Medieval walrus ivory may reveal trade between Norse and Indigenous Americans hundreds of years before Columbus, study finds

A dogged search for walrus ivory may have brought two unlikely cultures together — the Thule Inuits of the Arctic and the Norse of Greenland — hundreds of years before Christopher Columbus set sail, a new study suggests.

By analyzing samples of Atlantic walrus (Odobenus rosmarus rosmarus) tusk ivory collected by Norse explorers in Greenland and later exported to Europe for trade, archaeologists have pinpointed locations where the Norse and Inuit likely overlapped, they reported in a study published Sept. 27 in the journal Science Advances.

The researchers also built and sailed in clinker-built Norwegian boats to understand the long and dangerous journey that the Norse people may have taken from southern Greenland into the High Arctic to hunt walruses.

Previously, archaeologists knew that Norse, or Scandinavian, settlers on Iceland and Greenland had hunted walruses for their ivory starting around A.D. 900, establishing a trade network that extended across Europe.

"Walrus ivory was considered the gold of that time," study first author Emily Ruiz-Puerta, a bioarchaeologist at the University of Copenhagen, told Live Science. "People used walrus ivory to pay church taxes. It was considered a very elite gift."

Related: Epic 11-foot-tall sea level rise drove Vikings out of Greenland

The Norse eventually decimated the walrus population of Iceland, and had to sail to Greenland to keep up the flow of ivory. Archaeologists had assumed that walrus hunting by the Norse had happened only in southern Greenland, where they had settled. But in her 2024 thesis, Ruiz-Puerta studied the genetic fingerprints of walruses across the Arctic, and found that each population had a distinct genetic signature. This meant that if she could extract DNA from a walrus ivory artifact in Greenland or Europe, Ruiz-Puerta could pinpoint where it had come from in North America and Iceland.

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"What really surprised us was that much of the walrus ivory exported back to Europe was originating in very remote hunting grounds located deep into the High Arctic," Peter Jordan, a professor of archaeology at Lund University in Sweden and senior author on the study, said in a statement.

By the 13th century, most walrus ivory samples came from hundreds of miles north of Norse settlements, Ruiz-Puerta said. For Norse traders to access walrus ivory so far north, it's possible they developed sailing capabilities advanced enough to survive the sea ice so they could hunt walruses and possibly even trade for ivory with the Thule Inuit, an Indigenous people who lived in what are now parts of eastern Russia, the Canadian Arctic and Greenland. Alternatively, perhaps the Norse stayed put in southern Greenland and traded with the Thule Inuit there.

Also around the 13th century, the Thule Inuit had recently migrated to these same northern hunting grounds. They were experts in Arctic living, and had developed sophisticated "toggling" harpoons that would latch into prey, enabling them to hunt walrus in open waters. They would have been capable of providing the Norse traders with walrus ivory, if the Norse had anything valuable to trade with, the researchers suggested.

Evidence of the Thule Inuit traveling far enough south to contact Norse settlements on Greenland hasn't been found, the study noted. But it's possible that the Norse traveled north to the High Arctic to hunt walruses and interacted with the Thule Inuit there, the researchers suggested. To test this idea, study co-author Greer Jarrett, an archaeologist at Lund University, recreated and sailed in Norse boats to learn about the journey's feasibility and the possible routes Norse voyagers may have taken to the High Arctic.

To pull off this journey, "walrus hunters probably departed from the Norse settlements as soon as the sea ice retreated," Jarrett said in the statement. "Those aiming for the far north had a very tight seasonal window within which to travel up the coast, hunt walrus, process and store the hides and ivory onboard their vessels, and return home before the seas froze again." The Norse likely would have hunted hundreds of walruses in this short period, and only made the treacherous journey every few years, Ruiz-Puerta added.

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Jarrett and his colleagues' journeys helped them understand Norse capabilities. It was possible for Norse traders to sail hundreds of miles into the Arctic circle, where they possibly encountered the Thule Inuit, the researchers found.

It's likely that the Vikings, who were largely Norse, met Indigenous Americans even earlier in Newfoundland, Canada, where the Vikings arrived in A.D. 1021. It also appears likely that Greenland's Norse people had encounters with the Tuniit, who preceded the Thule Inuit, the researchers wrote. For instance, a brass pot fragment was found at a Tuniit site by northwest Greenland, the researchers noted. But in the case of the possible walrus-hunting connection, contact between Indigenous North Americans and Europeans could have happened in the 13th century, around 200 years before Columbus landed in the Caribbean.

"I think for human history, that's really important," Ruiz-Puerta said.