Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (42 page)

to sail from Iceland during the next decade. As a result, by
a.d.
1000 virtually all the land suitable for farms in both Western and Eastern Settlements
had been occupied, yielding an eventual total Norse population estimated
at around 5,000: about 1,000 people at Western Settlement, 4,000 at Eastern
Settlement.

From their settlements the Norse undertook explorations and annual
hunting trips northwards along the west coast, far north of the Arctic Circle.
One of those trips may have gotten as far north as latitude 79
° N, only 700
miles from the North Pole, where numerous Norse artifacts including
pieces of chain mail armor, a carpenter's plane, and ships' rivets were dis
covered in an Inuit archaeological site. More certain evidence of northwards
exploration is a cairn at latitude 73°N containing a runestone (a stone with writing in the Norse runic alphabet), which states that Erling Sighvatsson, Bjarni Thordarson, and Eindridi Oddson erected that cairn on the Saturday
before Minor Rogation Day (April 25), probably in some year around 1300.

Greenland Norse subsistence was based on a combination of pastoralism
(growing domestic livestock) and hunting wild animals for meat. After Erik the Red brought livestock with him from Iceland, the Greenland Norse pro
ceeded to develop a dependence on additional wild food to a degree much
greater than in Norway and Iceland, whose milder climate permitted people
to obtain most of their food requirements from pastoralism and (in Nor
way) gardening alone.

Greenland's settlers started out with aspirations based on the mix of
livestock maintained by prosperous Norwegian chiefs: lots of cows and pigs,
fewer sheep and still fewer goats, plus some horses, ducks, and geese. As
gauged by counts of animal bones identified in radiocarbon-dated Green
land garbage middens from different centuries of Norse occupation, it quickly turned out that that ideal mix was not well suited to Greenland's
colder conditions. Barnyard ducks and geese dropped out immediately, per
haps even on the voyage to Greenland: there is no archaeological evidence of their ever having been kept there. Although pigs found abundant nuts to eat in Norway's forests, and although Vikings prized pork above all other
meats, pigs proved terribly destructive and unprofitable in lightly wooded Greenland, where they rooted up the fragile vegetation and soil. Within a
short time they were reduced to low numbers or virtually eliminated. Ar
chaeological finds of packsaddles and sledges show that horses were kept as
work animals, but there was a Christian religious ban against eating them,

so their bones rarely ended up in the garbage. Cows required far more effort
than sheep or goats to rear in Greenland's climate, because they could find
grass in pastures only during the three snow-free summer months. For the
rest of the year they had to be kept indoors in barns and fed on hay and
other fodder whose acquisition became the main summer chore of Greenland farmers. The Greenlanders might have been better off to discard their
labor-intensive cows, whose numbers did become reduced through the centuries, but they were too prized as status symbols to be eliminated entirely.

Instead, the staple food-producing animals in Greenland became hardy breeds of sheep and goats much better adapted to cold climates than were
the cattle. They had the additional advantage that, unlike cows, they can dig
down under snow to find grass for themselves in the winter. In Greenland today, sheep can be kept outdoors for nine months per year (three times as
long as cows) and have to be brought into shelter and fed for only the three
months of heaviest snow cover. Numbers of sheep plus goats started off barely equal to cow numbers at early Greenland sites, and then rose with
time to as many as eight sheep or goats for every cow. As between sheep and
goats, Icelanders kept six or more of the former for every one of the latter,
and that was also the ratio at the best Greenland farms during early years of
settlement, but relative numbers shifted with time until goat numbers rivaled those of sheep. That's because goats but not sheep can digest the
tough twigs, shrubs, and dwarf trees prevalent in poor Greenland pastures.
Thus, while the Norse arrived in Greenland with a preference for cows over
sheep over goats, the suitability of those animals under Greenland condi
tions was in the opposite sequence. Most farms (especially those in the
more northerly and hence more marginal Western Settlement) had to con
tent themselves eventually with more of the despised goats and few of the
honored cows; only the most productive Eastern Settlement farms suc
ceeded in indulging their cow preference and goat scorn.

The ruins of the barns in which the Greenland Norse kept their cows for nine months per year are still visible. They consisted of long narrow buildings with stone and turf walls several yards thick to keep the barn warm in
side during the winter, because cows could not stand cold as could the
Greenland breeds of sheep and goats. Each cow was kept in its own rectan
gular stall, marked off from adjacent stalls by stone dividing slabs that are still standing in many of the ruined barns. From the size of the stalls, from
the height of the doors through which cows were led in and out of the barn,
and of course from excavated skeletons of the cows themselves, one can cal
culate that Greenland cows were the smallest known in the modern world,

not more than four feet high at the shoulder. During the winter they re
mained all the time in their stalls, where the dung that they dropped accu
mulated as a rising tide around them until the spring, when the sea of dung
was shoveled outside. During the winter the cows were fed on harvested hay, but if its quantities weren't sufficient, it had to be supplemented with
seaweed brought inland. The cows evidently didn't like the seaweed, so that
farm laborers had to live in the barn with the cows and their rising sea of
dung during the winter, and perhaps to force-feed the cows, which gradually became smaller and weaker. Around May, when the snow started to
melt and new grass came up, the cows could at last be brought out of doors
to start grazing themselves, but by then they were so weak that they could
no longer walk and had to be carried outside. In extreme winters, when hay
and seaweed stores ran out before the new growth of summer grass, farmers collected the first willow and birch twigs of the spring as a starvation diet to
feed their animals.

Greenland cows, sheep, and goats were used mainly for milking rather
than for meat. After the animals gave birth in May or June, they yielded milk just during the few summer months. The Norse then turned the milk
into cheese, butter, and the yogurt-like product called
skyr,
which they stored
in huge barrels kept cold by being placed either in mountain streams or in
turf houses, and they ate those dairy products throughout the winter. The
goats were also kept for their hair, and the sheep for their wool, which was
of exceptionally high quality because sheep in those cold climates produce
fatty wool that is naturally waterproof. Meat was available from the live
stock just at times of culling, especially in the autumn, when farmers calcu
lated how many animals they would be able to feed through the winter on
the hay that they had brought in that fall. They slaughtered any remaining
animals for which they estimated that they would not have enough winter
fodder. Because meat of barnyard animals was thus in short supply, almost
all bones of slaughtered animals in Greenland were split and broken to extract the last bits of marrow, far more so than in other Viking countries. At archaeological sites of Greenland Inuit, who were skilled hunters bringing
in more wild meat than the Norse, the preserved larvae of flies that feed on
rotting marrow and fat are abundant, but those flies found slim pickings at
Norse sites.

It took several tons of hay to maintain a cow, much less to maintain a sheep, throughout an average Greenland winter. Hence the main occupa
tion of most Greenland Norse during the late summer had to be cutting,
drying, and storing hay. The hay quantities accumulated then were critical

because they determined how many animals could be fed throughout the following winter, but that depended on the duration of that winter, which
could not be predicted exactly in advance. Hence each September the Norse had to make the agonizing decision how many of their precious livestock to
cull, basing that decision on the amount of fodder available and on their
guess as to the length of the coming winter. If they killed too many animals in September, they would end up in May with uneaten hay and just a small herd, and they might kick themselves for not having gambled on being able to feed more animals. But if they killed too few animals in September, they
might find themselves running out of hay before May and risk the whole
herd starving.

Hay was produced in three types of fields. Most productive would be so-
called infields near the main house, fenced to keep livestock out, manured
to increase grass growth, and used just for hay production. At the cathedral
farm of Gardar and a few other Norse farm ruins, one can see the remains
of irrigation systems of dams and channels that spread mountain stream
water over the infields to further increase productivity. The second zone of
hay production was the so-called outfields, somewhat farther from the
main house and outside the fenced-off area. Finally, the Greenland Norse
carried over from Norway and Iceland a system called
shielings
or
saeters,
consisting of buildings in more remote upland areas suitable for producing
hay and grazing animals during the summer but too cold for keeping live
stock during the winter. The most complex shielings were virtually minia
ture farms, complete with houses where laborers lived during the summer
to tend animals and make hay but returned to live on the main farm during
the winter. Each year the snow melted off and the grass began to grow first
at low altitude and then at increasingly higher altitudes, but new grass is es
pecially high in nutrients and low in less-digestible fiber. Shielings were thus
a sophisticated method to help Norse farmers solve the problem of Greenland's patchy and limited resources, by exploiting even temporarily useful patches in the mountains, and by moving livestock gradually uphill to take
advantage of the new grass appearing at progressively higher altitudes as the
summer went on.

As I mentioned earlier, Christian Keller had told me before we visited
Greenland together that "life in Greenland was about finding the best
patches." What Christian meant was that, even in those two fjord systems that were the sole areas of Greenland with good potential for pastures, the
best areas along those fjords were few and scattered. As I cruised or walked
up and down Greenland's fjords, even as a naive city-dweller I felt myself

gradually learning to recognize the criteria by which the Norse would have
recognized patches good for being turned into farms. While Greenland's ac
tual settlers from Iceland and Norway had a huge advantage over me as ex
perienced farmers, I had the advantage of hindsight: I knew, and they
couldn't know, at which patches Norse farms were actually tried or proved poor or became abandoned. It would have taken years or even generations for the Norse themselves to have weeded out deceptively good-looking
patches that eventually proved unsuitable. Jared Diamond's city-dweller criteria for a good medieval Norse farm site are as follows: