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What if the North Americans told the Europeans stories about the stone buildings in South America? The buildings had already existed for a long time when the V

• jaclaz 5y ago
  >The first pyramids in America were built 1500-2000 years before the Vikings. We are closer to the Viking age, than they were to the first stone buildings at the time. I don't think we should underestimate how far stories can travel given enough time. Sure, but Occam's razor would probably come out with the fact that stories can be invented alright in almost no time. Fishermen (and sailors, and more generally travelers in the ancient times) have a long tradition of fabricating (tall) stories and/or exxagerating whatever they actually had seen or had been told, think of all the various bestiaries that were common in medieval times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bestiary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bestiary
• jcranmer 5y ago
  The pyramids you're talking about are in Norte Chico, the Peruvian coast of South America. South American chronology firmly establishes a pretty continuous history from those early countries down through the Wari culture, which was the chief Andean empire at the time of the Viking visits to Vinland (most people are only familiar with their successor culture, the Inca). Shifting to Mesoamerica, we're in the very early Postclassic--Teotihuacan has been abandoned, and Maya dominance is shifting from the Guatemalan Highlands to the Yucatan Peninsula. These cultures also built large megalithic structures. In North America proper, 1000 correlates with the height of the Mississippian cultures, which are noted for their use of large earthen, not lithic structures. This is about when Cahokia is building Monk's Mound for example. Going further northeast across the Appalachians is difficult for me to come across firmer chronology, because the narrative is dominated by the setup of Native Americans at the time of English settlement (~1600 and later), which isn't the same as that at the time of Viking settlement (~1000-1100). Although it is worth pointing out that Viking settlement is roughly the time that the Dorset culture is being replaced by the Thule culture that makes up the modern Inuit. As for trade routes, there are pretty well-established trade routes linking many of these places. Mexico's Pacific Coast and the US Southwest cultures seems to have pretty strong trade routes with the Andean coastline regions, and metallurgy probably diffused along that route. It's also thought that there was extensive contact between the Andean highlands and the Amazon river basin, and there are some tentative suggestions that the lineage of pottery in Mississippian and antecedent Southeastern cultures comes from the Amazon via the Caribbean. But Mesoamerica and the US Southwest are somewhat insulated from Mississippian and Southeastern cultures by large desert and semidesert regions, and most notably, corn takes an awfully long time to make its way from Mesoamerica into the eastern US, first showing up only around 1000. I'd be more likely to point to Inuksuk [1] as a basis for large stone construction known to the Vikings than stone pyramids existing very, very remotely along the trading routes. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuksuk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuksuk