Colonization in a Marginal Zone: the Norse in Greenland

2020

The understanding of the collapse of ancient civilizations is important for the understanding of very complex process happening in our civilization. The Earth is put in danger due to many reasons and some of them do not change throughout history. Because of the global range of human actions, the power reached by contemporary man is much more dangerous than it used to be centuries ago. Therefore, the understanding of the past collapses is crucial for the safety of our global village. The article shows the reasons for the collapse of the Greenland Norse civilization. It seems that the main reason was climate change but it also seems that the Greenland Norse could have survived, or at least postponed the collapse. The author indicates that cultural factors were the roots of ecological degradation and the lack of economic adaptation. The Norse knew the Inuit and their adaptive strategies but did not learn from them. It seems that the collapse of the Greenland Norse civilization was the ...

Medieval Archaeology in Scandinavia and Beyond. History, trends and tomorrow, 2015

The story about Norse Greenland is the story of virgin land being colonized, settled for half a millennium, and then abandoned. The enigma of the abandonment of the settlements has attracted the attention of researchers and the public for centuries and many explanations have been put forward. Today human agency, landscape changes, climate changes, resilience, sustainability and adaptation are key words and research has moved from local to more global perspectives. New results from research projects in recent years have diversified the discussion claiming that the Norse Greenlanders created a flexible and successful subsistence system that responded effectively to the major environmental challenges they faced. In a recent paper it has been argued (Dugmore et al 2012) that abandonment should be explained by a combination of external factors (climate changes; changes in European trade systems). In this paper the argument is explored further, focussing especially on Norse governance, Norse dietary economy and settlement patterns.

Holocene, 1997

The loss of the Norse Western Settlement in Greenland around the mid-fourteenth century has long been taken as a prime example of the impact of changing climate on human populations. This study employs an interdisciplinary approach combining historical documents, detailed archaeological investigations, and a high-resolution proxy climate record from the Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 (GISP2) to investigate possible causes

Journal of the North Atlantic, 2009

The isolation of the two Norse Greenlandic settlements, from each other as well as from the rest of the world, is a well rehearsed topic. Ideas about communications within the two settlements are, on the other hand, not much developed. One way of looking at intra-settlement communication is through the parish system. The parishes arguably refl ect the community structure, but they also provided the framework for much of the social interaction in the everyday lives of ordinary Greenlanders.

Arctic Anthropology, 2007

Changing economies and patterns of trade, rather than climatic deterioration, could have critically marginalized the Norse Greenland settlements and effectively sealed their fate. Counter-intuitively, the end of Norse Greenland might not be symptomatic of a failure to adapt to environmental change, but a consequence of successful wider economic developments of Norse communities across North Atlantic. Data from Greenland, the Faroe Islands, and medieval Iceland is used to explore the interplay of Norse society with climate, environment, settlement, and other circumstances. Long term increases in vulnerability caused by economic change and cumulative climate changes sparked a cascading collapse of integrated interdependent settlement systems, bringing the end of Norse Greenland.

2012

Norse Greenland has been seen as a classic case of maladaptation by an inflexible temperate zone society extending into the arctic and collapse driven by climate change. This paper, however, recognizes the successful arctic adaptation achieved in Norse Greenland and argues that, although climate change had impacts, the end of Norse settlement can only be truly understood as a complex socioenvironmental system that includes local and interregional interactions operating at different geographic and temporal scales and recognizes the cultural limits to adaptation of traditional ecological knowledge. This paper is not focused on a single discovery and its implications, an approach that can encourage monocausal and environmentally deterministic emphasis to explanation, but it is the product of sustained international interdisciplinary investigations in Greenland and the rest of the North Atlantic. It is based on data acquisitions, reinterpretation of established knowledge, and a somewhat different philosophical approach to the question of collapse. We argue that the Norse Greenlanders created a flexible and successful subsistence system that responded effectively to major environmental challenges but probably fell victim to a combination of conjunctures of large-scale historic processes and vulnerabilities created by their successful prior response to climate change. Their failure was an inability to anticipate an unknowable future, an inability to broaden their traditional ecological knowledge base, and a case of being too specialized, too small, and too isolated to be able to capitalize on and compete in the new protoworld system extending into the North Atlantic in the early 15th century.

Human Ecology, 2018

There is increasing evidence to suggest that arctic cultures and ecosystems have followed non-linear responses to climate change. Norse Scandinavian farmers introduced agriculture to sub-arctic Greenland in the late tenth century, creating synanthropic landscapes and utilising seasonally abundant marine and terrestrial resources. Using a niche-construction framework and data from recent survey work, studies of diet, and regional-scale climate proxies we examine the potential mismatch between this imported agricultural niche and the constraints of the environment from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries. We argue that landscape modification conformed the Norse to a Scandinavian style of agriculture throughout settlement, structuring and limiting the efficacy of seasonal hunting strategies. Recent climate data provide evidence of sustained cooling from the mid thirteenth century and climate variation from the early fifteenth century. Archaeological evidence suggests that the Norse made incremental adjustments to the changing sub-arctic environment, but were limited by cultural adaptations made in past environments.

2020

Antiquity

Greenland, far north land of the Atlantic, has often been beyond the limit of European farming settlement. One of its Norse settlements, colonized just before AD 1000, is — astonishingly — not even at the southern tip, but a way up the west coast, the ‘Western Settlement’. Environmental studies show why its occupation came to an end within five centuries, leaving Greenland once more a place of Arctic-adapted hunters.