Bronze artifacts recently discovered in Alaska and carbon dated to nearly 1,000 years ago have added to a growing mound of evidence which suggests that trade routes existed between East Asia and northwestern North America long before the arrival of Christopher Columbus.
The first Americans are thought to have caused a land bridge between Asia and Alaska about 15,000 years ago. That land bridge vanished about 10,000 years ago but evidence suggests that goods and ideas continued to flow back and forth between the two continents long after the land route was gone.
The latest artifacts were found in a 1,000 year old house at a site called “Rising Whale” at Cape Espenberg. Two artifacts, one appearing to be a whistle and the other a clasp or fastener were made of bronze at a time long before bronze working came to Alaska. Archeologists believe that they were most likely manufactured in China, Korea or Yakutia in what is now Russia. A piece of leather attached to the clasp carbon dates to about 600 CE.
The house also contained several obsidian artefacts which have a chemical signature indicating that they came from Russia’s Anadyr River valley.
The new finds add to a century of evidence that suggests trade routes existed across the Bering Straight.
According to Live Science, a 1913 study published by anthropologist Berthed Laufer which indicates that the Chinese had a special interest, at that time, in acquiring walrus and narwhal ivory. Some of this is thought to have come from northeast China but it also would have given North Americans in and around Alaska something to trade with.
Further evidence going back to the 1930s shows that a style of bone plate armour which became popular in and around Alaska about 1,000 years ago, was also worn by people in eastern Mongolia, China, Korea and Japan.
The researchers believe that it is possible that the inhabitants of the Rising Whale site could have belonged to the Birnirk culture. The Birnirk lived on both sides of the Bearing Strait and hunted whales in boats made from skin which were advanced for the time.
Genetic studies have shown that the Birnirk are the ancestors of the Thule culture which spread eastward as far as Greenland and are the ancestors of the Inuit people of Alaska and the Canadian Arctic.
At roughly the same time that trade and immigration were going on in northwestern North America, the Vikings were exploring and building some settlements in the northeast. At around the same time, Polynesians were trading in South America.
All of this serves to make Christopher Columbus’s “discovery” of America somewhat less spectacular than it is sometimes made out to be.
Owen Mason, a research associate at the University of Colorado will present the findings from the Rising Whale site at the Canadian Archaeological Association annual meeting in St. John’s Newfoundland, Canada, between April 28 and May 2.
