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 <strong>archaeology</strong> 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 <strong>archaeology</strong> 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 modern<strong>archaeology</strong>, 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.
TheGeographer 14- 11SPRING 2015Some Norse ruins are still very well-preserved over 500 yearsafter they were abandoned.exploitationof walrus wasmaintainedfor more thanfour centuries,despite the epic distances involved from the settlements in thesouthwest of Greenland, in both the journeys to the huntinggrounds some 600-900km to the north, and then onwardswith Atlantic traders for the long eastwards journey across theAtlantic to the markets of Europe.The comparatively benign climates that favoured the initialNorse settlement of Greenland deteriorated through the13th century, with a series of abrupt cold spells triggeredby volcanic activity that peaked in 1258-9 AD. In southwestGreenland the summer, vital for nurturing the livestock andgrowing fodder to keep them through the long sub-Arcticwinter, would have been desperately short. Snow would havepersisted around the farms into June and begun building upagain in August. This would have had a devastating impacton the domestic animals which were crucial in underpinningthe Norse subsistence system. But the colonies survived, andisotopic data on human remains and the faunal assemblagesof middens shows how: the Norse responded in perhaps theonly way they could, by moving deeper into the marine foodweb and hunting many more migrating seals. The adaptationwas effective and the settlement endured, but as dependenceon the annual seal migration grew, human populationsdwindled and the farmed areas contracted.By this time the Icelanders had developed trade in bulkycommodities (woollen cloth and dried fish), but the Greenlandeconomy, although intensified, remained specialised andunchanging. Ivory was still the vital product exported toEurope. Greenland cloth production remained limited anddiverse, and did not follow the route of standardisationand mass production adopted across Iceland. And then theworld changed. Plague devastated Norway; theold Royal Norwegian interest in trading withGreenland waned and was not replaced by anyinterest from the newly powerful Hanseaticmerchants. Walrus ivory, once prized for art,ornaments, and most famously the LewisChessmen, fell out of fashion or was replaced bysuperior African elephant ivory. Greenland didnot produce the wool and dried fish they desired.Climate became ever more unfavourable, furtherimpacting pastoral farming and compromisingany efforts to generate wool surplus for export.With the cold came an increasing reliance onmarine mammals, and with the storminesscame increasing risks on the long journey tothe distant walrus hunting grounds. Despitethis, the Norse identified a seemingly elegantsolution to the challenges they faced, tackledthem as an interdependent community, andstuck to a formula that had seen them throughdifficult times in the past. We do not know howthe Norse handled culture contact with theincoming Thule Inuit, but we do know that Thulelifestyles were not adopted by the Norse, asperhaps the solutions that had worked throughthe 13th and 14thcenturies were tooingrained to change.The last recordedcontact with NorseGreenlanders was inthe early 15th century,though archaeologicaldata shows that thecommunity enduredfor several decadesmore. Ultimately,it is likely that thevulnerabilities of theirdwindling populationto changing climate,to the economictransformationssweeping their distantmarkets, and to thechallenges of culturecontact proved toogreat. Despite, orperhaps becauseof their communalintegration andsuccessful priorSurveying a Norse bathhouse.At the site of the old Bishopric at Gardar, only the most massive stoneshave been left behind by the later builders of the modern village.Arctic adaptations, their settlement seems to have been toospecialised, too small and too remote to be able to cope withthe conjunctures of the 15th century. Many questions are stillunresolved, but worth pursuing, as a better understanding ofthe fate of Norse Greenland holds important lessons for ustoday as we grapple on a far larger scale with similar problemsof unprecedented climate changes, economic transformationsand migration.A reconstruction of the small Norse church at Brattahlíð - the modern Greenland settlement of Qassiarsuk.
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