Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (48 page)

Again, a skeptic, on being told about soil erosion and turf cutting, might
answer: "So what?" The answer is simple. Remember that, among the Norse
Atlantic islands, Greenland even before human impact was the coldest is
land, hence the one most marginal for hay and pasture growth and most
susceptible to loss of vegetation cover by overgrazing, trampling, soil erosion, and turf-cutting. A farm had to have sufficient pasture area to support
at least the minimum number of animals required to breed back herd numbers after a long cold winter had reduced them, before the next long cold winter. Estimates suggest that the loss of only one-quarter of the total pasture area at Eastern Settlement or Western Settlement would have sufficed
to drop the herd size below that minimum critical threshold. That's what
actually appears to have happened at Western Settlement, and possibly at
Eastern Settlement as well.

Just as in Iceland, the environmental problems that beset the medieval Norse remain concerns in modern Greenland. For five centuries after
Greenland's medieval Norse died out, the island was without livestock un
der Inuit occupation and then under Danish colonial rule. Finally, in 1915, before the recent studies of medieval environmental impacts had been carried out, the Danes introduced Icelandic sheep on a trial basis, and the first full-time sheep breeder reestablished the farm at Brattahlid in 1924. Cows were also tried but were abandoned because they took too much work.

Today, about 65 Greenland families raise sheep as their main occupa
tion, with the result that overgrazing and soil erosion have reemerged. Greenland lake cores show the same changes after 1924 as occurred after
a.d.
984: a decrease in tree pollen, increase in grass and weed pollen, and in
crease of topsoil carried into lakes. Initially after 1924, sheep were left out
doors in the winter to forage for themselves whenever the winter was
sufficiently mild. That caused grazing damage at the time when the vegetation was least capable of regenerating. Juniper trees are especially sensitive,
because both sheep and horses browse them in the winter when there is
nothing else available to eat. When Christian Keller arrived at Brattahlid in
1976, juniper was still growing there, but during my visit in 2002 I saw only
dead juniper.

After more than half of Greenland's sheep starved to death in the cold
winter of 1966-67, the government founded a Greenland Experimental Sta
tion to study the environmental effects of sheep by comparing vegetation
and soil in heavily grazed pastures, lightly grazed ones, and fields fenced to
keep sheep out. A component of that research involved enlisting archaeolo
gists to study pasture changes during Viking times. As a result of the appre-

ciation thereby gained about Greenland's fragility, Greenlanders have fenced
off their most vulnerable pastures and brought sheep indoors for barn feed
ing throughout the entire winter. Efforts are being made to increase the
supplies of winter hay by fertilizing natural pastures, and by cultivating oats, rye, timothy, and other non-native grasses.

Despite these efforts, soil erosion is a big problem in Greenland today.
Along Eastern Settlement fjords, I saw areas of bare stone and gravel, largely
devoid of vegetation as a result of recent sheep grazing. Within the last 25
years, high-velocity winds have eroded the modern farm at the site of the
old Norse farm at the mouth of the Qorlortoq Valley, thereby furnishing us
with a model for what happened at that farm seven centuries ago. While both the Greenland government and the sheep farmers themselves under
stand the long-term damage caused by sheep, they also feel under pressure to generate jobs in a society with high unemployment. Ironically, raising
sheep in Greenland doesn't pay even in the short run: the government has
to give each sheep-farming family about $14,000 each year to cover their
losses, provide them with an income, and induce them to carry on with the
sheep.

The Inuit play a major role in the story of the demise of Viking Greenland. They constituted the biggest difference between the histories of the Greenland and Iceland Norse: while the Icelanders did enjoy the advantages of a less daunting climate and shorter trade routes to Norway compared to their
Greenland brethren, the Icelanders' clearest advantage lay in not being
threatened by the Inuit. At minimum, the Inuit represent a missed opportunity: the Greenland Vikings would have had a better chance of surviving if
they had learned from or traded with the Inuit, but they didn't. At maxi
mum, Inuit attacks on or threats to the Vikings may have played a direct
role in the Vikings' extinction. The Inuit are also significant in proving to us
that persistence of human societies wasn't impossible in medieval Green
land. Why did the Vikings eventually fail where the Inuit succeeded?

Today we think of the Inuit as
the
native inhabitants of Greenland and the Canadian Arctic. In reality, they were just the most recent in a series of
at least four archaeologically recognized peoples who expanded eastward across Canada and entered Northwest Greenland over the course of nearly
4,000 years before Norse arrival. Successive waves of them spread, remained
in Greenland for centuries, and then vanished, raising their own questions
of societal collapses similar to the questions that we are considering for the

Norse, Anasazi, and Easter Islanders. However, we know too little about those earlier disappearances to discuss them in this book except as back
ground to the Vikings' fate. While archaeologists have given to these earlier
cultures names like Point Independence I, Point Independence II, and
Saqqaq, depending on the sites where their artifacts became recognized, the
languages of those people, and their names for themselves, all are lost to us
forever.

The Inuits' immediate predecessors were a culture referred to by archae
ologists as the Dorset people, from their habitations identified at Cape
Dorset on Canada's Baffin Island. After occupying most of the Canadian
Arctic, they entered Greenland around 800
b.c.
and inhabited many parts of
the island for about a thousand years, including the areas of the later Viking
settlements in the southwest. For unknown reasons, they then abandoned
all of Greenland and much of the Canadian Arctic by around
a.d.
300 and
contracted their distribution back to some core areas of Canada. Around
a.d.
700, though, they expanded again to reoccupy Labrador and north
western Greenland, though on this migration they did not spread south to
the later Viking sites. At Western and Eastern Settlements, the initial Viking
colonists described seeing only uninhabited house ruins, fragments of skin
boats, and stone tools that they guessed were left by vanished natives similar
to the ones that they had encountered in North America during the Vinland
voyages.

From bones recovered at archaeological sites, we know that Dorset peo
ple hunted a wide range of prey species varying among sites and time peri
ods: walrus, seals, caribou, polar bears, foxes, ducks, geese, and seabirds.
There was long-distance trade between the Dorset populations of Arctic
Canada, Labrador, and Greenland, as proven by discoveries of tools of stone
types quarried from one of these sites appearing at other sites a thousand
kilometers distant. Unlike their successors the Inuit or some of their Arctic
predecessors, though, Dorset people lacked dogs (hence also dogsleds) and didn't use bows and arrows. Unlike the Inuit, they also lacked boats of skin
stretched over a framework and hence could not go to sea to hunt whales.
Without dogsleds, they were poorly mobile, and without whale-hunting,
they were unable to feed large populations. Instead, they lived in small set
tlements of just one or two houses, big enough for no more than 10 people and just a few adult men. That made them the least formidable of the three Native American groups that the Norse encountered: Dorset people, Inuit,
and Canadian Indians. And that, surely, is why the Greenland Norse felt

safe enough to continue for more than three centuries to visit the Dorset-
occupied coast of Labrador to fetch timber, long after they had given up
on visiting "Vinland" farther south in Canada because of the dense hostile
Indian populations there.

Did Vikings and Dorset people meet each other in Northwest Green
land? We have no firm proof, but it seems likely, because Dorset people sur
vived there for about 300 years after the Norse settled the southwest, and
because the Norse were making annual visits to the Nordrseta hunting
grounds only a few hundred miles south of Dorset-occupied areas and
made exploratory trips farther north. Below, I shall mention one Norse account of an encounter with natives who might have been Dorset people.
Other evidence consists of some objects clearly originating with Vikings
— especially pieces of smelted metal that would have been prized for making
tools—discovered at Dorset sites scattered over Northwest Greenland and the Canadian Arctic. Of course, we don't know whether Dorset people acquired those objects by face-to-face contacts, peaceful or otherwise, with
Norse, or whether they were merely scavenged from abandoned Norse sites.
Whichever was the case, we can be confident that Norse relations with the
Inuit had the potential for becoming much more dangerous than those relatively harmless relations with Dorset people.

Inuit culture and technology, including mastery of whale-hunting in open
waters, arose in the Bering Strait region somewhat before
a.d.
1000.
Dogsleds on land, and large boats at sea, enabled the Inuit to travel and
transport supplies much more rapidly than could Dorset people. As the
Arctic became warmer in the Middle Ages and the frozen waterways sepa
rating Canadian Arctic islands thawed, the Inuit followed their bowhead
whale prey through those waterways eastwards across Canada, entering
Northwest Greenland by
a.d.
1200, and thereafter moving south along
Greenland's west coast to reach the Nordrseta, then the vicinity of Western Settlement around
a.d.
1300, and the vicinity of Eastern Settlement around
1400.

The Inuit hunted all of the same prey species that Dorset people had tar
geted, and probably did so more effectively because they (unlike their
Dorset predecessors) possessed bows and arrows. But the hunting of whales
as well gave them an additional major food supply unavailable to either
Dorset people or the Norse. Hence Inuit hunters could feed lots of wives

and children and lived in large settlements, typically housing dozens of people, including 10 or 20 adult male hunters and fighters. In the prime
hunting grounds of the Nordrseta itself, the Inuit established, at a site called
Sermermiut, a huge settlement that gradually accumulated hundreds of
dwellings. Just imagine the problems it must have created for the success of
the Norse Nordrseta hunt if a group of Norse hunters, who could hardly
have numbered more than a few dozen, were detected by such a big group
of Inuit and failed to establish good relations.

Unlike the Norse, the Inuit represented the climax of thousands of years
of cultural developments by Arctic peoples learning to master Arctic condi
tions. So, Greenland has little wood available for building, heating, or illu
minating houses during the months of Arctic winter darkness? That was no problem for the Inuit: they built igloos for winter housing out of snow, and
they burned whale and seal blubber both for fuel and for lighting lamps.
Little wood available to build boats? Again, that was no problem for the
Inuit: they stretched sealskins over frameworks to build kayaks (Plate 18), as
well as to make their boats called
umiaqs
big enough to take out into unpro
tected waters for hunting whales.

Despite having read about what exquisite watercraft Inuit kayaks were, and despite having used the modern recreational kayaks now made of plas
tic and widely available in the First World, I was still astonished when I first
saw a traditional Inuit kayak in Greenland. It reminded me of a miniature
version of the long, narrow, fast battleships of the U.S.S.
Iowa
class built by
the American navy during World War II, with all of their available deck
space bristling with bombardment guns, anti-aircraft guns, and other
weaponry. Nineteen feet long, tiny compared to a battleship, but still much
longer than I had ever imagined, the deck of the slim kayak was packed with
its own weaponry: a harpoon shaft, with a spear-thrower extension at the grip end; a separate harpoon head about six inches long, attachable to the shaft by a toggle connection; a dart to throw at birds, with not only an arrow point at the tip but three forward-facing sharp barbs lower on the dart
shaft to hit the bird in case the tip just missed; several sealskin bladders to
act as drags on harpooned whales or seals; and a lance for delivering the
death blow to the harpooned animal. Unlike a battleship or any other
watercraft known to me, the kayak was individually tailored to its paddler's
size, weight, and arm strength. It was actually "worn" by its owner, and its seat was a sewn garment joined to the owner's parka and guaranteeing a
waterproof seal so that ice-cold water splashing over the decks could not
wet him. Christian Keller tried in vain to "wear" modern kayaks tailored to