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.