Or how about the recent viking settlement discovered in Utah?
NB: insert 
or :rolleyes: as deemed appropriate.
re. cannibalism in NZ, It’s not Captain Cook, but:
From Sydney Parkinson’s Journal of a Voyage to the South Seas (1773).
Make of that what you will.
Erroneous and Xema. If DNA evidence for the Anasazi people eating human flesh is insufficient evidence for some anthropologists, they are hardly likely to accept a diary entry from over 200 years ago.
I don’t know what happened way back when, but you need hard evidence (possibly more evidence than can reasonably exist) to convince people that canniblism took place.
Who who! Hold your ponies there folks! I was in NZ just a few years ago. And even though I opted for Thai Air instead of my trusty Viking ship, I’d say this is proof enough for anyone we have actually been to NZ. (Can you believe they wouldn’t let me carry my axe aboard in the hand baggage? :mad: )
And while we’re on the subject, a Maori fellow, somewhat inebriated admitted, I met in a bar proudly told me that they had in fact eaten the previous inhabitants.
It’s very likely that the Vikings possessed some kind of primitive compass. Also they may have used a kind of crystal or rock, with which, when the sunlight was views through it, they were able to determine the latitude. Also it’s quite certain they knew how to navigate using stars and the sun. Also I heard, when they wished to sail to Island, they’d first sail to Bergen then point the ship in the right direction, trail a long rope after the boat – and by looking at the rope they could see whether they sailed straight. That’s also a kind of navigation equipment.
- Rune
Bullshit is it? So how do you explain this, then?
Tiny Viking loses helmet overboard one evening after coming back from a particularly good pillage.
20 years later, after it being tossed as flotsam across the globe’s oceans, tiny helmet washes up on the shores of New Zealand.
A passing giant eagle (like they had in NZ) takes a fancy to the shiny object and picks it up. However, on the way back to the nest the eagle stops to pick up a kiwi takeaway. In the confusion of a bungled snatch, the tiny viking helmet becomes embedded on the escaping kiwi’s head.
Tiny Viking dies a broken man, after being dubbed “Tiny No-Horn Head” by the other Vikings. Kiwi lives to a ripe old age of 1900, seeing off all preditors with its tiny helmet.
See, the simplists answers are always the most likely.
Occam’s Razor triumphs again!
Sounds painful.
If anyone is interested in the whacko racist site, it can be found here.
Warning: I think they take Jiimm’s discovery *very[/] seriously.
jjimm:
It was carried there by a migrating swallow.
Didn’t the Vikings get surprisingly far south tho (Mediterrian I think, or maybe to Sierra Leonne??)
Brian
Christianised Vikings did make pilgrimages to Rome, IIRC, and I think there was also some good old-fashioned Viking plundering going on in the Mediterranean at some point. Haven’t heard about the Sierra Leone claims, but there are some who believe the Guanches of Tenerife and the other Canary Islands, encountered in the 16th century by Europeans, were descended from wayward Vikings. There are a lot of weird claims about the Guanches, though.
You’re referring to the solarstein, or “sunstone”. It’s not really a compass, but a polarization-sensitive crystal used to locate the position of the sun when it’s below the horizon, and a fair patch of unclouded sky is available. It doesn’t tell you where North is – just where the sun is (reportedly to within about 5 degrees).
There’s been a lot of negative writing about this, discounting the existence of such things. But the idea was originally proposed by analogy with an existing navigation device, called the “Twilight Compass” , that did exactly the same thing, and was used by Scandinavian airlines for navigation.
You can call it an "instrument: if you like, but that’s pushing it, I think. And it’s not really useful outside of the Far North, where the sun can disappear below the horizon for weeks or months at a time. All it’s telling you is where the sun is, after all.
See this map.
Emphasis in second paragraph mine.
Some people will refuse to believe the evidence, no matter how reliable and copious it is.
There is a very large amount of evidence for cannibalism in New Zealand, both by highly reliable eye-witnesses such as Captain Cook, and in Maori tradition itself.
This site quotes from Cook’s journals:
I’m not denying the observations of Captain Cook or Sydney Parkinson, but we are talking about cannibalism. It’s the ultimate taboo and accusations should be made very carefully. If anyone has actual physical evidence (such as charred human bones or human bones which contain evidence of systematic butchery) please post!
Your statement seems contradictory. If you are not denying the observations of Cook and others, then you presumably accept that cannibalism took place.
In any case, I don’t really accept the premise that because something is taboo to us an entirely different standard of evidence is demanded than for any other occurrences in the historical record. Cook himself states his initial skepticism that the practice occurred. One might as well doubt any other incident recorded in his journals.
This site, by a professor of Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley, states:
From other sites, this evidence at least in some sites includes exactly what you are asking for: charred human bones and indications of butchery.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Colibri *
**Your statement seems contradictory. If you are not denying the observations of Cook and others, then you presumably accept that cannibalism took place.
My position is that I don’t know what happened. If the only evidence was 200+ year old diary entry, then I would tend to be skeptical, but if there is hard evidence, then I’m a believer.
I believe the taboo reference is to the anthropological community. Around thirty years ago (with a lot of evidence being discovered just over twenty years ago), a number of researchers began discovering that much of the literature on cannabilism was bad. Most of it was hearsay (often by opponents of those accused or by early white settlers or explorers who had a vested interest in painting the newly encountered people in the worst light). In other places, it was discovered that even among the peoples who claimed to have practiced it, it was always told that they used to do that, but that they had abandoned the practice. At that point, the theory was put forth that all claims of cannibalism were actually propaganda pieces and, without hard evidence (no earlier writings), tales of cannibalism were to be treated as simply distortions by enemies of the supposed cannibals.
This is probably an extreme position, but when one looks at the enormous amount of “evidence” collected before the 1970s that has turned out to be either erroneous–or, frequently, false–it is somewhat understandable.
Ritual cannibalism (drinking some token amount of blood, eating an enemiy’s heart or liver) has certainly appeared in various places in the world. The objection is to the notion of killing, roasting, and eating a whole human as sustenance.
I do not know that the extreme position is entirely justified, but it does seem to be the current default position in anthropology.
:pinches self:
Nope. I’m real, I’m here. We didn’t disappear at all. Still around a 1000 years later.
We got religion, though, i.e. turned from Norse (misnomer) gods to the Christian god.
And while we’re at it, a chance for me to debunk my pet peves:
- Vikings did not have horns on their helmets.
- They were not beserks or warriors
- They were explorers, merchants and sometimes used some force to get a good deal (‘An offer he couldn’t refuse’.)
True that some early accounts were hearsay. However, there are a sufficient number of first-hand accounts, dating from Cortez to Cook and other explorers of the Pacific, that there really can be little doubt (except by some anthropologists who have an axe to grind on the subject) that cannibalism was regularly practiced by at least some human societies up until fairly recent times.
If these allegations were merely propaganda, one would expect them to be more widespread than they were. In fact, in most regions the practice (as a habitual one) was attributed to only a few of the local ethnic groups (Melanesia and Polynesia being an exception). For example, the Arawaks - who were residents of the islands the Spanish most coveted - were not generally accused of being cannibals, while the Caribs (the original cannibals), who were a much lesser threat to the Spanish, were. Likewise, among mainland groups, the Aztecs were considered to be cannibals, but the Incas and Mayans were not. If the Spanish were using cannibalism to justify their conquests, why did they not accuse all their opponents of it? Likewise in Africa, some groups that were severe threats to European colonization, such as the Zulu, were not considered to be cannibalistic, while some Central Africa groups were (e.g. the Fang). In general, North American Indians were not considered to be habitual cannibals by the English, French, or Spanish. The Australian Aborigines, in general, were not accused of widespread cannibalism, whereas the Pacific Islanders were.
(Caveat: Some accusations of cannibalism may have been made against many ethnic groups encountered by Europeans, and some of such allegations may well have been propaganda by their opponents. The point I am trying to make is that only a few groups were accused of widespread and habitual cannibalism, and most of these groups - including the Aztecs, Fang, Fijians, and Maori - probably were, in fact, frequently cannibalistic.)
True. Ritual cannibalism is undoubtedly much more widespread than cannibalism for sustenance. Even for groups that practiced it, cannibalism may have been done as much to humiliate an enemy as for actual nourishment. However, I think that it is no coincidence that the region where cannibalism seems to have been most widespread, Oceania, lacks most other large mammals suitable for meat besides human.
In my opinion, which is based in part on reading first-hand historical accounts, in part on the archaeological and anthropological evidence published in scientific journals, and in part on discussing it with members of some of the ethnic groups that supposedly practiced it in the recent past, including Maori, Fijians, and Fang (some of whom cheerfully acknowledge that their ancestors did so), the “extreme position” is just as much a distortion of the actual situation as its adherants accuse the traditional position of being.