Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (44 page)

mouths. At Vatnahverfi farms far inland, seal bones are as common in the garbage as are the bones of sheep and goats. Conversely, caribou bones are even commoner at big rich lowland farms than at the poorer uphill farms where the animals must have been killed.

Because Western Settlement lies 300 miles north of Eastern Settlement, its hay production per acre of pasture was barely one-third that of Eastern Settlement. However, Western Settlement was closer to the hunting grounds for walruses and polar bears that were Greenland's chief export to Europe, as I shall explain. Yet walrus ivory has been found at most Eastern Settlement archaeological sites, where it was evidently being processed during the winter, and ship trade (including ivory export) with Europe took place mainly at Gardar and other big Eastern Settlement farms. Thus, Western Settlement, although much smaller than Eastern Settlement, was crucial to the Norse economy.

Integration of poorer with richer farms was necessary because hay production and grass growth depend especially on a combination of two factors: temperature, and hours of sunlight. Warmer temperatures, and more hours or days of sunlight during the summer growing season, meant that a farm could produce more grass or hay and hence feed more livestock, both because the livestock could graze the grass for themselves during the summer and had more hay to eat during the winter. Hence in a good year the best farms at low elevation, on the inner fjords, or with south-facing exposures produced big surpluses of hay and livestock over and above the amounts required for the farm's human inhabitants to survive, while small poor farms at higher elevations, near the outer fjords, or without south-facing exposures produced smaller surpluses. In a bad year (colder and/or foggier), when hay production was depressed everywhere, the best farms might still have been left with some surplus, albeit a small one. But poorer farms might have found themselves with not even enough hay to feed all their animals through the winter. Hence they would have had to cull some animals in the fall and might at worst have had no animals left alive in the spring. At best, they might have had to divert their herd's entire milk production to rearing calves, lambs, and kids, and the farmers themselves would have had to depend on seal or caribou meat rather than dairy products for their own food.

One can recognize that pecking order of farm quality by the pecking order of space for cows in the ruins of Norse barns. By far the best farm, as reflected in the space for the most cows, was Gardar, unique in having two huge barns capable of holding the grand total of about 160 cows. The barns

at several second-rank farms, such as Brattahlid and Sandnes, could have
held 30 to 50 cows each. But poor farms had room for only a few cows, per
haps just a single one. The result was that the best farms subsidized poor
farms in bad years by lending them livestock in the spring so that the poor
farms could rebuild their herds.

Thus, Greenland society was characterized by much interdependence and sharing, with seals and seabirds being transported inland, caribou
downhill, walrus tusks south, and livestock from richer to poorer farms. But
in Greenland, as elsewhere in the world where rich and poor people are in
terdependent, rich and poor people didn't all end up with the same average wealth. Instead, different people ended up with different proportions of
high-status and low-status foods in their diets, as reflected in counts of
bones of different animal species in their garbage. The ratio of high-status
cow to lower-status sheep bones, and of sheep to bottom-status goat bones,
tends to be higher on good than on poorer farms, and higher on East
ern than on Western Settlement farms. Caribou bones, and especially seal bones, are more frequent at Western than at Eastern Settlement sites be
cause Western Settlement was more marginal for raising livestock and was also near larger areas of caribou habitat. Among those two wild foods, caribou is better represented at the richest farms (especially Gardar), while people at poor farms ate much more seal. Having forced myself out of curiosity
to taste seal while I was in Greenland, and not gotten beyond the second bite, I can understand why people from a European dietary background
might prefer venison over seal if given the choice.

As an illustration of these trends with some actual numbers, the garbage
of the poor Western Settlement farm known as W48 or Niaquusat tells us
that the meat consumed by its unfortunate inhabitants came to the horrify
ing extent of 85% from seals, with 6% from goats, only 5% from caribou,
3% from sheep, and 1% (O rare blessed day!) from beef. At the same time, the gentry at Sandnes, the richest Western Settlement farm, was enjoying a
diet of 32% caribou venison, 17% beef, 6% sheep, and 6% goat, leaving only
39% to be made up by seal. Happiest of all was the Eastern Settlement elite at Erik the Red's farm of Brattahlid, who succeeded in elevating beef con
sumption above either caribou or sheep, and suppressing goat to insignifi
cant levels.

Two poignant anecdotes further illustrate how high-status people got to
eat preferred foods much less available to low-status people even on the
same farm. First, when archaeologists excavated the ruins of the Cathedral of St. Nicholas at Gardar, they found under the stone floor the skeleton of a

man holding a bishop's staff and ring, probably John Arnason Smyrill, who
served as Greenland's bishop from 1189 to 1209. Carbon isotope analysis of his bones shows that his diet had consisted 75% of land-based foods
(probably mostly beef and cheese) and only 25% of marine foods (mostly seal). A contemporary man and woman whose skeletons were buried im
mediately beneath the bishop's, and who thus were presumably also of high
status, had consumed a diet somewhat higher (45%) in marine food, but
that percentage ranged up to 78% for other skeletons from Eastern Settle
ment, and 81% from Western Settlement. Second, at Sandnes, the richest
farm in Western Settlement, the animal bones in the garbage outside the
manor house proved that its occupants were eating plenty of caribou and
livestock and not much seal. Only fifty yards away was a barn in which animals would have been kept for the winter, and in which farm workers would
have lived then along with the animals and the manure. The garbage dump
outside that barn showed that those workers had to content themselves with
seal and had little caribou, beef, or mutton to enjoy.

The complexly integrated economy that I have described, based on rais
ing livestock, hunting on land, and hunting in the fiords, enabled the
Greenland Norse to survive in an environment where no one of those com
ponents alone was sufficient for survival. But that economy also hints at
a possible reason for the Greenlanders' eventual demise, because it was vulnerable to failure of any of those components. Many possible climatic events could raise the specter of starvation: a short, cool, foggy summer, or
a wet August, that decreased hay production; a long snowy winter that was
hard on both the livestock and the caribou, and that increased the winter
hay requirements of the livestock; ice pile-up in the fjords, impeding access
to the outer fiords during the May-June sealing season; a change in ocean temperatures, affecting fish populations and hence the populations of fish-
eating seals; or a climate change far away in Newfoundland, affecting harp
and hooded seals on their breeding grounds. Several of these events have been documented in modern Greenland: for instance, the cold winter and
heavy snows of 1966-1967 killed 22,000 sheep, while migratory harp seals
during the cold years of 1959-1974 fell to a mere 2% of their former num
bers. Even in the best years, Western Settlement was closer to the margin for
hay production than was Eastern Settlement, and a drop in summer tem
perature by a mere 1
°C would suffice to cause failure of the hay crop at the
former location.

The Norse could cope with livestock losses from one bad summer or bad
winter, provided that it was followed by a series of good years enabling

them to rebuild their herds, and provided that they could hunt enough seal and caribou to eat during those years. More dangerous was a decade with
several bad years, or a summer of low hay production followed by a long
snowy winter necessitating much hay for feeding livestock indoors, in com
bination with a crash in seal numbers or else anything impeding spring ac
cess to the outer fjords. As we shall see, that was what actually happened
eventually at Western Settlement.

Five adjectives, mutually somewhat contradictory, characterize Greenland
Norse society: communal, violent, hierarchical, conservative, and Euro
centric. All of those features were carried over from the ancestral Icelandic
and Norwegian societies, but became expressed to an extreme degree in
Greenland.

To begin with, Greenland's Norse population of about 5,000 lived on
250 farms, with an average of 20 people per farm, organized in turn into
communities centered on 14 main churches, with an average of about 20 farms per church. Norse Greenland was a strongly communal society, in
which one person could not go off, make a living by himself or herself, and
hope to survive. On the one hand, cooperation among people of the same
farm or community was essential for the spring seal hunt, summer Nordr-seta hunt (described below), late-summer hay harvest, and autumn caribou
hunt and for building, each of which activities required many people work
ing together and would have been inefficient or impossible for a single per
son alone. (Imagine trying to round up a herd of wild caribou or seals, or
lifting a 4-ton stone of a cathedral into place, by yourself.) On the other hand, cooperation was also necessary for economic integration between
farms and especially between communities, because different Greenland locations produced different things, such that people at different locations de
pended on each other for the things that they did not produce. I already
mentioned the transfers of seals hunted at the outer fjords to the inner
fjords, of caribou meat hunted at upland sites to lowland sites, and of livestock from rich to poor farms when the latter lost their animals in a harsh winter. The 160 cattle for which the Gardar barns contained stalls far ex
ceeded any conceivable local needs at Gardar. As we shall see below, walrus
tusks, Greenland's most valuable export, were acquired by a few Western
Settlement hunters in the Nordrseta hunting grounds but were then distrib
uted widely among Western and Eastern Settlement farms for the laborious
task of processing before export.

Belonging to a farm was essential both to survival and to social identity.
Every piece of the few useful patches of land in the Western and Eastern Set
tlements was owned either by some individual farm or else communally by
a group of farms, which thereby held the rights to all of that land's re
sources, including not only its pastures and hay but also its caribou, turf,
berries, and even its driftwood. Hence a Greenlander wanting to go it alone
couldn't just go off hunting and foraging for himself. In Iceland, if you lost
your farm or got ostracized, you could try living somewhere else
—on an is
land, an abandoned farm, or the interior highlands. You didn't have that op
tion in Greenland, where there wasn't any "somewhere else" to which to go.

The result was a tightly controlled society, in which the few chiefs of the
richest farms could prevent anyone else from doing something that seemed
to threaten their interests
—including anyone experimenting with innova
tions that did not promise to help the chiefs. At the top, Western Settlement
was controlled by Sandnes, its richest farm and its sole one with access to
the outer fjords, while Eastern Settlement was controlled by Gardar, its rich
est farm and the seat of its bishop. We shall see that this consideration may help us understand the eventual fate of Greenland Norse society.

Also carried to Greenland from Iceland and Norway along with this
communality was a strong violent streak. Some of our evidence is written: when Norway's King Sigurd Jorsalfar proposed in 1124 to a priest named
Arnald that Arnald go to Greenland as its first resident bishop, Arnald's
excuses for not wanting to accept included that the Greenlanders were
such cantankerous people. To which the shrewd king replied, "The greater
the trials that you suffer at the hands of men, the greater will be your own merits and rewards." Arnald accepted on condition that a highly respected
Greenland chief's son named Einar Sokkason swear to defend him and
the Greenland church properties, and to smite his enemies. As related in
Einar Sokkason's saga (see synopsis following), Arnald did get involved in the usual violent quarrels when he reached Greenland, but he handled them
so skillfully that all the main litigants (including even Einar Sokkason)
ended up killing each other while Arnald retained his life and authority.

The other evidence for violence in Greenland is more concrete. The
church cemetery at Brattahlid includes, in addition to many individual
graves with neatly placed whole skeletons, a mass grave dating from the ear
liest phase of the Greenland colony, and containing the disarticulated bones
of 13 adult men and one nine-year-old child, probably a clan party that lost
a feud. Five of those skeletons bear skull wounds inflicted by a sharp instru
ment, presumably an axe or sword. While two of the skull wounds show