Sorry, Mormons. No Lehi, Nephi, liahonas, or wooden submarines.


#############

https://www.science.org/content/article/first-viking-settlement-north-america-dated-exactly-1000-years-ago

The first permanent settlement of Vikings in North America—a seaside outpost in Newfoundland known as L’Anse aux Meadows—has tantalized archaeologists for more than 60 years. Now, scientists at last have a precise date for the site: Tree rings show a Viking ax felled trees on the North American continent exactly 1000 years ago, in 1021 C.E. The result is a star example of a relatively new dating method using a spike in solar radiation that left its mark in tree rings around the world.

“The precision is astounding,” says Rachel Wood, a radiocarbon scientist at the Australian National University who wasn’t involved in the new study. “The idea to use these short-term sharp fluctuations in radiocarbon … has been around for a few years, but it is great to see it actually being used to date an important archaeological site.”

The Vinland sagas, a pair of Icelandic texts written in the 13th century, describe the Norse explorer Leif Erikson’s expeditions to a land referred to as Vinland. Although the texts contain their fair share of embellishment, most historians agree the sagas show Vikings sailed southwest from Greenland and reached the North American continent sometime at the turn of the millennium. The discovery of a Viking-era archaeological site in 1960 featuring the remains of distinctive Norse-style buildings, a bronze cloak pin, iron nails, and other Viking artifacts bolstered such evidence.

#############

Alt for Norge!

I wonder why their settlement did not survive long term.

Shortage of lutefisk. And no flour for lefse.

Hehehe

Correct BoJ

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-vikings-a-memorable-visit-to-america-98090935/

"Why Didn’t They Stay?

The Viking presence in North America had dwindled to nothing long before Columbus began island hopping in the Caribbean. Why did the Norse fail where other Europeans succeeded? After all, Vikings were consummate seamen and peerless raiders who populated marginally inhabitable Greenland and who would push their way into the British Isles and France. And with their iron weapons and tools, they had a technological edge over America's indigenous peoples.

Several explanations have been advanced for the Vikings' abandonment of North America. Perhaps there were too few of them to sustain a settlement. Or they may have been forced out by American Indians. While the European conquest was abetted by infectious diseases that spread from the invaders to the Natives, who succumbed in great numbers because they had no acquired immunity, early Icelanders may not have carried similar infections.

But more and more scholars focus on climate change as the reason the Vikings couldn.t make a go of it in the New World. The scholars suggest that the western Atlantic suddenly turned too cold even for Vikings. The great sailing trips of Leif and Thorfinn took place in the first half of the 11th century, during a climatic period in the North Atlantic called the Medieval Warming, a time of long, warm summers and scarce sea ice. Beginning in the 12th century, however, the weather started to deteriorate with the first frissons of what scholars call the Little Ice Age. Tom McGovern, an archaeologist at Hunter College in New York City, has spent more than 20 years reconstructing the demise of a Norse settlement on Greenland. In the middle of the 14th century, the colony suffered eight harsh winters in a row, culminating, in 1355, in what may have been the worst in a century. McGovern says the Norse ate their livestock and dogs before turning to whatever else they could find in their final winter there. The settlers might have survived if they had mimicked the Inuit, who hunted ringed seal in the winter and prospered during the Little Ice Age.

With sea ice making the routes from Iceland to Greenland and back impassable for Norse ships for much of the year, the Little Ice Age probably curtailed further Norse traffic to North America. Iceland also fared badly during this time. By 1703, weather-related food shortages and epidemics of plague and smallpox had reduced Iceland's population to 53,000, from more than 150,000 in 1250."

I will suggest an additional factor. I do not know if this has been explored before, but it may well be relevant.

What motivated the Viking explorations and raids? The desire for the wealth of the people whom they were raiding.

Did the Americas--specifically the Americas near where the Vikings landed--have concentrations of wealth sufficient to motivate long-term settlements? Were there within reach of northern Nova Scotia concentrations of wealth and resources comparable to those available in Dublin, London, France, Iberia, Italy, the Baltic, around the Black and Caspian Seas?

So perhaps the cost-benefit analysis didn't support a permanent presence in L’Anse aux Meadows, especially if climatic conditions were increasingly inclement. There would have been other, richer, and safer pickings in Europe than in northern Canada.

Both theories make sense. It was probably a combination of factors.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/16/2023 06:58PM by summer.

to provide food for future expeditions and settlers. If the Vikings didn't have a lot of livestock with them, perhaps the Indians wouldn't catch diseases from them.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/17/2023 04:23PM by anybody.

But consider Iceland which has even fewer resources than North America, but has been continuously inhabited since probably ~900 CE.

North America had things of value to the Vikings - furs, and esp. timber which is quite rare in Greenland and Iceland.

The Vikings in Greenland were not likely raiding any part of Europe.

> But consider Iceland which has even fewer
> resources than North America, but has been
> continuously inhabited since probably ~900 CE.

The Vikings established colonies in places that gave them footholds for further exploration. There were all sorts of such settlements between the Baltic, for example, and the Black Sea that supported the annual raids down to the richer regions to the south. And when the Viking Age came to a close, many if not most of those who populated the settlements stayed in their new homes. We should therefore not be surprised to see some colonies remain in place for hundreds of years in Greenland; and permanently in Russia, a country named after the Viking Rus, as well as England, Scotland, Ireland, and even the banks of the Iranian Caspian.


-----------------
> North America had things of value to the Vikings -
> furs, and esp. timber which is quite rare in
> Greenland and Iceland.

Agreed. But that doesn't disprove my hypothesis because, again, the Vikings used their overseas settlements both to reap local resources and as bases from which to launch raids. If the raids didn't pan out, the Vikings stopped going there and went elsewhere, sometimes leaving settlers behind but sometimes not. If the colonists in Nova Scotia had not managed to establish a durable and self-sufficient presence by the time their overseas support ended, it should not be surprising that none of them stayed behind.


--------------
> The Vikings in Greenland were not likely raiding
> any part of Europe.

Yes and no. Every spring the main Viking clans met in Upsalla and decided who would go where. Some would raid the west coast of Scotland and then Ireland, relying in part on settlements that were already in those countries; others would garner supplies at Viking settlements in the British Danelaw before raiding other parts of England; still others would work through the dozens of Russian settlements their predecessors had formed as they moved down the Oder, Dnieper, and Volga.

I suspect that there were for some time "reinforcements" sent to Greenland every year or so to support both the local communities and to explore other regions therefrom--at least until first L’Anse aux Meadows and, centuries later, Greenland were abandoned as insufficiently productive.

The bottom line I am proposing is that the Vikings may well have decided that Nova Scotia was too expensive in cost-benefit terms and that the settlers agreed. There were lots of settlements in Eurasia that the Vikings abandoned, and L’Anse aux Meadows was far from the only one from which the colonists also retreated.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/16/2023 08:49PM by Lot's Wife.

I'd also like to add to your list of Viking peoples: the Normans. Although British people were taught that they were invaded by "the French", the Normans (and William the Conqueror) were actually Vikings who'd only been in France for a couple of generations or so. I wish this was taught in British schools - because it's true.

My Bat Crap Crazy Grandmother, the family genealogist, said we were descended from William the Conqueror. She made several trips to the UK and France and spent the majority of her time in libraries researching so who knows. I wouldn't bet money on it.

Susan I/S Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> My Bat Crap Crazy Grandmother, the family
> genealogist, said we were descended from William
> the Conqueror. She made several trips to the UK
> and France and spent the majority of her time in
> libraries researching so who knows. I wouldn't
> bet money on it.

It's not unlikely at all after nearly a thousand years. He will have many descendants now... probably thousands.

Millions, probably tens of millions.

If you start with William having two children in 1030 and assume each of those has two children per thirty-year generation, for a total of 32 generations to the present, you get over four billion descendants alive today.

Now, that is an overstatement for a few reasons. First, a significant proportion of those descendants will not have reproduced. Second, many of those descendants will unwittingly have mated with other descendants of William. So four billion is a high estimate.

On the other hand, William did not have just two children. He had ten acknowledged children and probably a number of "illegitimate" others as well. Also significant is the fact that William was a king and the father of two kings and, through them, more kings and queens and nobles, all of whom had a huge advantage over commoners in reproductive terms. So four billion may not be as outlandish a number as it first appears.

Assume that number is a ten-fold overstatement and you still have 400 million descendants running around today. What this means is that anyone who counts among her ancestors English progenitors within the last several hundred years has an extremely high probability of having descended from William through through not one but multiple different lines.

With apologies to Susan and Sir. Thomas, descendants of William I are ten pence per dozen.

  
  
  

And yet if we did the same analysis of Vandals and their descendants in Spain. . .

;-)

Next time someone mentions the supposed Columbus prophecy in the Book of Mormon, say it is really about the Norse and watch their face.

L'Anse aux Meadows is unlikely to have been the main settlement, or even the first settlement, of the colony. Neither the sagas nor the evidence from the site itself support that idea.

L'Anse aux Meadows contains evidence that the Norse were collecting food and other items from southerly areas. They were also smelting their own iron, which the natives were apparently incapable of doing, but which would require large amounts of wood not found in the vicinity. This would have presumably occurred in the fertile, wooded areas that hack archeologists in which have failed to find anything. I think the main reason the colony failed was that they didn't introduce enough livestock and crops of their own. Some of them likely interbred with the more numerous natives as they did in Greenland, and became assimilated into their culture as often happens in these situations. The Glooskap legend of eastern Canada appear to show influences from Norse and Celtic stories such as Loki and Finn MacCool.

Instead, with L'Anse, all we're looking at is a confirmed Norse village. There are almost certainly other sites out there, but no one has managed to find them yet, let alone excavate them. It is possible that other ones lie buried under some modern town or village, or even that some natives took over the site(s). Archeologists found L'Anse because it is in a treeless area and thus easy to identify. Mainstream archaeology loves to sing its own praises, but its failure in identifying Norse sites in Canada is laughable. For example, the other, tentatively identified, Norse sites are in even bleaker, barren places like Baffin Island where even minor human activity can be seen by any plodding "digger" from a plane or satellite. The only problem is that Baffin Island is almost uninhabitable so it is of little significance.

"I empathize! History might have treated the invaders with more respect had they not insisted on calling themselves 'Normans.'"

--Richard the Short, Parking Lot, Leicester, England

summer Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I wonder why their settlement did not survive long
> term.


Yeah, how long did it have to remain to be considered permanent?

Fascinating stuff though.

Lamanites

The Americas, i.e., The New World, are/is a special place and it was set aside for a special people, the Children of Israel.

The Norse, being a shabbier White than the Chosen White of Israel, simply were evicted from the Americas by a red zoning ghawd.

Religion doesn't need facts, it has fancy...flights thereof!

> The Americas, i.e., The New World, are/is a
> special place and it was set aside for a special
> people, the Children of Israel.

A picayune point, perhaps, but syntactically that sentence should end with an exclamation point.

I'm sure you agree!

Lot's Wife Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> > The Americas, i.e., The New World, are/is a
> > special place and it was set aside for a
> special
> > people, the Children of Israel.
>
> A picayune point, perhaps, but syntactically that
> sentence should end with an exclamation point.
>
> I'm sure you agree!


I do,

Hahaha? ¡haha

Church news release: Lost city of Zarahemla found.

Vikings covered more than the Atlantic coast or maybe I imagined themassive rune stone I saw in Arkansas.

The Heavener Runestone is generally believed to be a 19th century creation. There's no supporting evidence of Vikings in the area, and the runes themselves come from two different "alphabets" or stages of alphabetic development.

Ah the Viking Kinderhook.

The Vikings probably would have been successful in Vineland if they would not have attacked the natives.

Lot's Wife Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> And yet if we did the same analysis of Vandals and
> their descendants in Spain. . .
>
> ;-)

Genghis Khan's DNA shows up throughout Eurasia.

##

Greenland prospered because of the Medieval Warm period. Then we got the Little Ice Age. My guess is that Greenland was an extension of Iceland, and Newfoundland was an extension of Greenland, so without an economically viable Greenland, Newfoundland was abandoned. As we celebrate Thanksgiving, it's worth remembering that the Plymouth Brethren landed in Massachusetts Bay during the worst climate temperature drop of the Little Ice Age, a major factor in their deprivations and 50% mortality rate.

Getting this thread LDS-relevant, I don't believe Viking long boats were made of reeds, nor was the Mayflower.

"I don't believe Viking long boats were made of reeds, nor was the Mayflower." ... were you there ?

The Wiki article thinks that they used the Newfoundland site as a base and boat-repair hub in support of further explorations southward. Apparently five indigenous groups had used the same site at various points before the Vikings came along, so the location must have had good resources.