R.Boswell: Thule did not scare Vikings

Thule did not scare Vikings out of Newfoundland, research says



Canwest News Service


It's the oldest whodunit in Canadian history, and new research has conclusively ruled out one of the suspect aboriginal groups behind the retreat of would-be Viking colonists from the New World.
A scientific re-dating of the eastward migration of the Thule - ancestors of modern-day Inuit - has pegged their push across Canada's polar frontier to no earlier than 1200 AD. That's at least 150 years after Norse voyagers from Greenland are believed to have abandoned their short-lived, 11th-century settlement at the northern tip of Newfoundland following hostile encounters there, and in Labrador, with native inhabitants they called Skraelings.
Because of their relatively late arrival in northern Canada - originally set by experts at about 1000 AD - the Thule (pronounced "too-ley") have always been outside contenders in the long-running quest to identify the people who scared the Vikings out of Canada.
An earlier paleo-Eskimo culture called the Dorset - which was eventually overrun and extinguished by the eastward-migrating Thule - and Indian nations such as Newfoundland's extinct Beothuks and the ancestral Innu of Labrador, remain suspects in this coldest of Canadian cold cases.
Thule archeological sites, while spread widely across the Canadian Arctic and Greenland, have never been found as far south as Newfoundland. But lingering uncertainty about the timing of the Thule migration, the precise boundaries of their movements and the identity of the Skraelings who clashed with the Norse have kept the Thule as long shots on the list of suspects.
Now, a study by Canadian archeologists Max Friesen and Charles Arnold - published last month in the scholarly journal American Antiquity - argues that their re-dating of two sites in the western Arctic proves the Thule didn't reach Canada from their Alaskan homelands until after 1200.
"A round figure of A.D. 1000 has often been assumed for the beginning of the migration," Friesen and Arnold write. "We believe that the most parsimonious interpretation is that the Thule migration happened in the 13th rather than the 11th century A.D."
This 200-year difference has "major implications," the authors argue, for assessing "the nature of Thule interaction with Dorset and Norse peoples in the East."
Friesen, an anthropology professor at the University of Toronto, told Canwest News Service: "Although I'm normally pretty cautious about these things, I do think that we can definitively rule out the Thule as being those Skraelings . . . As far as we can tell, Thule never made it onto the island of Newfoundland."
That still leaves unsolved a monumental mystery from the dawn of Canadian history, and few solid clues about what happened.
It is known that Viking voyagers reached Canadian shores about 1,000 years ago. A site unearthed in the 1960s at L'Anse aux Meadows, N.L., proved that Norse settlers built sod houses and tried to create an offshoot of their Greenland and Iceland colonies.
The Newfoundland site is almost certainly the legendary place called Vinland that is described in the literary sagas of medieval Iceland. According to oral tradition that was eventually set down in writing in the 13th century, Vinland was a relative paradise of summer greenery and mild winters for Norse visitors used to harsher conditions back home.
Led by Leif Eiriksson, the Vikings envisioned a farming community and had even found vines with what they believed were grapes - thus Vinland - during their Canadian explorations.
But they also found unidentified tribes of natives who were hostile toward them, and the Vikings abandoned Vinland after a few years, sailing home for the safer shores of Greenland.
It's believed the Norse did return to Canada in subsequent centuries. Archeologists have found evidence of extensive interactions and even trading relationships between the Norse and both Dorset and Thule until about 1400, when the modern Inuit culture began taking shape in the Arctic ahead of exploratory visits to North America by the English, French and Portuguese.