[technicalbard]

If the Vikings had brought the beads to Greenland or Labrador and trader with the Inuit, the Inuit could have traded those beads across the arctic of Canada in a couple of hundred years - EASILY. Remember that the Inuit of North America only entered from Asia in the last 4000 years or so, and speak a language that is closely related to languages in Siberia...

So these beads could have come to Alaska from east OR west. We will probably never know for sure.

[aksss]

Alaska was peopled in the Holocene (>10k years ago). But yeah, i think you’re right: I tend to think of the particularly coastal Arctic people’s across AK/Canada as having more consistent inter-tribal contact and periodic aggregation than between Arctic and more Southerly tribes. Not crazy to think trade goods could flow between the indigenous people of the east and west coasts of the Arctic, albeit slowly. I think far, far more likely that this item would have come to Alaska via Siberia though, if for no other reason than proximity. Fascinating to think of the story of that bead. Blows the mind.

[yongjik]

I'm not so sure about the "easily" part: from [1], most part of Greenland was colonized after Vikings settled on Iceland. So I'd imagine it wasn't exactly a leisurely trip from there to Alaska.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thule_people

[aksss]

It would have been a series of trade network hops, not an express route by one guy. So traded from one village to the next over and over westwards. Going from Venice over the Silk Road and up through Siberia and into Alaska, or up through Eastern Europe into northern Asia and across Siberia, probably would have involved fewer exchanges though, I’d guess. Either way, that bead is a looong way from Venice. :D