Mysterious European Figure in Pre-Columbian Baffin Island
A thirteenth- or fourteenth-century Thule ivory carving from southern Baffin Island in Canada should hardly surprise anyone. After all, the Thule Inuit did dwell in this place at that time. But when...
View ArticleColumbus Knew Where He Was Going, Claims Soviet Historian
A weird little news report from New York Herald Tribune, 12 October 1959 Soviet Historian Declares Columbus Tricked World. A Soviet Historian said today that Christopher Columbus hoodwinked the world...
View ArticleTanfield Valley: Europeans in Pre-Columbian Baffin Island?
Tanfield Valley [A] is one of the most exciting sites to have come under the archaeologist’s trowel in the last fifty years: less golden but in its way as thrilling as Tutankhamen’s tomb. The valley –...
View ArticleIrish-speaking Argentinean Indians!!
One of the weaker proofs of Pre-Columbian contacts with Europe is the legend of the ‘white Indian’. Typically, a pioneer in the sixteenth or seventeenth or eighteenth or even the nineteenth century...
View ArticleBishop Erik’s Unorthodox Trip, 1121
Let’s start with historical orthodoxy. From c. 950-1000 Viking Greenlanders crossed the Davis Strait and set up a settlement or perhaps several small settlements in Canada. This settlement or these...
View ArticleThe Mysterious End of the Western Settlement
Imagine a Mary Celeste incident – an empty apparently abandoned ship – but extended instead to an entire land. At least one such account comes down to us and that is the abandonment of the Western...
View ArticleThe Lost Zen Letters: A Cautionary Tale about Children and Archives
***Dedicated to KR who pointed Zenwards*** The story (as always) is a simple one, perhaps deceptively, perhaps dishonestly so. In 1558 in Dello scoprimento dell’ isole Frislanda, Eslanda, Engrouelanda,...
View ArticleA Mysterious Island, Incest and a Twelfth-century Papal Letter
Greenland certainly had contact with the New World in the late tenth century. Did though this contact continue into the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth century? This controversy...
View ArticleThe Name ‘America’ and Amerigo Vespucci
There are perhaps a score of different theories as to where the word ‘America’ comes from. These range from various Amerindian etymologies to a Bristol-based merchant with the surname Ameryk! The...
View ArticleJasper and Butternuts on the Edges of Vinland
***Dedicated to Wade*** Jasper is a silica stone that was used by our ancestors both as a decoration and as a form of primitive match. Because of its fire-making properties jasper is often found in...
View ArticleAmerican Indians in Twelfth-Century Germany?! #1: Hakluyt
***Thanks to ANL who sent this one in*** In 1601 Richard Hakluyt translated, into English, António Galvão’s Tratado que compôs o nobre & notauel capitão Antonio Galuão, dos diuersos &...
View ArticleAmerican Indians in Twelfth-Century Germany #2: The Portuguese
First of all a huge thank to those who, two days ago, sent so many interesting emails about this problem. Thanks, particularly, to Wade, the Count, Borky, Kenton and Filip, I now have the original...
View ArticleA Newland to the West of Iceland 1285?
Those stray British, Scandinavian and Dutch references to exploration in the medieval northern Atlantic have frequently been set out on this blog: remember the inventio fortunatatae, or the incest...
View ArticlePre-Columbian Trips to America? Ballast!
Imagine the excitement of the archaeologists who had gathered at NA-57 off the Florida coast near Fernandina in 1972. In some offshore piles they had found various bits of ‘rubbish’ from European...
View ArticleThe Cherokees’ Mediterranean Origins!?
Bizarrists must always be thankful for the Atlantic Ocean, because it has offered us some of the craziest history theories of the last two hundred years. Welsh Indians in Florida, Indians in Ireland,...
View ArticleWhy Didn’t Others Try Before Columbus?
Beach has been much struck by two separate accounts that seem to suggest that people from one side of Euro Asia made their way to the other side of that landmass by sea: one of the accounts is Roman...
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