I just recalled that the Vikings practiced innoculation against smallpox. They offered this service in southern Europe. I don’t recall the timing at all, it may not be a factor at all in this question. Anyway, lack of contact or limited contact is the simplest explanation.
The impact of the Norse might also be compared to the impact on North American natives by the Spanish and other Europeans. The Spanish didn’t stay in most of the US southeast after their explorations of the early-mid 16th century, but apparently still caused pandemics. Likewise the plague in southeastern Massachusetts of 1616-19 which wiped out a lot of the natives before English settlers arrived in the area from 1620 had apparently been caused by shipwrecked or other itinerant Europeans.
In neither of those cases was the contact between Europeans and natives obviously greater than that of the Norse, or the areas necessarily a lot more heavily populated by natives (they might have been or were in some places, but this probably can’t be comprehensively known). It would tend to suggest the difference wasn’t as much about the climate or the number of people on either side, but a difference in which diseases were prevalent among ca. 11th century Norse from Greenland v ~16th century Europeans.
I don’t agree with the point that population density in the US Southwest or Massachusetts wasn’t greater than Labrador/Newfoundland.
Both the US Southwest and Massachusetts were inhabited by farming peoples; in the US Southwest, the Spanish encountered a very densely populated landscape indeed - the observers in De Soto’s expedition remarked on the large numbers of towns they had found, for example, among the chieftainships in that part of the world - the Coosa ‘paramount chieftianship’ had an estimated populations of 50,000 or so, and was only one of those encountered:
By contrast, Newfoundland/Labrador was never very densely inhabited. Estimates vary, but are in any event low:
This is what you would expect: Newfoundland was marginally inhabitable compared with the US southwest or new England; the inhabitants lived by hunting & gathering, not by agriculture, and in bands and not chieftianships. They certainly did not build towns.
As has been said, these communities certainly would have had a higher population density than those in Labrador/Newfoundland, since they were agricultural societies rather than hunter gatherers. Despite this, as far as I know the New England pandemic doesn’t appear to have spread far inland.
That wasn’t really my point. I know in some places DeSoto observed what appeared to be large settlements, like in Alabama, but we don’t really know the whole history of the actual population or what happened to it between then and when later Europeans didn’t see large settlements. Also the Spanish traversed areas of the US southeast that aren’t that populated even now (mountains of western NC and eastern TN, etc). We don’t really know that that didn’t end up greatly cutting down the sparser populations in those places relatively just as much.
Likewise we don’t know the actual population of southeastern MA or what effect disease actually had further away.
It could be that population density of natives was a major factor, but it seems pretty clear it didn’t require many Europeans or for them to stay in any one place for long to cause such pandemics. IOW those characteristics of the Norse contact with the new world, coming in pretty small numbers and not staying around long, are probably not the reason it didn’t result in a big impact on the natives. That is if it didn’t which isn’t certain either. It didn’t kill a large absolute number of natives in those areas because there weren’t a large number, that I grant.
Have they found evidence of significant Native American contact at L’Anse aux Meadows? I don’t see a large NA population nearby that settlement without a lot of interaction.
Just to be clear, the Franks came before the Vikings.
Only a couple of native artifacts were found at L’Anse aux Meadows, but were apparently not obtained locally but from farther north. From here:
Based on that, and my expertise as a guy on the internet, I’d say there was not enough contact for the Norse to start an epidemic in North America even if they did bring serious communicable diseases with them.
The thing is, we know De Soto & Co. traversed through areas of high population density, and it is known (from distribution of trade-goods, both pre and post-Columbian) that these native American chieftianships had at least some contact with other native groups in proximity to them. Thus, it is reasonable to suppose that the conditions existed for the spread of a pandemic - first in those densely populated chieftianships, and then, once well established in the New World in such reservoirs, to their immediate trade-partners.
This is certainly consistent with the later findings of significant population collapse in those areas.
Contrast that with the situation in Newfoundland. The native Americans there lived in hunter-gatherer bands. Connections with the mainland, while they no doubt existed, were a lot more tangential. There were no pockets of dense native population to act as reservoirs for a pandemic infection. If a hunter-gatherer group was infected with (say) Smallpox, it was perfectly possible that every member in it could die, without spreading it to others - let alone spreading it off of the island of Newfoundland. In contrast, should a native in (say) a Coosa town get Smallpox, he or she would likely spread it to the whole town, leaving some survivors to flee to other locations - spreading the disease.
To my mind, that’s a significant factor.
Another is that the Norse who settled in places like L’Anse aux Meadows did not come directly from mainland Europe. They came from what was already a small, isolated population - the Norse settlements of Greenland, which were already at two removes from mainland Europe (Europe - Iceland - Greenland). Greenland was probably too small in population to act as a significant reservoir for pandemic infections. Thus, it is likely that the Norse had no pandemic diseases to contribute.
Taking these two factors together, it is not surprising to find that the Norse did not infect the natives of Newfoundland (though it may well have been better for the native cultures, in the long run, if they had).
Probably, but more from the almost complete lack of Norse artifacts from Native American archaeological sites in eastern Canada and the northeastern US. L’Anse aux Meadows is just a single site, and it was a pretty short-lived one at that, so you might not expect much trade there. But if there had been extensive contact between the Norse and Native Americans anywhere in the region you would expect at least some trade goods and trinkets to show up in Native American sites.
There is another potential site, recently discovered and not yet confirmed.
Did the vikings also not encounter native Americans in Greenland? They (the vikings) were there for 500 years and there are Greenlandic Inuit, too.
It’s complicated.
Dorset culture natives lived on Greenland at the same time as the Norse, but far away from them (Dorset on the north part of the island, and Norse on the south); and Thule (Innuit) arrived circa 1200 AD (so after the Norse were already there - the Norse were the aboriginals, compared with the Innuit!).
However, there is only a small amount of evidence of contact, and the whole subject is controversial. A small number of artifacts may represent trade, scavenging, or fights; a few oral histories of fights. That’s it.
If you look at the maps you can see that the Thule displace both Dorset and Norse, but no-one knows whether this is a case of the Thule violently taking over, or of the other groups assimilating, or (in the case of the Norse) the Norse simply dying out and the Thule moving in to the territory.
I take it as a given that we don’t find Norse artifacts. That’s why it’s only recently become accepted that the Vikes got here before the Genoan. With no NA artifacts it seems unlikely the Norse encountered many NAs, not even wiping them out with disease or violence.
I posted about that upthread in post #18. But it doesn’t hurt to post again, since some participants in this thread seem to have ignored it.
There are a few Norse artifacts found in Arctic sites, such as the Tanfield Valley site I also cited in post #18. There’s also a Norse coin found in Maine, although that has questionable provenance.
Trouble is it’s hard to show the Vikings were at the sites where the artifacts are found. Trade north of the Arctic Circle wouldn’t be surprising, but not necessarily with a lot of contact between people that could spread disease readily.
Don’t get me wrong, the Vikings may have been to many more places and met many more North Americans than we know about, there’s just scant evidence to show that.
L’Anse aux Meadows was not Vinland. We have not found the Vinland settlement yet (maybe it’s underwater) and L’Anse aux Meadows seems to have been more of a temporary camp.
Did anyone else read the thread title as implying that the Spanish were the native populations and were expecting to read a thread about disease in Visigothic Spain?
Contact in the form of combat certainly can spread disease – the Spaniards managed to infect the Aztecs with smallpox while engaging them (see Bernal Diaz’ account).
There’s no reason that Vikings might not have spread disease among the Indians where thet landed – but the population there was more spread out, not concentrated as in Mexico, which was a sizeable city, after all. (Even if the Vikings had been trading with the Inuit, that wouldn’t necessarily have protected the local Indians). If the Vikings did manage to transmit a virulent disease, it’s possible that it would have been to a restricted area, killing only the groups directly contacted. The great plague that struck New England in the 17th century, after all, didn’t depopulate North America. People who get too sick simply don’t travel.