A reader asked me why I assumed that late mesolithic and early neolithic peoples could undertake long river and coastal journeys.
Let me tell you about a little place in northern Canada called Peawanuck. I have written about it elsewhere, because it has sentimental importance to me. It also has some importance to the outside world, because, since 2000 it has been the site of the Peawanuck Neutron Monitor. This is part of a global network of neutron monitors strategically located to provide precise, real-time, 3‑dimensional measurements of cosmic ray angular distribution activity. If your main interest is history, you may not know why this is important, but trust me, it is. Other monitors are located at the South Pole, Mawson and McMurdo Sound stations in Antarctica; at Inuvik, Fort Smith, Nain, and Goose Bay in Canada; at Thule in Greenland; on Svalbard (the arctic island which appears in The Golden Compass); and Apatity in northern Russia. These locations share an obvious characteristic: remoteness.
Peawanuck has a population of 300, and it cannot be reached by road, as no road comes anywhere near it. It is possible to push a truck along a temporary ice road during part of the winter, but that comes in from Fort Severn in the west, and to reach the nearest real road this way is a dangerous thousand kilometer trek into Manitoba. So Peawanuck is remote, by anyone’s standards. The normal access is via a $1600 plane flight from the nearest large town. Before the 1960s, virtually all travel was by foot, canoe, or dog-sled.
The people of Peawanuck, the Weenusk, form part of the Nishnawbe-Aski Nation and are governed by the Mushkegowuk Tribal Council. Most people there live by hunting, fishing, and trapping, or by guiding the occasional adventurous tourist to see the polar bears and other wildlife, or to fish in the Winisk river system. It’s a fine little place. It has some social problems, and young people must leave to find work, but culturally, it is strong, and traditional language and customs thrive.
The reason I bring up Peawanuck is that, until the 1950’s, there wasn’t much about life in the village that would have been out of place in Mesolithic Europe. Certainly, in the 19th century, life in Peawanuck would have been almost indistinguishable from a settlement in the far north of Europe in 6000 BC. When I look over the maps and site reconstructions in archaeological reports from, say, the Ertebølle culture of ancient Scandinavia, everything about them looks familiar. Everything is comprehensible. I have no trouble visualizing the lifestyle. That’s why, when I read discussions among archaeologists about prehistoric Europe, sometimes they ring true to me, and sometimes they don’t.
What rings the most false to me are the assumptions that prehistorians make about mobility, travel, and trade. There is no question that there was extensive trade across prehistoric Europe. The distribution of artifacts shows this. But it is still customary for archaeologists to assume that people didn’t travel any significant distance, and that trade was “not really” trade. First, discussion concentrates on fancy objects that had a good chance of being preserved as grave goods, rather than ordinary goods, which obviously would not. Next, it is asserted that trade objects only moved from hand to hand in tiny steps, going through a multitude of intermediaries. The implication is that nobody really knew what they were doing: that, say, bits of amber just drifted southward across Europe in a haphazard fashion, and that nobody involved knew where they came from or where they were going. This is part of a deeply embedded mind-set. European scholars start absorbing clichés about immobility practically from the cradle. How often have you been told, for example, that medieval peasants “never traveled more than a few miles from where they were born” ― despite the fact that this notion has been repeatedly disproved by genetic studies and parish records of births and marriages? Not to mention the fact that a healthy human being can walk 80 kilometers in a day (as I have done many times). But this image of a pre-modern, or a prehistoric person existing in a tiny cocoon of ignorance, unable to move or think outside of a few acres, simply doesn’t accord with what I know about a hunting and gathering lifestyle that still exists, and existed in relatively pristine form, only a short time ago.
We know exactly how much Peawanuck’s people traveled, traditionally, and how far. Normal connections of trade, family visits, friendship, and political contacts on a personal level extended from the Winisk river (the “homeland”) as far east as western Quebec, as far west as Norway House in Manitoba, all along the Hudson’s Bay coast as far as the Chippewyan territories in the northwest and the Innuit settlements in the northeast, and as far south as the height-of land in Algoma, and the shores of Lake Superior. This is still the rough area within which people are likely to have some relatives, or other personal connections. This area is larger than France.
Trade within this area was extensive, and it existed long before any influence by Europeans. It was trade, not some mystical non-economic “gift exchange”. Hard-headed, profit-oriented, practical, value for value trade. It was not confined to “prestige objects” or ceremonial trinkets. Most of it involved moving ordinary, useful goods in large quantities from places where they were abundant to places where they were scarce, in exchange for goods of proportionate value. Luxury goods, as in most real-life economies, rode piggy-back on trade networks already established for more practical commodities. Trade was not driven by, organized by, or for the benefit of elites. The Weenusk never had any “elites” ― no kings, no powerful chiefs, nobody who could boss anyone around. Tobacco imported from thousands of kilometers away was for everyone.
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