Several walrus face bones have also turned up at the farm, suggesting that the inhabitants hunted in the communal Disko Bay expedition, says excavation leader Konrad Smiarowski of the City University of New York in New York City. "There were no activities more central to Norse identity than farming," archaeologist William Fitzhugh of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) in Washington, D.C., wrote in 2000.Geographer Jared Diamond of the University of California, Los Angeles, popularized this view in his 2005 bestseller, This narrative held sway for years. Around 1400, the value of ivory in Europe fell as tusks from Russian walrus and African elephants flowed into the continent.Even as surviving from marine resources became more difficult, the growing season on land shortened, and the meager pastures yielded even less.

For an extended time, nonetheless, the relatively warm West Greenland current flowing northwards along the southwestern coast of Greenland made it feasible for the Norse to farm much as their relatives did in Iceland or northern Norway.

The bones in middens help explain why: As temperatures fell, people in the large farms continued to eat beef and other livestock whereas those in smaller farms turned to seal and caribou, as Diamond had suggested. In 1888, a party of six led by By 1911, the population was about 14,000, scattered along the southern shores. These two species of seal migrate north along Greenland shores in the spring, and Smiarowski thinks the Norse likely caught them with boats and nets or clubs.In 2012, NABO researchers clinched the case that the Greenlanders ate a marine diet by analyzing human bones in Norse graveyards.
(He believed, though, that only the poorer settlers ate seal meat.) New pollen and soil data show that the Norse allowed fields and what little forest existed to recover after tilling and turf cutting. • Diamond, Jared (2005). Historians and climatologists agree that as the cold spell continued, ice would have clogged the seas farther south and for longer each year, disrupting voyages. But in the 13th century, economics and climate began to conspire against the Norse.

The nomadic Inuit, by contrast, hunted seal native to the fjords, and rarely embarked on open-ocean hunts or journeys.Not only did the climate disrupt trade, but the market did, too.


But after some 500 years of occupation, the Norse settlements of Greenland were abandoned—and centuries later, experts remain unsure why. Stone shelters here once housed more than 100 cows—a sign of power in medieval Scandinavia.If the Greenland settlement was originally an effort to find and exploit the prized natural resource of ivory, rather than a collection of independent farmers, the society would have needed more top-down planning than archaeologists had thought, says Christian Koch Madsen of the Danish and Greenlandic National Museums in Copenhagen. But not everyone agrees with the entire vision. Meanwhile, the seal-hunting, whale-eating Inuit survived in the very same environment.Norse colonists established settlements in southern Greenland, often siting their farmsteads on fjords.Over the last decade, however, new excavations across the North Atlantic have forced archaeologists to revise some of these long-held views.

"We used to think of Norse as farmers who hunted. Although historians long assumed that the Norse settled Iceland and Greenland in search of new farmland, some researchers have recently suggested that the hunt for ivory instead drove the settlement of both islands. Now, we consider them hunters who farmed. tragic collapse of the Greenland Norse. Just at the time we can do something with all this data, it is disappearing under our feet," Holm says.In 1976, a bushy-bearded Thomas McGovern, then 26, arrived for the first time on the grassy shore of a fjord in southern Greenland, eager to begin work on his Ph.D. in archaeology.

As pioneers who weathered climate change, the Greenland Norse may hold lessons for society today. "We could make a coat," a student jokes.But the function of the button matters a lot less than what it's made of: walrus tooth. I recently read Jared Diamond's novel Collapse and found the chapters on the Norse extremely interesting and I want to learn more about their downfall. A Greenlander in Norway, on visit; it is also mentioned in a Norwegian diploma from 1426, Peder Grønlendiger.

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