Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (47 page)

CHAPTER
8

Norse Greenland's End

Introduction to the end
■ Deforestation ■ Soil and turf damage ■

The Inuit's predecessors
■ Inuit subsistence ■ Inuit/Norse relations ■

The end
■ Ultimate causes of the end
■

I

n the previous chapter we saw how the Norse initially prospered in Green
land, due to a fortunate set of circumstances surrounding their arrival.
They had the good luck to discover a virgin landscape that had never
been logged or grazed, and that was suitable for use as pasture. They arrived
at a time of relatively mild climate, when hay production was sufficient
in most years, when the sea lanes to Europe were free of ice, when there was European demand for their exports of walrus ivory, and when there
were no Native Americans anywhere near the Norse settlements or hunting
grounds.

All of those initial advantages gradually turned against the Norse, in
ways for which they bore some responsibility. While climate change, Eu
rope's changing demand for ivory, and the arrival of the Inuit were beyond
their control, how the Norse dealt with those changes was up to them. Their
impact on the landscape was a factor entirely of their own making. In this
chapter we shall see how the shifts in those advantages, and the Norse reac
tions to them, combined to bring an end to the Norse Greenland colony.

The Greenland Norse damaged their environment in at least three ways: by
destroying the natural vegetation, by causing soil erosion, and by cutting
turf. As soon as they arrived, they burned woodlands to clear land for pasture, then cut down some of the remaining trees for purposes such as lumber and firewood. Trees were prevented from regenerating by livestock
grazing and trampling, especially in the winter, when plants were most vul
nerable because of not growing then.

The effects of those impacts on the natural vegetation have been gauged by our friends the palynologists examining radiocarbon-dated slices of sedi
ments collected from the bottoms of lakes and bogs. In those sediments oc-

cur at least five environmental indicators: whole plant parts such as leaves, and plant pollen, both of which serve to identify the plant species growing
near the lake at that time; charcoal particles, proof of fires nearby; magnetic
susceptibility measurements, which in Greenland reflect mainly the amounts
of magnetic iron minerals in the sediment, arising from topsoil washed or
blown into the lake's basin; and sand similarly washed or blown in.

These studies of lake sediments yield the following picture of vegeta-
tional history around the Norse farms. As temperatures warmed up at the
end of the last Ice Age, pollen counts show that grasses and sedges became
replaced by trees. For the next 8,000 years there were few further changes in
the vegetation, and few or no signs of deforestation and erosion
—until the
Vikings arrived. That event was signaled by a layer of charcoal from Viking fires to clear pastures for their livestock. Pollen of willow and birch trees de
creased, while pollen of grasses, sedges, weeds, and pasture plants introduced by the Norse for animal feed rose. Increased magnetic susceptibility
values show that topsoil was carried into lakes, the topsoil having lost the plant cover that had previously protected it from erosion by wind and wa
ter. Finally, sand underlying the topsoil also was carried in when whole val
leys had been denuded of their plant cover and soil. All of these changes
became reversed, indicating recovery of the landscape, after the Viking settlements went extinct in the 1400s. Finally, the same set of changes that ac
companied Norse arrival appeared all over again after 1924, when the
Danish government of Greenland reintroduced sheep five centuries after
their demise along with their Viking caretakers.

So what?
—an environmental skeptic might ask. That's sad for willow
trees, but what about people? It turned out that deforestation, soil erosion,
and turf cutting all had serious consequences for the Norse. The most obvi
ous consequence of deforestation was that the Norse quickly became short of
lumber, as did the Icelanders and Mangarevans. The low and thin trunks of
the willow, birch, and juniper trees remaining were suitable for making only
small household wooden objects. For large pieces of wood to fashion into beams of houses, boats, sledges, barrels, wall panels, and beds, the Norse
came to depend on three sources of timber: Siberian driftwood washed up
on the beaches, imported logs from Norway, and trees felled by the Green-landers themselves on voyages to the Labrador coast ("Markland") discovered in the course of the Vinland explorations. Lumber evidently remained
so scarce that wooden objects were recycled rather than discarded. This can
be deduced from the absence of large wooden panels and furniture at most
Greenland Norse ruins except for the last houses in which the Norse of

Western Settlement died. At a famous Western Settlement archaeological
site called "Farm Beneath the Sands," which became almost perfectly preserved under frozen river sands, most timber found was in the upper layers
rather than in the lower layers, again suggesting that timber of old rooms
and buildings was too precious to discard and was scavenged as rooms were
remodeled or added. The Norse also dealt with their poverty in timber by resorting to turf for walls of buildings, but we shall see that that solution
posed its own set of problems.

Another answer to the "so what?" response to deforestation is: poverty in
firewood. Unlike the Inuit, who learned to use blubber for heating and
lighting their dwellings, remains in Norse hearths show that the Norse con
tinued to burn willow and alder wood in their houses. A major additional demand for firewood that most of us modern city-dwellers would never
think of was in the dairy. Milk is an ephemeral, potentially dangerous food source: it is so nourishing, not only to us but also to bacteria, that it quickly
spoils if left to stand without the pasteurization and refrigeration that we
take for granted and that the Norse, like everyone else before modern times,
didn't practice. Hence the vessels in which the Norse collected and stored milk and made cheese had to be washed frequently with boiled water, twice
a day in the case of milk buckets. Milking animals at saeters (those summer
farm buildings in the hills) was consequently confined to elevations below
1,300 feet, above which firewood was unavailable, even though pasture
grasses good for feeding livestock grew up to much higher elevations of
about 2,500 feet. In both Iceland and Norway we know that saeters had to
be closed down when local firewood became exhausted, and the same presumably held for Greenland as well. Just as was true for scarce lumber, the
Norse substituted other materials for scarce firewood, by burning animal bones, manure, and turf. But those solutions too had disadvantages: the
bones and manure could otherwise have been used to fertilize fields for in
creased hay production, and burning turf was tantamount to destroying pasture.

The remaining heavy consequences of deforestation, besides shortages
of lumber and firewood, involved shortages of iron. Scandinavians obtained
most of their iron as bog iron
—i.e., by extracting the metal from bog
sediments with low iron content. Bog iron itself is locally available in
Greenland, as in Iceland and Scandinavia: Christian Keller and I saw an iron-colored bog at Gardar in the Eastern Settlement, and Thomas McGov-
ern saw other such bogs in the Western Settlement. The problem lay not

with finding bog iron in Greenland but with extracting it, because the ex
traction required huge quantities of wood to make the charcoal with which to produce the necessary very high temperature of fire. Even when the
Greenlanders skipped that step by importing iron ingots from Norway, they still needed charcoal to work the iron into tools, and to sharpen, repair, and
remake iron tools, which they had to do frequently.

We know that the Greenlanders possessed iron tools and worked with
iron. Many of the larger Norse Greenland farms have remains of iron
smithies and iron slag, though that doesn't tell us whether the smithies were
used just to rework imported iron or to extract bog iron. At Greenland
Viking archaeological sites have been found examples of the usual iron ob
jects expected for a medieval Scandinavian society, including axe heads,
scythes, knives, sheep shears, ships' rivets, carpenters' planes, awls to punch
holes, and gimlets to bore holes.

But those same sites make clear that the Greenlanders were desperately
short of iron, even by the standards of medieval Scandinavia, where iron
wasn't plentiful. For example, far more nails and other iron objects are
found at British and Shetland Viking sites, and even at Iceland sites and at
the Vinland site of L'Anse aux Meadows, than at Greenland sites. Discarded
iron nails are the commonest iron item at L'Anse aux Meadows, and many
are also found at sites in Iceland, despite Iceland's own shortage of wood
and iron. But iron poverty was extreme in Greenland. A few iron nails have
been found in the lowest archaeological layers there, almost none in later
layers, because iron became too precious to discard. Not a single sword, hel
met, or even a piece of one has been found in Greenland, and just a couple
of pieces of chain mail armor, possibly all from a single suit. Iron tools were
reused and resharpened until worn down to stubs. For example, from exca
vations in Qorlortoq Valley I was struck by the pathos of a knife whose
blade had been worn down to almost nothing, still mounted on a handle
whose length was all out of proportion to that stub, and evidently still valu
able enough to have been resharpened.

The Greenlanders' iron poverty is also clear from the many objects, re
covered at their archaeological sites, that in Europe were routinely made of
iron but that the Greenlanders made of other, often unexpected, materials.
Those objects included wooden nails and caribou-antler arrowheads. Ice
land's annals for the year 1189 describe with surprise how a Greenland ship
that had drifted off course to Iceland was nailed not with iron nails but with
wooden pegs, and then lashed together with whale baleen. However, for

Vikings whose self-image focused on terrifying opponents by swinging a
mighty battleaxe, to be reduced to making that weapon out of whalebone
must have been the ultimate humiliation.

A result of the Greenlanders' iron poverty was reduced efficiency of es
sential processes of their economy. With few iron scythes, cleavers, and shears available, or with those tools having to be made of bone or stone, it
would have taken more time to harvest hay, butcher a carcass, and shear
sheep, respectively. But a more immediately fatal consequence was that, by losing iron, the Norse lost their military advantage over the Inuit. Elsewhere
around the world, in innumerable battles between European colonizers and
the native peoples whom they encountered, steel swords and armor gave Europeans enormous advantages. For instance, during the Spanish con
quest of Peru's Inca Empire in 1532-1533, there were five battles in which respectively 169, 80, 30, 110, and 40 Spaniards slaughtered armies of thou
sands to tens of thousands of Incas, with not a single Spaniard killed and
only a few injured
—because Spanish steel swords cut through Indian cot
ton armor, and the Spaniards' steel armor protected them against blows from Indian stone or wooden weapons. But there is no evidence that the
Greenland Norse after the first few generations had steel weapons or steel armor anymore, except for that one suit of chain mail whose pieces have
been discovered, and which may have belonged to a visiting European on a
European ship rather than to a Greenlander. Instead, they fought with
bows, arrows, and lances, just as did the Inuit. Nor is there any evidence that
the Greenland Norse used their horses in battle as cavalry steeds, which
again gave decisive advantages to Spanish conquistadors battling the Incas
and Aztecs; their Icelandic relatives certainly didn't. The Greenland Norse also lacked professional military training. They thereby ended up with no
military advantage whatsoever over the Inuit—with probable consequences
for their fate that we shall see.

Thus, the impact of the Norse on the natural vegetation left them short of
lumber, fuel, and iron. Their other two main types of impact, on soil and on turf, left them short of useful land. In Chapter 6 we saw how the fragility of
Iceland's light volcanic soils opened the door there to big problems of soil
erosion. While Greenland's soils are not as supersensitive as Iceland's, they still rank as relatively fragile by world standards, because Greenland's short cool growing season results in slow rates of plant growth, slow soil forma
tion, and thin topsoil layers. Slow plant growth also translates into low soil

content of organic humus and clay, soil constituents that serve to bind wa
ter and keep the soil moist. Hence Greenland soils are easily dried out by the
frequent strong winds.

The sequence of soil erosion in Greenland begins with cutting or burn
ing the cover of trees and shrubs, which are more effective at holding soil
than is grass. With the trees and shrubs gone, livestock, especially sheep and
goats, graze down the grass, which regenerates only slowly in Greenland's
climate. Once the grass cover is broken and the soil is exposed, soil is carried
away especially by the strong winds, and also by pounding from occasion
ally heavy rains, to the point where the topsoil can be removed for a dis
tance of miles from an entire valley. In areas where sand becomes exposed, as for example in river valleys, sand is picked up by the wind and dumped
downwind.

Lake cores and soil profiles document the development of serious soil
erosion in Greenland after the Norse arrived, and the dumping of topsoil
and then sand by wind and running water into lakes. For instance, at the site
of an abandoned Norse farm that I passed at the mouth of the Qoroq Fjord,
downwind of a glacier, so much soil was blown away by high-velocity winds
that only stones remained. Wind-blown sand is very common at Norse
farms: some abandoned ones in the Vatnahverfi area are covered by sand ten
feet deep.

The other means besides soil erosion by which the Norse inadvertently
made land useless was that they cut turf for buildings and to burn as fuel,
because of their shortage of timber and firewood. Almost all Greenland
buildings were constructed mostly of turf, with at best only a stone founda
tion plus some wooden beams to support the roof. Even St. Nicholas's
Cathedral at Gardar had only the lowest six feet of its walls made of stone,
above which the walls were of turf, with a roof supported by wooden beams
and with a wood-paneled front. Although Hvalsey Church was exceptional
in having walls entirely of stone up to their full height, it was still roofed with turf. Greenland turf walls tended to be thick (up to six feet thick!) in
order to provide insulation against the cold.

A large Greenland residential house is estimated to have consumed
about 10 acres of turf. Furthermore, that amount of turf was needed more
than once, because turf gradually disintegrates, so that a building must be
"returfed" every few decades. The Norse referred to that process of acquir
ing turf for construction as "flaying the outfield," a good description of the damage done to what would otherwise be pastureland. The slow regenera
tion of turf in Greenland meant that that damage was long-lasting.