On an Early Colony

Growing up, my interest in history made me want to become an archaeologist. However, when I realized that 99% of that profession is in the pursuit of the artefact and not the actual finding of it, my innate laziness put the kibosh on that possible career. The opposite was true for a woman named Anne Stine Ingstad. Anne relished the pursuit, the chase, the digging, and the tedious research required by a classic archaeologist.

And Anne was led to excavate a site of one of America’s first colonies of European settlement. We probably all know about Roanoke Island, the first English attempt at settlement and how those colonists mysteriously vanished. Most of us have heard about colonial Jamestown or Williamsburg and those more successful attempt at a permanent English settlement in North America. But the site of the place of early attempt at a colony where Anne dug was a bit more north than what became Virginia.

Anne and her collaborator/husband, Helge, began surveying and carefully uncovering their site on the northeastern coast of North America in 1961 at a site called Grassland Bay. Locals pointed out the small settlement area to Anne by saying they thought the lumps of earth marked an old Native American campsite. However, Anne’s trained eye soon realized that it was a previously unknown and uncatalogued European site. For the next seven years, she and her husband and a growing team of researchers dug the site. What they discovered and uncovered was astounding and re-wrote the colonial history of America.

Over the years, the team was able to uncover and positively identify the remains of sod houses built on timber frames. Inside them, metal needles were found along with fragile bits of fabric, indicating that women were indeed part of the early settlement. They uncovered large, centralized cooking pits, proving that much of the food was prepared for the group rather than for individual houses and families. They found remnants of an iron forge, thus showing that the site didn’t belong to native tribespeople but rather to metal-working Europeans. And they found boathouses and boat-repair shops, indicating that the place was used as a way-station for other ships which passed by. All in all, the excavations carried out by Anne and the team proved beyond doubt that besides the fact that the colony was European, that it was occupied for some decades, and that it was from the early colonial settlement period.

But Anne’s work met some opposition in some corners of the history and archaeology disciplines. Since there was no corroborating narrative about an attempt at a colony at that site, there were skeptics who said that it was a much later site than what Anne and her team had proposed. Rather than a European colony, they argued, that it was merely an outpost of later settlements further down the North American coast.

But Anne then used carbon-dating methods to show that the wood used in the building of the sod huts was older than any of the other European colonial attempts. In fact, the proof Anne had showed that it may have been the oldest European settlement in North America–ever. She thus silenced her critics.

And, today, we recognize that Anne Stine Ingstad uncovered the fact that Vikings settled in Newfoundland, in North America a full 600 years before the English tried to colonize the New World.

On a Genome Project

The study of genetics and the promise of genome science hold out the hope for a future of increased health and quality of life for many. In the meantime, the science has been used for more mundane yet still fascinating purposes. Genealogists have been accessing genetic information for years now, connecting people to ancestors they never knew they had. One such attempt at tracing ancestry in Iceland recently has been interesting and revealing.

The project involves a man named Hans Jonatan, a man of Danish descent who immigrated to Iceland in 1802. I use the term “immigrated” loosely, because Hans apparently hid himself on a ship that left Copenhagen and entered Iceland secretly. He left Denmark after having fought in the Danish Navy, a service in which he distinguished himself. It seems that the prospect of him being sent to the West Indies prompted Hans to make his escape to Iceland. He got a job at a trading post in a village there, and ended up having a wife and a large family. All in all, a good if difficult life.

Fast forward to 2018. Genetic specialists wanted to recreate Hans Jonatan’s genome by only using his descendants’ genetic samples and not using any of the man’s own physical, genetic material. That had never been attempted before. Luckily, Hans Jonatan’s family in Iceland has grown significantly in the past 200 years. Taking samples from several of those family members, scientists were able to reconstruct almost 40% of Jonatan’s mother’s DNA and almost 20% of his.

You might be wondering how this was possible. How could the genetic makeup of someone be recreated simply by, in a way, reverse engineering the man’s DNA? Well, first of all, the fact that Iceland is a remote island nation certainly helps. The place is perfectly set up to isolate a person’s genetic history. And then there’s the other, even more important marker, especially concerning Hans Jonatan’s mother.

You see, while Jonatan’s father was Danish, his mother certainly was not. She was a slave from Africa, brought to the Danish colony of St. Croix, where she met Jonatan’s father. The genome project found that she was from West African tribes. That fact is also why it was so much easier to identify the DNA markers in the attempt to re-create Hans Jonatan’s genes. And the fact that his mother was a slave is why why Hans was being sent back to the West Indies after his naval service.

And, it’s why he escaped to Iceland. Yes, by stowing away and making it to Iceland, he became the first black man to ever live there. And now, over 900 of his direct descendants live there, too.

On a Weird Pair of Pants

Iceland is a weird place. First of all, many people don’t have last names–seriously. They take the first name of their fathers and add -son or -daughter (-son/-dottir). So, you’ll have a different last name than your dad (if his dad didn’t have his same first name). So, yeah. They eat strange things, get all their energy from the earth (not a bad thing!), and let’s not even begin to talk about the language and grammar. But the Icelandic folklore is perhaps the most odd thing about this interesting and odd nation of fewer than 375,000 people.

The isolation of the place helped to foster a rich if sometimes oddly twisted culture of strange practices and stories. The Christianity that the island nation practiced a few hundred years ago had not quite shed some of its Danish pre-Christian rituals, and even witchcraft was known to be practiced. For example, if prayer couldn’t heal you or your loved one from whatever ailment you or they had, you would turn to the local practitioner of folk medicine or traditional healing rituals for help. This practice also applied to such things as casting spells on ones enemies to seek revenge or asking for a spell or talisman to help you get lucky and/or fall into some money. And if you think that this is weird, remember that they were killing witches over in Salem, Massachusetts many years after this time period.

That’s where the pants come in. Icelandic folklore has a story that if you wore the pants of your enemy (or friend, even) after their death, you would get all the money that they would have gotten had they been alive. You’d put on the pants, and then you would have to place a coin in the crotch of the pants. The coin would have to have been somehow stolen or surreptitiously taken from the man’s widow without her knowledge. Having done this, the pants would then fill with money as long as you didn’t remove the first coin. And when you died, you would have to pass the pants on to your closest male relative so the endless supply of money would continue for the next generation. If you don’t believe me, it’s all chronicled in the Icelandic Museum of Sorcery and Witchcraft–for real.

And when I say that you had to wear the pants of the person after they were dead, I mean exactly that. The pants, you see, had to be made from the actual person–the skin of the dead person–that you would flay from the waist down, take the skin, dry it, and then make the skin into pants. By wearing them, the folklore said you were, in effect, becoming that person, and that would therefore allow you to fall heir to all their money.

The Icelandic word for these “death pants” is Nabrok.

Told you it was a weird place.