793 and 1493: Comparing colonial discourses of ‘disappearance’

In the archaeological and historical literature around the Viking Age in the northern and western islands of Scotland, UK, the overarching discourse has always been one of colonisation followed by population replacement. The narratives constructed within this discourse only work when we see only Scandinavian people and practices expanding outward from a homeland, without taking into account the effect of these expanded horizons on Scandinavian identities. The linguistic, historical and archaeological data for these events are patchy and inconsistent, but their interpretation has nonetheless extended into extremes of rhetoric involving genocide and replacement. All of this is very familiar to Caribbeanists who study the aftermath of indigenous contact with Europeans. The trope of indigenous ‘disappearance’ has long been mobilised to justify displacement and disenfranchisement. New ethnohistoric work on the islands of Puerto Rico and Hispaniola has revealed the persistence of indigenous Taíno lifeways despite the massive disruptions of the colonial period. This paper will draw parallels not between two dissimilar historical processes, but rather in the discourses surrounding two contact events – the first Viking raid in northern Britain in 793, and the first European landing on Puerto Rico in 1493 – in order to highlight systemic colonialist distortions of contact scenarios. It will apply Caribbeanist and indigenous perspectives on discourses of identity formation in medieval Europe.