Here's something that came across my news feed today:
https://time.com/6076460/vikings-dis...-america-myth/
Here's the title:
No, the Vikings Did Not Discover America. Here's Why That Myth is Problematic
I'm not even going to try and summarize the article. It's a jumble of different thoughts and claims about European visits to North America and possible European ancestry of someone or another, and a mish-mash of commentary about how various elements of American society have claimed this or that in order to somehow feel important, or something.
My objection to it is that it dismisses, correctly, the Kensington Runestone as evidence of Norse settlement in the New World, but it also dismisses "the historic myth that the Norse had visited New England repeatedly from the 10th to the 14th centuries, ", without giving any further commentary on the evidence for that.
Now, a diversion or two.
I suspect that most ISF denizens are sufficiently historically aware to know that the Norse did, in fact, visit the New World during that era, and established at least one settlement at L'anse Aux Meadows, Newfoundland. That isn't in dispute by any significant scholars. Although there is little or no evidence that they went as far south as New England, they probably did, at least a little bit. There's good reason to believe that they sent parties for exploration, hunting, or some purposes south from Newfoundland. The dating of L'anse aux Meadows fits in very well with The Vinland Sagas, so there is every reason to believe that those sagas are a reasonable accurate account of actual history. Of course, with no real evidence to confirm anything but the barest details of the stories, individual events can't be corroborated, but the basic idea that Lief Ericsson ventured from Greenland (or Iceland, via Greenland?) to North America is part of history, not of legend.
Second, a bit of a diversion about the word "discovered". Like most people my age (58) and older, we heard the phrase "Columbus discovered America" a lot when we were little, and then later learned that there were Norse explorers before Columbus, and that there may have possibly been other Europeans who stumbled on things. Oh, and, of course, thousands of years earlier, some Asian people discovered it from the other side, settled there, and spread out all acrose the continents of North and South America, and nearby islands, and lived there for centuries before Europeans showed up. In the end, any argument about who "discovered" America, is an argument about the meaning of the word "discovered".
Regardless of what you call it, we know that the ancestors of Native Americans came here thousands of years ago and their descendants developed a variety of civilizations, and evolved in a variety of ways from their Asiatic ancestors. We know that Scandinavians came here around the 11th century or so, but their colonies didn't "stick", and their descendants were wiped out, leaving nothing genetically or culturally trackable. Nothing but a few artifacts and wall that lay mostly buried for centuries, and some stories written down in Iceland, but no influence on the Native American cultures that anyone can identify. (Presumably, there was probably at least one Scandinavian woman who married into the Skraelings, or one Scandinavian man who impregnated a Native woman voluntarily or otherwise, but there is no detectable European ancestry in the Native population.) Then, along came Columbus, and he said, "Hey, Your Majesties! I found something cool here! We should conquer it!" And they did, and that's the point at which descendants of Europeans started taking things over.
Other than that, there are a few legends of people possibly going across the ocean, and maybe even returning, but there's nothing significant and no real reason to believe it happened.
So my problem with this article is that, if anyone reading it was not thoroughly familiar with the story of the Norse settlements, this article would make it sound like it was all myth, made up to propogate some story about white supremacy, or something. Somebody writing about history for Time magazine ought to be able to do better than that. It's like the author desperately wanted to debunk something about Euro-centric American history, but in doing so he either completely dismisses the real history, or perhaps he is totally ignorant of it. The idea that Vikings discovered America, and lived here for a time is not myth. It's history.
(Except: They weren't Vikings, because "Viking" doesn't mean Scandinavian, or Norse. The Norsemen who settled at L'Anse aux Meadows were not Vikings. Come to think of it, "Vikings" shouldn't even be capitlized. Leif Erikson and the people who came with him were not vikings.)
https://time.com/6076460/vikings-dis...-america-myth/
Here's the title:
No, the Vikings Did Not Discover America. Here's Why That Myth is Problematic
I'm not even going to try and summarize the article. It's a jumble of different thoughts and claims about European visits to North America and possible European ancestry of someone or another, and a mish-mash of commentary about how various elements of American society have claimed this or that in order to somehow feel important, or something.
My objection to it is that it dismisses, correctly, the Kensington Runestone as evidence of Norse settlement in the New World, but it also dismisses "the historic myth that the Norse had visited New England repeatedly from the 10th to the 14th centuries, ", without giving any further commentary on the evidence for that.
Now, a diversion or two.
I suspect that most ISF denizens are sufficiently historically aware to know that the Norse did, in fact, visit the New World during that era, and established at least one settlement at L'anse Aux Meadows, Newfoundland. That isn't in dispute by any significant scholars. Although there is little or no evidence that they went as far south as New England, they probably did, at least a little bit. There's good reason to believe that they sent parties for exploration, hunting, or some purposes south from Newfoundland. The dating of L'anse aux Meadows fits in very well with The Vinland Sagas, so there is every reason to believe that those sagas are a reasonable accurate account of actual history. Of course, with no real evidence to confirm anything but the barest details of the stories, individual events can't be corroborated, but the basic idea that Lief Ericsson ventured from Greenland (or Iceland, via Greenland?) to North America is part of history, not of legend.
Second, a bit of a diversion about the word "discovered". Like most people my age (58) and older, we heard the phrase "Columbus discovered America" a lot when we were little, and then later learned that there were Norse explorers before Columbus, and that there may have possibly been other Europeans who stumbled on things. Oh, and, of course, thousands of years earlier, some Asian people discovered it from the other side, settled there, and spread out all acrose the continents of North and South America, and nearby islands, and lived there for centuries before Europeans showed up. In the end, any argument about who "discovered" America, is an argument about the meaning of the word "discovered".
Regardless of what you call it, we know that the ancestors of Native Americans came here thousands of years ago and their descendants developed a variety of civilizations, and evolved in a variety of ways from their Asiatic ancestors. We know that Scandinavians came here around the 11th century or so, but their colonies didn't "stick", and their descendants were wiped out, leaving nothing genetically or culturally trackable. Nothing but a few artifacts and wall that lay mostly buried for centuries, and some stories written down in Iceland, but no influence on the Native American cultures that anyone can identify. (Presumably, there was probably at least one Scandinavian woman who married into the Skraelings, or one Scandinavian man who impregnated a Native woman voluntarily or otherwise, but there is no detectable European ancestry in the Native population.) Then, along came Columbus, and he said, "Hey, Your Majesties! I found something cool here! We should conquer it!" And they did, and that's the point at which descendants of Europeans started taking things over.
Other than that, there are a few legends of people possibly going across the ocean, and maybe even returning, but there's nothing significant and no real reason to believe it happened.
So my problem with this article is that, if anyone reading it was not thoroughly familiar with the story of the Norse settlements, this article would make it sound like it was all myth, made up to propogate some story about white supremacy, or something. Somebody writing about history for Time magazine ought to be able to do better than that. It's like the author desperately wanted to debunk something about Euro-centric American history, but in doing so he either completely dismisses the real history, or perhaps he is totally ignorant of it. The idea that Vikings discovered America, and lived here for a time is not myth. It's history.
(Except: They weren't Vikings, because "Viking" doesn't mean Scandinavian, or Norse. The Norsemen who settled at L'Anse aux Meadows were not Vikings. Come to think of it, "Vikings" shouldn't even be capitlized. Leif Erikson and the people who came with him were not vikings.)
via International Skeptics Forum https://ift.tt/2SDFvi4
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire