Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (51 page)

via, such precious wooden objects are typically scavenged and carried away
to reuse wherever the farm owners are resettling, because wood is at such a premium. Recall that the Norse camp at L'Anse aux Meadows on New
foundland, which was abandoned after such a planned evacuation, con
tained little of value except 99 broken nails, one whole nail, and a knitting
needle. Evidently, Western Settlement was either abandoned hastily, or else
its last occupants couldn't carry away their furniture because they died there.

The animal bones in those topmost layers tell a grim story. They include:
foot bones of small wild birds and rabbits, which would normally have been
considered too small to be worth hunting and usable only as last-ditch
famine food; bones of a newborn calf and lamb, which would have been born in the late spring; the toe bones of a number of cows approximately equal to the number of spaces in that farm's cow barn, suggesting that all cows had been slaughtered and were eaten down to the hoofs; and partial
skeletons of big hunting dogs with knife marks on the bones. Dog bones are otherwise virtually absent in Norse houses, because the Norse were no more
willing to eat their dogs than we are today. By killing the dogs on which they
depended to hunt caribou in the autumn, and by killing the newborn live
stock needed to rebuild their herds, the last inhabitants were in effect saying
that they were too desperately hungry to care about the future. In lower
debris layers of the houses, the carrion-eating flies associated with human
feces belong to warmth-loving fly species, but the top layer had only cold-
tolerant fly species, suggesting that the inhabitants had run out of fuel as
well as food.

All of these archaeological details tell us that the last inhabitants of those
Western Settlement farms starved and froze to death in the spring. Either it
was a cold year in which the migratory seals failed to arrive; or else heavy ice
in the fjords, or perhaps a band of Inuit who remembered their relatives
having been stabbed by the Norse as an experiment to see how much blood ran out of them, blocked access to the seal herds in the outer fjords. A cold
summer had probably caused the farmers to run out of enough hay to feed
their livestock through the winter. The farmers were reduced to killing their
last cows, eating even the hoofs, killing and eating their dogs, and scroung
ing for birds and rabbits. If so, one has to wonder why archaeologists did
not also find the skeletons of the last Norse themselves in those collapsed
houses. I suspect that Ivar Bardarson failed to mention that his group from Eastern Settlement performed a cleanup of Western Settlement and gave a
Christian burial to the bodies of their kinsmen
—or else that the copyist

who copied and shortened Bardarson's lost original omitted his account of
the cleanup.

As for the end of Eastern Settlement, the last Greenland voyage of the
royal trading ship promised by the king of Norway was in 1368; that ship
sank in the following year. Thereafter, we have records of only four other
sailings to Greenland (in 1381, 1382, 1385, and 1406), all by private ships
whose captains alleged that their destination had really been Iceland and
that they had reached Greenland unintentionally as a result of being blown
off course. When we recall that the Norwegian king asserted exclusive rights
to the Greenland trade as a royal monopoly, and that it was illegal for pri
vate ships to visit Greenland, we must consider four such "unintentional" voyages as an astonishing coincidence. Much more likely, the captains'
claims that to their deep regret they had been caught in dense fog and
ended up by mistake in Greenland were just alibis to cover their real inten
tions. As the captains undoubtedly knew, so few ships by then were visiting
Greenland that the Greenlanders were desperate for trade goods, and Norwegian imports could be sold to Greenlanders at a big profit. Thorstein
Olafsson, captain of the 1406 ship, could not have been too sad at his navi
gational error, because he spent nearly four years in Greenland before
returning to Norway in 1410.

Captain Olafsson brought back three pieces of recent news from Green
land. First, a man named Kolgrim was burned at the stake in 1407 for hav
ing used witchcraft to seduce a woman named Steinunn, the daughter of
the lawman Ravn and the wife of Thorgrim Solvason. Second, poor Steinunn then went insane and died. Finally, Olafsson himself and a local girl
named Sigrid Bjornsdotter were married in Hvalsey Church on Septem
ber 14,1408, with Brand Halldorsson, Thord Jorundarson, Thorbjorn Bar-
darson, and Jon Jonsson as witnesses, after the banns had been read for the happy couple on three previous Sundays and no one had objected.
Those laconic accounts of burning at the stake, insanity, and marriage are just the usual goings-on for any medieval European Christian society and
give no hint of trouble. They are our last definite written notices of Norse
Greenland.

We don't know exactly when Eastern Settlement vanished. Between 1400
and 1420 the climate in the North Atlantic became colder and stormier, and
mentions of ship traffic to Greenland ceased. A radiocarbon date of 1435
for a woman's dress excavated from Herjolfsnes churchyard suggests that
some Norse may have survived for a few decades after that last ship re
turned from Greenland in 1410, but we should not lay too much stress on

that date of 1435 because of the statistical uncertainties of several decades associated with the radiocarbon determination. It was not until 1576-1587
that we know definitely of further European visitors, when the English explorers Martin Frobisher and John Davis sighted and landed in Greenland,
met Inuit, were very impressed by their skills and technology, traded with
them, and kidnapped several to bring back to exhibit in England. In 1607 a
Danish-Norwegian expedition set out specifically to visit Eastern Settle
ment, but was deceived by the name into supposing that it lay on Green
land's east coast and hence found no evidence of the Norse. From then on,
throughout the 17th century, more Danish-Norwegian expeditions and Dutch and English whalers stopped in Greenland and kidnapped more Inuit, who (incomprehensibly to us today) were assumed to be nothing
more than descendants of blue-eyed blond-haired Vikings, despite their
completely different physical appearance and language.

Finally, in 1721 the Norwegian Lutheran missionary Hans Egede sailed for Greenland, in the conviction that the kidnapped Inuit really were Norse Catholics who had been abandoned by Europe before the Reformation, had reverted to paganism, and must by now be eager for a Christian missionary
to convert them to Lutheranism. He happened first to land in the fjords of
Western Settlement, where to his surprise he found only people who were clearly Inuit and not Norse, and who showed him ruins of former Norse farms. Still convinced that the Eastern Settlement lay on Greenland's east
coast, Egede looked there and found no signs of the Norse. In 1723 the Inuit
showed him more extensive Norse ruins, including Hvalsey Church, on the southwest coast at the site of what we now know to be Eastern Settlement.
That forced him to admit to himself that the Norse colony really had vanished, and his search for an answer to the mystery began. From the Inuit,
Egede gathered orally transmitted memories of alternating periods of fight
ing and friendly relations with the former Norse population, and he wondered whether the Norse had been exterminated by the Inuit. Ever since
then, generations of visitors and archaeologists have been trying to find out
the answer.

Let's be clear about exactly what the mystery involves. The ultimate
causes of the Norse decline are not in doubt, and the archaeological investi
gations of the top layers at Western Settlement tell us something about the
proximate causes of the collapse in the final year there. But we have no cor
responding information about what happened in the last year of Eastern
Settlement, because its top layers have not been investigated. Having taken
the story this far, I can't resist fleshing out the end with some speculation.

It seems to me that the collapse of Eastern Settlement must have been
sudden rather than gentle, like the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union and of Western Settlement. Greenland Norse society was a delicately balanced
deck of cards whose ability to remain standing depended ultimately on the
authority of the Church and of the chiefs. Respect for both of those authorities would have declined when the promised ships stopped coming
from Norway, and when the climate got colder. The last bishop of Green
land died around 1378, and no new bishop arrived from Norway to replace
him. But social legitimacy in Norse society depended on proper function
ing of the Church: priests had to be ordained by a bishop, and without an ordained priest one couldn't be baptized, married, or receive a Christian burial. How could that society have continued to function when the last
priest ordained by the last bishop eventually died? Similarly, the authority
of a chief depended on the chief's having resources to redistribute to his fol
lowers in hard times. If people on poor farms were starving to death while
the chief survived on an adjacent richer farm, would the poor farmers have
continued to obey their chief up to their last breath?

Compared to Western Settlement, Eastern Settlement lay farther south,
was less marginal for Norse hay production, supported more people (4,000
instead of just 1,000), and was thus less at risk of collapse. Of course, colder climate was in the long run bad for Eastern as well as Western Settlement: it
would just take a longer string of cold years to reduce the herds and drive
people to starvation at Eastern Settlement. One can imagine the smaller and
more marginal farms of the Eastern Settlement getting starved out. But
what could have happened at Gardar, whose two cattle barns had space for
160 cows, and which had uncounted herds of sheep?

I would guess that, at the end, Gardar was like an overcrowded lifeboat.
When hay production was failing and the livestock had all died or been
eaten at the poorer farms of Eastern Settlement, their settlers would have
tried to push their way onto the best farms that still had some animals:
Brattahlid, Hvalsey, Herjolfsnes, and last of all Gardar. The authority of the
church officials at Gardar Cathedral, or of the landowning chief there,
would have been acknowledged as long as they and the power of God were
visibly protecting their parishioners and followers. But famine and associ
ated disease would have caused a breakdown of respect for authority, much as the Greek historian Thucydides described in his terrifying account of the
plague of Athens 2,000 years earlier. Starving people would have poured
into Gardar, and the outnumbered chiefs and church officials could no longer prevent them from slaughtering the last cattle and sheep. Gardar's

supplies, which might have sufficed to keep Gardar's own inhabitants alive
if all the neighbors could have been kept out, would have been used up in the last winter when everybody tried to climb into the overcrowded
lifeboat, eating the dogs and newborn livestock and the cows' hoofs as they
had at the end of Western Settlement.

I picture the scene at Gardar as like that in my home city of Los Angeles in 1992 at the time of the so-called Rodney King riots, when the acquittal of
policemen on trial for brutally beating a poor person provoked thousands
of outraged people from poor neighborhoods to spread out to loot busi
nesses and rich neighborhoods. The greatly outnumbered police could do
nothing more than put up pieces of yellow plastic warning tape across roads entering rich neighborhoods, in a futile gesture aimed at keeping the looters
out. We are increasingly seeing a similar phenomenon on a global scale to
day, as illegal immigrants from poor countries pour into the overcrowded
lifeboats represented by rich countries, and as our border controls prove no more able to stop that influx than were Gardar's chiefs and Los Angeles's yellow tape. That parallel gives us another reason not to dismiss the fate of
the Greenland Norse as just a problem of a small peripheral society in a
fragile environment, irrelevant to our own larger society. Eastern Settlement
was also larger than Western Settlement, but the outcome was the same; it
merely took longer.

Were the Greenland Norse doomed from the outset, trying to practice a
lifestyle that could not possibly succeed, so that it was only a matter of time
before they would starve to death? Were they at a hopeless disadvantage
compared to all the Native American hunter-gatherer peoples who had occu
pied Greenland on and off for thousands of years before the Norse arrived?

I don't think so. Remember that, before the Inuit, there had been at least four previous waves of Native American hunter-gatherers who had arrived
in Greenland from the Canadian Arctic, and who had died out one after another. That's because climate fluctuations in the Arctic cause the large
prey species essential for sustaining human hunters
—caribou, seals, and whales—to migrate, fluctuate widely in numbers, or periodically abandon
whole areas. While the Inuit have persisted in Greenland for eight centuries
since their arrival, they too were subject to those fluctuations in prey num
bers. Archaeologists have discovered many Inuit houses, sealed up like time capsules, containing the bodies of Inuit families that starved to death in that
house during a harsh winter. In Danish colonial times it happened often