Ivory trade between Norse and the Thule Inuit.
Previously, archaeologists knew that Norse, or Scandinavian, settlers on Iceland and Greenland had hunted walruses for their ivory starting around A.D. 900, establishing a trade network that extended across Europe.
"Walrus ivory was considered the gold of that time," study first author
Emily Ruiz-Puerta, a bioarchaeologist at the University of Copenhagen, told Live Science. "People used walrus ivory to pay church taxes. It was
The Norse eventually decimated the walrus population of Iceland, and had to sail to Greenland to keep up the flow of ivory. Archaeologists had assumed that walrus hunting by the Norse had happened only in southern Greenland, where they had settled. But in her
2024 thesis, Ruiz-Puerta studied the genetic fingerprints of walruses across the Arctic, and found that each population had a distinct genetic signature. This meant that if she could extract DNA from a walrus ivory artifact in Greenland or Europe, Ruiz-Puerta could pinpoint where it had come from in North America and Iceland.
"What really surprised us was that much of the walrus ivory exported back to Europe was originating in very remote hunting grounds located deep into the High Arctic,"
Peter Jordan, a professor of archaeology at Lund University in Sweden and senior author on the study, said in a
statement.
By the 13th century, most walrus ivory samples came from hundreds of miles north of Norse settlements, Ruiz-Puerta said. For Norse traders to access walrus ivory so far north, it's possible they developed sailing capabilities advanced enough to survive the sea ice so they could hunt walruses and possibly even trade for ivory with the
Thule Inuit, an Indigenous people who lived in what are now parts of eastern Russia, the Canadian Arctic and Greenland. Alternatively, perhaps the Norse stayed put in southern Greenland and traded with the Thule Inuit there.
Also around the 13th century, the Thule Inuit had recently migrated to these same northern hunting grounds. They were experts in Arctic living, and had developed sophisticated "
toggling" harpoons that would latch into prey, enabling them to hunt walrus in open waters. They would have been capable of providing the Norse traders with walrus ivory, if the Norse had anything valuable to trade with, the researchers suggested. ...
https://www.livescience.com/archaeo...hundreds-of-years-before-columbus-study-finds