• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1967 0

account for much less than 0.1% of animal bones recovered at Greenland Norse archaeological sites, compared to between 50 and 95% at most contemporary Iceland, northern Norway, and Shetland sites. For instance, the archaeologist Thomas McGovern found the grand total of three fish bones in Norse garbage from Vatnahverfi farms next to lakes teeming with fish, while Georg Nygaard recovered only two fish bones from a total of 35,000 animal bones in the garbage of the Norse farm Ö34. Even at the GUS site, which yielded the largest number of fish bones—166, representing a mere 0.7% of all animal bones recovered from the site—26 of those bones come from the tail of a single cod, and bones of all fish species are still outnumbered 3 to 1 by bones of one bird species (the ptarmigan) and outnumbered 144 to 1 by mammal bones.

This paucity of fish bones is incredible when one considers how abundant fish are in Greenland, and how saltwater fish (especially haddock and cod) are by far the largest export of modern Greenland. Trout and salmon-like char are so numerous in Greenland’s rivers and lakes that, on my first night in the youth hostel at Brattahlid, I shared the kitchen with a Danish tourist cooking two large char, each weighing two pounds and about 20 inches long, that she had caught with her bare hands in a small pool where they had become trapped. The Norse were surely as adept with their hands as that tourist, and they could also have caught fish in fjords with nets while they were netting seals. Even if the Norse didn’t want to eat those easily caught fish themselves, they could at least have fed them to their dogs, thereby reducing the amount of seal and other meat that their dogs required, and sparing more meat for themselves.

Every archaeologist who comes to excavate in Greenland refuses initially to believe the incredible claim that the Greenland Norse didn’t eat fish, and starts out with his or her own idea about where all those missing fish bones might be hiding. Could the Norse have strictly confined their munching on fish to within a few feet of the shoreline, at sites now underwater because of land subsidence? Could they have faithfully saved all their fish bones for fertilizer, fuel, or feeding to cows? Could their dogs have run off with those fish carcasses, dropped the fish bones in fields chosen with foresight to be ones where future archaeologists would rarely bother to dig, and carefully avoided carrying the carcasses back to the house or midden lest archaeologists subsequently find them? Might the Norse have had so much meat that they didn’t need to eat fish?—but why, then, did they break bones to get out the last bit of marrow? Might all of those little fish bones have rotted away in the ground?—but preservation conditions in Greenland middens are good enough to preserve even sheep lice and sheep fecal pellets. The trouble with all those excuses for the lack of fish bones at Greenland Norse sites is that they would apply equally well to Greenland Inuit and Icelandic and Norwegian Norse sites, where fish bones prove instead to be abundant. Nor do these excuses explain why Greenland Norse sites contain almost no fishhooks, fish line sinkers, or net sinkers, which are common in Norse sites elsewhere.

I prefer instead to take the facts at face value: even though Greenland’s Norse originated from a fish-eating society, they may have developed a taboo against eating fish. Every society has its own arbitrary food taboos, as one of the many ways to distinguish itself from other societies: we virtuous clean people don’t eat those disgusting things that those other gross weirdoes seem to savor. By far the highest proportion of those taboos involves meat and fish. For instance, the French eat snails and frogs and horses, New Guineans eat rats and spiders and beetle larvae, Mexicans eat goat, and Polynesians eat marine annelid worms, all of which are nutritious and (if you let yourself taste them) delicious, but most Americans would recoil at the thought of eating any of those things.

As for the ultimate reasons why