A Bead Too Far: Rethinking Global Connections Before Columbus

Seems plausible to me that beads could’ve reached the Americas before Columbus, although the dates seem AWFULLY close to Columbus. Error bars on measurements like this seem like they almost certainly overlap 1492. +/- 30 years (or more) seems pretty typical for that age of sample. https://radiocarbon.pl/en/uncertainty-of-radiocarbon-date/

> ...[A]t the Ust’-Polui site near Salekhard, on the Ob River, archaeologists have found beads... believed to have originated in the Roman Empire or from Parthian production centres

Aw man, I would set a one-way time machine to a 2nd Century Parthian bead production center for the ASMR alone. If I ever got bored I could just hitchhike to Alaska.

The Venetian beads discovery is controversial (I think one of the reviewers argued that those style beads only began being manufactured in the 16th and 17th century), but smelted alloys have been discovered for sometime in older Inuit sites [0].

That said, communities like the Yupik have constantly travelled across the Bering and all the way in Uelkal, but I'm not sure we can treat the Inuit in the same context as other First Nations with regards to Pre-Colombian exchange.

Though, that said as well, if there were trade connections, it was most likely extremely limited. Even Hokkaido wasn't truly settled and colonized by the Japanese until the 1860s, and there's a reason Tungusic peoples like the Jurchen and Manchu preferred migrating south into China and Korea instead of northward - it was inhospitable land whose inhabitants were viewed as "barbarians". Sort of similar to how the Greeks and Romans didn't explore far beyond Crimea into Central Asia due to various Indo-European nomadic tribes that they'd view as "barbarians", and relying on second hand information.

Also, the distances are massive - Chukota to the Amur is the same distance as Paris to Baghdad, except with a fraction of the population density.

Loved visiting the Bering Land Bridge Natural Preserve outside Nome though. It was exhilarating. I always wanted to do something similar in Chukota or Sakha as well, but can't with the current political climate. At least I've been able to scratch my ethnographic itch about Paleo-Siberian and Northern Pacific communities when visiting Fairbanks, Seattle, or Hokkaido on occasional visits.

Highly recommend reading "The Shaman's Coat: A Native History of Siberia" by Anna Reid as well. It's what stoked a lot of my interest in Paleo-Siberian peoples. Scratches a similar itch to thinking about Inner Asian communities and the ancestral Puebloans.

[0] - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03054...