Alternate Universe: No Industry, No Guns

[Yansuf]

Re: Alternate Universe: No Industry, No Guns

 

One matter not mentioned here so far was that by the 18th century, without coal England would have been deforested by the demand for wood to burn.

(There was a Discovery Show about the impact of coal on society some years ago, it gave the above info. Unfortunately I do not have a link to it.)

 

Of course, with rubber science an alternative might have been devised; but that might bring us back to having the same effect as fossil fuels.

 

Without firearms, invasions of "Horse Peoples" would still be a threat.

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: Alternate Universe: No Industry, No Guns

 

One matter not mentioned here so far was that by Without firearms' date=' invasions of "Horse Peoples" would still be a threat.[/quote']

One of Kaiser Wilhelm of glorious memory's greater gaffs was, during one of the pre-1914 games of chicken, to stop a hunting holiday in East Prussia and hurry back to Berlin because the Russians had just moved a Cossack division up to its exercise area near the border.

The Tatars are coming, the Tatars are coming! (Another true fact: the Russians had Chinggiside [descendants of Genghis Khan] cavalry corps commanders.)

Then he sent a message to the Reichstag demanding more money for cavalry because the Russians had 20 [or was it 50?] divisions, making the Conservatives even more upset. Everyone knew that the day of cavalry was over.

The upshot of all this bushwa was absolutely nada because Europe has never had to worry about invasions of horse people. (We'll leave the Huns out of this because, frankly, 90% of what we "know" about the Huns is pulled out of nineteenth century butts.) Gunpowder isn't the issue. Forage is. Feeding lare numbers of horses is an issue of the way agriculture is organised in the region. Europe is different from Inner Eurasia 'cuz it gets more rain, leading to intensive rather than extensive forage production. Horse people armies lack foraging capacity in their TOE because the assumption is that wherever they go, there will be extensive pasture. So they can't invade Europe.

[megaplayboy]

Re: Alternate Universe: No Industry, No Guns

 

Miltech-wise, no gunpowder/explosives and limited resources to make steel = cavalry still around, sophisticated crossbows and perhaps a few steam cannons.

Eventually, I'd think electricity still gets discovered, and somebody figures out how to use wind turbines and dams to generate it.

 

Beyond that, I dunno. Biofuels? Solar panels? The tricky part, I guess, is skipping from about 1807 to 2007, in terms of power sources and the products depending on them. You could still have electric cars and electric power in a world without fossil fuels, but the breakthrough required would be orders of magnitude greater.

[Arac-4105]

Re: Alternate Universe: No Industry, No Guns

 

Without oil... no plastics, no sophisticated petrochemicals (a large catalog of glues, pigments for ink, paint and dye, and a lot of complex chemicals goes away), no safety glass, no foam....

 

With suitable replacements, you could still have fiberglass, and there's always leather, cloth, wood and ceramics to fall back on.

 

Total population would be lower, since advanced medicine wouldn't be so advanced. Nations might be smaller, since everything perishable would have to be made locally instead of being centrally made and shipped worldwide.

 

As for what folks say about things stagnating when things get to where oil was popularized in our history... poppycock. People would still invent and engineer their way around the limits of what they have, and discover new uses all the time. Perhaps steam boilers that heat up in seconds instead of half an hour? Perhaps a simple chemical method of getting fuel from biomass? Who knows?

[Cancer]

Re: Alternate Universe: No Industry, No Guns

 

As others have said, if you have no coal, then your metals are very sharply limited to the stuff you can smelt with charcoal. That means iron is low-grade (except for the rare meteoritic stuff) and expensive. It also means that the world gets deforested in a hurry. I suspect you don't get much more advanced technologically than the Greeks or maybe the Romans, and your most effective energy source will still be human labor, though you might get some water-wheel mills at a sharply limited number of high-quality sites.

 

Horse barbarians will remain a recurrent threat to Asia and eastern Europe, wherever the steppe people can reach after a decade or two of good seasons bring the numbers of themselves and horses up to a certain minimum level and a charismatic and able leader gets them all together to go looting. It wasn't until late in the Ottoman invasions of Europe that firearms tech reached the level where light cavalry by itself was no longer a serious threat to disciplined, properly-equipped and led infantry.

 

I don't know if you can get reliable transoceanic sea travel without iron or not. That takes multi-masted ships, which have a threshold minimum size, and I don't know if you can reach that size without iron fittings (and nails) at critical places. Without that it's possible to cross oceans, but not on the scale (or reliability) where you can project military power successfully for more than a single season.

 

That's the hard-science view. With squishy tech, you might be able to get steam power (with bronze fittings) to work with geothermal sites and, perhaps, large arrays of metal mirrors focusing sunlight onto boilers. Archimedes did some astonishing stuff, though he had iron to work with for the devices he supposedly came up with.

 

With magic all bets are off, especially if alchemical manipulation lets you create metal in quantity without extensive fuel consumption.

[Tom Carman]

Re: Alternate Universe: No Industry, No Guns

 

Miltech-wise, no gunpowder/explosives and limited resources to make steel = cavalry still around, sophisticated crossbows and perhaps a few steam cannons.

Eventually, I'd think electricity still gets discovered, and somebody figures out how to use wind turbines and dams to generate it.

 

Beyond that, I dunno. Biofuels? Solar panels? The tricky part, I guess, is skipping from about 1807 to 2007, in terms of power sources and the products depending on them. You could still have electric cars and electric power in a world without fossil fuels, but the breakthrough required would be orders of magnitude greater.

 

There were practical electric cars at the dawn of the 20th Century, and in the days of hand-crank-started IC engines it was questionable which would win out. The real advantage of the gasoline engine was the power-density of its "storage" system.

[Dog Soldier]

Re: Alternate Universe: No Industry, No Guns

 

No industry or guns? Wouldn't that be sort like 10000 BC?

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: Alternate Universe: No Industry, No Guns

 

It is possible to make all kinds of iron and steel, on an industrial scale, without coal. Nails, even. Three major ironmaking industries emerged in Europe's charcoal fields at the same time that the Welsh coal-fired industry emerged. There would be very significant differences, yes, but the details are much less exciting than might be supposed.

One important difference: people would be much, much uglier than in 10,000 BC.

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: Alternate Universe: No Industry, No Guns

 

"It's my weekend, and I'll post if I want to/ You'd post, too if you were as MEGO as me-e-e"

 

All natural iron on Earth (leaving a minute and probably overestimated number of meteors aside) exists in some kind of ferric oxide. Rust is not very useful, so chemically, the crucial issue is to find some reactant such that FexOy+R> Fe +RO. Nature has cooperatively provided us with an "R" in the form of carbon. Unfortunately, the production of CO2, CO, etc does not produce as much heat as is required to unrust iron. The solution is to introduce excess atmospheric oxygen and burn carbon to produce the surplus heat required to reduce the iron oxide.

Unfortunately, iron-carbon alloys have a lower melting temperature the higher the carbon proportion goes. Melting high-carbon iron will plug your airholes, unless it be your intent to produce high carbon iron alloy.

Now, in traditional ironmaking, there are three broad categories of product, designated by their industrial use: cast iron (highest proportion of carbon, up to 4%); steel (carbon 1--2%); and wrought iron (up to 1%). Cast iron not only melts at a reasonable temperature so that it can be cast in molds, it is also very hard. Wrought iron, by contrast, is very tough. Steel has both the qualities of hardness and toughness in a balance between the extremes of cast and wrought iron.

Cast iron may be easier to produce, but iron is not a very good casting metal for a number of reasons. Above all, it shrinks in the mold (making it artistically unimpressive) and the casting process carries various impurities into the final form that weaken the cast. This is a very tricky business, still not fully understood in the 1940s, when the use of aluminum additive to suppress one kind of flaw (CO bubbles) nearly caused a fiasco in the Pacific Fleet.

If most consumers want steel or wrought iron, you have two choices. You can make fully carburised iron and sell it to secondary industry, where it is turned into steel or wrought iron by heating the cast iron and exposing the hot metal to an air blast so that the carbon is gradually burnt away. Or you can arrange your reactor in such a way that it produces this product.

This sounds tough, but it is not actually that hard. You just use a "flux," a composite material that washes the semi-molten nuggets of iron out of your reactor. Because the moisture content of the air will govern just how much heat you can extract from a given amount of air blown into the reactor, iron of this kind made in dry climates such as northern Nigeria and southern India will be inherently superior to iron made in a climate such as England's, as will iron made from ores that are high in their iron percentage in the first place, such as those of Sweden and Spain.

All this said, there are two industries that will buy conveniently sized chunks of cast iron ("pigs"). Naval and fortress artillery makers do not care if their guns look ugly or are engineered for cheapness and safety over lightness, and the bigger ships get, the more nail makers are interested in cheap production over individual quality. Ingenious manipulation of water power (or, of course, a steam engine) will yield very nearly automated nail production. Just heat the pig up in a furnace, throw it in one end of the slit mill, and cheap nails come out the other end.

If you switch the economics of the industry on their end and go looking for the cheapest way of making cast iron, then the production process starts to look a little different. "All" you need is a big brick tower, granted that you have the ceramics to resist this kind of heat. Fill it with a mix of conveniently available carbon, and iron ore, light a fire, blast air through the bottom (with water or windmill-pumped bellows), and in good time, molten cast iron will drip out the bottom. Moulds for guns, frying pans and even rails can be put in the bottom (note that I'm leaving out one of the most expensive labour costs, puddling).

The charcoal ultimately required will be proportionate to the amount of iron that is wanted. England's most important traditional ironmaking industry was located in the Weald forest south of London, because it could conveniently supply shipbuilders and the Royal Navy along the Thames. There was always another healthy industry in the northeast, in Cumbria, and in the Midlands, stretching west towards Wales. As the Royal Navy's operational base shifted west towards the Devon coast, however, a new industry was born in the Severn river valley, which contains several areas where (very bad) iron ore is found alongside substantial deposits of coal. It is most unlikely that the legendary early ironfounders such as Abraham Darby were in fact the first to smelt cast iron with coal. I think their religion has far more to do with their fame than their actual merits, because for reasons that go to eighteenth century English [ecclesiastical] politics, "Dissenters" and "Nonconformists" celebrated innovativeness and "practical knowledge" amongst their fellows.

So convenience and a market for cast iron specifically determines the mode and place of the first celebrated experiments with industrial-scale manufacture of cast iron. (Note: Sung China+cast Iron=industrial scale B.S.)

The presumption that cast iron could not be made on the same scale with charcoal is certainly right for some reasons. The death of the Wealden industry was long, slow and horrid. As early as the 1730s, a visionary scheme to transfer British ironmaking to America to take advantage of its limitless charcoal supplies had much currency. But we need to be aware of the context. There were other demands on the Weald. Fuel was a key element in the British cost of living, especially around London, and this drove the cost of fuel up in the first place.

The Weald was a producing forest in no small part because it was inaccessible to commercial farming due to the fact that its soils would not support roads easily, and one had to move gravel long distances in order to pave them. Traditionally, roads in places like the Weald are paved with timber --a nasty little negative feedback loop. Getting at the more inaccessible wood was thus expensive. There is little evidence that the Weald was running out of wood per se so much as of accessible wood in the 1700s. In Sweden, Cumbria and the Urals, there was no shortage of charcoal, and therefore no reason to turn to coal. Swedish steelmakers, still using charcoal, were among the first to turn to the Bessemer process for making cast steel.

Globally, of course, the development of the railroad brought the whole world to the foundry gate and gave a huge advantage to places with convenient access to coal and good communications. Coal-made iron took off, and since this was indispensable to railmaking anyway, created a positive feedback loop. Crucible, exothermic steel ("Bessemer" process and others) made for even better rails, creating the need for a secondary smelting and intensifying demand on fuel. No industry, not even the Swedish, I think, could build a national rail network on charcoal.

 

Traditional ironfounding is a complex industry burdened with a not-very-helpful traditional language and certain hard-to-grasp concepts such as the flux. Like any historical enterprise, it turns out that context is dependent on knowing boring dates and placenames. I find that historians who work on that side of things may also have an allergy to reading technical books about iron and steel making (I recommend the Iron and Steel Institute's comprehensive Making, Shaping and Forging of Iron and Steel, if I have that title right off the top of my head). There are exceptions, though. Some great work has come out of the bicentennary of the first iron bridge across the Severn. See the articles in Kiraly, if you can find them in my again-off-the-top biblio ref.

The result of this obscurity is quite unnecessary confusion, much worsened by the way that it is shaped by a long-dead partisan tradition in British history. (Dead partisanship is so much harder to detect, because we don't know the issues.) But if people could make steel in 1200BC (and they could), there is no reason to think that not having coal would stand in the way of any of the techncal achievements of art that we know took place before the beginning of coal-fired iron in Coalbrook Dale in the 1700s.

[SteveZilla]

Re: Alternate Universe: No Industry, No Guns

 

Some random thoughts/conjectures...

 

If the production of steel and possibly other metals is reduced in quantity/quality for whatever reason, one of the changes IMO would be that preserved foods would not be in steel/aluminum/tin cans, but in glass bottles.

 

Recycling of already produced pure metals would be greatly favored.

 

The Skyscraper as we know it might not exist, or be of a much more humble stature. Meaning that cities would have to have grown outwards where in real life they grew upwards.

 

Deforrestation of the planet would not be a healthy thing for the human race to do. IIRC, Forrests produce much of the Oxygen we breath.

 

That is all...

[Captain Obvious]

Re: Alternate Universe: No Industry, No Guns

 

Deforrestation of the planet would not be a healthy thing for the human race to do. IIRC, Forrests produce much of the Oxygen we breath.

 

That is all...

 

Oceans produce more O2 than forests...it probably wouldn't register to the typical human, especially with the increased plant growth due to higher CO2 levels. The bigger problem would be loss of building materials and fuel if the forests aren't properly maintained. If the forests are burnt into extinction, the human race will be reduced to living in caves and burning buffalo dung.

[SteveZilla]

Re: Alternate Universe: No Industry, No Guns

 

Oceans produce more O2 than forests...it probably wouldn't register to the typical human' date=' especially with the increased plant growth due to higher CO2 levels. The bigger problem would be loss of building materials and fuel if the forests aren't properly maintained. If the forests are burnt into extinction, the human race will be reduced to living in caves and burning buffalo dung.[/quote']

 

Hmm. I wasn't aware of that. A search online informed me that Oceanic plants produce half of all the Oxygen (meaning terrestrial plants produce the other half). Still, cutting O2 production by half also means a significant reduction (probably by about half) of CO2 absorption.

 

I'm not anywhere near a climatologist/biologist/whatever-igist, but it strikes me that either one of those is not all that good, but couple them together, and it could potentially be worse than the sum of it's parts.

 

But long before those make an effect, I think the destruction of habitat would have an impact on human population. As an example of the consequences of loosing the forest (for whatever cause), I point to Easter Island.

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: Alternate Universe: No Industry, No Guns

 

 

But long before those make an effect, I think the destruction of habitat would have an impact on human population. As an example of the consequences of loosing the forest (for whatever cause), I point to Easter Island.

 

Just because I'm that kind of guy, I'll point out here that the environmental degradation theory of decline for Easter Island is not without its critics. There's a "no more islands" school of Oceanic historians who find it somewhat offensive. And before someone proclaims "PC," I'll point out the parallel Atlantic case, where this theory has been built up for Greenland but ignores all the other Atlantic islands (Faroes, Shetlands, Orkneys, Vestflotten, Outer Hebrides) --and never mind Arctic Russia-- where nothing of the sort happened.

[OddHat]

Re: Alternate Universe: No Industry, No Guns

 

What would the world look like today if (assume some handwavium reason) there were no fossil fuels (Oil' date=' gas, coal, etc) and gunpowder simply didn't work/exist?[/quote']

 

Simply didn't work isn't something I can comment on, but my Imperium Romanum thread in Fantasy Hero extensively covers a world where the industrial revolution never took place. Just drop the magic and you're set.

 

Personally, I'd say we'd be looking at a world that was mostly Roman / Imperial Chinese in the way it looked, perhaps a bit more advanced technologically if you allow blimps, and a good chunk closer to the modern world if you allow the steam engine.

[The Weapon]

Re: Alternate Universe: No Industry, No Guns

 

All bets are off' date=' then. I still think the whales would've been toast without the discovery of a cheaper alternative to whale oil. Likewise, pollution in large cities would be incredible, what with tons of animal exhaust hitting the streets each day (not to mention that in a large enough population of animals, a significant percentage of them perish each day, creating a number of carcasses to be removed. When internal combustion and electricity were introduced, cities quickly became much cleaner in direct proportion to the reductuion in livestock. It wasn't until some time in the 1950s that people began noticing a significant problem with smog in congested areas. The wider effects of lead-based fuels were either unknown or not widely known.[/quote']

 

Mostly you're right but fossil feuls aren't really "lead based" they just added lead to petrol to reduce knocking.

I too think the whales are gone. The later stages of the european invasion of everywhere are slowed, but not stopped. Remember much of european imperialism was accomplished with just horses and steel not fossil fuels.

[Pattern Ghost]

Re: Alternate Universe: No Industry, No Guns

 

All bets are off' date=' then. I still think the whales would've been toast without the discovery of a cheaper alternative to whale oil. [/quote']

 

Two words: Whale Ranches!

 

Aleutian whale ranchers become one of the wealthiest cartels on the planet, until other oceanic cultures learn their techniques and follow suit. Eventually, there is an abundance of cheap whale oil, meat and other whale byproduct available the world over.*

 

Supply and demand.

 

Note: This also helps alleviate the oxygen shortage caused by deforestation: Massive kelp farms are required to raise the whales properly, thus bringing up the level of plant mass in the oceans.

 

*Relatively cheap: Transportation costs are likely to be high, as noted above, due to limitations on ship building.

[Matt Frisbee]

Re: Alternate Universe: No Industry, No Guns

 

My two cents' worth:

 

1) Lower life expectancy leading to a younger population. Early marriage (13+) could be fairly common.

 

2) Lower population and lower population density. Without advanced materials and technology to build large buildings, urban sprawl and transportation of basic necessities would allow a city to only get so large before it becomes impractical.

 

3) Less diverse economy. Locally made craftwork will be the rule and if it isn't made locally you generally can't get it.

 

4) Regionalization of speech. Less travel and communication will lead to the rise of highly specific accents, slang and possibly regional dialects (sub-language).

 

5) On a personal note, I wouldn't particularly want to live there, but it would be interesting to role play.

 

Matt "I'm out of pennies now" Frisbee

[Old Man]

Re: Alternate Universe: No Industry, No Guns

 

Just because I'm that kind of guy' date=' I'll point out here that the environmental degradation theory of decline for Easter Island is not without its critics. There's a "no more islands" school of Oceanic historians who find it somewhat offensive.[/quote']

 

There's quite a bit of archaeological evidence that shows that Rapa Nui was pretty heavily vegetated at the time of its discovery, and that its settlers were the ones responsible for turning it into the barren grassland it is today.

 

And before someone proclaims "PC," I'll point out the parallel Atlantic case, where this theory has been built up for Greenland but ignores all the other Atlantic islands (Faroes, Shetlands, Orkneys, Vestflotten, Outer Hebrides) --and never mind Arctic Russia-- where nothing of the sort happened.

 

The difference there is that the Viking settlements in Greenland were far more remote than the other sites you list. IIRC the voyage from Greenland to Iceland took weeks, the settlements were iced in for half the year, and the soil available to the settlements was really limited.

 

Anyway, back to the thread.

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: Alternate Universe: No Industry, No Guns

 

This thread isn't dead. It's only sleeping.

Or, possibly, palming for the fjords.

 

There's quite a bit of archaeological evidence that shows that Rapa Nui was pretty heavily vegetated at the time of its discovery, and that its settlers were the ones responsible for turning it into the barren grassland it is today.

 

 

 

The difference there is that the Viking settlements in Greenland were far more remote than the other sites you list. IIRC the voyage from Greenland to Iceland took weeks, the settlements were iced in for half the year, and the soil available to the settlements was really limited.

 

Anyway, back to the thread.

 

Easter Island is deforested today. Since it has been a sheep ranch since the 1820s, long before modern interest awoke, this is hardly surprising. It would seem, on the basis of contested early accounts and pollen counts, that it was deforested long before 1820.

Now, this apparently keys into a long-running debate in Chile over the native wine palm forests. Wherever there are anxious people debating things in newspapers, there is the possibility of distortion, but of course most of us are more interested in Jared Diamond's contention that Easter Island was deforested by its inhabitants and constitutes a laboratory of human folly.

 

First, let me emphasise that this is a hypothesis. Only archaeology can tell us what the island was actually like in 1650, and its methods are sample-based. There is epistemic room for arguing that the island was still forested at the time of first European contact, a position that some scholars have taken.

Granted that the deforestation model is correct, how did it happen? The anthropogenic explanation has been strongly contested, for the excellent reason that numerous oceanic islands off the east coast of Chile within the neo-tropical zone have been deforested, not by humans, but by introduced rats and ovocarpids.

 

Beyond this there is the larger claim that deforestation led to impoverishment and isolation. Taking the isolation claim first, I should note that the "no more islands" thesis of Polynesian history emphasises that the Polynesian space was united by regular long range voyages. I find this compelling on linguistic grounds. Easter Island could hardly be said to be be isolated unless it was no longer the destination of such voyages.

Taking impoverishment second, Diamond's use of the available archaeological and material history is questionable. Boats do not have to be made with wood. Taking a more speculative turn, the ovocarpids present on Selkirk Island in 1700 do not need to have been restricted to that island. While there was no genocidal war fought on Easter Island for the last scrap of shipbuilding timber, there may well have been sheep herds there even before the Tahitians intervened to commercialise operations in the 1820s.

 

In the Atlantic case, a promised total revision of our understanding of the early Medieval era has been delayed in final editing. Goodbye to the Vikings promises, according to early reviews, reinterpret the supposed Viking era as one in which populations flowed north and west in reponse to the increasing strength and stability of the European littoral market economy beginning c. 900.

Cod and herring fishing to meet the needs of inland consumers presents a paradoxical requirement for a long distance inshore fishery. It was resolved by fisherfolk going out to promising fishing grounds and establishing agricultural support colonies on adjacent shores.

Archaeology confirms the development of an intensive, capitalised agriculture in the Viking era. Close to the sea, island farms could draw on vast fertiliser and manure resources. And they also exhibited the ecological sensitivity that any long-term farming operation requires. This is as true of Iceland as it is of islands off Murmansk.

 

On the other hand, agriculture on Greenland was initiated in 970AD, but was abandoned some time after 1400. Resumed in 1740, it has continued to the present day, so that agriculture remains Greenland's main export industry in 2008. Both ancient Vikings and modern farmers rely heavily on animal husbandry, especially sheep. However, modern farmers also raise arable fodder crops, and vast quantities of flax and other "mueslix" grass grain seeds have been found in Viking poo.

 

The mystery of the temporary abandonment has tantalised people ever since. Leaving aside pure b.s. such as the "Little Ice Age" hypothesis, much straining effort has been made to make it a great deal more mysterious than it actually was. The key example is Diamond's hyperbolically exaggerated reconstruction of the last days of a house in the Western Settlement, a reconstruction that even the excavators find overstated, I seem to recall hearing. (Take that for what it is worth.) There are a number of other claims, too, about textiles found buried in permafrost ("proving" the Little Ice Age), and shrinking average size in burial grounds. These are all in question. As with Easter Island, archaeology is expensive in Greenland, and thus rarely undertaken. And such evidence there is, is cherrypicked to support

 

Well...[begin original research here]

 

As with the Chilean wine palm story, there is a present day, or rather 1815--1926 context here. After Norway gained its independence from Denmark, it entered into a tortuous series of diplomatic efforts to regain control over its former Atlantic possessions, an effort that ended with a 1926 (I think; I'd have to -gasp- look this up to be sure of the year) World Court ruling against the last Norwegian claim, to East Greenland. The story of Greenland's Nordic history is thus written to the needs of the appellants, and resolved by historiographic synthesis from the bench. For Norway's case, it was important to emphasise that the newly united crown abandoned the settlers. Norwegian researchers dug up cases in which Icelanders complained that the royal monopoly trading ship was not sent, and turned this into an argument that Iceland was neglected, therefore Greenland even more so. In fact, the royal monopoly could not compete with Hanse ships. Royal neglect, yes; isolation, no.

But Denmark had to claim the entire island in order top head off a "scramble for Greenland." For that, paradoxically enough, the Danes had to insist on non-continuity. If its claim were medieval, it could not claim unsettled parts of Greenland. It had instead to stake its claim on evangelical grounds. Denmark had a "civilising" mission as the first to bring a surviving Christianity to the island. This meant that Christian influences could not have survived the intervening centuries. And after a two century delay and in the face of a lack of evidence, how could one rule out the possiblity that the Inuits encountered in 1740 were not folk Catholics unless one argued that there had been no cultural intermixing at all.

 

[end original research, begin book recommendation]

 

The alternative hypothesis (recently laid out in Karin Seaver, Frozen Echoes)has always been one of gradual abandonment, as settlers moved out of this peripheral area just as the oceanic cod fishery on the Newfoundland banks emerged. The Greenland Norse did not die out. Having lost their local, captive textiles market to goods shipped over directly, they moved down into the Grand Banks fishery. Some settled in Newfoundland and Labrador, but most travelled back to metropolitan ports. Those who remained, assimilated.

[Beast]

Re: Alternate Universe: No Industry, No Guns

 

Austians had a nasty air rifle back in the 1800's

this is not your kid brother's daisy bbgun

 

http://www.beemans.net/Austrian%20airguns.htm