Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (43 page)

Dairy products alone were not enough to feed the 5,000 Norse inhabitants
of Greenland. Gardening was of little use in making up that resulting
deficit, because growing crops was so marginal in Greenland's cold climate
and short growing season. Contemporary Norwegian documents men
tioned that most Greenland Norse never saw wheat, a piece of bread, or beer
(brewed from barley) during their entire lives. Today, when Greenland's cli
mate is similar to what it was at the time that the Norse arrived, I saw at the
former best Norse farm site of Gardar two small gardens in which mod
ern Greenlanders were growing a few cold-resistant crops: cabbage, beets,
rhubarb, and lettuce, which grew in medieval Norway, plus potatoes, which arrived in Europe only after the demise of the Norse Greenland colony. Pre
sumably the Norse, too, could have grown those same crops (other than potatoes) in a few gardens, plus perhaps a little barley in especially mild
years. At Gardar and two other Eastern Settlement farms I saw small fields at sites that might have served as Norse gardens, at the base of cliffs that would have retained the sun's heat, and with walls to keep sheep and winds
out. But our only direct evidence for gardening by the Greenland Norse is
some pollen and seeds of flax, a medieval European crop plant that was not
native to Greenland, hence that must have been introduced by the Norse,
and that was useful for making linen textiles and linseed oil. If the Norse did
grow any other crops, they would have made only an extremely minor con
tribution to the diet, probably just as an occasional luxury food for a few
chiefs and clergy.

Instead, the main other component of the Greenland Norse diet was
meat of wild animals, especially caribou and seals, consumed to a far greater
extent than in Norway or Iceland. Caribou live in large herds that spend the
summer in the mountains and descend to lower elevations during the win
ter. Caribou teeth found in Norse garbage middens show that the animals were hunted in the fall, probably by bow and arrow in communal drives
with dogs (the middens also had bones of big elkhounds). The three main
seal species hunted were the common seal (alias harbor seal), which is resi
dent all year round in Greenland and comes out on beaches in inner fjords to bear its pups in the spring, at which time it would have been easy to net from boats or to kill by clubbing; and the migratory harp seal and hooded
seal, both of which breed in Newfoundland but arrive in Greenland around May in large herds along the seacoast, rather than in the inner fjords where
most Norse farms were located. To hunt those migratory seals, the Norse es
tablished seasonal bases on the outer fjords, dozens of miles from any farm.

The May arrival of harp and hooded seals was critical to Norse survival, because at that time of year the stocks of stored dairy products from the previ
ous summer and of caribou meat hunted in the previous fall would be
running out, but the snow had not yet disappeared from the Norse farms so
that livestock could not yet be put out to pasture, and consequently the live
stock had not yet given birth and were not yet producing milk. As we shall
see, that made the Norse vulnerable to starvation from a failure of the seal
migration, or from any obstacle (such as ice in the fjords and along the
coast, or else hostile Inuit) that impeded their access to the migratory seals.
Such ice conditions may have been especially likely in cold years when the Norse were already vulnerable because of cold summers and hence low hay
production.

By means of measurements of bone composition (so-called carbon iso
tope analyses), one can calculate the ratio of seafood to land-grown food
that the human or animal owner of those bones had consumed over the
course of a lifetime. As applied to Norse skeletons recovered from Green
land cemeteries, this method shows that the percentage of seafood (mostly
seals) consumed in Eastern Settlement at the time of its founding was
only 20% but rose to 80% during the later years of Norse survival: presum
ably because their ability to produce hay to feed wintering livestock had de
clined, and also because the increased human population needed more food than their livestock could provide. At any given time, seafood consumption
was higher in Western Settlement than in Eastern Settlement, because hay
production was lower at Western Settlement's more northerly location. Seal
consumption by the Norse population may have been even higher than
these measurements indicate, since archaeologists would understandably rather excavate big rich farms than small poor farms, but available bone
studies show that people at small poor farms with just a single cow ate more
seal meat than did rich farmers. At one poor Western Settlement farm, an
astonishing 70% of all animal bones in garbage middens were of seals.

Apart from that heavy reliance on seals and caribou, the Norse obtained
minor amounts of wild meat from small mammals (especially hares), sea
birds, ptarmigans, swans, eider ducks, beds of mussels, and whales. The lat
ter probably just consisted of the occasional stranded animal; Norse sites contain no harpoons or other whale-hunting equipment. All meat not consumed immediately, whether from livestock or wild animals, would have
been dried in storage buildings called
skemmur,
built of uncemented stones for the wind to whistle through and dry out the meat, and located on windy
sites like tops of ridges.

Conspicuously nearly absent from Norse archaeological sites are fish,
even though the Greenland Norse were descended from Norwegians and
Icelanders who spent much time fishing and happily ate fish. Fish bones ac
count for much less than 0.1% of animal bones recovered at Greenland
Norse archaeological sites, compared to between 50 and 95% at most con
temporary Iceland, northern Norway, and Shetland sites. For instance, the archaeologist Thomas McGovern found the grand total of three fish bones
in Norse garbage from Vatnahverfi farms next to lakes teeming with fish,
while Georg Nygaard recovered only two fish bones from a total of 35,000
animal bones in the garbage of the Norse farm 034. Even at the GUS site, which yielded the largest number of fish bones
—166, representing a mere
0.7% of all animal bones recovered from the site—26 of those bones come
from the tail of a single cod, and bones of all fish species are still outnum
bered 3 to 1 by bones of one bird species (the ptarmigan) and outnumbered
144 to 1 by mammal bones.

This paucity of fish bones is incredible when one considers how abun
dant fish are in Greenland, and how saltwater fish (especially haddock and
cod) are by far the largest export of modern Greenland. Trout and salmonlike char are so numerous in Greenland's rivers and lakes that, on my first
night in the youth hostel at Brattahlid, I shared the kitchen with a Danish tourist cooking two large char, each weighing two pounds and about 20
inches long, that she had caught with her bare hands in a small pool where they had become trapped. The Norse were surely as adept with their hands
as that tourist, and they could also have caught fish in fjords with nets while
they were netting seals. Even if the Norse didn't want to eat those easily
caught fish themselves, they could at least have fed them to their dogs,
thereby reducing the amount of seal and other meat that their dogs required, and sparing more meat for themselves.

Every archaeologist who comes to excavate in Greenland refuses initially
to believe the incredible claim that the Greenland Norse didn't eat fish, and starts out with his or her own idea about where all those missing fish bones might be hiding. Could the Norse have strictly confined their munching on
fish to within a few feet of the shoreline, at sites now underwater because
of land subsidence? Could they have faithfully saved all their fish bones for fertilizer, fuel, or feeding to cows? Could their dogs have run off with those
fish carcasses, dropped the fish bones in fields chosen with foresight to be
ones where future archaeologists would rarely bother to dig, and carefully
avoided carrying the carcasses back to the house or midden lest archaeologists subsequently find them? Might the Norse have had so much meat that

they didn't need to eat fish?
—but why, then, did they break bones to get out
the last bit of marrow? Might all of those little fish bones have rotted away
in the ground?—but preservation conditions in Greenland middens are
good enough to preserve even sheep lice and sheep fecal pellets. The trouble
with all those excuses for the lack of fish bones at Greenland Norse sites is
that they would apply equally well to Greenland Inuit and Icelandic and
Norwegian Norse sites, where fish bones prove instead to be abundant. Nor
do these excuses explain why Greenland Norse sites contain almost no fish
hooks, fish line sinkers, or net sinkers, which are common in Norse sites
elsewhere.

I prefer instead to take the facts at face value: even though Greenland's
Norse originated from a fish-eating society, they may have developed a
taboo against eating fish. Every society has its own arbitrary food taboos, as
one of the many ways to distinguish itself from other societies: we virtuous
clean people don't eat those disgusting things that those other gross weirdos
seem to savor. By far the highest proportion of those taboos involves meat
and fish. For instance, the French eat snails and frogs and horses, New Guineans eat rats and spiders and beetle larvae, Mexicans eat goat, and Polynesians eat marine annelid worms, all of which are nutritious and (if
you let yourself taste them) delicious, but most Americans would recoil at
the thought of eating any of those things.

As for the ultimate reasons why meat and fish so often get tabooed, they
are much more likely than plant foods to develop bacteria or protozoa that
give us food poisoning or parasites if we eat them. That's especially likely to
happen in Iceland and Scandinavia, whose people employ many fermenta
tion methods for long-term preservation of smelly (non-Scandinavians
would say "rotting") fish, including methods using deadly botulism-causing bacteria. The most painful illness of my life, worse even than malaria, arose
when I contracted food poisoning from eating shrimp that I had bought in
a market in Cambridge, England, and that were evidently not fresh. I was
confined to bed for several days with awful retching, intense muscle pain,
headaches, and diarrhea. That suggests to me a scenario for the Greenland
Norse: perhaps Erik the Red, in the first years of the Greenland settlement, got an equally awful case of food poisoning from eating fish. On his recovery, he would have told everybody who would listen to him how bad fish is
for you, and how we Greenlanders are a clean, proud people who would
never stoop to the unhealthy habits of those desperate grubby ichthyophagous Icelanders and Norwegians.

Greenland's marginality for raising livestock meant that the Greenland
Norse had to develop a complex, integrated economy in order to make ends
meet. That integration involved both time and space: different activities
were scheduled at different seasons, and different farms specialized in pro
ducing different things to share with other farms.

To understand the seasonal schedule, let's begin in the spring. In late
May and early June came the brief but crucial season of seal hunting, when the migratory harp and hooded seals moved in herds along the outer fjords,
and the resident common seals came out on beaches to give birth and were
easiest to catch. The summer months of June through August were an espe
cially busy season, when the livestock were brought out to pastures to graze,
livestock were yielding milk to turn into storable dairy products, some men
set out in boats for Labrador to cut timber, other boats headed north to
hunt walruses, and cargo boats arrived from Iceland or Europe for trading.
August and early September were hectic weeks of cutting, drying, and storing hay, just before the weeks in September when the cows were led back to
barns from pastures and the sheep and goats were brought nearer to shelter. September and October were the season of the caribou hunt, while the win
ter months from November to April were a time to tend the animals in
barns and shelters, to weave, to build and repair with wood, to process the
tusks of walrus killed during the summer
—and to pray that the stores of dairy products and dried meat for human food, the hay for animal fodder,
and the fuel for heating and cooking didn't run out before the winter's end.

Besides that economic integration over time, integration over space
was also necessary, because not even the richest Greenland farm was self-
sufficient in everything required to survive through the year. That integra
tion involved transfers between outer and inner fjords, between upland and lowland farms, between Western and Eastern Settlement, and between rich
and poor farms. For instance, while the best pastures were in the lowlands at
the heads of the inner fjords, the caribou hunt took place at upland farms suboptimal for pasturing because of cooler temperatures and a shorter
growing season, while the seal hunt was concentrated in outer fjords where
salt spray, fog, and cold weather meant poor farming. Those outer fjord
hunting sites were beyond reach of inner-fjord farms whenever the fjords
froze or filled up with icebergs. The Norse solved these spatial problems by
transporting seal and seabird carcasses from outer to inner fjords, and cari
bou joints downhill from upland to lowland farms. For instance, seal bones
remain abundant in the garbage of the highest-elevation inland farms, to
which the carcasses must have been carried dozens of miles from the fjord