What we know about history is always changing with new discoveries. For a long time, Columbus’s famed voyage of 1492 was thought to be the first European travel to the Americas, until evidence of a Viking settlement that pre-dated Columbus’s voyage by about 500 years was found at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland.
Now, a tiny, bright blue shred of evidence suggests that we might need to re-think the history of North America a little more.
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Before the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria set sail for the New World, a handful of shiny blue beads from Venice were already there.
That’s what University of Alaska researcher Michael Kunz and Robin Mills of the Bureau of Land Management found, in a most unlikely location: Alaska.
Such beads had been found before at indigenous sites in North America before, near the Caribbean, along the eastern coast, and in the Great Lakes region; they were fairly common trade goods, and each of those discoveries were dated to post-Columbus times, as early as 1550.
Alaska, of course, is nowhere near there, with a whole lot of land and a huge mountain range in between.
Kunz and Mills discovered the Venetian beads at three different sites in Alaska.
One of the sites, Punyik Point, is now unoccupied but once served as a stop on a trading route for inland Inuit, who would hunt caribou and fish trout in the area. So, it made sense to find some trade goods near Punyik Point — it’s been a known, likely spot for some time.
As the Geophysical Institute reported, about 60 years ago, University of Wisconsin researcher William Irving found blue glass beads similar to those Mills and Kunz found on an expedition to Punyik Point, but he didn’t realize what he’d found. He also didn’t have radiocarbondating technology at his disposal. Kunz and Mills did.
Glass beads themselves can’t be carbon dated.
The material has to be organic. But the beads Kunz and Mills found happened to be wrapped up with a pair of bangles, attached by and threaded through with some twine — which can be carbon dated.
“We almost fell over backwards,” Kunz said of the carbon dating results. “It came back saying (the plant was alive at) some time during the 1400s. It was like, Wow!”
Carbon dating of charcoal beds and other materials from the other sites backed up those results, confirming that the beads had indeed made it to Alaska before Columbus.
Kunz and Mills believe the beads must have made an epic journey in the 15th century.
The beads must have left the Venetian workshop, bought and sold and traded hands throughout Asia along the Silk Road, they believe, continually making their way north and east, until finding the hands of someone brave enough to make the 52-mile journey across the open ocean of the Bering Strait to Alaska.
Kunz and Mills put the arrival of the beads in Alaska at some time between 1440 and 1480, well before Columbus’s voyage.
Ben Potter, an archaeologist with Liaocheng University in China, told Gizmodo that Kunz and Mills’s discovery was “very cool.”
“The data and arguments are persuasive, and I believe their interpretation of movement of the beads through trade from East Asia to the Bering Strait makes sense,” he said .
“I think the main takeaway is that there are often much longer-distance cultural connections in the past that we tend to be unaware of in the present. Much of the public imagines Columbus as the only (or first) connection between the old and new worlds, yet there are many instances of cultural connectivity in the Bering Straits region—and this is one.”
Kunz and Mills’s research was published in American Antiquity .
h/t: Geophysical Institute , Gizmodo
