Wednesday, October 20, 2021

The 1021 Project

We have a year for the Anse aux Meadows: 28 years after the AD 993 cosmic flux. That's when three trees were cut down for timber, and sawn by iron axes.

Lucky we knew about that flux.

They say that 1000ish was a warmer time but, even then, the Newfie / Labrador coast was hardly a Vinland. The study says, however, there is "exotic" wood, so these Norse likely had ventured further south. Which they could do because they had a base, at the Anse.

I don't know if the bellicose skrælingjar were at the Anse or in the Vinland; we do know they weren't Inuit. The Inuit have their own sagas, which name the indigenes Tuniit. Northeast nontundra Canada had a culture at Cape Dorset; but that one ends around AD 1000. Afterward, um. Maybe the Beothuk?

I find difficult to blame plague for the "Terminal Dorset", if it is even a thing; or simply lack of archaeology in a vast landscape even Canadians find difficult to visit, and near impossible to winter-over. These Norse came from a bottlenecked population itself, that of Greenland; their transmissible diseases, if any, had run their course. This wasn't mediaeval Lisbon.

Could be I'm thinking of the wrong plague. Maybe it's not airborne, and sticks in a man for longer before it kills him. Hepatitis?

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