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CHAPTER 8

Norse Greenland’s End

Introduction to the end ■ Deforestation ■ Soil and turf damage ■ The Inuit’s predecessors ■ Inuit subsistence ■ Inuit/Norse relations ■ The end ■ Ultimate causes of the end ■

In the previous chapter we saw how the Norse initially prospered in Greenland, due to a fortunate set of circumstances surrounding their arrival. They had the good luck to discover a virgin landscape that had never been logged or grazed, and that was suitable for use as pasture. They arrived at a time of relatively mild climate, when hay production was sufficient in most years, when the sea lanes to Europe were free of ice, when there was European demand for their exports of walrus ivory, and when there were no Native Americans anywhere near the Norse settlements or hunting grounds.

All of those initial advantages gradually turned against the Norse, in ways for which they bore some responsibility. While climate change, Europe’s changing demand for ivory, and the arrival of the Inuit were beyond their control, how the Norse dealt with those changes was up to them. Their impact on the landscape was a factor entirely of their own making. In this chapter we shall see how the shifts in those advantages, and the Norse reactions to them, combined to bring an end to the Norse Greenland colony.

The Greenland Norse damaged their environment in at least three ways: by destroying the natural vegetation, by causing soil erosion, and by cutting turf. As soon as they arrived, they burned woodlands to clear land for pasture, then cut down some of the remaining trees for purposes such as lumber and firewood. Trees were prevented from regenerating by livestock grazing and trampling, especially in the winter, when plants were most vulnerable because of not growing then.

The effects of those impacts on the natural vegetation have been gauged by our friends the palynologists examining radiocarbon-dated slices of sediments collected from the bottoms of lakes and bogs. In those sediments occur at least five environmental indicators: whole plant parts such as leaves, and plant pollen, both of which serve to identify the plant species growing near the lake at that time; charcoal particles, proof of fires nearby; magnetic susceptibility measurements, which in Greenland reflect mainly the amounts of magnetic iron minerals in the sediment, arising from topsoil washed or blown into the lake’s basin; and sand similarly washed or blown in.

These studies of lake sediments yield the following picture of vegetational history around the Norse farms. As temperatures warmed up at the end of the last Ice Age, pollen counts show that grasses and sedges became replaced by trees. For the next 8,000 years there were few further changes in the vegetation, and few or no signs of deforestation and erosion—until the Vikings arrived. That event was signaled by a layer of charcoal from Viking fires to clear pastures for their livestock. Pollen of willow and birch trees decreased, while pollen of grasses, sedges, weeds, and pasture plants introduced by the Norse for animal feed rose. Increased magnetic susceptibility values show that topsoil was carried into lakes, the topsoil having lost the plant cover that had previously protected it from erosion by wind and water. Finally, sand underlying the topsoil also was carried in when whole valleys had been denuded of their plant cover and soil. All of these changes became reversed, indicating recovery of the landscape, after the Viking settlements went extinct in the 1400s. Finally, the same set of changes that accompanied Norse arrival appeared all over again after 1924, when the Danish government of Greenland reintroduced sheep five centuries after their demise along with their Viking caretakers.

So what?—an environmental skeptic might ask. That’s sad for willow trees, but what about people? It turned out that deforestation, soil erosion, and turf cutting all had serious consequences for the Norse. The most obvious