GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

3 7 2 " GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL
remote Polynesian islands, Greenland could not support a self-sufficient
food-producing society, though it did support self-sufficient Inuit huntergatherer
populations before, during, and after the Norse occupation
period. The populations of Iceland and Norway themselves were too small
and too poor for them to continue their support of the Greenland Norse
population.
In the Little Ice Age that began in the 13th century, the cooling of the
North Atlantic made food production in Greenland, and Norse voyaging
to Greenland from Norway or Iceland, even more marginal than before.
The Greenlanders' last known contact with Europeans came in 1410 with
an Icelandic ship that arrived after being blown off course. When Europeans
finally began again to visit Greenland in 1577, its Norse colony no
longer existed, having evidently disappeared without any record during
the 15th century.
But the coast of North America lay effectively beyond the reach of ships
sailing directly from Norway itself, given Norse ship technology of the
period A.D. 986-1410. The Norse visits were instead launched from the
Greenland colony, separated from North America only by the 200-mile
width of Davis Strait. However, the prospect of that tiny marginal colony's
sustaining an exploration, conquest, and settlement of the Americas was
nil. Even the sole Norse site located on Newfoundland apparently represents
no more than a winter camp occupied by a few dozen people for a
few years. The Norse sagas describe attacks on their Vinland camp by
people termed Skraelings, evidently either Newfoundland Indians or Dorset
Eskimos.
The fate of the Greenland colony, medieval Europe's most remote outpost,
remains one of archaeology's romantic mysteries. Did the last Greenland
Norse starve to death, attempt to sail off, intermarry with Eskimos,
or succumb to disease or Eskimo arrows? While those questions of proximate
cause remain unanswered, the ultimate reasons why Norse colonization
of Greenland and America failed are abundantly clear. It failed
because the source (Norway), the targets (Greenland and Newfoundland),
and the time (A.D. 984-1410) guaranteed that Europe's potential advantages
of food production, technology, and political organization could not
be applied effectively. At latitudes too high for much food production, the
iron tools of a few Norse, weakly supported by one of Europe's poorer
states, were no match for the stone, bone, and wooden tools of Eskimo