Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (50 page)

travel. They were equally impressed by Inuit umiaqs, marksmanship, sewn skin clothing and boats and mittens, harpoons, bladder floats, dogsleds, and seal-hunting methods. The Danes who began colonizing Greenland in 1721 promptly embraced Inuit technology, used Inuit umiaqs to travel along the Greenland coast, and traded with the Inuit. Within a few years, the Danes had learned more about harpoons and ringed seals than the Norse had in a few centuries. Yet some of the Danish colonists were racist Christians who despised the pagan Inuit just as had the medieval Norse.

If one tried to guess without prejudice what form Norse/Inuit relations might have taken, there are many possibilities that were actually realized in later centuries when Europeans such as the Spanish, Portuguese, French, English, Russians, Belgians, Dutch, Germans, and Italians, as well as the Danes and Swedes themselves, encountered native peoples elsewhere in the world. Many of those European colonists became middlemen and developed integrated trade economies: European traders settled down or visited areas with native peoples, brought European goods coveted by the natives, and in exchange obtained native products coveted in Europe. For instance, the Inuit craved metal so much that they went to the effort of making cold-forged iron tools from iron in the Cape York meteor that had fallen in Northern Greenland. Hence one could have imagined the development of a trade in which the Norse obtained walrus tusks, narwhal tusks, sealskins, and polar bears from the Inuit and sent those goods to Europe in exchange for the iron prized by the Inuit. The Norse could also have supplied the Inuit with cloth and with milk products: even if lactose intolerance would have prevented the Inuit from drinking milk itself, they would still have consumed lactose-free milk products such as cheese and butter, which Denmark exports to Greenland today. Not only the Norse but also the Inuit were at frequent risk of starvation in Greenland, and the Inuit could have reduced that risk and diversified their diet by trading for Norse milk products. Such trade between Scandinavians and Inuit promptly developed in Greenland after 1721: why didn't it develop already in medieval times?

One answer is the cultural obstacles to intermarriage or just to learning between the Norse and the Inuit. An Inuit wife would not have been nearly as useful to a Norseman as was a Norse wife: what a Norseman wanted from a wife was the ability to weave and spin wool, to tend and milk cattle and sheep, and to make
skyr
and butter and cheese, which Norse but not Inuit girls learned from childhood. Even if a Norse hunter did befriend an Inuit hunter, the Norseman couldn't just borrow his friend's kayak and learn how

to use it, because the kayak was in effect a very complicated and individually
tailored piece of clothing connected to a boat, made to fit that particular
Inuit hunter, and fabricated by the Inuit's wife who (unlike Norse girls) had
learned from childhood to sew skins. Hence a Norse hunter who had seen
an Inuit kayak couldn't just come home and tell his wife to "sew me one of
those things."

If you hope to persuade an Inuit woman to make you a kayak to your
own measurements, or to let you marry her daughter, you have to establish
a friendly relationship in the first place. But we have seen that the Norse had
a "bad attitude" from the beginning, referring to both North American In
dians in Vinland and Inuit in Greenland as "wretches," and killing the first natives they encountered in both places. As church-oriented Christians, the Norse shared the scorn of pagans widespread among medieval Europeans.

Still another factor behind their bad attitude is that the Norse would
have thought of themselves as the natives in the Nordrseta, and the Inuit as
the interlopers. The Norse arrived in the Nordrseta and hunted there for
several centuries before the Inuit arrived. When the Inuit finally appeared from northwestern Greenland, the Norse would have been understandably reluctant to pay the Inuit for walrus tusks that they, the Norse, regarded as
their own privilege to hunt. By the time that they encountered the Inuit, the
Norse themselves were desperately starved for iron, the most coveted trade
item that they could have offered to the Inuit.

To us moderns, living in a world in which all "native peoples" have already been contacted by Europeans except for a few tribes in the most remote parts of the Amazon and New Guinea, the difficulties in establishing
contact are not obvious. What do you really expect the first Norseman spot
ting a group of Inuit in the Nordrseta to have done?
—shout out "Hello!",
walk over to them, smile, start using sign language, point to a walrus tusk,
and hold out a lump of iron? Over the course of my biological fieldwork in
New Guinea I have lived through such "first-contact situations," as they are called, and I found them dangerous and utterly terrifying. In such situations
the "natives" initially regard the Europeans as trespassers and correctly per
ceive that any intruder may bring threats to their health, lives, and land
ownership. Neither side knows what the other will do, both sides are tense
and frightened, both are uncertain whether to flee or to start shooting, and
both are scrutinizing the other side for a gesture that could hint that the others might panic and shoot first. To turn a first-contact situation into a
friendly relationship, let alone to survive the situation, requires extreme

caution and patience. Later European colonialists eventually developed
some experience at dealing with such situations, but the Norse evidently
shot first.

In short, the 18th-century Danes in Greenland, and other Europeans
meeting native peoples elsewhere, encountered the same range of problems
that the Norse did: their own prejudices against "primitive pagans," the
question of whether to kill them or rob them or trade with them or marry them or take their land, and the problem of how to convince them not to
flee or shoot. Later Europeans dealt with those problems by cultivating that
whole range of options and choosing whichever option worked best under the particular circumstances, depending on whether the Europeans were or
were not outnumbered, whether the European colonist men did or did not
have enough European women along as wives, whether the native people had trade goods coveted in Europe, and whether the natives' land was attractive to Europeans to settle. But the medieval Norse had not developed that range of options. Refusing or unable to learn from the Inuit, and lack
ing any military advantage over them, the Norse rather than the Inuit be
came the ones who eventually disappeared.

The end of the Greenland Norse colony is often described as a "mystery." That's true, but only partly so, because we need to distinguish ultimate rea
sons (i.e., underlying long-term factors behind the slow decline of Green
land Norse society) from proximate reasons (i.e., the final blow to the
weakened society, killing the last individuals or forcing them to abandon
their settlements). Only the proximate reasons remain partly mysterious;
the ultimate reasons are clear. They consist of the five sets of factors that we
have already discussed in detail: Norse impact on the environment, climate change, decline in friendly contact with Norway, increase in hostile contact
with the Inuit, and the conservative outlook of the Norse.

Briefly, the Norse inadvertently depleted the environmental resources on
which they depended, by cutting trees, stripping turf, overgrazing, and
causing soil erosion. Already at the outset of Norse settlement, Greenland's
natural resources were only marginally sufficient to support a European
pastoral society of viable size, but hay production in Greenland fluctuates
markedly from year to year. Hence that depletion of environmental re
sources threatened the society's survival in poor years. Second, calculations
of climate from Greenland ice cores show that it was relatively mild (i.e., as
"mild" as it is today) when the Norse arrived, went through several runs of

cold years in the 1300s, and then plunged in the early 1400s into the cold
period called the Little Ice Age that lasted until the 1800s. That lowered hay
production further, as well as clogging the ship lanes between Greenland
and Norway with sea ice. Third, those obstacles to shipping were only one
reason for the decline and eventual end of trade with Norway on which
the Greenlanders depended for their iron, some timber, and their cultural
identity. About half of Norway's population died when the Black Death
(a plague epidemic) struck in 1349-1350. Norway, Sweden, and Denmark
became joined in 1397 under one king, who proceeded to neglect Norway
as the poorest of his three provinces. The demand by European carvers for walrus ivory, Greenland's principal export, declined when the Cru
sades gave Christian Europe access again to Asia's and East Africa's elephant
ivory, whose deliveries to Europe had been cut off by the Arab conquest of
the Mediterranean shores. By the 1400s, carving with ivory of any sort,
whether from walruses or elephants, was out of fashion in Europe. All those
changes undermined Norway's resources and motivation for sending ships
to Greenland. Other peoples besides the Greenland Norse have simi
larly discovered their economies (or even their survival) to be at risk when
their major trading partners encountered problems; they include us oil-
importing Americans at the time of the 1973 Gulf oil embargo, Pitcairn and
Henderson Islanders at the time of Mangareva's deforestation, and many
others. Modern globalization will surely multiply the examples. Finally, the
arrival of the Inuit, and the inability or unwillingness of the Norse to make
drastic changes, completed the quintet of ultimate factors behind the Green
land colony's demise.

These five factors all developed gradually or operated over long times.
Hence we should not be surprised to discover that various Norse farms were
abandoned at different times before the final catastrophes. On the floor of a
large house on the largest farm of the Vatnahverfi district of Eastern Settle
ment was found a skull of a 25-year-old man with a radiocarbon date
around
a.d.
1275. That suggests that the whole Vatnahverfi district was
abandoned then, and that the skull was of one of the last inhabitants, be
cause any survivors would surely have buried the dead man rather than just leave his body on the floor. The last radiocarbon dates from farms of Qor-
lortoq Valley of Eastern Settlement cluster around
a.d.
1300. Western Settle
ment's "Farm Beneath the Sands" was abandoned and buried under glacial
outwash sand around
a.d.
1350.

Of the two Norse settlements, the first to vanish completely was the
smaller Western Settlement. It was more marginal for raising livestock than

was Eastern Settlement, because its more northerly location meant a shorter
growing season, considerably less hay production even in a good year, and hence greater likelihood that a cold or wet summer would result in too little
hay to feed the animals through the following winter. A further cause of
vulnerability at Western Settlement was that its only access to the sea was by
a single fjord, so that a hostile group of Inuit at the mouth of that one fjord
could cut off all access to the crucial seal migration along the coast on which the Norse depended for food in the late spring.

We have two sources of information about the end of Western Settle
ment: written and archaeological. The written account is by a priest named
Ivar Bardarson, who was sent to Greenland from Norway by the bishop of
Bergen to act as ombudsman and royal tax collector, and to report on the
condition of the Church in Greenland. Some time after his return to Nor
way around 1362, Bardarson wrote an account called
Description of Green
land,
of which the original text is lost and which we know only through
later copies. Most of the preserved description consists of lists of Greenland
churches and properties, buried among which is an exasperatingly brief ac
count of the end of Western Settlement: "In the Western Settlement stands a
large church, named Stensnes [Sandnes] Church. That church was for a
time the cathedral and bishop's seat. Now the skraelings [= wretches, i.e.,
the Inuit] have the entire Western Settlement.
...
All the foregoing was told
us by Ivar Bardarson Greenlander, who was the superintendent of the
bishop's establishment at Gardar in Greenland for many years, that he had
seen all this, and he was one of those that the lawman [a high-ranking offi
cial] had appointed to go to the Western Settlement to fight against the skraelings, in order to drive the skraelings out of the Western Settlement. On their arrival they found no men, either Christian or heathen . .."

I feel like shaking Ivar Bardarson's corpse in frustration at all the questions that he left unanswered. Which year did he go there, and in which month? Did he find any stored hay or cheese left? How could a thousand
people have vanished, down to the last individual? Were there any signs of
fighting, burned buildings, or dead bodies? But Bardarson tells us nothing
more.

Instead, we have to turn to the findings of archaeologists who excavated
the uppermost layer of debris at several Western Settlement farms, corre
sponding to the remains left in the settlement's final months by the last
Norse to occupy it. In the ruins of those farms are doors, posts, roof timbers,
furniture, bowls, crucifixes, and other big wooden objects. That's unusual:
when a farm building is abandoned intentionally in northern Scandina-