Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [113]
Like those Polynesian and Portuguese/Spanish expansions, the Viking expansion began to fizzle out when all areas readily accessible to their ships had already been raided or colonized, and when Vikings returning home ceased to bring stories of uninhabited or easily raided lands overseas. Just as two specific events set off the Viking chain reaction, two other events symbolize what throttled it. One was the Battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066, capping a long series of Viking defeats and demonstrating the futility of further raids. The other was the forced abandonment of the Vikings’ most remote colony of Vinland around A.D. 1000, after only a decade. The two preserved Norse sagas describing Vinland say explicitly that it was abandoned because of fighting with a dense population of Native Americans far too numerous to be defeated by the few Vikings able to cross the Atlantic in ships of those times. With the Faeroes, Iceland, and Greenland already full of Viking settlers, Vinland impossibly dangerous, and no more discoveries of uninhabited Atlantic islands being made, the Vikings got the point that there were no longer any rewards to greet pioneers risking their lives in the stormy North Atlantic.
When immigrants from overseas colonize a new homeland, the lifestyle that they establish usually incorporates features of the lifestyle that they had practiced in their land of origin—a “cultural capital” of knowledge, beliefs, subsistence methods, and social organization accumulated in their homeland. That is especially the case when, as true of the Vikings, they occupy a land that is originally either uninhabited, or else inhabited by people with whom the colonists have little contact. Even in the United States today, where new immigrants must deal with a vastly more numerous established American population, each immigrant group still retains many of its own distinctive characteristics. For instance, within my city of Los Angeles there are big differences between the cultural values, educational levels, jobs, and wealth of recent immigrant groups such as Vietnamese, Iranians, Mexicans, and Ethiopians. Different groups here have adapted with different ease to American society, depending in part on the lifestyle that they brought with them.
In the case of the Vikings, too, the societies that they created on the North Atlantic islands were modeled on the continental Viking societies that the immigrants had left behind. That legacy of cultural history was especially important in the areas of agriculture, iron production, class structure, and religion.
While we think of Vikings as raiders and seafarers, they thought of themselves as farmers. The particular animals and crops that grew well in southern Norway became an important consideration in overseas Viking history, not only because those were the animal and plant species available for Viking colonists to carry with them to Iceland and Greenland, but also because those species were involved in the Vikings’ social values. Different foods and lifestyles have different status among different peoples: for instance, cattle ranked high but goats ranked low in the values of ranchers in the western United States. Problems arise when the agricultural practices of immigrants in their land of origin prove ill-matched to their