Posted on 10/19/2012 6:11:45 PM PDT by Engraved-on-His-hands
For the past 50 years—since the discovery of a thousand-year-old Viking way station in Newfoundland—archaeologists and amateur historians have combed North America's east coast searching for traces of Viking visitors.
It has been a long, fruitless quest, littered with bizarre claims and embarrassing failures. But at a conference in Canada earlier this month, archaeologist Patricia Sutherland announced new evidence that points strongly to the discovery of the second Viking outpost ever discovered in the Americas.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.nationalgeographic.com ...
The same is true of south and central American pre Colombian societies. I’m not sure what the Aztec did differently but they did somehow survive and keep their culture largely intact.
The Aztec did have a form of written language which is a real lifesaver amid a societal collapse. Unfortunately the Spaniards trashed most of it.
Oh! Oh! Oh! I can answer this, since I just read "Longbow: A Social and Military History" by Robert Hardy! Your definition of a "longbow" may be too narrow if you restrict it to bows that are about 6' long, made of yew (both heart and sap wood) and have a D-shaped cross-section.
They have the remains of bows, that would have been approximately 6 ft. in length, that they dug up in Somerset, England. These two bows date to around 2,400 B.C. He also cited examples of longbows from Egypt, other parts of Africa, Asia and, most relevantly to this thread, the cold Nordic regions.
These longbows differed, in many respects (length, wood used and cross-section, for example), to the longbows used by Henry V to obliterate the French at Agincourt, but that weapon itself had evolved from the time Edward I faced the Welsh longbow, a century earlier and those bows were probably different, in some ways, to the examples pulled from the wreck of the "Mary Rose" of 1545.
Interestingly, there was speculation that the Vikings may have re-introduced the longbow to Britain during their occupation of parts of that island.
I think we can both agree that De Soto covered some serious territory during his exploration of the southern part of the U.S., without getting too distracted by his specific itinerary. De Soto described very large indian populations, particularly around the Mississippi river. The remains of the Mississippian Culture seem to support his testimony. Those large populations were long by the time the next group of Europeans explored the Mississippi.
That animal opened up the Great Plains to human use.
The next group of Europeans up the Mississippi arrived probably after 1550, but certainly long before the French.
Best one is to HILLBILLY ARCHAOLOGIST where the guy gets out of the Norse Only syndrome and takes a try at translating the materials in Gothic ~ voila, that work dovetails with my own ~ benchmarks!
Super interesting! Thanks for the history lesson, and clarifying some of the questions I had.
Thanks for the info on the longbow....so it was around much earlier than what the “Conventional Wisdom” states?
It seems to have been around, in one form or another, for a very long time. I think the reason that so many people associate the longbow exclusively with England is because that country made a very conscious and determined effort to make it an important (vital) part of their military. For hundreds of years, people in every village were required to train with the longbow.
The French could have done the very same thing - they certainly had a first-hand understanding of how effective the longbow could be, they had yew and they had many examples of English longbows, but they chose not to. The French were more concerned with maintaining their established order, rather than have well-trained, well-armed peasants upsetting things.
I think that has been pretty much established as a fact. Even when the Pilgrims landed in 1620, they found deserted villages where no one lived any longer.
” http://www.midwesternepigraphic.org/heavener01.html “
I had read this years ago and forgotten about it.
Thanks for the link.
The Norwegian Vikings for the most part went west, it is thought they looking for better farm lands – Norway being very mountainous with less tillable land compared to Sweden and Denmark. The Norwegian Viking voyages to the America’s and their settlement attempts were not voyages of war and plunder but primarily in seeking better farm lands and permanent settlements (the Vikings were, contrary to many misconceptions, were not solely pillagers and plunders and no more or less so than many other Europeans tribes of their time but were some of the first truly international traders). It also had something to do with land inheritance laws at the time wherein the first born son got everything, leading subsequent sons to go out and find their own lands and fortune.
The Danes also went west but stopped in England and Ireland and establishing towns that are still known today by their Viking names (many towns and cities in the British Isles that ends in “ford” (fiord) have their roots in a Viking settlement. Parts of England were known as the “Daneland” and Viking kings ruled there for many years, imparting laws and words in the English language that are still evident today. Even the Norman Conquest was not a conquest by the French as it was a conquest by Norseman who had previously conquered northern France (The Normans were decedents of Norsemen). Parts of the Magna Carte have roots in Old Norse law which in its time was rather democratic compared to other European kingdoms.
The Swedish Vikings primarily went east into Russia (the Russland (sp?) being a Viking name) and even into Byzantium and perhaps even as far as Baghdad, establishing trade routes with the Middle East. There is even some evidence that the Swedish Vikings ventured into China – Viking coinage has been found in China and Chinese coinage found in Sweden dating back to the Viking era. It has been said that some Swedish architecture and design going back to the Viking era, has a profound Asian influence which can still be seen today.
I find this interesting not only because I am descendent from Vikings (my dad was born in Norway) but because I’m very interested in European history from the pre-Roman era up through the Renaissance. Fascinating stuff.
The top drawer folks in France had no interest in arming former Burgundians, or Bretons, or Gascons, or Italians, or Swiss, or..... GERMANS! Eventually they had to, but the English nailed them when they were weak ~
Then, that winter they were besieged by hungry Indians so they took to the practice of burying their dead in unmarked graves so the Indians wouldn't know how many were left. That ended up being a common practice in America.
That's the winter of 1621 and might well have been a particularly bad influenza, or possibly hanta virus. However, it's the brutal winter of 1646/47, immediately following a period of drought, when the real killer disease ~ hanta virus ~ pret' near wiped out all the Indians in New England and New York (Acadia) who lived in larger villages, or even towns.
After that Indians were no longer a serious threat to Europeans on the East Coast and in fact turned to professional hunting to sell fresh meat to them.
That's a very good point. Britain faced a very similar situation, in that the Brits were trying to incorporate into one army Irish, Welsh, Scots, Saxons, Normans and people from Brittany, Gascony and other portions of what ultimately became France, but which had been under English control since Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry II had been married. The author of the book I mentioned earlier stated that Edward III, or maybe it was Henry V, had a greater claim to the French throne by birth than did the French claimant at that time. Ultimately, the diversity of Great Britain became its strength (sorry, I just had to go there) as these diverse peoples were unified in their hatred of all things French.
Most histories consider the period where Anjou was the seat of British royalty to be a period where England was essentially just another unassimilated French province ~ plus, most the folks there spoke GALLO, which isn't really French.
Think of it this way ~ an early version of the Hapsburg empire, but with one family in one town ruling over a dozen countries, more or less ~ or at least they were able to marry off their daughters quite well.
Going back to the late 1300s/mid 1400s there's a Bourbon princess who was married off to the king of Sweden. She wanted a nice house ~ as princesses in those days were wont ~ but there was no land for sale in Sweden at the time. In fact, in much of Europe land was never sold ~ only leased ~ it was considered rather sinful to sell your hard won land (people had died so you could have it).
What they did was LEASE SOME LAND for her house/castle/palace. This became the place where tradition has it that all Swedish kings were then born ~ even though they were actually elected up until the first Vassa king ~ and history claims he was born there ~ on the other hand this guy did a cross country skiing event (while fleeing from the Danes who were busy killing all the Swedish nobility) that would make a modern Sa'ami cross country skiing champion blanch. They do this annually though, so everybody gets to see if they are up to the stern stuff inside the Vassa king.
The national archives burned in 1697 or thereabouts so all Swedish history prior to that date is known ONLY from local title deeds, town histories, family traditions, entries in Bibles, or church records, foreign records, untrustworthy Norwegian, Danish, Finnish and Russian records, etc.
Most of any of my Swedish or Sa'ami ancestors were already in America before those records burned so I know they didn't do it. Somewhere in there ~ in the burned records ~ is a deal made between Sweden and Spain where Sweden provided expert surveyors to Spain to begin marking up America so it could be developed and populated with Europeans.
Premature anti-Frenchists... I respect their enthusiasm.
The other day while reading through one of those older scanned books you can find on the net I ran across a reference to Cornwall that referred to it as being the country that lie on both sides of the English Channel ~ that is, today's Cornwall and Brittany.
I'd already surmised that they worked in unison, but this reference suggested they worked in unison up to the end of the Hundred Year's War ~ and were quite a bit wealthier than their neighbors the English and French who were busy impoverishing each other with warfare.
Supposedly whoever it was in charge of Nantes during that period also held title to most of the land currently counted as being part of Cornwall, so that would have been one of the larger mini-states that were common in Europe in the 1300-1500s.
Same ancestry as Howard Dean?
Since none of us alive walking this earth today, have a living memory of who and when the markings took place, I am not cemented in one particular theory. I do however, lean toward the idea the markings are far older and appear to have more in connection with the numerous other known Norse sites.
In the grand scheme of things what these landmarks tell me is this continent has throughout the course of time had many different peoples spending much time here, long before Columbus sat sail.
You are welcome. Yes, one more history's mysteries. Visiting this site is on my long list of places I want to go.
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