It is been find in the Karma Sutra – but did Vikings play a role with weed in North America?
While cannabis is having a moment globally as Canada, the US, Europe and more are looking to embrace the plant and invest in research to unlock more medical benefits, it has long be part of the global culture. The plants was first domesticated about 12,000 years ago in East Asia during the early Neolithic period. It has been part of documented ancient history in prehistoric societies in Eurasia and Africa. In appears in China, the Middle East, use spread throughout the Islamic empire to North Africa. In the mid 1500s, it spread to the western hemisphere. And now, there may be a clue about it in North America.
Archaeologists excavating and analyzing a Viking settlement in Newfoundland one substance raising some high-minded questions — cannabis. Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers focused on L’Anse aux Meadows, a site in northern Newfoundland, Canada where Vikings landed and settled around the year 1000. Previously scientists believed Vikings only stayed in this spot a short time, but their work uncovered the possibility Vikings may have stayed until the 12th or 13th century. And they might have had marijuana with them.
An archaeological team excavated a peat bog about 100 feet from the Viking settlement. They found a layer of “ecofacts,” which are “environmental remains which may have been brought to the site by humans.” This layer was radiocarbon dated to the early Middle Ages and is where researchers discovered cannabis pollen, a plant not native to the area.
The question propose how was the cannabis used? Were they producing clothing from the plant’s fibers or smoking it for medical or potentially recreational reasons? It also could mean none of these things, reminded the study’s lead author and postdoctoral fellow at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Paul Ledger.
Earlier, marijuana was inhaled by Daoists, who burned it in incense burners. So it was used not only in religious ceremonies, but also for medical use including pain and other issues. And in the Karma Sutra, it was used recreationally. Considering the hard life of a marauding Viking, a little pain relief and relaxation would be highly valued.
More research is being done to see if humans local to the Newfoundland area and not Vikings could have been the ones responsible for the cannabis pollen. Viking scholars are curious about the find and will continue to investigate.
Researchers in Italy have found evidence that cannabis was used by residents of Milan hundreds of years ago by studying bones from a 17th-century cemetery. In a report on the research, the scientists surmise that weed was likely used recreationally, noting that hospital records from the time do not include cannabis in an inventory of medicinal plants used in Milan in the 1600s.
Medical records from the Middle Ages show that cannabis was used in Europe as an anesthetic and as a treatment for gout, urinary infections and other medical conditions. But in 1484, cannabis was banned in what is now Italy by a decree issued by Pope Innocent VIII. In it, the pope referred to cannabis as an “unholy sacrament” and banned the use of the herb by all Catholics.
Marco Peruca, a former Italian senator and founder of Science for Democracy, led a referendum to legalize cannabis in Italy in 2021. He told reporters that the papal decree and other bans on cannabis throughout history have led to a stigma against the plant.
“This was a plant belonging to another culture and tradition that was intertwined with religion,” said Perduca, who says it traveled centuries ago to Italy from the eastern Mediterranean.
“So anything and everything that had to do with a non-purely Christian set of rules…was supposed to be linked with paganism and movements not only against the Church, but against the [Holy Roman] Empire.”
Definitive evidence of the use of cannabis in what is now Italy had not been found in the centuries that followed the papal ban. That changed, however, when researchers studied the femur bones from skeletons of people who lived in 1600s Milan. The remains had been buried in the Ca’ Granda Crypt, under a church annexed to the Ospedale Maggiore, the city’s most important hospital for the poor at the time, according to a report from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
“We know that cannabis has been used in the past, but this is the first study ever to find traces of it in human bones,” said biologist and doctoral student Gaia Giordano at the University of Milan’s Laboratory of Forensic Anthropology and Odontology (LABANOF) and Laboratory of Toxicological Investigation. “This is an important finding, because there are very few laboratories that can examine bones to find traces of drugs.”
Study Investigates Historical Use of Recreational and Medicinal Plants
The research, which was published in the December issue of the peer-reviewed Journal of Archaeological Science, attempted to discover traces of plants used for medical or recreational purposes by residents of 17th-century Milan. The results of the research can help fill in the gaps in the historical records of plants used for medicinal or recreational purposes.
“Toxicological investigations on historical and archaeological remains are rare in literature but constitute a different and potent tool for reconstructing the past, and in particular for better understanding remedies and habits of past populations,” the researchers wrote in the introduction to the study. “Archeotoxicological analyses have been performed on hair samples collected from pre-Columbian Peruvian mummies revealing the presence of cocaine or nicotine.”
To conduct the research, scientists studied nine femur bones from the cemetery in Milan. Two of the bones, one from a woman in her 50s and another from a teenage boy, contained traces of the cannabinoids tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabidiol (CBD), direct evidence that the two people had used cannabis.
“The results obtained on bone samples showed the presence of two molecules, Delta-9-THC and CBD, highlighting the administration of cannabis,” the researchers wrote. “These results, to the best of our knowledge, constitute the first report on the detection of cannabis in historical and archaeological human osteological remains. Indeed, according to the literature, this plant has never been detected in ancient bone samples.”
The researchers note that the findings suggest that people of all ages and genders used cannabis at the time. An analysis of the medical records of the Ospedale Maggiore did not include cannabis among its records of healing plants used at the time, leading the researchers to conclude that cannabis was used recreationally. The researchers believe that cannabis may have been added to foods as a way to relax and escape the realities of the time.
“Life was especially tough in Milan in the 17th century,” archaeotoxicologist Domenico di Candia, who led the study, told the newspaper Corriere della Sera. “Famine, disease, poverty and almost nonexistent hygiene were widespread.”
Italy was a major producer of hemp for use in rope, textiles and paper for centuries. Peruca notes that the popularity of hemp in Italy throughout history makes it likely the plant was also used for its psychoactive effects.
“People used to smoke and make ‘decotta,’ or boiled water, with all kinds of leaves, so it is very difficult to identify what was the habit back then,” Peruca said. “But because hemp was used for so many industries, it’s possible that people knew those plants could also be smoked or drunk.”
This is not the first time the researchers have studied human remains to find evidence of historical drug use. In an earlier study, Giordano found traces of opium in cranial bones and well-preserved brain tissue.
Workers at a Southern California Medieval Times have walked off the job and went on strike before their second performance of the day Saturday, the union confirmed.
About 25 of the 50 workers in their bargaining unit walked out at the Buena Park location, said Erin Zapcic, lead organizer of Medieval Times Performers United.
“We’ll be out picketing basically every day for the foreseeable future until we can make some kind of meaningful progress with the company,” Zapcic said, who plays the Queen in the California shows.
Medieval Times LLC has not responded to numerous requests for comment.
The show’s cast of knights, squires, and stable hands voted to unionize, 27-18, last November and join the American Guild of Variety Artists.
“By bringing the Performers and Stable Hands at Medieval Times, Buena Park, CA to the ‘table,’ we will collaboratively negotiate a fair Collective Bargaining Agreement which ensures that wages are commensurate with skills, improves safety protocols (and enforces them) and brings about a respectful working environment,” the union said in a November statement.
Zapcic said people work at Medieval Times because they love it, not for the money. But since reopening after COVID, staffing levels were so short, workers were performing six days a week.
“They love to tell us that we’re not Broadway and it’s absolutely correct,” Zapcic said. “Broadway does eight shows a week. We do anywhere from 16 to 21.”
The strike is affecting performances at the location. Zapcic said the company is pulling performers from other departments and non-unionized locations. The closest location to California is in Scottsdale, Arizona.
The union has filed numerous unfair labor practice charges against the company both in California and New Jersey, including one on their TikTok account getting banned.
In October, Medieval Times filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against the union for using the company name, which is still ongoing.
“It is a grotesque attempt to retaliate against workers for exercising their legally protected right to form a union and bargain collectively,” Medieval Times Performers United and the American Guild of Variety Artists said in a statement in October.
Much of the union’s support came from social media, especially on TikTok. The union’s last post on TikTok was advocating for fair wages.
Zapcic believes the company had reported the account to be banned for violating TikTok’s intellectual property policy. A screenshot shared with CNN showed CEO Perico Montaner reported the union’s Facebook account for trademark infringement.
The union has been in wage negotiations with management since December.
“They had our account banned, and we have to take this,” Zapcic said. “We have to start yelling even louder.”
Long, long ago—five years, to be precise—Jeff Owens accepted that his calls to the vet would tax his fortitude. When the person on the other end asks his name, Owens, a test scorer in Albuquerque, says, “Jeff.” When they ask for his cat’s name, he has to tell them, “Baby Jeff.” The black exotic shorthair, a wheezy female with a squashed face and soulful orange eyes, is named for Owens, says his partner, Brittany Means, whose tweet about Jeff and Baby Jeff went viral this past spring. The whole thing started as a joke several years ago, when Means started calling every newcomer to their home—the car, the couch—“Baby Jeff.” Faced with blank adoption paperwork in 2017, the couple realized that only one name would do.
Baby Jeff is a weird (albeit very good!) name, but it’s not as weird as it would have been a century or two ago. In the U.S., and much of the rest of the Western world, we’re officially living in an era of bequeathing unto our pets some ratherhuman names. It’s one of the most prominent reminders that these animals have become “members of the family,” says Shelly Volsche, an anthropologist at Boise State University, to the point where they’re ascribed “agency and personhood.” The animals in our homes commonly receive so many of the acts of love people shower on the tiny humans under their care; pets share our beds, our diets, our clothes. So why not our names, too?
The names and nature of the human-animal bond weren’t always this way. Kathleen Walker-Meikle, a medieval historian at the Science Museum Group and the author of Medieval Pets, has found records from the Middle Ages describing dogs with names that alluded to some part of their physical appearance (Sturdy or Whitefoot), or an object that appealed to their human (a 16th-century Swiss wagoner once owned a dog named Speichli, or “Little Spoke”). Details on cats are sparser, Walker-Meikle told me, but some Old Irish legal texts make mention of a few felines, among them Cruibne (“little paws”) and Bréone (“little flame”).
Jeff (right) and Baby Jeff (Brittany Means)
Even when people-ish names did appear during this era, and the few centuries following, they trended zany, cheeky, cutesy, even pop-cultural—nothing that would be easily mistaken for a child’s given name. The 18th-century English painter William Hogarth named his pug Trump—perhaps an anglicization of a Dutch admiral called Tromp, according to Stephanie Howard-Smith, a pet historian at King’s College London. Catherine Parr, the last of King Henry VIII’s six wives, had a dog called Gardiner, after the anti-Protestant Bishop of Winchester. “This was her enemy, who wanted to destroy her,” Walker-Meikle told me. The idea was “to take the piss out of” him.
Then, as the Victorian era ushered in the rise of official dog breeds, people began to reconceptualize the roles that canines could play in their homes. Once largely relegated to working roles, dogs more often became status symbols, and items of luxury—and as their status grew, so did the list of names they could acceptably bear. People no longer considered it such “a slight, necessarily, to share your name with a dog,” Howard-Smith told me. Diminutive names for animals—Jack or Fanny rather than John or Frances—became more common, too, paving the path for even more overlap down the line.
The big boom happened in the 20th century, and by its latter half, lists of the most popular dog and baby names were getting awfully hard to tell apart. Nowadays, you could probably “go to a playground and shout ‘Alice!,’ and perhaps both dogs and girls would come rushing to you,” says Katharina Leibring, an expert in language and dialect at Uppsala University, in Sweden. Cats, meanwhile, seem to “have been kind of behind the curve in getting human names,” or perhaps receiving any names at all, Volsche told me. Even in 19th-century texts, Howard-Smith has spotted accounts from families who named their dogs, but would refer to “the cat” as only that.
Findings such as these have heldtrueacross several countries, but pet naming trends have never been universal. In Taiwan, for example, dogs and cats might get food names, onomatopoeic names, or even English human names, such as Jasper or Bill. They don’t, however, “get Chinese human names,” which hold particular significance, says Lindsey Chen, a linguist at National Taiwan Normal University. “We love them, but they’re not humans.” In Togo, the Kabre people sometimes name their dogs with pointed phrases—such as Paféifééri, or “they are shameless”—that, when spoken aloud, communicate their frustrations with other humans without confronting them directly.b
American animals who lack human-esque names aren’t loved any less, but the degree of intimacy we have with modern companion animals may almost demand anthropomorphism. Joann Biondi, a photographer in Miami, does not view her Maine coon as a “pet”; a frequent model for her artwork, he is her travel companion, her roommate, her business partner—“a creature who shares my life,” she told me. When she adopted him 13 years ago, she wanted a name befitting of his dignified features. But he also “looked like a hairy Italian soccer player,” Biondi told me, so she chose Lorenzo, sometimes tacking “Il Magnifico” on to the end.
Several experts told me they’d feel a bit uncomfortable if a close family member decided to name a new pet after them. “There is still a reluctance to call animals things that really make them sound indistinguishable from a human,” Walker-Meikle told me. But some pet owners are downright inspired by that uncanny valley, including Sean O’Brien, an enterprise-software salesperson in Iowa, who deliberately sought out a very human name for his cockapoo, Kyle. “It’s just funny to see people’s reactions, like, ‘Did you say Kyle?’” he told me.
A smidge of the species barrier can still be found in the ways some owners play with their pets’ names. Howard-Smith’s family dogs, Winnie and Arabella, have been gifted some unhuman monikers: Babby Ween, the Weenerator; Bubs, Bubski, Ballubbers, Ballubber-lubbers. Volsche’s pug, Lucy, is frequently dubbed Pug Nugget, Chunky Monkey, and Lucy, Devourer of Snackies, Demander of Attention. My own cats, Calvin and Hobbes, enjoy titles such as Chumbowumbo, Chino Vatican, Fatticus Finch, Herbal Gerbil, and Classic Herbs. Children with nicknames this unhinged would suffer all kinds of public humiliation. But with pets, “I think we can be a bit freer,” Howard-Smith told me. It’s funny; it’s embarrassing; it’s “a snapshot into someone’s relationship with their pet.” These are the impromptu names that are offered up in private, and the animals can’t complain.
Means and Owens, Baby Jeff’s people, plan to keep giving their animals starkly human names. In addition to the cat, their home is also shared by a quartet of chickens: Ludwing van Beaktoven; Johenn Sebastian Bawk; Brittany, Jr. (named for Means, of course—“it was my turn,” she told me); and Little Rachel (named for their human roommate). The next bird they adopt will be named Henjamin, in honor of Means’s brother Ben. But Means and Owens, too, have a sense for which names just don’t feel quite right. “I knew this guy with a cat named Michael,” Means said. “Every time I think of it, it blows me away.”
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