hvalsey. According to this legend, there was open war between the Norse chief Ungortoq and the Inuit leader K'aissape. The Inuit made a massive attack on Hvalsey and burned down the Norse inside their houses, but Ungortoq escaped with his family. K'aissape conquered him after a long pursuit, which ended near Kap Farvel. However, according to archaeological studies, there is no sign of a conflagration."
From the other side, Norse accounts describe often hostile encounters with natives, whom they called Skrælings. This term referred to the Greenland Inuits and the (probably Algonquian-speaking) Canadian Indians in Vinland. Intriguingly, some accounts might possibly also describe encounters with the Dorset people, who still maintained some presence in Northwestern Greenland for a few centuries after the Norse settled in Greenland. Of course, the Inuit also have oral traditions about the now-extinct Dorset people.
I don't know of any oral traditions about the Norse from Canadian Indians, though. Unlike the settlements in Greenland, L'Anse aux Meadows was just an exploration base that never developed into a permanent settlement. So unlike the prolonged periods of contact between the Norse and the Inuit, there might have been just a few isolated encounters between the Norse and the Canadian Indians that didn't leave enough of an impression to be preserved in oral tradition.
Wiped out, yes, but not necessarily by the Vikings. The Dorset Culture mentioned in the article was displaced by the encroaching Thule (Inuit) Culture.
I'm still embarrassed that it was only a few years ago when I learned (from Wikipedia) that the Inuit are descendants of the Thule culture, which migrated from Asia in boats during the Middle Ages. I had always learned in school that the native peoples of North America came across the Bering land bridge some 15,000 years ago, and I had no idea that the dominant peoples in the Arctic when Europeans began colonizing the Americas are from a completely separate and much more recent migration. I hope I'm not the only one that missed out on this bit of history.
Well, I just learned this from your post, and I am Canadian.
I wonder if part of the Dorset disappearance was due to Viking pathogens.
The Dorset were present across Canada's North, and only the Easternmost would have had contact with vikings. The entire Dorset culture was rapidly displaced shortly after the Thule (Inuit) came across the Bering sea. The Thule do have tales of contact with what is now thought to be the Dorset, and they do suggest the result was violent conflict that the Dorset were simply not ready for. There are also some theories that the Thule might be partly responsible for the abandonment of at least one viking settlement in Greenland. In short, the Thule were bad-ass, possibly to the point of turning the tables on the vikings. To be fair, the vikings of Greenland have very little in common with the vikings of popular culture. They were farmers and traders, not berserkers and pillagers.
At that point, they were no longer vikings (as in, they never went viking), they were simply migrant norsemen.
The Norse found only abandoned Dorset settlements when they first came to Greenland. They had already disappeared from Greenland by A.D. 300, long before the Norse arrived. They did reoccupy northwestern Greenland around A.D. 700, but didn't go into the areas that would later be settled by the Norse. Because their settlements didn't overlap, they would have encountered each other only on hunting expeditions and such. Norse objects such as pieces of smelted metal have been found in Dorset sites, though this doesn't definitely establish face-to-face contact as these objects may have simply been scavenged from abandoned Norse sites.
Anyway, the Dorset disappearance is usually blamed on the Inuit (whose oral traditions recount driving off the Dorset people), although they seem to have already been in decline when the Inuit arrived. It could be that Inuit pathogens may have partly been to blame, though we may never know.
It certainly did for the First Nations people called the Beothuk they are extinct in part due to European spread diseases. Vikings landed in L'anse aux Meadows Newfoundland over 1,000 years ago.
The Mi'kmaq were also very important to the extermination of the Beothuk. As was the common case across Canada, groups of indigenous people who were in earlier contact with European traders and colonists and who were better able to utilize iron tools and other European technology diligently set about exterminating any hereditary enemies in the vicinity. Read any early ethnographic account from Champlain on and you will find detailed reports of this.
The tale of indigenous extermination is not at all simple, and while European diseases certainly played a role, many other factors were also very important. One result of this was that some groups were wiped out almost immediately when Europeans entered the area, while others persisted and even thrived for some centuries after contact.
The most devastating effect of disease was likely in the West Coast groups, who left a large number of abandoned villages a few decades after first contact, where contact was very late (in the late 1700's) and colonization played a relatively small role in their destruction (the Interior groups were probably more strongly affected by colonization rather than disease, having had more contact with Eastern groups over the preceding centuries and therefore likely some immunity to disease.)
Probably because it was 30 generations or more later, and there was no writing.
Is there any significant historical evidence of mass genocide among seafaring cultures of the north?
It's kind of racist to assume that Vikings "wiped out" a bunch of people simply because there is evidence that they were present in a certain place. "Viking" as a term has its origin in an expedition of some sort, whether to trade or colonize.
>Is there any significant historical evidence of mass genocide among seafaring cultures of the north?
Hell, yes. Most cultures along the Western Atlantic seaboard have long oral traditions and solid historical evidence of devastating Viking raids.
>...whether to trade or colonize.
You forgot rape, pillage, burn, and slaughter. Then write songs about it afterwards.
It seems like these Vikings encountered the Dorset, not the Inuit, and the Dorset were later wiped out by the Inuit, so no oral tradition of the Viking contact would have survived.
Please see my other comments, but we don't have direct proof of face-to-face contact between the Dorset and the Norse but ample proof of prolonged periods of contact between the Inuit and the Norse.
I've read them, and they are interesting. That is certainly true for Greenland, but I was talking about Canada only. Is there evidence of contact between the Inuit and the Norse there?
It's certainly possible, but I don't know if there is unambiguous evidence for contact between the Inuit and the Norse in Canada. Norse objects and technology in Inuit possession in Canada could easily have been obtained first in Greenland, where the Norse settlements were. There are Norse objects that have been discovered in places the Norse never visited like Ellesmere Island, indicating that they reached there through trade between Inuit groups.
The Greenland Norse probably sent expeditions to the Canadian islands and coast to get timber for a few centuries at least. An Icelandic document records that in 1347, a ship that was returning from "Markland" came off course and ended up in Iceland. Markland along with Helluland and Vinland is one of the Norse names given to regions in the North American coast and islands. So there could well have been opportunities to encounter Inuits who expanded to Northwest Canada by the 13th or 14th centuries. But even the Norse themselves haven't left many records about such expeditions or encounters with other peoples.
Well, there were other evidences of Vikings in Canada, but not at that latitude http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Anse_aux_Meadows
I read this and kind of expected like scientists having found evidence of there currently being a population vikings who were just living in the past under the radar.
Scientists are strange, is enough to find a small viking stone in canada as proof for viking presence but seeing pyramids and megalithic structures all over the world is not enough to convince them that ancient civilizations on different continents including america were communicating.
There are multiple archaeological proof of Norse presence in Canada - L'Anse aux Meadows is the remains of a whole village. Furthermore we also have historical evidence in the form of the Vinland Sagas, which is Icelandic tales about the discovery of 'Vinland' and encounters with the natives. Taken together the evidence is solid.
In comparison there are no historical sources that talk about pre-columbian communication between old-world and american civilizations, and no archaeological evidence either. The word "pyramid" is indeed used by later times to describe buildings both in America and in Egypt, but apart from a similar basic shape, they are fundamentally different in architecture and use.
The only reason to assume pre-columbian communication is basically that it would be cool if it were true. That is not good enough for historians though.
Probably its because pyramids are the most effective way to pile up rocks without them falling down for a long time, try it out-
I would say that cones are better.
We tend to call the simple version of those "mounds". There's a lot of them in the world.
Square pyramids are what you get when you make a mound out of rectangular dressed stone. Making cones or other types of pyramids out of dressed stone is much harder because they demand more complicated shapes.
Norse presence in Artic North America is neither controversial or new. This discovery isn't terribly surprising, considering their settlements in Newfoundland and Greenland. That said, there's no evidence to suggest there was any meaningful exchange between the Norse and sub-Artic indigenous nations.
The sweet potato, on the other hand, does indicate at least some incidental exchange between the Americas and Polynesia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_potato#Origin.2C_distrib...
I don't see how pyramids or other structures could be used for communication.
I think he's suggesting that the idea of building pyramids spread through some form of communication, not that the pyramids themselves were used for communication.
I don't agree with that, myself -- a pyramid is a fairly simple shape, and could easily have occurred to different groups of people.
We don't know actually what he is suggesting while your idea is correct one most probably (I tried to be funny actually:)).
As well I agree about pyramids being simple. Another problem with communication theory is that Mayans used different counting system.
It's not only the shape but also the construction technique, very large stones cut with high precision in both egypt or south america http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumapunku
If the technique can be thought up once, it can likely be thought up more than once. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery
I don't share givan's belief, but I would note that this depends heavily on the complexity of the idea. If, for instance, manuscripts with identical detailed stories were found in two distant civilizations from the same time period, I would consider that evidence that the civilizations had interacted.
Pumapunku was built thousands of years after the pyramids in egypt. Plenty of time for banging rocks together to determine which one is the harder and figuring out that using flat stones and sand is great for polishing.
Hail, Protong!! Szukalski would be proud, but I have to say I do agree with you that, on the surface, it seems like much prejudice can be expressed in archeology, too. Well, we humans are frail; it takes a lot to change peoples minds about things.