I had never heard of murals showing blonde men being sacrificed and the significance of boats made from planks in Maya murals would not have been apparent to me. Fascinating stuff. The more you learn, the more you wish you could know.
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.
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.
My understanding is that these isolated runestones deep in North America, thousands of kilometers away from any other evidence of Norse presence, have about zero value as archaeological evidence. It's hard to come up with a story for how a genuine ancient Norse artifact could get there like that that is even remotely plausible. Modern hiking ethics are a pretty modern invention. Usually, when people go on expeditions like that, they leave a trail of trash behind them. And nobody's going to make a clean hike thousands of kilometers into an unknown land without leaving any traces, then stick around somewhere long enough to carve "gnome valley" in huge letters on a rock - which must have been roughly the plan all along, too, because otherwise, why did you pack stone chisels for the trip, and if you didn't pack them, then where's the on-site smithy? - and then just fade into the mist, again leaving no trace.
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.
I understand the doubt about the Norse origins of the Heavener runestones and others found in the area.
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.
All of the features that you point out do make it quite clean and easy to load.
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.
Sounds like a great opportunity for a historical novel to drive more tourism to Oklahoma. I really love eastern Oklahoma and wish I owned a piece of it.
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.
I read all of Louis L'Amour's books when I was younger so fictional accounts woven around actual persons or events and in a geographic setting that one would likely recognize if they visited is pretty familiar to me. James Michener also did a great job with his novels. History may be my favorite subject thought that isn't the direction I took with my career. Maybe it is my time to shine.
Given sane priors, shouldn't one always assume that they penetrated farther into the continent by some amount than the recovered artifacts indicate?
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
I think that they are being Bayesian, they're just holding it differently. Archaeologists usually look for a healthy body of evidence - entire settlements, for example, or evidence of campsites - before assuming that someone was there. A single out-of-place artifact with broken provenance, though, has little evidentiary value, because the broken provenance makes it difficult-to-impossible to establish when the artifact got to where it was. Even with good provenance, an isolated artifact is usually taken as evidence of trade rather than presence. (For example, see the discussion of the coin in TFA.)
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.
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.
I'm pretty sure they do think this way. That's basically what this article is about.
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.
I don't know your background, but I first encountered this in either my first or second year of undergrad archaeology classes. It's definitely a well-appreciated principle.
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.
Other fields are rarely rigorous, and often misuse science. If the dismissive attitude is present, it has foundations.
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".
Programmers accusing other fields of not being rigorous is like the pot calling the enamelware kettle black.
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.
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.
Depends on what you're trying to work out - if you want to know the furthest some lost drunk straggler wandered off and died in the woods - yes, but if you want to know the extent of relatively large exploration/camps then a single artifact doesn't actually prove that.
Given the incredibly small number of artifacts that are going to exist, I don't really see why it would matter.
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?
They called it "Vinland" after the wild grape vines they apparently found... but the most northernmost species of wild grape (vitis riparia) in North America stops in the northeast at around latitude 46.
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!
It's my understanding that the climate at the time was at the peak of a warm cycle (basically the opposite of the little ice age) which had the effect of increasing the range of more southerly plant species. We know that the one place they did have a small settlement in Newfoundland would have been forested at the time even though it is not today. This warm period ending coincides with the abandonment of Greenland.
Also, the Norse had a somewhat different idea of what wine is; if the Norse did indeed talk about berries they could make wine from, then they probably meant currant or something similar.
This might be true, but I also think this interpretation has often been made by Europeans or others who aren't aware of just how common wild grapes are in the eastern half of North America.
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 not the presence of grapes in North America that I'm thinking of, it's more that they're absent from the Nordics. Now, obviously there were Norse who'd encountered European Grapes on their travels/raids down south, but there really weren't growing any grapes up here back then.
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. :/
Vikings in Chichén Itzá. Wow. That would be pretty stunning.
> 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.
In the tradition, the article shares a lot of tantalizing speculation. For example, did the Mayans really trade with Chaco for turquoise (the mineral)? Found one reference that said the Mayans did make the color.
Conceivably the Norse 'penny' reached Maine as a trade object. Etc. fun stuff to think about.
The author is simply out-of-date. Turquoise found in Central and Southern Mexican sites was for a long time thought to be Southwestern. Eventually isotopic analysis determined that to be pretty unlikely. It probably comes from unknown sources somewhere in the Mexican highlands that may not exist anymore. Same story with cacao, which may have come from West Mexico instead. Likewise, the macaws referenced were bred in Paquime [1] in the Southwest itself (and perhaps elsewhere). We have the breeding rooms and baby skeletons to support it.
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.
> 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."
When the Chacoan ruins were originally discovered by Anglo-Americans in the 19th century, the initial hypothesis was that they were Aztecan. By the mid 20th, early archaeologists had shifted somewhat and recognized that they had primarily Puebloan populations, but many still insisted on a lingering belief that the sites were ultimately founded and/or governed by exiled Toltec nobility or that of various other mesoamerican groups. This was significantly motivated by early 20th century beliefs about the "essential natures" of certain ethnic groups. For Puebloans, it was believed that building a society like what was evident at Chaco was fundamentally against Puebloan nature (too much hierarchy, political complex, use of violence, etc...). Needless to say, this is both racist and also incorrect. Mesoamericans have not been found at Chaco.
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 would consider myself Puebloan although from southern Colorado. I think it's mildly interesting that I have a completely different understanding than an archeologist does
It happens surprisingly often. I'm curious how your understanding differs though. I'm not trying to describe how we think about Chaco today, but rather how academics 60-70 years ago interpreted it through a diffusionist lens.
My understanding is that the Spanish knew what the ruins were because they asked around and got the answer. I think there's a difference between knowing something and formally studying something scientifically and methodically. The latter surely must involve discounting second hand testimony while valuing physical evidence. Like, I can tell you about how my father-in-law found conquistador armor in an ice cave by the great sand dunes but academically that doesn't interest anyone.
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.
Chaco is pretty different than the modern Pueblos in a number of important ways. It's a lot more monumental (The back wall of Pueblo Bonito was ~5 stories tall), many potsherds have "mesoamerican" designs, the burials are incredibly rich, and the road network looks a lot like Aztec roads and the time period matched Toltecs, who were their "predecessors". Moreover, diffusionism was totally in vogue and it wasn't considered radical at all to suggest that Chaco was the distant outpost of some Toltecs making the local Puebloan populations labor for them. After all, Pacquime down in Chihuahua was an even larger, more impressive Toltec output (it wasn't). Additionally, though we now understand "anasazi" to refer to ancestral Puebloans, prior to the discovery/analysis of the Magician's Tomb in the 1920s, the link between ancestral and modern Puebloans was only suspected at best, and definitely not as a continuation.
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.
The short answer is that we don't know the exact meaning. There are similar finds of dental modifications scattered across the Southwest. However, it's important to note that the Southwest was in active "cultural communication" with its neighboring areas, including Mesoamerica. Plenty of ideas went both ways, especially iconography. People like Lekson are still arguing that Chaco was at least partially an experiment/imitation of more Southern political systems.
Google for pictures of it. It's quite vibrant. There are even older Egyptian murals that are still colorful, too. Pigments can last a long time if you keep them out of the light.
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.
While the particular mural may be in good shape I think it's worth pointing out that those Egyptian murals exist in the second best climate on earth for preservation (the first being the Antarctic desert).
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.
I don't know anything about how these murals were made.
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).
If the original were still intact, perhaps chemical analysis of the pigments used could provide information about this. Unfortunately it seems that can't be done since the mural was destroyed decades ago. But maybe fragments of it remain in the area waiting to be found?
The settlement in L’Anse aux Meadows dates from the year 1000 and was excavated in 1968--basically a thousand years later. From the article:
> ...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.
As another commenter pointed out, it's not really on the beach per se, but set back and up some. I haven't been there since I was 8 but I have a fairly strong visual memory of the site. It was really neat. There was a spot on the ground where wild strawberries grew (vs the area next to it) in a nice rectangle because there'd been (I believe) a stable there and fertility in the ground was still higher than adjacent to it, 1000 years later.
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.
The L'Anse aux Meadows site is not on the beach. It's inland a ways enough to be protected from the tides. It's in a place where trees don't grow so there aren't any roots to destroy the site and sedges don't do a lot of damage.
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.
Geology is really slow. If a hill lost 1 foot per 1000 years it would need to have started at 9.5 miles high to last just 50 million years. Loose sand can be moved around quite a bit, but this is a rocky area with plenty of plant life to keep soil stable.
There is obviously some selection bias here. You see the one structure that survived, but not the N similar ones that did disappear.
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.
> Even after their departure, the Norse continued to return to the Americas, most likely to pick up lumber since no trees grew on Greenland and Iceland.
This actually never occurred to me, and it’s interesting that these famous seafarers would have resource constraints for building boats.
There was a lot of snarky comments in Danish news a couple of years ago when the Forestry Department sent the government a message stating that some oak-trees commissioned 200 years ago for the royal navy were now ready for harvest.
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.
IIRC, the Middle East used to be heavily forested, but then you had thousands of yers of deforestation and now the cradle of civilization has little forest left.
For similar reasons North American timber and fish were very much in high demand during the colonial period.
This is a pop-sci article that is nearly as out there as the (well-debunked) fantasies of Gavin Menzies, suggesting that the Vikings made it down to Central America. Beware when pop-sci articles on history ask a constant series of questions "Could the X people have done Y?". Sometimes they act like they are being cautious about the answer, but they are never straight with the reader that among experts, even raising that question in a non-specialist venue seems inappropriate. To be honest and forthright that there isn’t even room for speculation with our current state of knowledge, does not sell copies and create ad impressions.
The author literally starts by citing Menzies' Chinese discovery thesis, albeit weakly dismissing it by the end of the paragraph. (Interestingly, Menzies' theory is listed, but not the generally-accepted theory of Polynesian transoceanic contact).
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).
Just to add here, the article's author is an expert on middle period (Tang-Song) China (her first book was on local deities, her second on contracts). She then shifted her focus a bit westward to the Silk Road. She has apparently shifted her focus yet again. I'm not an expert on pre-Columbian archaeology. But neither is she.
This particular category of "speculative" history raises red flags with me for another reason - it seems to be a tradition with white supremacists to push theories that say that "actually europeans were there first", and using said theories to downplay issues that indigenous people have.
But it would be a possible source of inspiration for Aztecs to make white dudes their gods in human form. Nevermind the fact that the Aztecs don't show up for another three centuries--internal consistency of these sorts of speculative theories isn't exactly a high priority, and especially if you can rely on ignorance to make the seams invisible.
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.
Well if they're just going to make up shit, I'd expect something like "Vikings met the Aztecs and taught them civilization and were then worshipped as gods", not "the Vikings got their asses kicked by Mayans and were never heard from again, except for this one mural where it shows Vikings as prisoners being drowned in the ocean."
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.
You're certainly not the only one who is concerned about this. As an outsider, the fact that I have no idea how many modern political filters any piece of soft-science has to pass through makes me quite skeptical of all of those fields.
Hilarious. Marxist are constantly trying to rewrite history of the Vikings to fit the modern political spectrum of migration & multiculturalism, but now suddenly rewriting history is problem because of "white supremacy", which is of course once again trying to fit history into our modern discourse.
"Text book history of the world" is very rarely written by history experts. And way too often, that textbook history is actually in direct contradiction to scholarly consensus.
They don't seem to mention at all that light skinned, light haired people could be suffering from albinism - a taboo condition that would absolutely be the kind of thing ancient peoples would sacrifice folks over...
One interesting thing I’ve learned about the Viking settlers is that they didn’t come to Iceland and Greenland as conquerors, like Columbus did- in fact when they arrived in both places, they were the first inhabitants. Iceland is one of the few places anywhere in the world that never went through waves of immigration or displacement or ethnic cleansing or what have you. The Greenland settlement was abandoned, but that was for economic reasons- the market for ivory was flooded by cheap elephant ivory, so the trade in walrus ivory became worthless. But there was no starvation or donner party scenario- they just packed everything onto ships, locked the doors and moved back to Denmark. Pretty peaceful overall for people who have a reputation for being barbarians.
There is plenty of archaeological evidence of Dorset culture settlement in Greenland long before the Vikings arrived there.
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.
I'm just pointing out that most of the inhabited places in the world have extremely bloody histories; England went through waves of conquest by Gauls, Brits, Romans, Norse, Normans, etc, etc. Other places are similar. Any given city in Asia or Europe has probably been sacked and its inhabitants slaughtered at some point or another.
Whereas Iceland has not gone through the same thing, and today, it is remarkable peaceful- the violent crime rate is super low. I just wonder if there is a connection there- perhaps having a region be conquered and subjugated leaves generational scars that never heal.
Or maybe they were just incredibly antisocial and felt compelled to leave by their desire to not live near other people. Such a seclusionist mindset might explain why they were there in the first place...
It's the same thing. If we’re going to laud Iceland for being the settlement of a terra nullius, then clearly those Irish monks had claim to it, and the subsequent settlement of the Norse without their invitation represented encroachment on someone else’s land.
Maybe it was 'trespassing' I suppose. I don't know much about this subject but from what's been described in this thread, assuming there must have been violence seems like a leap.
No evidence cited, far fetched claims, and a political bent. Quite simply, that isn't how it (history) works. Mass immigration of different cultures always comes with at least a little violence and everybody doesn't pack up and leave ever - there are always some who stay. And then you go into a "Western imperialism violent / all other cultures peaceful" thing which is just sily. Without reading anything, I'm tempted to say your underlying political beliefs are slanting your claims. Let's see what the internet says...
> 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.
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.
I didn't make any claims about their raids on Europe though. I was talking specifically about Iceland, and Greenland, and only about Iceland and Greenland. So all your sources are completely irrelevant to what I said. You're reading things I never wrote.
The Thule people of Greenland arrived in 1300-1400, after the vikings had arrived.
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.
The article mentions arsenical bronze being unlike bronze made in the rest of the world, but that's not true. Arsenical bronze has been made around the world for thousands of years. This is likely due to arsenic often being found in close proximity to copper while sources of tin are harder to find. However it's my understanding that some cultures in the Andes did have access to tin and produced tin bronze as well as arsenical bronze.
I'm surprised the opening paragraph, while cataloging asserted pre-Columbian transatlantic voyages, didn't mention the Roman ships and amphora found in Brazil. Last I heard the Brazilian government was stopping anyone from investigating those remains.
> Vinland enjoyed more hours of daylight than Greenland: ‘In the depth of winter, the sun was aloft by mid-morning and still visible at mid-afternoon,’ information that places Vinland somewhere between New Jersey and the Gulf of Saint Lawrence.
> 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.
"This is called the Sacred Cenote because the Maya performed rituals in which they burned and hacked apart offerings before tossing them into the pool."
"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."
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.