archaeology

10SPRING 2015Norse GreenlandProfessor Andrew J Dugmore, Institute of Geography, University of EdinburghArchaeology is known to yield spectacular, prosaic,curious or just plain baffling details of the past.Perhaps surprisingly, in modern archaeology thereis a general lack of concern with the earliest, thelargest, and the otherwise unique, as the academicdrive is usually to tackle major questions aboutpeople in the past; to better understand issuessuch as the emergence, organisation, resilience,persistence, transformation and collapse ofsocieties; or to better understand identity,migration and human-environmental interactions.Archaeology has both great synergy with geographyand great potential relevance for today, because the pastprovides us with ‘completed experiments’ and these can helpus to understand the consequences of particular choicesand sets of circumstance. A long-term perspective allows usto track what happened next, often in quite chilling detail,enabling us to understandThe collaborative research brought more about how eventstogether under the umbrella of the unfold and the processesNorth Atlantic Biocultural Organisation which may drive them.(NABO) nicely illustrates bothGiven the rich archivecontemporary trends at the interface presented by the myriadof archaeology and geography and of different completedthe evolving story of the Scandinavian experiments of everysettlement of the North Atlantic. See culture there has ever been,www.nabohome.org to find out more. even the partial recordsthat have survived enableus to explore processes of change that can resonate withthe challenges faced by today’s societies. We are not Vikingsor Neolithic farmers (and never willbe), but understanding the choicesopen to them, what they did and theconsequences of those decisions, helpsus to understand processes of changeand the implications of differentoptions. We are almost certainlymoving into times of unprecedentedglobal transformations that will affectthe whole planet. Geographical scalesof change in the past may not havebeen as great as the global scales ofchange we will have to face, but wehave many cases to consider in thepast where profound change rockedentire societies to their very core,affecting their entire world. Given thechallenge of an unknowable future,we can, with the benefit of hindsight, usefully delve into thearchives of the past to understand how people met (or failedto meet) challenges such as climate change, economic stressand culture conflict, and for evidence of any warning signalsthat change was imminent before it actually happened.The Norse settlement of Greenland, with its epic beginningand enigmatic ending, is a well-known but widelymisunderstood story that illustrates key trends in modernarchaeology, the questions it seeks to answer, its modernrelevance, and its close interactions with geography.Towards the end of the tenth century, the westward pulseof the Scandinavian Viking Age migrations, catalysed by“Archaeologyhas both greatsynergy withgeography andgreat potentialrelevance fortoday.”developments in seafaring, brought hundredsof settlers from Iceland to the south-westernfiords of Greenland. Why they ventured into thedangerous, iceberg-strewn and stormy watersaround Greenland has long been debated. Itmight have been a desperate quest for landto settle at the very edge of the known world.It was, however, more likely to have been amarket-driven economic strategy applied to thesub-Arctic, where the goal was to harness theriches represented by ivory, furs, hides and otherArctic exotica. To secure a suitable base withinGreenland, the Norse established permanent settlementssupported by pastoralism and fodder production, withintroduced sheep, goats, cattle, horses and pigs, and a wellintegratedlarge-scale use of wild resources. A generation laterthese peoples ventured westwards to Newfoundland, but didnot establish a lasting foothold in North America.The Norse colonies in Greenland endured for well over fourhundred years, but why they came to an end some timein the mid-15th century AD has long been debated. It hasbeen seen as a tragic morality tale; of an ill-conceivedEuropean expansion into the sub-Arctic, boosted by arather fanciful naming, buoyed along by anomalously warmmedieval climates, but founded on a misguided attemptto build a very remote farming economy across pockets ofmarginally-viable agricultural land huddled between thegreat inland ice sheet and the seasonally frozen sea. Theidea of an increasingly isolated society, led to its doom by acomplacent and oppressive elite who wilfully failed to respondto changing climate, createsa poignant story. Sad, but notfundamentally threatening,because we may think we are somuch more knowledgeable, havemany more options, and canrespond and adapt and so avoidtheir fate.In recent years however, adifferent, more challengingand disturbing narrativehas developed. We havecome to realise the scaleand effectiveness of Norseadaptations to Greenland, torecognise their communalapproaches, and to identifytheir long-term successes inresource management and conservation. In Greenland, theNorse first encountered mass spring migrations of seals.They successfully switched from the winter cod fishing usedin Iceland to a communal seal hunt, probably inspired byother Norse communal marine mammal hunts of the FaroeIslands and Northern Isles. Faunal evidence from acrossthe Greenland settlements shows that they developed awell-integrated provisioning system that utilised a widerange of wild resources to supplement pastoral production.Animal populations vulnerable to overhunting, such as thenon-migratory harbour seals and caribou, were hunted, yetconserved, over multi-century timescales. A highly specialisedThe long, low grassy mound marks the site of turf-built Norse longhouseØ69. The Scandinavians first established hayfields here; some 500 yearsafter they were abandoned, Inuit farmers have reclaimed them to growfodder for their sheep.