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By Root 2087 0

society, finally vanished; the Iceland colony struggled for many centuries through poverty and political difficulties, to emerge in recent times as one of the world’s most affluent societies; and the Orkney, Shetland, and Faeroe colonies survived with little difficulty. All of those Viking colonies were derived from the same ancestral society: their differing fates were transparently related to the different environments in which the colonists found themselves.

Thus, the Viking expansion westwards across the North Atlantic offers us an instructive natural experiment, just as does the Polynesian expansion eastwards across the Pacific (map, pp. 182-183). Nested within this large natural experiment, Greenland offers us a smaller one: the Vikings met another people there, the Inuit, whose solutions to Greenland’s environmental problems were very different from those of the Vikings. When that smaller experiment ended five centuries later, Greenland’s Vikings had all perished, leaving Greenland uncontested in the hands of the Inuit. The tragedy of the Greenland Norse (Greenland Scandinavians) thus carries a hopeful message: even in difficult environments, collapses of human societies are not inevitable: it depends on how people respond.

The environmentally triggered collapse of Viking Greenland and the struggles of Iceland have parallels with the environmentally triggered collapses of Easter Island, Mangareva, the Anasazi, the Maya, and many other pre-industrial societies. However, we enjoy advantages in understanding Greenland’s collapse and Iceland’s troubles. For Greenland’s and especially Iceland’s history, we possess contemporary written accounts from those societies as well as from their trade partners—accounts that are frustratingly fragmentary, but still much better than our complete lack of written eyewitness records for those other pre-industrial societies. The Anasazi died or scattered, and the society of the few surviving Easter Islanders became transformed by outsiders, but most modern Icelanders are still the direct descendants of the Viking men and their Celtic wives who were Iceland’s first settlers. In particular, medieval European Christian societies, such as those of Iceland and Norse Greenland, that evolved directly into modern European Christian societies. Hence we know what the church ruins, preserved art, and archaeologically excavated tools meant, whereas much guesswork is required to interpret archaeological remains of those other societies. For instance, when I stood within an opening in the west wall of the well-preserved stone building erected around A.D. 1300 at Hvalsey in Greenland, I knew by comparison with Christian churches elsewhere that this building too was a Christian church, that this particular one was an almost exact replica of a church at Eidfjord in Norway, and that the opening in the west wall was the main entrance as in other Christian churches (Plate 15). In contrast, we can’t hope to understand the significance of Easter Island’s stone statues in such detail.

The fates of Viking Iceland and Greenland tell an even more complex, hence more richly instructive, story than do the fates of Easter Island, Mangareva’s neighbors, the Anasazi, and the Maya. All five sets of factors that I discussed in the Prologue played a role. The Vikings did damage their environment, they did suffer from climate changes, and their own responses and cultural values did affect the outcome. The first and third of those three factors also operated in the histories of Easter and Mangareva’s neighbors, and all three operated for the Anasazi and the Maya, but in addition trade with friendly outsiders played an essential role in the histories of Iceland and Greenland as of Mangareva’s neighbors and the Anasazi, although not in Easter Island and Maya history. Finally, among these societies, only in Viking Greenland did hostile outsiders (the Inuit) intervene crucially. Thus, if the histories of Easter Island and Mangareva’s neighbors are fugues weaving together two and three themes respectively, as do some fugues