Maximum Eskimo

Please take this forward! I think it's very interesting and the counterpoint to Ice & Mice is a real treat.

I vaguely remember a conlang proposal years back (on the Zompist forums) for the language of the Inuits who settled the Svalbard Archipelago... or it may have been Dorset or Thule culture, come to think of it; the settlement was pretty early. It was competing with another conlanger's design for a Finnic language spoken by Saami who had made it there first... ;) Either scenario was pretty charming.

Regarding Yupik colonization of Siberia, it does seem to have been relatively late, and quite limited. I don't recall reading any arguments for more extensive settlement by Eskimoan cultures than was found on the ground by the early Russian explorers. (With disease in the 19th century and village centralization in the 20th, the later range was much contracted, of course).

I may be starting to sound shrill, but I'll repeat what I said on Ice & Mice: I strongly believe *Eskimoan cultural contact with Mesoamerica is considerably more plausible than with the Sinosphere. (Which is to say, still not very, without a lot of special arrangements.)

-- Kim
 
Iron? You're probably looking at bog iron smelting. I don't know what the available resources of bog iron are in the territory. You might want to look that up.

As noted, the Norse built iron forges wherever they settled in North America, and their source was bog iron. Material resources shouldn't be a showstopper.

Any kind of iron smelting generally requires much hotter temperatures and more advanced equipment, which is a bigger challenge for a non-sedentary hunter-gatherer society.

I think metallurgy of any kind is tough, but the *Eskimo who spread to more temperate climes ATL will be at least a little more sedentary.

Also, keep in mind the communication barriers. A lot of trade occurs within groups, because they can talk to each other. It occurs at the fringes with related groups because the languages are similar enough that they can work towards mutual understandings. Languages that are completely unrelated to each other make it much harder to work out trade with. It's hard to find two languages more unrelated to each other than Eskimo and Norse.

The linguistic separation between Norse and Greenland Eskimo doesn't seem relevant to me. After all, English and Chinese traded just fine--that's what pidgins are for. Are English and Chinese less-unrelated? Once you get to the "seperate language families" level, the mutual unintelligiblity is pretty much at 100%. To me the barriers are cultural, not linguistic, and they seem strong--as noted, 10 generations of Eskimos and Norse coexisted in Greenland without doing much interaction of *any* kind. It's hard to say what direction this was coming from. If (and that's a big if) it was because of Norse xenophobia, then the scarcer resources available to the newcomers ATL will make them somewhat more likely to deal. If it was from the Eskimo side, I"m not seeing a strong impetus to trade--they had access to all the things they needed. Again, iron tools are the big apparent exception.



It doesn't mean that they can't work out trade, but the learning curve is going to be steep and difficult. And its going to take place at the furthest fringes of Inuit culture, which might mean a good long time to work its way back.

But hell, its your timeline. I'm not telling you how to run it. Good luck, have fun, and stand by your choices.[/QUOTE]
 
How plentiful is bog iron, and how easy is it to work? I'm just wondering. I suppose I could look it up myself, but I suspect that you've got a greater grasp of it.
 
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It's hard to find two languages more unrelated to each other than Eskimo and Norse.

Joseph Greenberg begs to differ. He had Indo-European and Eskimo-Aleut as two members of a larger grouping (Eurasiatic) that also includes Uralic-Yukaghir, Altaic, Japanese-Korean-Ainu, Gilyak and Chukotian.

(Of course his later theories were ferociously attacked, for no very good reason that I can see, by the majority of linguists who specialize in the various language families he proposed to unite -- at least for the Americas, his earlier unifications involving the far more diverse African language families were just as bitterly opposed at the time, but are now universally accepted.)
 
How plentiful is bog iron, and how easy is it to work? I'm just wondering. I suppose I could look it up myself, but I suspect that you've got a greater grasp of it.
It happens in certain marshes. iron accumulates on the reeds, and you can pull them up, dry it out and then burn and forge it. Most every farmstead in Iceland had its own forge.

Now... How common? I don't know that. I think you have to have ?slightly acidic? on the right kind of rock. I do know that, in addition to Iceland, several places in Newfoundland had it, and I THINK there's some up and down the east coast of North America.
 
It happens in certain marshes. iron accumulates on the reeds, and you can pull them up, dry it out and then burn and forge it. Most every farmstead in Iceland had its own forge.

Now... How common? I don't know that. I think you have to have ?slightly acidic? on the right kind of rock. I do know that, in addition to Iceland, several places in Newfoundland had it, and I THINK there's some up and down the east coast of North America.

The Saugus Iron Works, the first industry in Massachusetts, used bog iron from the bed of a drained lake. That kind of thing is beyond the pale for pretty much any Native North American society, but the raw material is out there.
 
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