340 Year Old Chinese Coin Found in Yukon

Interesting, but not earth-shattering.  It does show a continuation of a stream or flow of east/west contact, sometimes interrupted, that may go back as far as the Jomon Culture of Japan.

From The Vancouver Sun

Chinese coin found in Yukon evidence of early east-west link

 Artifact probably reached Canada by way of Russian traders

 By Randy Boswell, Postmedia News

November 1, 2011

 

A 340-year-old coin from China has been unearthed by archeologists near a planned Yukon gold mine, shedding fresh light on historic trade links between 17th-century Chinese merchants, Russian fur traders and first nations in the northwest corner of North America.

The coin is etched with traditional Chinese characters indicating it was minted during the Qing Dynasty reign of Emperor Kangxi, who ruled China from 1662 to 1722. But other information stamped on the money piece - which has a large central hole and four smaller ones - shows it was minted in China's Zhili province between 1667 and 1671.

The coin was discovered during a dig near Western Copper and Gold Corp.'s proposed Casino mine site about 300 kilometres northwest of Whitehorse. A heritage impact assessment for the Vancouver mining company was being conducted by Ecofor Consulting Ltd., based in B.C. and Yukon, when the find was made.

Ecofor team leader James Mooney spotted the metal object as a co-worker dug into the ground on a height of land south of Yukon River.

"I was less than a metre from our archeologist Kirby Booker when she turned over the first shovel of topsoil and I caught sight of something dangling from the turf," Mooney said in a statement. "It was the coin - the neatest discovery I've ever been part of."

Subsequent research revealed that it was just the third historic Chinese coin ever found in Yukon, though many more have been recovered at archeological sites in coastal Alaska.

"The coin adds to the body of evidence that the Chinese market connected with Yukon first nations through Russian and coastal Tlingit trade intermediaries during the late 17th and 18th centuries, and perhaps as early as the 15th century," the statement said.

Russian traders seeking furs from North American wildlife - including the sea otter, seal and beaver - are known to have exchanged tobacco, tea, kettles and other goods (some obtained from Chinese traders) with the Tlingit peoples of coastal Alaska.

The Tlingit, in turn, "controlled direct trade with the interior first nations" through the famed Chilkoot Pass, "one of the few entry points through the coastal mountains to the interior."

The location of the coin discovery along the prehistoric trade route - at "a likely place for a traveller to have rested or camped," according to Mooney - is now part of Selkirk First Nation territory in southwestern Yukon, a short distance from the U.S.-Canada border.

Apart from the traditional centre hole in the coin, the four smaller piercings could have been made in China, where it was common for coins to be nailed to gates or doorways for good luck, Mooney said.
On the other hand, first nations in Canada "might have made the extra holes to attach them to clothing," he noted.

"They used the coins as decoration or sewed them in layers like roofing shingles onto hide shirts to protect warriors from arrow impacts."

Paul West-Sells, president of Western Copper and Gold, said in the statement that, "it's satisfying that the work we're doing to support development of the Casino project is also contributing to the understanding of Yukon's heritage."

 

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

Linguistics Again - The Yenseic-Na Dene Connection

Prior post. I found this story at Mike Ruggeri's "The Ancient Americas Breaking News": From The Anchorage Daily News Distant Native languages bridge Bering Sea Siberian culture's words have echo in North America By GEORGE BRYSONgbryson@adn.com Published: March 4th, 2008 12:41 AM Last Modified: March 4th, 2008 03:31 AM A remote population of a few hundred indigenous Siberians who live thousands of miles west of Alaska speak a language that appears to be an ancient relative of more than three dozen Native languages in North America, experts say. A panel of respected linguists who met in Anchorage on Friday are hailing new research that links the Old World language of Ket, still spoken sparingly along the Yenisei River in western Siberia, and the sprawling New World family of Na-Dene languages -- a broad grouping that encompasses the many Athabascan tribes in Alaska, along with the Tlingit and Eyak people, as well as Indian populations in western Canada and the American Southwest, including the Navajo and the Apache. Other than Siberian Yupik, a regional Eskimo dialect that straddles the Bering Strait, a connection between North American and Asian language families had never before been demonstrated. The research by University of Western Washington linguist Edward Vajda, who spent 10 years deciphering the Ket language, drew upon parallel work by three Alaskans -- Jeff Leer, Michael Krauss and James Kari, professors of linguistics at the University of Alaska Fairbanks -- who independently detailed patterns in Na-Dene languages. Establishing that two such far-distant language groups are closely related is both demanding and rare in the exacting field of historical linguistics, according to participants who attended a language symposium at the annual meeting of the Alaska Anthropological Association. That Interior Indian languages spoken in North America are related to languages spoken in Asia has long been assumed, since other fields of science have widely concluded that the Americas weren't populated until ice age hunters migrated across a temporary land bridge from the old world to the new some 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. And as early as 1923, other linguists speculated specifically about a genetic link between the Yeniseic family of languages spoken along the Yenisei River (of which Ket is now the only surviving member) and the Na-Dene family, spoken in North America. Ten years ago, American linguist Merritt Ruhlen did so again after producing a list of 36 cognates -- comparable words in two languages that sound alike and mean the same thing. But producing lists of similar-sounding words isn't sufficient evidence to establish a real genetic relationship between two languages, declared Bernard Comrie, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, speaking at the conference. That's because cognates can also occur by accident or chance -- when selective words are adopted by travelers from unrelated languages, or when words have a universal appeal. [Yeah, okay. So, what are the odds that this happened 15,000 years ago in a remote region of Siberia???] What makes the new finding so exciting, Comrie said, is that it's based on complex and verifiable morphologies that show how certain Ket words were systematically altered to create Athabascan words -- or vice versa (the research doesn't speculate on which language came first or when). Vajda began studying the Ket language firsthand in the 1990s after the Iron Curtain fell and he interviewed Ket speakers in the southwestern Siberia city of Tomsk, as well as in Germany. "There is no road and no train," Vajda said in an interview last week in Anchorage, here to address the symposium. "You have to go by steamboat or helicopter to get there." Through his research and interviews, Vajda determined that there are about 1,200 people who say they are Ket, including about 200 people who speak the language. But only about 100 speak Ket fluently, Vajda said, and nearly all of them are now older than 50. "They were the last hunters of north Asia that didn't have any domesticated animals that they used for food," he said. "They moved around, they didn't live in the same place." That came to an end when the Stalin regime in the Soviet Union forced the Ket to live in villages. Now their traditional lifestyle is nearly gone, Vajda said -- and their language is disappearing too. While trying to capture it before it vanishes altogether, Vajda gained a new understanding about the peculiarities of Ket verbs, suffixes and tonalities -- which are unlike any of the other Siberian languages to the east. Comparing what he learned with research conducted independently in Alaska, Vajda began to find words the two languages had in common. A news release issued this week by the Alaska Native Language Center at UAF concurs, noting language similarities "too numerous and displaying too many idiosyncratic parallels to be explained by anything other than common descent." Among linguistic scholars elsewhere who've reviewed Vajda's paper in its draft form and reacted favorably so far is Dr. Heinrich Werner of Bonn, Germany -- a world authority in the Ket language, whose work Vajda cited and incorporated into his own, along with that of the Alaskans. Vajda thinks his research might be a door-opener for scientists in other fields, including those who work in human genetics and archaeology, to proceed with additional comparisons of the two cultures. He says it also points out the necessity and urgency to record dying languages before they disappear.