Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [144]
As an illustration of these trends with some actual numbers, the garbage of the poor Western Settlement farm known as W48 or Niaquusat tells us that the meat consumed by its unfortunate inhabitants came to the horrifying extent of 85% from seals, with 6% from goats, only 5% from caribou, 3% from sheep, and 1% (O rare blessed day!) from beef. At the same time, the gentry at Sandnes, the richest Western Settlement farm, was enjoying a diet of 32% caribou venison, 17% beef, 6% sheep, and 6% goat, leaving only 39% to be made up by seal. Happiest of all was the Eastern Settlement elite at Erik the Red’s farm of Brattahlid, who succeeded in elevating beef consumption above either caribou or sheep, and suppressing goat to insignificant levels.
Two poignant anecdotes further illustrate how high-status people got to eat preferred foods much less available to low-status people even on the same farm. First, when archaeologists excavated the ruins of the Cathedral of St. Nicholas at Gardar, they found under the stone floor the skeleton of a man holding a bishop’s staff and ring, probably John Arnason Smyrill, who served as Greenland’s bishop from 1189 to 1209. Carbon isotope analysis of his bones shows that his diet had consisted 75% of land-based foods (probably mostly beef and cheese) and only 25% of marine foods (mostly seal). A contemporary man and woman whose skeletons were buried immediately beneath the bishop’s, and who thus were presumably also of high status, had consumed a diet somewhat higher (45%) in marine food, but that percentage ranged up to 78% for other skeletons from Eastern Settlement, and 81% from Western Settlement. Second, at Sandnes, the richest farm in Western Settlement, the animal bones in the garbage outside the manor house proved that its occupants were eating plenty of caribou and livestock and not much seal. Only fifty yards away was a barn in which animals would have been kept for the winter, and in which farm workers would have lived then along with the animals and the manure. The garbage dump outside that barn showed that those workers had to content themselves with seal and had little caribou, beef, or mutton to enjoy.
The complexly integrated economy that I have described, based on raising livestock, hunting on land, and hunting in the fjords, enabled the Greenland Norse to survive in an environment where no one of those components alone was sufficient for survival. But that economy also hints at a possible reason for the Greenlanders’ eventual demise, because it was vulnerable to failure of any of those components. Many possible climatic events could raise the specter of starvation: a short, cool, foggy summer, or a wet August, that decreased hay production; a long snowy winter that was hard on both the livestock and the caribou, and that increased the winter hay requirements of the livestock; ice pile-up in the fjords, impeding access to the outer fjords during the May-June sealing season; a change in ocean temperatures, affecting fish populations and hence the populations of fish-eating seals; or a climate change far away in Newfoundland, affecting harp and hooded seals on their breeding grounds. Several of these events have been documented in modern Greenland: for instance, the cold winter and heavy snows of 1966 -1967 killed 22,000 sheep, while migratory harp seals during the cold years of 1959-1974 fell to a mere 2% of their former numbers. Even in the best years, Western Settlement was closer to the margin for hay production than was Eastern Settlement, and a drop in summer temperature by a mere 1° C would suffice to cause failure of the hay crop at the former location.
The Norse could cope with livestock losses from one bad summer or bad winter, provided that it was followed by a series of good years enabling them to rebuild