Fashion, Climate, and the Norse

Posted by bfagan1200 at 1/13/2008 6:01 PM
Categories: The Great Warming


Sunset in the Greenland fjords


Greenland and Iceland have become fashionable meccas for archaeologists in recent years. Both are stable, welcoming places to work, even if field conditions are often arduous. As a result, we know a great deal more about the Greenland Norse than we did even a few years ago.

The Great Warming tells the story of interactions between the Inuit and the Norse on the western shores of the Davis Strait that separates Greenland from the Canadian Archipelago during the Medieval Warm Period. Part of this story revolves around the Inuit's hunger for iron, which they obtained from Melville Bay in northern Greenland, as well as from the Norse. I recount the ingenious theory of Olaf Envig, who believes the Norse recycled nails from their worn out ships and traded them to the Inuit for walrus ivory. Like so many archaeological theories, this one depends on intangibles, for we are unlikely to find the places where the Norse recycled their ships or where they built new ones--perhaps in Labrador, if Envig is to be believed.

Smoked herring were a staple of medieval Europe

But there's another fascinating point here. Conventional wisdom has it that the Norse abandoned their Greenland settlements in the face of rapidly deteriorating climatic and ice conditions in the north. The bitter cold made their traditional dairying economy impracticable, and they resisted any notion of adapting Inuit hunting methods, especially ice fishing in the dead of winter. But a new generation of research is raising questions about the climatic theory. One of the staples of the Greenland Norse economy was walrus ivory, which was much prized in Iceland and Europe. Ivory was the major tithe paid to Norway by the Greenland church, as were furs and falcons. Greenland was the outermost frontier of Medieval Europe, difficult of access even in the more benign times of the Warm Period. This made its communities extremely vulnerable to shifting fashions in Europe. For instance, the soft ivory of the African elephant was ideal for carving, so much so that elephant tusks were an important part of the Indian Ocean dhow trade between India and Africa for many centuries. During High Medieval times, African tusks became more readily available in Europe, far more so than walrus ivory, at a time when ivory was used less frequently for icons and other religious ornaments. The demand for walrus dried up rapidly in the face of the new, softer material.

The shifting needs of the new fashions would have rippled out along Atlantic trade routes within a few generations. A lessening demand for walrus ivory may have come at a time when the Greenland climate was deteriorating, placing further stress on remote communities that often suffered through harsh winters. The twelfth to fourteenth centuries also saw a dramatic explosion in the European fish trade, centered on herring and cod, as new trade routes replaced ancient Norse networks. The Norse communities in Greenland finally withered away in the face of intense cold and economic isolation. So to invoke climate alone as a cause of Norse abandonment is probably tool simplistic an explanation--research continues.

 

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