Rice in the Carolingian empire? 
One question - why would we put them down in the current Eastern US rather than, say, Vancouver (where hunter-gatherers made a very nice sedentary living) or central Mexico (where North American civilization really flourished)?
Rice wasn’t really farmed anywhere in Europe until after the Carolingians. It was known, but nobody on the roads is likely to be carrying any viable seed grain.
There are bears in that area (coastal SC) right now. Historically, bears ranged over almost all of the US (only the tiniest corner of Nevada, though).
And do you think Carolingian-era Europeans were unfamiliar with bears? Until the Middle Ages, the European Brown Bear was common across Germany, Eastern France, Northern Italy and Switzerland. Compare that to a map of the Empire…
Yep, I was going to post this. There would have been bears in every part of SC (and probably Georgia) back then, along with Large Angry Kitties.
There’s still a few Bounty descendants on Pitcairn, so survival is possible.
These carolingians enjoy bears as entertainment - baiting, making them dance etc. The consequences of trying to do that with a kodiak might reduce the number of Carolingians down from 15,000. But I think I’m dropping them in Virginia. Black bears can be aggressive, but are smaller than the common brown bear of their home. There are snakes though. The difference between poaching and hunting in the Carolingian Empire is not one of skill or technique, but is defined by whether someone important has defined the hunting location as theirs. Anyway, there are some in the group who can stalk, kill, dress game. There is no rice. There are some draft animals, and riding horses. Virginia at this time has bog iron.
Winter in Virginia is going to be startlingly harsh for Western European folks, I think, by the way. The original Virginia colonists survived one winter only on supplies given to them by the natives and cannibilism.
They could get lucky, there could be mild winters in that region, The Carolinas and south do make more sense though. But where ever they end up, if all 15,000 are in one place, it better be a fertile Eden full of readily available food or most of them will die of starvation or murder in less than a year.
Such as Smilodons, who were probably not really smiley. Scimitar cats, other sabretooths. Cave lions, cheetas, dire wolves and cave bears. Mammoths, mastodons, and horses. Giant armadillios, sloths and beavers. A lot of different oxen, pronghorns, antelopes, camelids. Terathorns and maybe, at an outside chance, Titanis, biggest of the terror birds.
Regarding the ability of the 15K to survive, would it make a difference if the OP had selected people from a civilization that wasn’t in the middle of a dark age? What if instead of 9th century Carolignians the OP had selected Romans from the era of Julius Caesar, Greeks from the time period of Alexander, Chinese from the height of the Han dynasty, or Egyptians from the time period of Ramesses II?
People today don’t really appreciate just how much selective breeding has changed plants used as food. Pretty much everything the settlers find will be scrawnier, sparser, tougher, and more difficult to harvest than the versions created by thousands of years of Native American genetic engineering. To have the land be able to support them before theoretical crops come in (other than rivers/seashore as I mentioned) the 15,000 would need to be spread out across hundreds or thousands of square miles. And migrate as animal food sources are depleted/move on. It doesn’t matter what part of the past the people come from, to survive (if any survive) they will turn into thinly-spread hunter-gatherers. The problem isn’t the age they come from, it is the completely unmodified utter wilderness they are being dropped into.
Maybe dropping them in California would give them the best chance. AFAIK it’s the only place in the Americas with frequent naturally occurring wildfires. That might be a big benefit in finding a spot that would be good for farming.
Yep. Here’s a picture showing the difference between maize and its pre-domesticated form Zea (plant) - Wikipedia
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The technological levels of past civilizations depend not only on a large number of people with various technical specalized skills that can take years to master, but also on large trading networks spanning hundreds or thousands of miles carrying resources from one place to another (these seem to have existed deep into pre-history.) The new transplants would not only have to have the skills to work the resources but also to find them across millions of square miles. For instance the mention of settling in coastal SC. Fine, you’ve got plenty of fish and wood. But you don’t have flint to make fancy (and razor sharp) stone tools–you are going to have to bang relatively crude and dull things out of chunks of quartz. You want the good stuff, you’ll have to trade with someone hundreds of miles around where flint is abundant.
I assumed “poachers” meant people who knew how to set snares or traps, rather than hunting with a bow.
Agriculture is hard. Its really A. Lot. Of. Work. In an environment where you have cleared fields and seed corn. In an environment where you have to fell the trees, pull up the roots, get rid of the stones, plow the furrows plant the seeds and then wait a season for the plants to ripen? With no foodstocks to see you through that period and with very little seeds beyond the pre-cultivated stuff you may be able to find, if you can recognize it in its natural state?
Its not going to happen.
Hunting creatures with no fear of man on the other hand? Real damn easy. Read about the Dodo and the Sea Cow. If the 15 000 are a bit spread out, they’ll do fine until winter at least and in a clement climate they’ll be ok. Building huts and making fire is within the competencies of 9th century travelers.
But agriculture… until population densities outstrip food resources, it’ll be a massive investment of effort for no real payoff. By the time that becomes an issue, agriculture will be a legend.
I don’t know about the wildfires being a benefit, but California is a nice spot climate-wise.
You’re not going to lose half the population in the first winter when it drops down to the 40s at night.
While Carolingian agriculture may have been less extensive than Merovingian, and so possibly predominantly on extant cleared acres, at least some of our involuntary colonists are familiar with cutting a morgen or two out of the woods. European woods, that is. Our Carolingians find beer important. While back home they have seen the first “mass produced” beer from monasteries (get it?), many are proficient in home-brewing. Maybe an incentive for agriculture, just like the first time around?
Also as eaters of sheep and a risk to human life in the woods and mountains. Wild bears were totally a thing in Western Europe the early Middle Ages. Take a look atmedieval bear spearssometime. They were not for prodding dancing bears.
And there are snakes in Europe, too.
If you drop them off on a coast and have some fishers in the mix that would be a help. Those were rich waters.
But scooping up a fair sized town with all of its specialists and some farmers would be best.
I wonder how long it would take - if ever - for the Guilds to realize that their knowledge needed to be shared.
The creatures having no fear of man has been mentioned a bit, but these are creatures that do have a fear of predation generally (unlike Dodos and such) and so they aren’t going to just let you walk up and kill them.