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The Viking Mystery Of Baffin Island

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Bianca
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« on: May 29, 2009, 08:15:50 am »



Traces of a stone-and-sod wall have been found at Nanook archeo-
logical site on Baffin Island. If confirmed, it would represent only the
second location in the New World where Norse seafarers -- popularly
known as Vikings -- built a dwelling.

( P. Sutherland,
Canadian Museum of Civilization.)









                                                         The Viking mystery of Baffin island






Posted: May 29, 2009,
by NP Editor
Colby Cosh,
 
In one of Jorge Luis Borges’s finest nonfiction pieces, The Scandinavian Destiny (1953), the Argentine genius contemplates the dizzying accomplishment of the longboating Northmen of the Middle Ages, who, after the decline of Rome, accomplished a “sudden eruption at the most heterogenous points of the globe” — but founded no cohesive empire, and mostly left the most modest of traces. Borges points out that Snorri Sturluson’s 13th-century chronicle of Norse kings, the Heimskringla, gives homely Viking names for settlements ranging from “Biarmaland,” modern Arkhangelsk, to “Norvesuud,” or Gibraltar — in short, the whole breadth of Europe. They were familiar with Constantinople and Africa, and founded Russia, whose first capital, Novgorod, was their “Holmgard.”

And, of course, sometime around 1000 AD, they stumbled on to the great continent in the West, encountering the dark-skinned, broad-cheeked skraelingar on our shores. But in short order they managed to misplace Vinland, Markland and Helluland, and were unable to reach them again.
“Viking epitaphs are scattered across the face of the Earth on runic stones,” Borges says, and gives a few stirring, sad examples. In Arabia: “Tola erected this stone in memory of his son Harald, brother of Ingvar. They departed in search of gold, and went far and sated the eagle in the East.” On an island in the Black Sea: “Grani built this barrow in memory of Karl, his friend.” But in the absence of lapidary traces — and unfortunately, no convincing ones have been found in North America — everything connected with the men of the North necessarily has an unreal, fantastic quality. It took a pair of near-prophetic dreamers, Helge and Anne Ingstad, to delve into the earth at L’Anse aux Meadows, Nfld., and retrieve the first unambiguous physical evidence of a pre-Columbian European presence in North America.


Further north, the elusiveness of such evidence is redoubled by the question of exactly who were the skraelingar the Vikings might have met and dealt with. The Inuit are known to be hardly more “aboriginal” in Canada’s Arctic than the Spanish in Florida; their ancestors supplanted an older, very different people called the “Dorset culture.” No one knows precisely when or how this happened, or how much conflict it may have involved, but it took place in what we think of as a historical time, between Charlemagne and Magna Carta. Inuit myth describes the violent displacement of a race of unwarlike, easily intimidated “giants.”
This three-sided drama, however it played out, was the locus of the moment at which, in Borges’ words, “America and Europe [first] looked at each other in all innocence.” It, in a sense, marks the arrival of homo sapiens as a global species — yet it is almost totally undocumented and poorly understood. Now word arrives from Pat Sutherland of the Canadian Museum of Civilization that there may be a second L’Anse aux Meadows at the Nanook dig site on Baffin Island — one which may contain evidence of direct Norse-Dorset contact, or at least contemporaneous occupation.


If the evidence is convincing, it would release some of the scholarly tension now surrounding the topic. University of Waterloo anthropologist Robert Park, who has argued in the past that there was a considerable gap between the disappearance of the Dorset and the occupation of the Arctic by the paleo-Inuit, recently delivered a hard blow to the increasingly common presumption of Dorset-Norse interaction. Sutherland and other researchers have offered three main kinds of evidence for a trading relationship between the Dorset and the Vikings: spun yarn at known Dorset sites, “European”-looking Dorset portrait carvings and complex woodworking techniques that can supposedly only have come from the Norse.


Park points out, in a paper published in the journal Antiquity last year, that similar items of all three types have been found at Dorset sites radiocarbon-dated to before 870, the “very firmly established” date at which the Scandinavians had reached only as far westward as Iceland. (The paleo-Inuit definitely did not make yarn, he admits, but yarn has been found all over pre-Columbian America, so the Dorset might have been capable of making it.) He suggests that there has been much careless dismissal of “problematic” pre-870 carbon dates which are actually quite sound, and that anthropologists have been overhasty in seeing Norse traces in what are actually indigenously Dorsetian objects.


Sutherland is the central antagonist in Park’s critique; the forthcoming findings from Nanook, where the dig site is said to have undeniably European architectural features, will be subjected to the tough skepticism he is known for. With the placement of a keystone of human history in the balance, I am sure neither would want it any other way.




National Post
colbycosh@gmail.com
« Last Edit: May 29, 2009, 08:19:58 am by Bianca » Report Spam   Logged

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