colonization of the Americas, involving a number of European countries, took place primarily between the late 15th century and the early 19th century. The Norse had explored and colonized areas of Europe and the North Atlantic, colonizing Greenland and creating a short term settlement near the northern tip of Newfoundland circa 1000 AD. However, due to its long duration and importance, the later colonization by the European powers involving the continents of North America and South America is more well-known.[2][3][4][5]
With the signing of the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, Portugal and Spain agreed to divide the Earth in two, with Portugal having dominion over non-Christian lands in the world's eastern half, and Spain over those in the western half. Spanish claims essentially included all of the Americas; however, the Treaty of Tordesillas granted the eastern tip of South America to Portugal, where it established Brazil in the early 1500s, and the East Indies to Spain, where It established the Philippines. The city of Santo Domingo, in the current-day Dominican Republic, founded in 1496 by Columbus, is credited as the oldest continuously inhabited European-established settlement in the Americas.[10]
By the 1530s, other Western European powers realized they too could benefit from voyages to the Americas, leading to
Violent conflicts arose during the beginning of this period as indigenous peoples fought to preserve their territorial integrity from increasing European colonizers and from hostile indigenous neighbors who were equipped with Eurasian technology. Conflict between the various European empires and the indigenous peoples was a leading dynamic in the Americas into the 1800s, although some parts of the continent gained their
Other regions, including California, Patagonia, the North Western Territory, and the northern Great Plains, experienced little to no colonization at all until the 1800s. European contact and colonization had disastrous effects on the indigenous peoples of the Americas and their societies.[2][3][4][5]
Norse colonization of the Americas.[15] Leif Erikson's brother is said to have had the first contact with the native population of North America which would come to be known as the skrælings. After capturing and killing eight of the natives, they were attacked at their beached ships, which they defended.[16]
While the Norse established some colonies in the north-eastern part of North America as early as the tenth century, systematic European colonization began in 1492. A
expedition sailed west in order to find a new trade route to the Far East, the source of spices, silks, porcelains, and other rich trade goods. Ottoman control of the Silk Road, the traditional route for trade between Europe and Asia, forced European traders to look for alternative routes. The Genoese mariner Christopher Columbus led an expedition to find a route to East Asia, but instead landed in The Bahamas.[17] Columbus encountered the Lucayan people on the island Guanahani (possibly Cat Island), which they had inhabited since the ninth century. In his reports, Columbus exaggerated the quantity of gold in the East Indies, which he called the "New World
". These claims, along with the slaves he brought back, convinced the monarchy to fund a second voyage. Word of Columbus's exploits spread quickly, sparking the Western European exploration, conquest, and colonization of the Americas.
Spanish explorers, conquerors, and settlers sought material wealth, prestige, and the spread of Christianity, often summed up in the phrase "gold, glory, and God".[18] The Spanish justified their claims to the New World based on the ideals of the Christian Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula from the Muslims, completed in 1492.[19] In the New World, military conquest to incorporate indigenous peoples into Christendom was considered the "spiritual conquest". In 1493, Pope Alexander VI, the first Spaniard to become Pope, issued a series of Papal Bulls that confirmed Spanish claims to the newly discovered lands.[20]
After the final
Iberia, the Treaty of Tordesillas was ratified by the Pope, the two kingdoms of Castile (in a personal union with other kingdoms of Spain) and Portugal in 1494. The treaty divided the entire non-European world into two spheres of exploration and colonization. The longitudinal
boundary cut through the Atlantic Ocean and the eastern part of present-day Brazil. The countries declared their rights to the land despite the fact that Indigenous populations had settled from pole to pole in the hemisphere and was their homeland.
After European contact, the native population of the Americas plummeted by an estimated 80% (from around 50 million in 1492 to eight million in 1650), due in part to Old World diseases carried to the New World,
encomenderos. Spain had a legal tradition and devised a proclamation known as The Requerimento to be read to indigenous populations in Spanish, often far from the field of battle, stating that the indigenous were now subjects of the Spanish Crown and would be punished if they resisted.[25] When the news of this situation and of the abuse of the institution reached Spain, the New Laws were passed to regulate and gradually abolish the system in the Americas, as well as to reiterate the prohibition of enslaving Native Americans. By the time the new laws were passed, 1542, the Spanish crown had acknowledged their inability to control and properly ensure compliance of traditional laws overseas, so they granted to Native Americans specific protections not even Spaniards had, such as the prohibition of enslaving them even in the case of crime or war. These extra protections were an attempt to avoid the proliferation of irregular claims to slavery.[26] However, as historian Andrés Reséndez has noted, "this categorical prohibition did not stop generations of determined conquistadors and colonists from taking Native slaves on a planetary scale, ... The fact that this other slavery had to be carried out clandestinely made it even more insidious. It is a tale of good intentions gone badly astray."[27]
A major event in early Spanish colonization, which had so far yielded paltry returns, was the
New Spain". More than an estimated 240,000 Aztecs died during the siege of Tenochtitlan, 100,000 in combat,[28] while 500–1,000 of the Spaniards engaged in the conquest died. The other great conquest was of the Inca Empire (1531–35), led by Francisco Pizarro
.
During the early period of exploration, conquest, and settlement, c. 1492–1550, the overseas possessions claimed by Spain were only loosely controlled by the crown. With the conquests of the Aztecs and the Incas, the New World now commanded the crown's attention. Both Mexico and Peru had dense, hierarchically organized indigenous populations that could be incorporated and ruled. Even more importantly, both Mexico and Peru had large deposits of silver, which became the economic motor of the Spanish empire and transformed the world economy. In Peru, the singular, hugely rich
, in Newfoundland, Greenland, Labrador, and Nova Scotia (from 1498 to 1502, and in 1520).
During this time, the Portuguese gradually switched from an initial plan of establishing trading posts to extensive
quinto real collected by the Casa de Contratación), in addition to collecting all the taxes they could. By the late 16th century silver from the Americas accounted for one-fifth of the combined total budget of Portugal and Spain.[29] In the 16th century perhaps 240,000 Europeans entered ports in the Americas.[30][31]
France founded colonies in the Americas: in eastern North America (which had not been colonized by Spain north of Florida), a number of Caribbean islands (which had often already been conquered by the Spanish or depopulated by disease), and small coastal parts of South America. Explorers included Giovanni da Verrazzano in 1524; Jacques Cartier (1491–1557), and Samuel de Champlain (1567–1635), who explored the region of Canada he reestablished as New France.[32]
In the French colonial regions, the focus of economy was on sugar plantations in the French West Indies. In Canada the fur trade with the natives was important. About 16,000 French men and women became colonizers. The great majority became subsistence farmers along the St. Lawrence River. With a favorable disease environment and plenty of land and food, their numbers grew exponentially to 65,000 by 1760. Their colony was taken over by Britain in 1760, but social, religious, legal, cultural, and economic changes were few in a society that clung tightly to its recently formed traditions.[33][34]
British colonization began with North America almost a century after Spain. The relatively late arrival meant that the British could use the other European colonization powers as models for their endeavors.
Anabaptists also flocked to Pennsylvania. The lure of cheap land, religious freedom and the right to improve themselves with their own hand was very attractive.[37]
Mainly due to discrimination, there was often a separation between English colonial communities and indigenous communities. The Europeans viewed the natives as savages who were not worthy of participating in what they considered civilized society.[
John Smith convinced the colonists of Jamestown that searching for gold was not taking care of their immediate needs for food and shelter. The lack of food security leading to extremely high mortality rate was quite distressing and cause for despair among the colonists. To support the colony, numerous supply missions were organized. Tobacco later became a cash crop, with the work of John Rolfe and others, for export and the sustaining economic driver of Virginia and the neighboring colony of Maryland. Plantation agriculture was a primary aspect of the economies of the Southern Colonies and in the British West Indies. They heavily relied on African slave labor to sustain their economic pursuits.[citation needed
]
From the beginning of Virginia's settlements in 1587 until the 1680s, the main source of labor and a large portion of the immigrants were
indentured servants looking for new life in the overseas colonies. During the 17th century, indentured servants constituted three-quarters of all European immigrants to the Chesapeake Colonies. Most of the indentured servants were teenagers from England with poor economic prospects at home. Their fathers signed the papers that gave them free passage to America and an unpaid job until they became of age. They were given food, clothing, housing and taught farming or household skills. American landowners were in need of laborers and were willing to pay for a laborer's passage to America if they served them for several years. By selling passage for five to seven years worth of work, they could then start on their own in America.[39] Many of the migrants from England died in the first few years.[9]
Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen became the administrator of the colony (1637–43), building a capital city and royal palace, fully expecting the Dutch to retain control of this rich area. As the Dutch had in Europe, it tolerated the presence of Jews and other religious groups in the colony. After Maurits departed in 1643, the Dutch West India Company took over the colony, until it was lost to the Portuguese in 1654. The Dutch retained some territory in Dutch Guiana, now Suriname. The Dutch also seized islands in the Caribbean that Spain had originally claimed but had largely abandoned, including Sint Maarten in 1618, Bonaire in 1634, Curaçao in 1634, Sint Eustatius in 1636, Aruba
in 1637, some of which remain in Dutch hands and retain Dutch cultural traditions.
On the east coast of North America, the Dutch planted the colony of
Weckquaesgeeks.[42] Dutch fur traders set up a network upstream on the Hudson River
. There were Jewish settlers from 1654 onward, and they remained following the English capture of New Amsterdam in 1664. The naval capture was despite both nations being at peace with the other.
Russia came to colonization late compared to Spain or Portugal, or even England.
Cossack explorers along rivers sought valuable furs of ermine, sable, and fox. Cossacks enlisted the aid of indigenous Siberians, who sought protection from nomadic peoples, and those peoples paid tribute in fur to the czar. Thus, prior to the eighteenth century Russian expansion that pushed beyond the Bering Strait
dividing Eurasia from North America, Russia had experience with northern indigenous peoples and accumulated wealth from the hunting of fur bearing animals. Siberia had already attracted a core group of scientists, who sought to map and catalogue the flora, fauna, and other aspects of the natural world.
A major Russian expedition for exploration was mounted in 1742, contemporaneous with other eighteenth-century European state-sponsored ventures. It was not clear at the time whether Eurasia and North America were completely separate continents. The first voyages were made by
Indigenous peoples' native religions was systematically perpetrated by the European Christian colonists and settlers from the 15th–16th centuries onwards.[3][2][4][5][7][8]
During the
Jesuits often created missions, bringing together dispersed Indigenous populations in communities supervised by the friars in order to more easily preach the gospel and ensure their adherence to the faith. These missions were established throughout Spanish America which extended from the southwestern portions of current-day United States
through Mexico and to Argentina and Chile.
As
philosopher Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, held the Valladolid debate, with the former arguing that Native Americans were endowed with souls like all other human beings, while the latter argued to the contrary to justify their enslavement. In 1537, the papal bull Sublimis Deus
definitively recognized that Native Americans possessed souls, thus prohibiting their enslavement, without putting an end to the debate. Some claimed that a native who had rebelled and then been captured could be enslaved nonetheless.
When the first
Indigenous peoples' native religions.[52] However, in Pre-Columbian Mexico, burning the temple of a conquered group was standard practice, shown in Indigenous manuscripts, such as Codex Mendoza. Conquered Indigenous groups expected to take on the gods of their new overlords, adding them to the existing pantheon. They likely were unaware that their conversion to Christianity entailed the complete and irrevocable renunciation of their ancestral religious beliefs and practices. In 1539, Mexican bishop Juan de Zumárraga oversaw the trial and execution of the Indigenous nobleman Carlos of Texcoco for apostasy from Christianity.[53] Following that, the Catholic Church removed Indigenous converts from the jurisdiction of the Inquisition, since it had a chilling effect on evangelization. In creating a protected group of Christians, Indigenous men no longer could aspire to be ordained Christian priests.[54]
Throughout the Americas, the
Jesuits were active in attempting to convert the Indigenous peoples to Christianity. They had considerable success on the frontiers in New France[55] and Portuguese Brazil, most famously with Antonio de Vieira, S.J;[56] and in Paraguay, almost an autonomous state within a state.[57]
The
Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe Up-Biblum God, a translation by John Eliot of the gospel into Algonquian
, was published in 1663.
Religion and migration
Cartagena de Indias in Colombia to maintain religious orthodoxy and practice. The Portuguese did not establish a permanent office of the Portuguese Inquisition in Brazil, but did send visitations of inquistors in the seventeenth century.[59]
English and Dutch colonies, on the other hand, tended to be more religiously diverse. Settlers to these colonies included
The European lifestyle included a long history of sharing close quarters with domesticated animals such as cows, pigs, sheep, goats, horses, dogs and various domesticated
indigenous people of the Americas
.
Epidemics of smallpox (1518, 1521, 1525, 1558, 1589), typhus (1546), influenza (1558), diphtheria (1614) and measles (1618) swept the Americas subsequent to European contact,[63][64] killing between 10 million and 100 million[65] people, up to 95% of the indigenous population of the Americas.[66] The cultural and political instability attending these losses appears to have been of substantial aid in the efforts of various colonists in New England and Massachusetts to acquire control over the great wealth in land and resources of which indigenous societies had customarily made use.[67]
Such diseases yielded human mortality of an unquestionably enormous gravity and scale – and this has profoundly confused efforts to determine its full extent with any true precision. Estimates of the
pre-Columbian population of the Americas
vary tremendously.
Others have argued that significant variations in population size over pre-Columbian history are reason to view higher-end estimates with caution. Such estimates may reflect historical population maxima, while indigenous populations may have been at a level somewhat below these maxima or in a moment of decline in the period just prior to contact with Europeans. Indigenous populations hit their ultimate lows in most areas of the Americas in the early 20th century; in a number of cases, growth has returned.[68]
According to scientists from University College London, the colonization of the Americas by Europeans killed so much of the indigenous population that it resulted in climate change and global cooling.[69][70][71] Some contemporary scholars also attribute significant indigenous population losses in the Caribbean to the widespread practice of slavery and deadly forced labor in gold and silver mines.[72][73][74] Historian Andrés Reséndez, supports this claim and argues that indigenous populations were smaller previous estimations and "a nexus of slavery, overwork and famine killed more Indians in the Caribbean than smallpox, influenza and malaria."[75]
Slavery
Main articles:
Bartolomé de Las Casas's indictment of early Spanish cruelty, known as the Black legend
, and indigenous barbarity, including human cannibalism, in an attempt to justify their enslavement.
Indigenous population loss following European contact directly led to Spanish explorations beyond the Caribbean islands they initially claimed and settled in the 1490s, since they required a labor force to both produce food and to mine gold. Slavery was not unknown in Indigenous societies.[citation needed] With the arrival of European colonists, enslavement of Indigenous peoples "became commodified, expanded in unexpected ways, and came to resemble the kinds of human trafficking that are recognizable to us today".[76]
While disease was the main killer of indigenous peoples, the practice of slavery and forced labor was also significant contributor to the indigenous death toll.
repartimiento system which was not abolished until the late 18th century.[78]
In the Caribbean, deposits of gold were quickly exhausted and the precipitous drop in the indigenous population meant a severe labor shortage. Spaniards sought a high value, low bulk export product to make their fortunes.
chattel slaves. Plantations required a significant work force to be purchased, housed, and fed; capital investment in building sugar mills on-site, since once cane was cut, the sugar content rapidly declined. Plantation owners were linked to creditors and a network of merchants to sell processed sugar in Europe. The whole system was predicated on a huge, enslaved population. The Portuguese controlled the African slave trade, since the division of spheres with Spain in the Treaty of Tordesillas, they controlled the African coasts. Black slavery dominated the labor force in tropical zones, particularly where sugar was cultivated, in Portuguese Brazil, the English, French, and Dutch Caribbean islands. On the mainland of North America, the English southern colonies imported black slaves, starting in Virginia in 1619
, to cultivate other tropical or semi-tropical crops such as tobacco, rice, and cotton.
Although black slavery is most associated with agricultural production, in Spanish America enslaved and free blacks and
Jesuits created hugely profitable agricultural enterprises and held a significant black slave labor force. European whites often justified the practice through the belts of latitude theory, supported by Aristotle and Ptolemy. In this perspective, belts of latitude wrapped around the Earth and corresponded with specific human traits. The peoples from the "cold zone" in Northern Europe were "of lesser prudence", while those of the "hot zone" in sub-Sahara Africa were intelligent but "weaker and less spirited".[76] According to the theory, those of the "temperate zone" across the Mediterranean reflected an ideal balance of strength and prudence. Such ideas about latitude and character justified a natural human hierarchy.[76]
African slaves were a highly valuable commodity, enriching those involved in the trade. Africans were transported to slave ships to the Americas, were primarily obtained from their African homelands by coastal tribes who captured and sold them. Europeans traded for slaves with the local native African tribes who captured them elsewhere in exchange for rum, guns, gunpowder, and other manufactures. The total
slave trade to islands in the Caribbean, Brazil, the Portuguese, Spanish, French, Dutch, and British Empires is estimated to have involved 12 million Africans.[79][80] The vast majority of these slaves went to sugar colonies in the Caribbean and to Brazil, where life expectancy was short and the numbers had to be continually replenished. At most about 600,000 African slaves were imported into the United States, or 5% of the 12 million slaves brought across from Africa.[81]
Colonization and race
Throughout the South American hemisphere, there were three large regional sources of populations: Native Americans, arriving Europeans, and forcibly transported Africans. The mixture of these cultures impacted the ethnic makeup that predominates in the hemisphere's largely independent states today. The term to describe someone of mixed European and indigenous ancestry is mestizo while the term to describe someone of mixed European and African ancestry is mulatto. The mestizo and mulatto population are specific to Iberian-influenced current-day Latin America because the conquistadors had (often forced) sexual relations with the indigenous and African women.[82] The social interaction of these three groups of people inspired the creation of a caste system based on skin tone. The hierarchy centered around those with the lightest skin tone and ordered from highest to lowest was the Peninsulares, Criollos, mestizos, indigenous, mulatto, then African.[20]
Unlike the Iberians, the British men came with families with whom they planned to permanently live in what is now North America.[36]
They kept the natives on the margins of colonial society.
Because the British colonizers' wives were present, the British men rarely had sexual relations with the native women. While the mestizo and mulatto population make up the majority of people in Latin America today, there is only a small mestizo population in present-day North America (excluding Central America).[35]
Colonization and gender
By the early to mid-16th century, even the Iberian men began to carry their wives and families to the Americas. Some women even carried out the voyage alone.[83] Later, more studies of the role of women and female migration from Europe to the Americas have been made.[84]
Impact of colonial land ownership on long-term development
Eventually, most of the Western Hemisphere came under the control of Western European governments, leading to changes to its landscape, population, and plant and animal life. In the 19th century over 50 million people left Western Europe for the Americas.[85] The post-1492 era is known as the period of the Columbian exchange, a dramatically widespread exchange of animals, plants, culture, human populations (including slaves), ideas, and communicable disease between the American and Afro-Eurasian hemispheres following Columbus's voyages to the Americas.
Most scholars writing at the end of the 19th century estimated that the
Geographic differences between the colonies played a large determinant in the types of political and economic systems that later developed. In their paper on institutions and long-run growth, economists
smallholder
production over forced labor.
commercial agriculture, and they ultimately raised the bargaining power
of the middle class. Both nations eventually developed more democratic and egalitarian institutions than their highly concentrated landowning counterparts.
List of European colonies in the Americas
There were at least a dozen European countries involved in the colonization of the Americas. The following list indicates those countries and the Western Hemisphere territories they worked to control.[91]
In 2007, the Smithsonian InstitutionNational Museum of American History and the Virginia Historical Society (VHS) co-organized a traveling exhibition to recount the strategic alliances and violent conflict between European empires (English, Spanish, French) and the Native people living in North America. The exhibition was presented in three languages and with multiple perspectives. Artifacts on display included rare surviving Native and European artifacts, maps, documents, and ceremonial objects from museums and royal collections on both sides of the Atlantic. The exhibition opened in Richmond, Virginia on March 17, 2007, and closed at the Smithsonian International Gallery on October 31, 2009.
The related online exhibition explores the international origins of the societies of Canada and the United States and commemorates the 400th anniversary of three lasting settlements in Jamestown (1607), Quebec City (1608), and Santa Fe (1609). The site is accessible in three languages.[93]
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^ abcBonch-Bruevich, Xenia. "Ideologies of the Spanish Reconquest and Isidore's Political Thought." Mediterranean Studies, vol. 17, 2008, pp. 27–45. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41167390. Accessed 12 Nov. 2020.
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^Suárez Romero. LA SITUACIÓN JURÍDICA DEL INDIO DURANTE LA CONQUISTA ESPAÑOLA EN AMÉRICA. REVISTA DE LA FACULTAD DE DERECHO DE MÉXICO TOMO LXVIII, Núm.270 (Enero-Abril 2018)
^Resendez, Andres (2016). The Other Slavery The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. p. 7.
^"Native Americans, Treatment of (Spain vs England)." Gale Encyclopedia of U.S. Economic History. Ed. Thomas Carson and Mary Bonk. Detroit: Gale, 1999. N. pag. World History in Context. Web. 30 Mar. 2015.
^Barker, Deanna (10 March 2004), Indentured Servitude in Colonial America, National Association for Interpretation, Cultural Interpretation and Living History Section.
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^Grinëv, Andrei Val'terovich. Russian Colonization of Alaska: Preconditions, Discovery, and Initial Development, 1741–1799. University of Nebraska Press, 2018.
^Veltre, Douglas W., and Allen P. McCartney. "Russian exploitation of Aleuts and fur seals: The archaeology of eighteenth-and early-nineteenth-century settlements in the Pribilof Islands, Alaska." Historical Archaeology 36.3 (2002): 8–17.
^Ricard, Robert.The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico: An essay on the Apostolate and the Evangelizing Methods of the Mendicant Orders in New Spain, 1523–1572. translated by Lesley Byrd Simpson. Berkeley: University of California Press 1966.
^Burkhart, Louise. The Slippery Earth: Nahua-Christian Moral Dialogue in Sixteenth-Century Mexico. Tucson: University of Arizona Press 1989.
^Cline, Sarah. "The Spiritual Conquest Re-Examined: Baptism and Church Marriage in Early Colonial Mexico". Hispanic American Historical Review 73:3(1993)453-80
^Altman, Ida, et al. The Early History of Greater Mexico. Pearson Education Inc. 2003, 117.
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^Cohen, Thomas M. The fire of tongues: António Vieira and the missionary church in Brazil and Portugal. Stanford Univ. Press, 1999
^Morner, M. "Preconditions and Methods of Evangelization in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Jesuit Missions of the River Plate Region." Swedish Missiological Themes 91.2 (2003): 275–296.
^Bloom, Hebert Ivan. The Economic activities of the Jews in Amsterdam in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
^Wadsworth, James E. Agents of orthodoxy: honor, status, and the Inquisition in colonial Pernambuco, Brazil. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006.
^Patricia U. Bonomi, Under the cope of heaven: Religion, society, and politics in Colonial America (2003).
^Faber, Eli. A Time for Planting: The First Migration, 1654–1820. Vol. 1. JHU Press, 1995.
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^ abcReséndez, Andrés. The Other Slavery : the Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America / Andrés Reséndez. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016. Print.
. It is now estimated that 11,863,000 slaves were shipped across the Atlantic. [Note in original: Paul E. Lovejoy, "The Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on Africa: A Review of the Literature," in Journal of African History 30 (1989), p. 368.] ... It is widely conceded that further revisions are more likely to be upward than downward.
^Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson, "Institutions as a Fundamental Cause of Long-Run Growth", Handbook of Economic Growth 1: 385–472. 2005.
^James Mahoney, "Path-Dependent Explanations of Regime Change: Central America in Comparative Perspective." Studies in Comparative International Development, 2001.
^Note that throughout this period, certain countries in Europe became united and also disunited (e.g.: Denmark/Norway, England/Scotland, Spain/Netherlands).
^Dale Mackenzie Brown (February 28, 2000). "The Fate of Greenland's Vikings". Archaeological Institute of America. Archived from the original on January 20, 2014. Retrieved January 20, 2016.
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