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Evidence for European presence in the Americas in AD 1021

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Re: Evidence for European presence in the Americas in AD 1021

#321

Post by WalterBright »

maldeh wrote: post #318
WalterBright wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate to say it, but in a sense, they were meaningless because there was no followup. We haven't had a machine that could even get us back there for 50 years now.

One could argue that we are doing the followup even to this day (with the China CLEP programme, India’s Chandrayaan, USA’s ongoing Artemis campaign and others). The deed was done, the minimum bar was set and humanity has been as determined as ever to breach the peak it had achieved back in the sixties even as government funding waxes and wanes. Public interest has not changed in the least.

> Public interest has not changed in the least.

Declining public interest cancelled the Apollo program. Modern rocket scientists had to dismantle the Saturn V engines to figure out how they worked.

Re: Evidence for European presence in the Americas in AD 1021

#322

Post by felipeerias »

jcranmer wrote: post #304
sampo wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond, Europeans had a history of living in close encounters with farm animals, so they had adopted diseases from the animals. And also the Eurasian geography made trade, and exchange of both culture and domesticated animals, and also diseases, easier in the east-west direction. Because in east-west direction the exchange happens inside the same climate zone. Cow, horse…

> Because in east-west direction the exchange happens inside the same climate zone. This is almost trivially refuted by reading a climate map. Traveling along the Silk Road takes you from a Mediterranean climate into a semi-desert alluvial flood plain, into mountains and high steppes, then back into desert, then low steppes, then mountains, then high desert, then more mountains, and then rich alluvial flood plain of…

The diffusion of domesticated plants and animals across Eurasia did not happen in a single trip, not even in a single lifetime. For example, chickens were first domesticated in Southeast Asia but it took millennia for them to spread to China and the Mediterranean.

Re: Evidence for European presence in the Americas in AD 1021

#323

Post by AlotOfReading »

voz_ wrote: post #269
nl wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to NASA archaeologist Tom Sever, the Mayan civilization in Mesoamerica was one of the densest populations in human history. Around 800 A.D., after two millennia of steady growth, the Mayan population reached an all-time high. Population density ranged from 500 to 700 people per square mile in the rural areas, and from 1,800 to 2,600 people per square mile near the center of the Mayan Empire (in what is now…

Right, agreed entirely, this is higher than the numbers I recall from reading, but same order of magnitude. It was the flippant reference to Spain regarding chronology that I took umbrage with. Thats ~700 years after the area of Spain was named Spain (Latin Hispaniola in the Roman empire, iirc). I always find the slightly emotional charge discussions (and subsequent downvotes) odd. There seems to be a very strong int…

It's true even if we're very pedantic. Mesoamerica has had urbanization and high population densities for quite a long time. Michael Smith has pointed out pretty high urbanization rates (approaching 20%) even in the terminal formative period. Typical numbers I've seen are somewhere in the 8-12+ish people/km^2 range. That's roughly comparable to the western Roman empire at the time. But yes, I did mean the kingdom, not a separate term in another language for a peninsula that doesn't really correspond to the modern area.

Re: Evidence for European presence in the Americas in AD 1021

#324

Post by mannerheim »

broof wrote: post #116
capableweb wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is "making noise about it" what we consider discovery now? I'd say the first person finding and visiting the place is indeed the discoverer of that place. Maybe Columbus popularised it rather.

I would say yes, "making noise about it" would be a relatively important part of discovery. Did Erikson know that there was an entire continent with advanced societies completely seperated from the "old world"? Because that is what Columbus discovered. I'm making the distinction between Leif Erikson discovering a tundra-like landmass beyond Greenland that they didn't think was significant, and Columbus's actions whic…

> Did Erikson know that there was an entire continent with advanced societies completely seperated from the "old world"?

Did Columbus know that?

Re: Evidence for European presence in the Americas in AD 1021

#325

Post by jcranmer »

PeterisP wrote: post #313
s1artibartfast wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simply put, living off the land is HARD, even with an established settlement and some trade, mass starvation is a pretty likely outcome. Reality is more complex and challenging than Farmville or AnimalCrossing.

I'm just wondering why the same process how vikings settled Greenland would not work in the (IMHO much more hospitable) North America.

That's an excellent question. The answer I would give is that the process by which the Norse settled Greenland did not actually ultimately work out in the first place. Colonization isn't a simple matter of gathering enough people to form a colonizing party, staking out an empty(-ish) piece of land, and building a new settlement there. Once that settlement is built, there needs to be a steady stream of consumable goods being provided, and until the new settlement can produce or trade for those goods on its own right, the colonizers are effectively subsidizing that settlement.

The settlements in Greenland never really reached that point. The leading hypothesis at this point for why Greenland collapsed was that the Arctic trade routes dropped far-off Greenland from their destinations--and without that trade, the settlements couldn't sustain themselves and collapsed. Newfoundland may be a more hospitable place than Greenland, but from a trade situation, it's even worse: it's not offering any trade goods to Europeans that Greenland or Iceland could be providing (at much shorter journeys), but it's still probably not able to tap into the North American trade network--I think you have to make it to Nova Scotia or New Brunswick to do that.

Re: Evidence for European presence in the Americas in AD 1021

#326

Post by gremloni »

acjohnson55 wrote: post #275
gremloni wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Byzantium? I would love some reading material on that.

Here's a short podcast series that talks about the Normans, including Bohemond, who set up a crusader state in Antioch, which had been Byzantine territory not long before: https://normancenturies.com/ You might also check out the podcast History of Byzantium. Although you'll have to go many hours before encountering the Norse, in the form of the Varangians. And I also recommend the excellent book Children of Ash and…

Awesome, thank you.

Re: Evidence for European presence in the Americas in AD 1021

#327

Post by thoweuroi24324 »

culi wrote: post #254
jcranmer wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, no. The Classic Maya collapse dates to around 900, which is before Cahokia even gets going.

This. I don't know why people think of the Mayan empire or Cahokia as fundamentally different from the numerous "failed states" of the Mediterranean. I use quotes because there's increasing consensus that it's not so much a matter of failure as a matter of political revolution amongst the enslaved class forced to work in agriculture for the ruling class

[flagged]

Re: Evidence for European presence in the Americas in AD 1021

#328

Post by lkrubner »

zeckalpha wrote: post #139
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #28

An interesting counter-factual that comes to mind - if the Norse Greenlanders had brought smallpox or other diseases with them, then Native Americans would have had 500 years to recover (and keep immunity?) - The conquistadors would have faced millions of not-dying-natives. A much different world would have resulted.

Indigenous populations started dropping centuries before Columbus and we don’t know why. (Of course they dropped further after Columbian contact) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahokia#Decline%20(13th%20an... > The population of Cahokia began to decline during the 13th century, and the site was eventually abandoned by around 1350.

As Fernand Braudel said, populations in Europe, China and and North America seems to roughly mirror one another for most of the last 5,000 years. The only possible explanation is the climate. Some centuries were good in the northern hemisphere, and some were bad. Not all at once, and not uniformly, but enough that we can see some link.

Re: Evidence for European presence in the Americas in AD 1021

#329

Post by goldenshale »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #28

An interesting counter-factual that comes to mind - if the Norse Greenlanders had brought smallpox or other diseases with them, then Native Americans would have had 500 years to recover (and keep immunity?) - The conquistadors would have faced millions of not-dying-natives. A much different world would have resulted.

I highly recommend you read (or listen, the audiobook was great) to Conquistador by Buddy Levy. It might change your mind on this point. It tells the story of Cortez from the day they arrive on the shores of Mexico to when they take over the Aztec empire, where there were still many, many native peoples. The European advantages were many more than just disease... for better and worse.

Re: Evidence for European presence in the Americas in AD 1021

#330

Post by Cyberthal »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #28

An interesting counter-factual that comes to mind - if the Norse Greenlanders had brought smallpox or other diseases with them, then Native Americans would have had 500 years to recover (and keep immunity?) - The conquistadors would have faced millions of not-dying-natives. A much different world would have resulted.

I doubt you can assume that such diseases would spread and persist in the Native American dispersed population. European immivasion created adjacent disease reservoirs of urban and concentrated agriculturalists.

Also, Europeans colonized other regions where they did not have as great a disease or technological advantage.

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