Tag Archives: archaeology

The Greenland Norse: Maybe the Young Folks Just Moved Away

The disappearance of the Norse colonies in Greenland after more than 400 years of occupation is a compelling historical mystery.

Some people have suggested that their numbers slowly diminished until there were too few left to reproduce. Others (such as Jane Smiley in her well-researched novel The Greenlanders) lay some of the blame on slave traders from the port of Bristol, carrying people away. Others wonder if conflict with the Thule Eskimos contributed to the settlements’ collapse. The bubonic plague has also been suggested as a culprit.

This article from  Der Spiegel suggests something less dramatic: with the settlements’ economy faltering and fewer ships coming from Norway and Iceland, young adults saw little potential in staying around, based on a study of Norse graves.

It also appears that epidemics were not responsible for the decline of farm life on the island. The scientists did not discover more signs of disease in the Viking bones uncovered on the island than elsewhere. “We found normal skeletons, which looked just like comparable finds from Scandinavian countries,” says [Danish anthropologist Niels] Lynnerup.

The archaeologists rule out malnutrition, saying the Greenlanders were doing well enough as seal-hunters to feed themselves, contrary to earlier views that they refused to learn seal-hunting.

In the final phase, it was young people of child-bearing age in particular who saw no future for themselves on the island. The excavators found hardly any skeletons of young women on a cemetery from the late period.

“The situation was presumably similar to the way it is today, when young Greeks and Spaniards are leaving their countries to seek greener pastures in areas that are more promising economically,” Lynnerup says. “It’s always the young and the strong who go, leaving the old behind.”

In addition, there was a rural exodus in their Scandinavian countries at the time, and the population in the more remote regions of Iceland, Norway and Denmark was thinning out. This, in turn, freed up farms and estates for returnees from Greenland.

However, the Greenlanders didn’t leave their houses in a precipitous fashion. Aside from a gold signet ring in the grave of a bishop, valuable items, such as silver and gold crucifixes, have not been discovered anywhere on the island. The archeologists interpret this as a sign that the departure from the colony proceeded in an orderly manner, and that the residents took any valuable objects along. “If they had died out as a result of diseases or natural disasters, we would certainly have found such precious items long ago,” says Lynnerup.

The settlements’ abandonment may have been planned. It is known that the Western Settlement was abandoned first, but even it appears to have been evacuated rather than wiped out by catastrophe.

Read the rest. I suppose that it is far too late to remind editors that “Viking” is an occupation, not an ethnicity.

The Norse on Baffin Island

Swedish archaeologist Martin Rundkvist discusses evidence of a Norse presence on Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic and whether the people who were there were seasonal trappers or trying to establish a year-round settlement. 

Remains of Old World rats are indicative.

So what we have here is High Medieval Christian Norse-speakers gone native in Arctic north-east Canada. Interesting stuff! But as so often – don’t believe the headlines.

And he reminds us,

Note that while NatGeo’s writer calls the Tanfield settlers “Vikings”, Dr. Sutherland wisely calls them “Norse”. The sites are post-Viking Period, and even during the Viking Period, most people were never Vikings. That was a part-time men-only occupation, not an ethnicity.

The past is always more complex than we imagine.

Kennewick Man Was Buff

How buff? Five foot-seven,  170 pounds, and all muscle, according to recent skeletal analysis. He also had eaten a lot of seal meat.

(Hat tip to Peculiar.)

The “2012” Prophecy and Ancient Maya Politics

If you know someone who starts getting nervous as the end of the year approaches because of the “Mayan prophecy,” send them here.

They should be able to understand how it all goes back to the king of one of the ancient Mayan city-states proclaiming how great he was.

The key to understanding the reference to 2012 is a unique title that this Calakmul king gives himself. In the text, he calls himself the “13 K’atun lord”—that is, the king who presided over and celebrated an important calendar ending, the 13th K’atun cycle (9.13.0.0.0). This event had occurred just a few years before in AD 692. In order to vaunt himself even further and place his reign and accomplishments into an eternal setting, he connects himself forward in time to when the next higher period of the Maya calendar would reach the same 13 number—that is, December 21, 2012 (13.0.0.0.0).

Cultic Objects from the Cult of Fire

I always chuckle at how when archaeologists cannot immediately ascertain the purpose of an ancient object, they describe it as “cultic,” in this case as a phallic symbol.

This tendency was parodied in the steampunk-ish graphic novel Motel of the Mysteries by David Macaulay, who also created City, Cathedral, Ship, and others.

In this instance, the “phallic symbols” appear to be parts of fire drills. If you have ever watched someone start a fire with a drill  (I have), it does seem sort of miraculous.

Puppy Mills for the Gods

When I read an article like “Millions of Mummy Puppies Revealed at Egyptian Catacombs,” I realize how little we know about what was really going on with popular religion there centuries ago.

It’s one thing to study the tombs of high-ranking individuals. We still put high-ranking individuals in fancy tombs, and we make pilgrimages to them. I have stood teary-eyed just contemplating the tomb of Thomas Jefferson, for example.

But puppy mills for the gods?

They estimate the catacombs contain the remains of 8 million animals. Given the sheer numbers of animals, it is likely they were bred by the thousands in puppy farms around the ancient Egyptian capital of Memphis, according to the researchers. The Dog Catacombs are located at Saqqara, the burial ground for the ancient capital Memphis.

“Our findings indicate a rather different view of the relationship between people and the animals they worshipped than that normally associated with the ancient Egyptians, since many animals were killed and mummified when only a matter of hours or days old,” Nicholson said. “These animals were not strictly ‘sacrificial.’ Rather, the dedication of an animal mummy was regarded as a pious act, with the animal acting as intermediary between the donor and the gods.”

If that is not sacrifice — what is? Giving something to get something is part of what sacrifice is about, isn’t it?

Ancient Egyptian religion has this bureaucratic feeling to it—all of those catacombs and holes like post office boxes full of dead things. They even mummified cuts of meat for tomb offerings (go through the photo sequence). I wonder if about 80 percent of the country’s linen production went into wrapping up bodies to be put away.

(Meanwhile, in ancient Scotland, they were doing funny things with skeletons.)

Experiential Archaeology Fail

It must be humiliating to copy a 3,500-year-old rowboat design, only to have yours sink.

Pictish Writing Discovered?

Some researchers now think that decorative carvings on Pictish memorial stones in Scotland may actually represent a form of writing.

The highly stylized rock engravings, found on what are known as the Pictish Stones, had once been thought to be rock art or tied to heraldry. The new study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A, instead concludes that the engravings represent the long lost language of the Picts, a confederation of Celtic tribes that lived in modern-day eastern and northern Scotland.

“We know that the Picts had a spoken language to complement the writing of the symbols, as Bede (a monk and historian who died in 735) writes that there are four languages in Britain in this time: British, Pictish, Scottish and English,” lead author Rob Lee told Discovery News.

“We know that the three other languages were — and are — complex spoken languages, so there is every indication that Pictish was also a complex spoken language,” added Lee, a professor in the School of Biosciences at the University of Exeter.

I have known some people who claimed to be practising Pictish Witchcraft. If the carving is indeed writing and is deciphered, then they will have to go back and revise their greatnth-grandmother’s Book of Shadows.

Acoustic Stonehenge

People keep attempting to tease out the secret of Stonehenge. The astronomical-calculator explanation bulked large at one time and remains in popular consciousness, but do you really need to haul large stones for many miles in order to predict the solstice?

If any thing, I suspect that it was more a question of using the solstices, etc., as demonstrations of how the “power of Heaven” reinforced the rule on earth of King Somebody and his descendents, the one who ordered the building of the monument. (Given its age and the stages of construction, there were no doubt multiple King Somebodies.)

But the search goes on. Here is research on the monument’s acoustic properties, using the replica Stonehenge in Washington state, which has all its pieces and is the same size as the original. Video and more links about studying sound in archaeological sites at the link.

(Via The Daily Grail)

Secrets of an Ancient Pagan

I love the permutations of the unfolding story of Ötzi “the iceman,” the Neolithic man whose freeze-dried body was found in the Alps on the Austrian-Italian border in 1991.

At first some people speculated that he had frozen to death in a blizzard or while on a shamanic quest—or even that he was a sacrificial victim. Others thought that he was a luckless hunter. But he had arrows and no bow, so how could he have been hunting? He did have a staff that some archaeologists thought he had been shaping with his copper ax into a new bow. (The apparent bowstring was coiled up in his pouch.)

One Austrian archaeologist, having considered factors such as pollen in his clothes and the sources of his clothing, staff/bow, etc., thought that Ötzi was on the run from a settlement down on what is now the Italian side, possibly as the loser in a village feud. Now it is pretty well accepted that he died violently, probably at the spot where he was found.

More DNA evidence is being studied.

Ötzi the ice mummy may have met his death in the Alps some 5300 years ago, but his descendants live on – on the Mediterranean islands of Corsica and Sardinia. The finding comes from an analysis of Ötzi’s DNA, which also reveals he had brown eyes and hair, and was lactose intolerant.

He lived 5,300 years ago, and his life — or at least his corpse — still is being invoked in various ways. I was surprised to learn that he is mentioned in books on diet (do they know about the arterial deposits?) and in a novel that deals with speculated European migration to prehistoric North America. (New archaeological evidence makes a strong circumstantial case for it.)

In fact, Amazon.com shows him appearing in forty different books. That is pretty good for someone from five millennia back who was not a famous ruler or religious figure.

And “Pagan”? I am assuming so, given that whatever religious tradition he followed or was aware of was most likely of a polytheistic-animistic sort. He is already invoked in at least one neo-shamanic book.

Also, he was a carrier of Lyme disease.