Lands of Ice and Mice: An Alternate History of the Thule

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http://www.gardenguides.com/taxonomy/broadleaf-arrowhead-sagittaria-latifolia/
It takes two years for Arrowhead to mature from seeds, planting tubers or roots is faster but it doesn't say how fast.

Twenty year life span.

If you harvest 1/4 of an area it'll be replaced in one season.

As far as I can tell you can remove the potatoes without harming the roots, so the plant should keep producing. Or would it, do tubers get replaced if removed?

I think it would.

 
Under ideal site conditions plants can be spread up to 6 feet apart and still attain stand closure within one growing season. On degraded or critical sites it is advisable to reduce plant spacing to 1 to 2 feet.
That's from the same article that mentioned the 40 tubers annually.

Winter draw-down periods are necessary to encourage voluntary reseeding; otherwise tubers will be relied on for re-growth.
Not sure exactly what that means, but it does sound like a reason to start engineering fields instead of just relying on natural stands of them.

Fascinating. Sounds like Stem Tubers. But the Wikipedia article suggests they're root tubers.
I think you might be right, must have misread it. A few articles talked about the root and tuber like they were seperate things.
 
Winter draw down simply means that water levels drop in winter. This plant grows in six to twelve inches of water, basically in the shallows. Might even grow in a couple of feet, but that's still pretty shallow.

What you see is that in the fall, rainfall tends to drop off. Things start drying up, the rivers go low. All the little feeders that feed rivers will tend to cease or decline. If you have mountain glacier fed streams, the coldness reaches there first, less water coming down the mountains, less water moving into the river systems. Come winter, snowfalls 'park', basically, ice and snow stays where it lands, it doesn't drain away into the river system.

So basically, what'll happen is that in the late fall and winter, the water levels drop. Ground that was between six inches and a foot or two under water is now above the water line and drying out.

So the timing of the plant's biology is tied to changing water levels and a fall/winter drying phase. Kind of makes sense when you think about it. Tubers are basically food storage reservoirs (sometimes reproductive units). Why do you need to store food if your environment is stable. Plants which have big tubers are basically in some way in a feast and famine environment.

Maybe it was the environmental complexity of the life cycle that made agriculture difficult? It would need regular seasonal flooding/drying, or late season drying.

Did you notice the germination temperature? It requires 80 or 90 degrees to germinate. Maybe there's some sort of microclimate lensing. That's a really high temperature to germinate from. Of course, that might also explain reproducing rhizomatically or vegetatively.
 
These things can be found at Chinese groceries? There's a few Chinese groceries around here. Maybe I'll go looking sometime.
 
The tubers come from rhizomes, I think that's where the root confusing came from with me.

That's a really high temperature to germinate from. Of course, that might also explain reproducing rhizomatically or vegetatively.
Right, if it can't seed it'll produce from the tuber. So a farmer would be wise to leave a few, which is what the Thule do anyway.

These things can be found at Chinese groceries?
The asian version, and I think they're seasonal around Chinese New Year.
 
This new ideas seem to be spinning fast and furious here. My two cents.

First absorption of the agricultural practices would almost certainly be through the Tlinglit. They were not only the furthest north, but they were the regional trading power, and had access to at least the Yupik IOTL. Although it's difficult to be sure with oral histories, they seem to have lived in the area for centuries, and were almost certainly already there in 1400.

There's a couple of unusual things about Tlingit culture. They were split into two moieties - the Raven and the "not Raven" (Wolf or Eagle, in different places). One was only supposed to marry from the opposite moiety. Within each of these groups, there were "houses" with their own noble lines. However, noble authority is only valid for those of that bloodline - authority is genetic, not territorial. As a result, settlements had many parallel lines of authority. One thing that is important for contact with the Thule is that ancestry, including nobility, is figured through the mother, not the father. Typically when marriages were arranged, men would move into the community, and there was nothing untoward about a non-Tlingit marrying in.

Another thing to consider is the Tlingit notion of property was well-developed, to the point where they not only considered property to be land or objects, but ideas. Thus one could have ownership over a dance, story, or song, somewhat akin to the modern Western ideas of intellectual property. For this reason, it's highly likely that the first Tlingit to take up agriculture will see the practices as clan property, and be very hesitant to let other clans in on it unless some advantageous trade can be made.

I'll leave the steps of the process of agriculture to Pesterfield to discuss, since he's doing a pretty good job. I'll briefly outline the stages I think Tlingit culture would go through, however.

First, there would be the initial introduction to agricultural practices. This can come either piecemeal through trade and trial-and-error, or in a more comprehensive fashion as bachelor Thule migrate into the region and marry in. Although the first clans to establish agriculture would attempt to keep this under wraps, the marriage system, where young men leave the clan of their birth and often move to a distant place, would mean that knowledge of the practices of agricultural husbandry would spread far and wide.

That doesn't mean that application would be universal, however. Except for low-level petty warfare, Tlingit life was pretty nice, all things considered, and few people went hungry. Adoption of agriculture initially may be seen as useful not because of the extra calories it brings in, but because it seems a long-term time saver compared to the historical practices of gathering wild plants. Also, the traditional diet was low in some nutrients, like Calcium and Vitamins A, C, and D. In order to compensate, Tlingit had to eat a lot of offal (as the Inuit did), but with access to more plants to provide trace elements they can have more of a protein monoculture, and should be more numerous and healthy.

Before the Thule get heavily involved in the region, I expect the Tlingit would begin expanding outward due to population pressures. Although with access to the Thule agricultural package, they could in theory climb up the slopes and attempt to displace the inland groups they traded with, given their maritime I think they'd turn against their southern neighbors. Presumably, they'd move into the territory of the Nisga’a and Tsimshian. The latter in particular is important, as it provides access to the Skeena River. This is the first area that would be considered "arable" in part under western terms, and more amenable to forming an agriculturally focused nation than the thin array of coastline the Tlingit have been limited to so far.

From here, there's breaks in the mountains which would lead to the Fraser Valley - the single largest agricultural area in modern BC, which is known for having huge amounts of wild...arrowhead! While I'd expect further coastal penetration as well, the main thrust may be down the Fraser and into OTL's Vancouver area instead, as the Dene groups inland will probably be pushovers in comparison.

As others have said, in the long run the Thule will probably decapitate the Tlingit nobility. Hell, the system lends itself to it - Thule men could go in, kill off most of the males in the clan, marry the widowed women - and their children will have legitimate clan status!

I'd expect that overall Thule genetic influence would be more minor than one would expect. Given the Northwest Coast is going to be more agriculturally productive than the Thule realm ultimately, it won't be long before the population is denser than the core Thule territory. Thus, which ever lucky Thule groups establish rule will probably find it pretty easy to resist further invasions after a few generations - meaning there will not be wave after wave of Thule migrants entering the region. Probably some Tlingit-descended groups will keep ahead of the invasion wave, particularly inland, and continue to expand until Eurasian plagues intervene.

As to the cultural drift thereafter, it's difficult to say. I'd argue at least for the sake of the story, however, that the analogue should be more Norman England than Anglo-Saxon. In the first few generations, there would be a recognizably Thule ruling class, but as time passed, even Thule-descended nobility would turn to local languages, except when they had to parlay with "Thule" elsewhere.
 
So, what we're looking at is probably a very extensive root system, spreading out close to the surface of the underwater soil. The plant pokes up a stem above water where it does its photosynthesis and biological activity. The products of that go into the root system, and energy is stored in tubers which grow from the root system very close to the surface. Fall comes, the top part of the plant dies off. The roots and tubers are used to supply energy for the next cycle of growth. Seeds are very difficult to germinate, they need stratification, high temperatures. So a secondary reproductive system evolves with the tubers, which means that they evolve to be easily dislodged, so that they can float or re-establish a new plant. Lots of potential wastage, so it ramps up tuber production.

Makes sense. You've got rich river soils, lots of water, and uncontested sunlight with no trees or pushes crowding it out. It probably gets sunlight maximum, sucking up reflected sunlight from the surface of the water. I'll bet you its photosynthesizing on the underside of the leaf structure as well

It's got a hell of a distribution range - temperate north american coasts, northern south america, and even asia. How did it get all those place? Bird gullets?

It might actually be viable in the southern mainland reaches of the Thule dominion. There's a lot of post-glacial rivers and lakes, many of which have that winter draw down characteristics (of course, a lot of arctic and sub-arctic rivers and lakes tend to be stable rock bound, with minimal shallows) (and artificially flooding shallows would probably do some weird stuff with permafrost). Still, there's almost certainly viable habitat.

The trouble is that it couldn't germinate by seeds. And the Tubers wouldn't have any means of getting there. So human agency could dramatically expand its northern range, it might make a viable cultivar.

You probably wouldn't be getting a lot of sexual reproduction, so you'd have to work mostly with importing tubers. There's a lot of genetic diversity down south. You might be able to keep bringing them up until you stumbled onto varieties that were reasonably tolerant.
 
I'll leave the steps of the process of agriculture to Pesterfield to discuss
Feel free to give your ideas, I'm just doing research.

I too think it'll be a convenience thing. No worries about finding the plants if they're in the field and you only have to wade through the minimum of needed water(the mention of water gardens a few posts back suggest some might have done this already).
 
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So, perhaps the best avenue for this to work, as their seems to have been pre-agricultural techniques in use, is for the wave of displaced Thule caribou riders to pour south when the little ice age comes and dominate the existing population, adapting to their lifestyle, including this. They then stay part of the Thule cultural sphere, and as they continually absorb small numbers of later refugees, these people try applying Thule based agricultural techniques to these pre-agricultural plants, and, eventually, after lots of trial and error, work out how to make it work.

I wouldn't image that the Tlingit would have adopted any Thule practices by cultural osmosis prior to the conquest, the motivation simply isn't there - basically it's too easy to live without it, and requires cultural changes to adopt. Post conquest, I imagine the transition to agriculture would still not be adopted by adjacent groups, only by those ruled by cultural Thule.

As was seen after a similar conquest (on a smaller scale) of sub-Roman Britain by the Anglo-Saxons, I would expect to see small genetic impacts on the population but almost complete cultural replacement.
 
What's the division between pre-agriculture and agriculture, some of what the Katzie and other did sounds like it was agriculture.
 
So, perhaps the best avenue for this to work, as their seems to have been pre-agricultural techniques in use, is for the wave of displaced Thule caribou riders to pour south when the little ice age comes and dominate the existing population, adapting to their lifestyle, including this. They then stay part of the Thule cultural sphere, and as they continually absorb small numbers of later refugees, these people try applying Thule based agricultural techniques to these pre-agricultural plants, and, eventually, after lots of trial and error, work out how to make it work.

A lot, I think, depends upon how adaptable the Thule toolkit is to the Northwest Coast right out of the box. If it can be adopted wholesale, I think it's inevitable they'll be rolled over, as hunter-gatherer groups the world over were generally rolled. That said, their relatively high population and organized status, and use of heavy wooden fortifications and well-developed ships meant they would be tougher nuts to crack than most. Bronze would provide an advantage, of course. Caribou riding, I'm not so sure, as it's unclear as of yet when it becomes part of Thule military practices, and the terrain isn't the best for cavalry regardless. I think the Northwest Coast would have to be swamped with sheer numbers, with the Thule even then suffering fairly high casualties due to the defensive advantages of home terrain. Thus I think that the Thule would probably bypass the Northwest coast, at least initially, settling in the colder uplands which would better suit their agricultural package, only filtering into the lowlands later.

On the other hand, if some of the crops just don't work well, or if entirely new techniques are needed, I expect the Northwest Coast natives to do some of the experimentation themselves. There's a lot of precedent for this in history, such as how the Nama, alone among the Khoisan, not only resisted the Bantu migrations, but adopted pastoralism themselves. Or how despite the early adoption of Egyptian agriculture, the Sahel and Ethiopian crop packages were developed independently by separate peoples.

I wouldn't image that the Tlingit would have adopted any Thule practices by cultural osmosis prior to the conquest, the motivation simply isn't there - basically it's too easy to live without it, and requires cultural changes to adopt. Post conquest, I imagine the transition to agriculture would still not be adopted by adjacent groups, only by those ruled by cultural Thule.

Slaveholding was common in the Northwest Coast, however. Even with Thule technological advantage, I'd say some coastal raiding groups (like the Haida) will capture Thule and manage to extract technological know how out of them. Actually, with the Haida being comparably isolated on the Queen Charlotte Islands, I'd say they stand the highest likelihood of surviving any Thule assault, as it would take a dedicated naval invasion, not merely slow diffusion, to displace them - and they evolved into the vikings of the Northwest Coast IOTL within only a few hundred years.
 
A lot, I think, depends upon how adaptable the Thule toolkit is to the Northwest Coast right out of the box. If it can be adopted wholesale, I think it's inevitable they'll be rolled over, as hunter-gatherer groups the world over were generally rolled. That said, their relatively high population and organized status, and use of heavy wooden fortifications and well-developed ships meant they would be tougher nuts to crack than most. Bronze would provide an advantage, of course.

Bronze would help a lot, and, if they have had pre-existing trade, then they may well have had access of the superior ships.

Caribou riding, I'm not so sure, as it's unclear as of yet when it becomes part of Thule military practices, and the terrain isn't the best for cavalry regardless.

The big advantage of the caribou wouldn't be to ride them directly into combat, I feel, but logistically.

I think the Northwest Coast would have to be swamped with sheer numbers, with the Thule even then suffering fairly high casualties due to the defensive advantages of home terrain. Thus I think that the Thule would probably bypass the Northwest coast, at least initially, settling in the colder uplands which would better suit their agricultural package, only filtering into the lowlands later.

This is why I predict a decapitation rather than displacement. I can easily see scenarios where the refugee Thule are recruited, essentially, as mercenaries, and then proceed to take over.

On the other hand, if some of the crops just don't work well, or if entirely new techniques are needed, I expect the Northwest Coast natives to do some of the experimentation themselves. There's a lot of precedent for this in history, such as how the Nama, alone among the Khoisan, not only resisted the Bantu migrations, but adopted pastoralism themselves. Or how despite the early adoption of Egyptian agriculture, the Sahel and Ethiopian crop packages were developed independently by separate peoples.

As I go into below, I think the problem is the existing productivity of what they have - why would they want to adopt something else without strong cultural drivers?

Slaveholding was common in the Northwest Coast, however. Even with Thule technological advantage, I'd say some coastal raiding groups (like the Haida) will capture Thule and manage to extract technological know how out of them.

I rather doubt this, both because the existing non-agricultural Pacific North-West package was so productive, and because the Thule don't see what they do as technology, but a form of mediation with the spirit world, directed by a shaman caste. Essentially, why would the slave-takers bother to perform generations of trial and error to adapt microclimate engineering and propagation techniques as well as adopting what is essentially a new religion?

Actually, with the Haida being comparably isolated on the Queen Charlotte Islands, I'd say they stand the highest likelihood of surviving any Thule assault, as it would take a dedicated naval invasion, not merely slow diffusion, to displace them - and they evolved into the vikings of the Northwest Coast IOTL within only a few hundred years.
 
I'd say some coastal raiding groups (like the Haida) will capture Thule and manage to extract technological know how out of them.

One thought. If a coastal raiding group captured you, could they extract the technological know how to build a laptop or an automobile? what about something similar? Could they extract the technological know how to build a lawn mower? A toilet?

I'm not so sure.

A skill like copper or bronze working? Not easy to replicate. It's not a generally known widespread skill, and its dependent on available resources that Haida or others may not have available. The more complex a society becomes, the more things get reserved to specialists. Its a tricky thing.

As to adoption of agriculture, that's a tricky thing. Cultures most of the time are very conservative and inclined towards stability. Radical innovation does not come easily. There are good reasons for that.

That doesn't mean that we don't get radical transformations from time to time, but they're always driven in some way.
 
As to adoption of agriculture, that's a tricky thing.
As you mentioned earlier the Thule already have domesticated versions of some of the Northwest plants.
Also some of the Northwest tribes are doing agriculture already, or if they aren't it's a technicality over what counts.

Capturing slaves might still serve a purpose, ransom them back for goods like copper/bronze tools.

But you have a point getting specific knowledge will mean either luck in capturing the right person, or going after a specific kind of person once they know what to look for.
 
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Quite, and the domesticates may make a huge difference. Wild Bistort rhizomes are about the size of a peanut. Domesticated versions may be about the size of a potato, and they may be much more amenable to gardening techniques. I could see occasional horticulture arising from this.
 
summit.sfu.ca/system/files/iritems1/10323/etd2090.pdf has a chart with an arrowhead/potato comparision.
Page 40 in the search box, page 30 according to the paper's page numbers.
 
A very quick read suggests that indigenous harvesting, potential pre-agricultural or agricultural harvesting was displaced by potatoes. Interesting.

Potatoes are hard to beat. Everyone sings the praises of rice, but hey potatoes, those unassuming, plainspoken tubers, they beat those effeminate, water paddy loving fuckers like rented mules.
 
A skill like copper or bronze working? Not easy to replicate. It's not a generally known widespread skill, and its dependent on available resources that Haida or others may not have available. The more complex a society becomes, the more things get reserved to specialists. Its a tricky thing.

As to adoption of agriculture, that's a tricky thing. Cultures most of the time are very conservative and inclined towards stability. Radical innovation does not come easily. There are good reasons for that.

IOTL, the Spanish introduced horses to Pueblo Indians in their employ in 1621. By 1750 there were horse riding Cree in Canada. This wasn't just a matter of transmission of the horses - they also transmitted the cultural knowledge of horse technology (bits, saddles, etc) all the way through the Great Plains. A lot of tribes pretty quickly picked up on selective breeding as well, aiming for particular colors, sizes, or speed. Keep in mind that almost all the groups which became horsemen were hunter-gatherers prior. Also keep in mind it was not one group of horsemen who came up from the Southwest and displaced everyone in their path - essentially all plains groups took to the lifestyle.

There's also the examples of numerous technologies picked up by southern tribes, most notably the Cherokee. Some innovations were indeed pushed by the U.S. government, like raising of cattle and pigs. Others were picked up independently, like metalworking (from African slaves, IIRC), and a written language. Or look at the Navajo, who picked up sheep herding from the Spanish. There are presumably a lot more cases in ancient history which have unfortunately been lost to the sands of time.

Admittedly, these might have had more "out of the box" appeal than switching from hunting and gathering to farming. Also, the disruption caused by the Eurasian plagues probably upset the foundations of most Native American societies enough they would be willing to try something new. Still, the first example in particular shows that radical changes can occur quite rapidly across a wide area, given the proper incentives.
 
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