Dr. Paula R. Curtis

Hansen starts us off with an excerpt from the Saga of Erik the Red- a moment of encounter with unknown (indigenous) peoples showing potential travel to North America, plus possible archaeological evidence of that movement.

She introduces the Anecdote Soup Theory- different sagas show similar stories because they're drawing on a pre-existing soup of anecdotes to tell the story as they feel fit. She talks about selecting the year 1000 because this is the year of Atlantic crossing to the Americas.

She compares this to a 16th cen encounter around the same site that mimics the earlier one. There's questions at hand of memory- how do we, or can we, trace these distant and potentially lost moments of the past?

The exit of Europeans from these areas may be surprising, but the world of 1000 was very different from 1492 and later.

Hansen notes that her date for globalization, 1000, is in some ways as arbitrary as anyone else's because you can make many arguments for "beginning," rather than "full force."

Some criteria for globalization based on Bayly: movement of unusual goods (especially slaves) over long distances, movement of tales and religions over long distances, spread of medical knowledge (not much knowledge of this, but it's likely there!).

A network of global pathways linked for the first time in 1,000. But this is just a moment- a brief flicker into existence, that lets us glimpse what happened when different people had these encounters.

Another thing happening in the year 1000 in many places is conversion-- Khazars to Judaism, Volga Emirate to Islam, Poland to Roman Christianity; a lot of these religious blocs still with us today.

This is one of the most visible places to see the impact of the year 1000 on us today.

Hansen identifies slavery as one of these globalization forces-- slavery from eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Africa, mainly. In some cases like Central Asia, we don't have estimated numbers, but it was presumably large.

Looking to Song China, Hansen notes increased trade with Southeast Asia around this time, as well as the development of Quanzhou as a meeting place of people from different religious backgrounds- Buddhist monasteries, Confucian temples, South Indian Hindu temples, and mosques.

Hansen briefly mentions Zhao Rukuo (1170-1228), who is the subject of her talk tomorrow. A Song figure who actually *couldn't* travel to distant locales, as many of our travel narrative writers do. Instead, he spoke to traders whom he encountered to learn about their homelands.

The "standard view" typically says The Age of Exploration began in 1492- but did it? We have people traveling very long distances in the year 1,000. Viking migrations to North America, for example. Zheng He's voyages (1405-1433) were along a route known to Chinese since 800.

We have different haaj routes from interior and then eastern coast of Africa as well. Then there's direct routes from SE Asia exports straight to Madagascar (rice, beans, etc. c. 1000). There's Polynesian voyages c.1025-1250 all over the Pacific (known from ethnographic study).

A key element of the global story here is that Europeans didn't invent the networks, but linked up pre-existing networks that were much older and well-establishing among diverse people across the globe.

Q&A - Leitzel questions why this moment in particular- should we look to environmental factors for this globalization? Its impact on population growth? Hansen suggests that she thinks that could definitely be an explanation.