[Paleopsych] Archeology Mag: The Fate of Greenland's Vikings

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The Fate of Greenland's Vikings
http://www.archaeology.org/online/features/greenland/
[In the last few paragraphs you'll encounter Thomas McGovern's theory that the 
reason for the fate of Greenland was the hidebound thinking of the Vikings at 
the time. Declining birthrates, too. Flash forward a millennium!]

     The Fate of Greenland's Vikings February 28, 2000
     by Dale Mackenzie Brown

     Arm of Ericsfjord, on which Eric the Red had his farm
     (Dale Mackenzie Brown)

     Some people call it the Farm under the Sand, others Greenland's
     Pompeii. Dating to the mid-fourteenth century, it was once the site of
     a Viking colony founded along the island's grassy southwestern coast
     that stretches in a fjord-indented ribbon between the glaciers and the
     sea. Archaeologists Jette Arneborg of the Danish National Museum, Joel
     Berglund of the Greenland National Museum, and Claus Andreasen of
     Greenland University could not have guessed what would be revealed
     when they excavated the ruins of the five-room, stone-and-turf house
     in the early 1990s.

     As the archaeologists dug through the permafrost and removed the
     windblown glacial sand that filled the rooms, they found fragments of
     looms and cloth. Scattered about were other household belongings,
     including an iron knife, whetstones, soapstone vessels, and a
     double-edged comb. Whoever lived here departed so hurriedly that they
     left behind iron and caribou antler arrows, weapons needed for
     survival in this harsh country, medieval Europe's farthest frontier.
     What drove the occupants away? Where did they go?

     [4][image] Map of Greenland showing settlements (Lynda D'Amico)
     [5][LARGER IMAGE]

     The disappearance of the Greenlanders has intrigued students of
     history for centuries. One old source held that Skraelings, or Inuit,
     who had crossed over from Ellesmere Island in the far north around
     A.D. 1000, migrated down the west coast and overran the settlement.
     Ivar Bardarson, steward of the Church's property in Greenland, and a
     member of a sister settlement 300 miles to the southeast, was said to
     have gathered a force and sailed northwest to drive the interlopers
     out, but "when they came hither, behold they found no man, neither
     Christian nor heathen, naught but some wild cattle and sheep, and they
     killed as many of the wild cattle and sheep as they could carry and
     with them returned to their houses." The death of the Western
     Settlement portended the demise of the larger eastern one a century
     later.

     Of the first 24 boatloads of land-hungry settlers who set out from
     Iceland in the summer of 986 to colonize new territory explored
     several years earlier by the vagabond and outlaw, Erik the Red, only
     14 made it, the others having been forced back to port or lost at sea.
     Yet more brave souls, drawn by the promise of a better life for
     themselves, soon followed. Under the leadership of the red-faced,
     red-bearded Erik (who had given the island its attractive name, the
     better to lure settlers there), the colonists developed a little
     Europe of their own just a few hundred miles from North America, a
     full 500 years before Columbus set foot on the continent. They
     established dairy and sheep farms throughout the unglaciated areas of
     the south and built churches, a monastery, a nunnery, and a cathedral
     boasting an imported bronze bell and greenish tinted glass windows.

     The Greenlanders prospered. From the number of farms in both colonies,
     whose 400 or so stone ruins still dot the landscape, archaeologists
     guess that the population may have risen to a peak of about 5,000.
     Trading with Norway, under whose rule they eventually came, the
     Greenlanders exchanged live falcons, polar bear skins, narwahl tusks,
     and walrus ivory and hides for timber, iron, tools, and other
     essentials, as well luxuries such as raisins, nuts, and wine.

     Excavations of Erik's farm, Brattahlid ("Steep Slope"), in 1932 by
     Danish archaeologists (Greenland, which became Danish in 1814, is
     today a self-governing possession of Denmark), revealed the remains of
     a church, originally surrounded by a turf wall to keep farm animals
     out, and a great hall where settlers cooked in fire pits, ate their
     meals, recited sagas, and played board games. Behind the church they
     found ruins of a cow barn, with partitions between the stalls still in
     place, one of them the shoulder blade of a whale--a sign of Viking
     practicality in a treeless land where wood was always in short supply.

     [6][image] Church ruins with outer protective wall designed to keep
     out farm animals (Dale Mackenzie Brown) [7][LARGER IMAGE]
     [8][LARGER IMAGE] [9][image]

     In 1961 workmen discovered near the barn a tiny horseshoe-shaped
     chapel built for Erik's wife Thjodhilde. When Erik and his supporters
     arrived in Greenland, the old Norse gods were still worshiped. Erik, a
     believer, upheld the ancient fatalistic philosophy of his Viking
     ancestors, but Thjodhilde converted to Christianity. Erik refused to
     surrender his beliefs, and Thjodhilde held steadfastly to hers. In
     time he granted her a small church 6.5 feet wide and 11.5 feet long,
     with room for 20 to 30 worshipers.

     During the excavations of Thjodhilde's chapel and its immediate
     surroundings in the 1960s, Danish archaeologists uncovered 144
     skeletons. Most of these indicated tall, strong individuals, not very
     different in build from modern Scandinavians. One male skeleton was
     found with a large knife between the ribs, evidence of violence on
     Greenland's frontier. A mass grave south of the church, containing 13
     bodies. According to Neils Lynnerup of the Panum Institute of the
     University of Copenhagen, who performed forensic work on the remains,
     the bodies were male, ranging from teens to middle age, with head and
     arm wounds suggesting they may have died in battle.

     The most compelling finds were three skeletons interred close to the
     church wall, just beneath where the eaves would have been. According
     to medieval Church accounts, those buried closest to the church were
     first in line for Judgement Day. Who were these three individuals? The
     archaeologists' best guess was that they were none other than
     Thjodhilde, Erik and their famous son, Leif, who around the year 1,000
     had set sail from Brattahlid on his epochal journey to America. Today,
     their bones rest on laboratory shelves in Copenhagen.

     With the islanders' early success came a desire to have someone of
     authority oversee the work of the Church in Greenland. Early in the
     twelfth century they dispatched one of their leaders, Einar Sokkason,
     to Norway to convince the king to send them a bishop. Bishop Arnald
     was chosen for the job, despite the hapless man's protestation that "I
     am no good at handling difficult people." Apparently the Greenlanders
     had a well-developed reputation for contentious behavior. Still, they
     provided Arnald with one of their finest farms, Gardar, on a fjord not
     far from Brattahlid. Here they erected a cathedral, built of the local
     reddish sandstone and dedicated to the patron saint of seafarers, St.
     Nicholas; with a meeting hall capable of holding several hundred
     people; a large barn for 100 cows; and tithe barns to contain the
     goods that would be religiously collected from the farmers by priests
     and set aside for Rome.

     [10][image] Ruins of the tithe barns where goods collected from the
     farmers in the Church's name were kept (Dale Mackenzie Brown)
     [11][LARGER IMAGE]

     Although the presence of the Church had originally uplifted the
     Greenlanders, it now became their burden. By the middle of the
     fourteenth century, it owned two-thirds of the island's finest
     pastures, and tithes remained as onerous as ever, some of the proceeds
     going to the support of the Crusades half way around the world and
     even to fight heretics in Italy. Church authorities, however, found it
     increasingly difficult to get bishops to come to the distant island.
     Several clerics took the title, but never actually went there,
     preferring to bestow their blessings from afar.

     Foundation stone of the Norse cathedral (Dale Mackenzie Brown)
     [12][LARGER IMAGE] [13][image]

     Life went sour for the Greenlanders in other ways. The number of
     Norwegian merchant vessels arriving in their ports, though only one or
     two a year in the best of times, dropped until none came at all. This
     meant that the islanders were cut off from the major source of iron
     and tools needed for the smooth running of their farms and the
     construction and maintenance of their boats. Norway's long dominance
     of the northern sea trade withered as Germany's Hanseatic League rose
     to ascendancy. Although the league's bigger ships could carry more
     cargo than Norwegian vessels, they apparently never anchored in
     Greenland. The dangerous ocean crossing would have put them at too
     much risk for too little gain, especially now that elephant ivory,
     once difficult to obtain, could be gotten easily from Africa and
     replaced walrus ivory in prominence.

     As the Greenlanders' isolation from Europe grew, they found themselves
     victims of a steadily deteriorating environment. Their farmland,
     exploited to the full, had lost fertility. Erosion followed severe
     reductions in ground cover. The cutting of dwarf willows and alders
     for fuel and for the production of charcoal to use in the smelting of
     bog iron, which yielded soft, inferior metal, deprived the soil of its
     anchor of roots. Pollen analysis shows a dramatic decline in these
     species during the Viking years. In addition, livestock probably
     consumed any regenerating scrub. Overgrazing, trampling, and scuffing
     by the Norsemen's sheep, goats and cattle, the core of the island's
     livelihood, left the land debased.

     Greenland's climate began to change as well; the summers grew shorter
     and progressively cooler, limiting the time cattle could be kept
     outdoors and increasing the need for winter fodder. During the worst
     years, when rains would have been heaviest, the hay crop would barely
     have been adequate to see the penned animals through the coldest days.
     Over the decades the drop in temperature seems to have had an effect
     on the design of the Greenlanders' houses. Originally conceived as
     single-roomed structures, like the great hall at Brattahlid, they were
     divided into smaller spaces for warmth, and then into warrens of
     interconnected chambers, with the cows kept close by so the owners
     might benefit from the animals' body heat.

     [14][image] Site of the great hall with sheep resting on the
     foundation. In a similar building, perhaps on the very spot, Leif
     Ericson may well have entertained family and friends with tales of his
     North American exploits. (Dale Mackenzie Brown) [15][LARGER IMAGE]

     When the Norsemen arrived in Greenland, they had the island and its
     waters to themselves. Now they had to contend with the Inuit, who were
     competing with them for animal resources. This was especially true in
     the Nordseta, the Greenlanders' traditional summer hunting grounds 240
     miles north of the Eastern Settlement. For years the Norsemen had been
     traveling to the area; they killed the walruses, narwahls, and polar
     bears they needed for trade with Europe and for payment of Church
     tithes and royal taxes. They also boiled seal blubber, filled skin
     bags with the oil, and gathered valuable driftwood.

     Inuit-Norse relations seem to have been fairly friendly at times,
     hostile at others. Few Inuit objects have been unearthed at the farms.
     Various Norse items, including bits of chain mail and a hinged bronze
     bar from a folding scale, have been found at Inuit camps in Greenland,
     mainland Canada, and on Baffin, Ellesmere, and Devon Islands. These
     are suggestive of commerce between the two peoples, but they may also
     have been seized by Inuit during raids on hunting parties in the
     Nordseta or plundered from farms.

     Norse mention of the Inuit is curiously scant in the surviving
     documents. An old story tells of hunters coming across "small people,"
     the Skraelings, with whom the Greenlanders apparently fought. The text
     says that when these people "are hit, their wounds turn white and they
     do not bleed, but when they die there is no end to the bleeding." The
     next account is that of Ivar Bardarson in his Description of
     Greenland; Bardarson reported on the take-over of the Western
     Settlement by the Skraelings, with the implication that they had
     killed the inhabitants. Years later, another source describes a
     Skraeling attack in the Eastern Settlement, in which 18 Greenlanders
     met their deaths and two boys and a woman were captured. As Canadian
     archaeologist Robert McGhee has pointed out, there is no physical
     evidence of massacres, the destruction of Norse property, or the
     takeover and reuse of Norse shelters by the Inuit, and nothing in
     Inuit tales of Inuit-Norse contact to back up Bardarson's claim.

     One valley farm, excavated in 1976 and 1977, revealed just how
     desperate some of the Greenlanders had become. During a freezing
     winter, the farmers killed and ate their livestock, including a
     newborn calf and lamb, leaving the bones and hoofs on the ground. Even
     the deerhound, probably the companion of many a hunt, may have been
     slaughtered for food; one of its leg bones bore the knicks of a
     knifeblade. Similar remains were found on another farm, but if, like
     their masters, the animals were starving, their fatless meat would
     have offered little nourishment.

     Whoever killed the animals was used to living in squalid conditions.
     The bone-littered earthen floors had been spread with an insulating
     layer of twigs that attracted mice and a variety of insect pests.
     Study of the farms' ancient insect fauna revealed the remains of
     flies. Brought inadvertently from Europe, the flies were dependent for
     their survival on the warm environment of the Norse houses and on the
     less than sanitary state of the interiors. Radiocarbon dating of their
     remains revealed that they died out suddenly when these conditions
     ceased to prevail around 1350, presumably when the structures were no
     longer inhabited. Some of the rooms had been used as latrines,
     possibly out of habit or because the occupants were reluctant to
     venture out into the searing cold. An ice core drilled from the
     island's massive icecap between 1992 and 1993 shows a decided cooling
     off in the Western Settlement during the mid-fourteenth century.

     Ruins of a barn. Upright stones divided the cow stalls; a whale
     shoulder blade (white partition on right) also served as a divider.
     (Dale Mackenzie Brown) [16][LARGER IMAGE] [17][image]

     A church graveyard at Herjolfsnes on the southernmost tip of Greenland
     sheds further light on the final days of the Eastern Settlement.
     Reports reached Danish archaeologists in the 1920s that the cemetery
     was being washed away by the sea and that bones and scraps of clothing
     from the graves were strewn on the beach. The archaeologists hurried
     to save what remained. The skeletons revealed a hard life; teeth
     showed heavy wear and the joints of many adults were thickened by
     rheumatism. Though the flesh had rotted away, the heavy woolen apparel
     the dead wore to the grave remained intact. No fewer than 30 robes, 17
     hoods or cowls, five hats, and six woven stockings (knitting had yet
     to be invented) emerged from the frozen earth. Most of the robes were
     heavily patched, but were in good enough condition to be wearable.

     The clothes were thought to reflect French and Dutch fashions, an
     unexpected find in a country supposedly out of touch with the rest of
     the world at the time. The generously cut hoods provided ample
     covering for shoulders and featured a long, decorative streamer known
     as a liripipe that hung down the back and could be wrapped across the
     face or around the hands to provide extra warmth. The most intriguing
     find seemed to be a tall cap, rather like a stove-pipe hat but flared
     at the back and without a brim. The archaeologists thought they
     recognized it as a Burgundian cap, which they had seen in European
     paintings of the high middle ages. Yet oddly here it was in Greenland.
     How were they to explain this anomaly?

     Because of its location, Herjolfsnes had been the first port of call
     for ships from Iceland and northern Europe. Archaeologists wondered
     who might have come to Greenland after Norse traders ceased to arrive.
     The most likely answer was English sea rovers or Basque whalers.
     According to their own tradition, Basques founded a whaling station in
     Newfoundland as early as 1372. They had only to follow Leif Eriksson's
     route north to reach Greenland. The archaeologists working on the site
     surmised that these Basques might well have stepped ashore sporting
     the new fangled Burgundian cap, which some fashion-starved Greenlander
     rushed to copy. This suggested that the islanders, no matter how cut
     off they may have been from Europe, still hungered for things
     European.

     The questions persist: what happened in the end to the last of the
     Greenlanders? what fate did the people who laid their loved ones to
     rest in this graveyard by the sea meet? who buried them when they
     died, and where? did the Greenlanders give up the island and depart
     for North America, as was said of the western settlers? It is hard to
     imagine such a mass-migration occurring, if for no other reason than
     that the islanders lacked the boats to carry it out. Without a ready
     source of nails, bolts, and wood for repairs, any ships that may have
     survived from earlier days would have made a leaky fleet indeed.

     Were the Greenlanders killed off by the Black Plague? Iceland's
     population had been reduced by as much as two-thirds when an epidemic
     struck in 1402 and dragged on for two years. Norway had suffered
     similarly. Had the Greenlanders also been afflicted, mass graves would
     tell the tale of the dying, and none from this period have been
     discovered.

     Were the islanders subject to intermittent pirate raids? It is
     conceivable that ship-borne marauders, rather than Skraelings, could
     have descended on the Western Settlement, but who could they have
     been? Basques? Perhaps. The archaeological date for the "Burgundian
     cap", set at A.D. 1500, has since been over-turned by radiocarbon
     dating. The new date for the cap is around 1300, suggesting that it
     reflected Nordic rather than southern European fashion. Such
     high-crowned caps are mentioned in Icelandic sagas from 1200-1300 and
     have been found as examples of women's fashion from this period.
     Archaeologists initially questioned the feasibility of the theory of
     an attack on the Greenlanders by Basques, believing the cap to be
     exemplary of Basque-influenced fashion, which seemed to preclude the
     possibility that the Norse settlers and the Basques were enemies. The
     re-dated cap is no longer evidence of friendly Greenlander-Basque
     relations, and the Basques are once again possible culprits in the
     mystery of the disappearance of the Greenlanders. English and German
     pirates also made several brutal attacks on Iceland in the fifteenth
     century; possibly they struck Greenland as well, though the new dates
     for the Greenlanders' clothing suggests minimal, if any, contact with
     Europeans.

     One Inuit story, recorded by Niels Egede, a Dane who grew up in
     Greenland during the eighteenth century when Denmark recolonized the
     island, lends some credence to the story of European raids. The
     narrator, whose ancestors had passed down the tale, recounts how three
     alien ships sailed in from the southwest "to plunder." In the ensuing
     fray, several of the Norsemen, to whom he refers as Norwegians, were
     killed. "But after the Norwegians had mastered them," he relates, "two
     of the ships had to sail away and the third they captured. The next
     year a whole fleet arrived and fought with the Norwegians, plundering
     and killing to obtain food. The survivors put out their vessels,
     loaded with what was left, and sailed away south, leaving some people
     behind. The next year the pirates came back again, and when we saw
     them we fled, taking some of the Norwegian women and children with us
     up the fjord, and left the others in the lurch. When we returned in
     the autumn hoping to find some people again, we saw to our horror that
     everything had been carried away, and houses and farms were burned
     down so that nothing was left."

     Once again the absence of any archaeological evidence of such violence
     leaves the tale unsubstantiated. Of all the houses so far studied in
     the Western Settlement, only one can be said to have been destroyed by
     fire. If such raids happened in the larger Eastern Settlement there
     would be signs of the havoc they wrought. The churches of both
     colonies seem to have been stripped bare, but a people intent on
     protecting their contents would have removed the sacred items and
     hidden them or, if the Greenlanders were indeed the irreligious
     rapscallions some sources say they were, sold them.

     [18][image] A Danish monument to Eric the Red at Brattahlid (Dale
     Mackenzie Brown) [19][LARGER IMAGE]

     In the end, the answer to the Greenlander question may be a lot less
     dramatic than the theories that have surrounded it in mystery. Thomas
     McGovern of New York's Hunter College, who has participated in
     excavations in Greenland, has proposed that the Norsemen lost the
     ability to adapt to changing conditions. He sees them as the victims
     of hidebound thinking and of a hierarchical society dominated by the
     Church and the biggest land owners. In their reluctance to see
     themselves as anything but Europeans, the Greenlanders failed to adopt
     the kind of apparel that the Inuit employed as protection against the
     cold and damp or to borrow any of the Eskimo hunting gear. They
     ignored the toggle harpoon, which would have allowed them to catch
     seals through holes in the ice in winter when food was scarce, and
     they seem not even to have bothered with fishhooks, which they could
     have fashioned easily from bone, as did the Inuit. Instead, the
     Norsemen remained wedded to their farms and to the raising of sheep,
     goats, and cattle in the face of ever worsening conditions that must
     have made maintaining their herds next to impossible.

     McGovern also believes that as life became harder, the birthrate
     declined. The young people who did come along may have seen a brighter
     future waiting somewhere else. The depredations of the plague in
     Iceland and in Norway could have created vacancies overseas that
     able-bodied Greenlanders might have filled. Through the years there
     may have been a slow but persistent drift of Greenlanders to those
     places that had been home to their ancestors, further reducing the
     island's dwindling population.

     Not everyone would have left; some must have stayed on their
     homesteads, unable to give up old attachments and resolved to wait out
     their fate. One such stoic was found lying face down on the beach of a
     fjord in the 1540s by a party of Icelandic seafarers, who like so many
     sailors before them had been blown off course on their passage to
     Iceland and wound up in Greenland. The only Norseman they would come
     across during their stay, he died where he had fallen, dressed in a
     hood, homespun woolens and seal skins. Nearby lay his knife, "bent and
     much worn and eaten away." Moved by their find, the men took it as a
     memento and carried it with them to show when at last they reached
     home.

     Dale Mackenzie Brown, who lives in Alexandria, Virginia, was the
     editor of Time-Life Books' archaeology book series, Lost
     Civilizations.