The history of Venetian pearls is interesting. Interesting and important, to the point that these small, precious glass objects could be the element that calls into question the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus. Why if history documents that Columbus arrived in the Americas in October 1492, recent archaeological discoveries tell us that several decades before that date some Europeans had already arrived in the New World. Not exactly where Columbus landed but a little further north, in the cold lands of Alaska. The new history of Venetian pearls begins here.
The news comes from these days and joins the equally recent one of the recognition, by Unesco, of the art of glass beads as an intangible cultural heritage of humanity. Pearls traveled, we wrote on that occasion, because they were used as a bargaining chip in markets all over the world. It was known that Christopher Columbus had them with him when he arrived in America. But it was not known that someone else, long before, had already brought them to those places and exchanged them with the inhabitants of those territories. Small glass beads have in fact been found in Alaska, in the Brokks Range, near Punyik Point, in a seasonal Inuit camp near the Continental Divide..
It is an area characterized by ancient trade routes. These pearls, with a hole in the center, little more than a blueberry and of the same color as this berry, have been dated between 1440 and 1480. This is certified by a radiocarbon test carried out not on the pearls but on the string found together with them. and that it was probably used to wear them as jewelry.
A small string of vegetable origin made it possible to date the ancient finds
They are not the first such artifacts found in these freezing Alaska territories. Some of them had already been found in the XNUMXs and XNUMXs. But at the time the discovery did not seem so important as it was not possible to date the small pearls found. Those too were colored turquoise and even those were in the Punyik Point area. In more recent times a dozen of them had been recovered between the localities of Kinyiksugvik and Lake Kaiyak House. Other researches followed, other findings. A small treasure of ancient metal rings, copper bracelets, earrings… and a string that, despite its age, was still intact. This is the turning point. Since string is made of plant fibers, there was organic matter to be able to perform radiocarbon dating using mass spectometry. The picture has reassembled itself.
"We almost fainted when the results arrived: the plant was alive in the fifteenth century," they said in a American Antiquity magazine article, Mike Kunz and Robin Mills Bureau of Land Management archaeologists and authors of the findings. “These we have found - affirm the two scholars - are undoubtedly the first European objects arrived in the New World by land". An epochal discovery, which calls into question the primacy of Christopher Columbus in the discovery of the Americas. Someone had therefore arrived before him, through the trade routes that started from Europe with the compass oriented to the east.
From Murano to Alaska, along the Silk Road and the Bering Strait
Merchants of the time crossed thousands of kilometers in wagons or on horseback along the Silk Road to China and Eastern Siberia. From here, on board kayaks, they crossed the Bering Strait. To land in Alaska after a journey of 80 kilometers on the open sea. And if you think that these small objects were produced in the kilns of Murano, the island of glass in the Venice lagoon, it is assumed that the pearls (and whoever wore them) traveled a route over sixteen thousand kilometers long. Venetian pearls, truly great travelers.
