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By Root 2034 0

consequence of deforestation was that the Norse quickly became short of lumber, as did the Icelanders and Mangarevans. The low and thin trunks of the willow, birch, and juniper trees remaining were suitable for making only small household wooden objects. For large pieces of wood to fashion into beams of houses, boats, sledges, barrels, wall panels, and beds, the Norse came to depend on three sources of timber: Siberian driftwood washed up on the beaches, imported logs from Norway, and trees felled by the Greenlanders themselves on voyages to the Labrador coast (“Markland”) discovered in the course of the Vinland explorations. Lumber evidently remained so scarce that wooden objects were recycled rather than discarded. This can be deduced from the absence of large wooden panels and furniture at most Greenland Norse ruins except for the last houses in which the Norse of Western Settlement died. At a famous Western Settlement archaeological site called “Farm Beneath the Sands,” which became almost perfectly preserved under frozen river sands, most timber found was in the upper layers rather than in the lower layers, again suggesting that timber of old rooms and buildings was too precious to discard and was scavenged as rooms were remodeled or added. The Norse also dealt with their poverty in timber by resorting to turf for walls of buildings, but we shall see that that solution posed its own set of problems.

Another answer to the “so what?” response to deforestation is: poverty in firewood. Unlike the Inuit, who learned to use blubber for heating and lighting their dwellings, remains in Norse hearths show that the Norse continued to burn willow and alder wood in their houses. A major additional demand for firewood that most of us modern city-dwellers would never think of was in the dairy. Milk is an ephemeral, potentially dangerous food source: it is so nourishing, not only to us but also to bacteria, that it quickly spoils if left to stand without the pasteurization and refrigeration that we take for granted and that the Norse, like everyone else before modern times, didn’t practice. Hence the vessels in which the Norse collected and stored milk and made cheese had to be washed frequently with boiled water, twice a day in the case of milk buckets. Milking animals at saeters (those summer farm buildings in the hills) was consequently confined to elevations below 1,300 feet, above which firewood was unavailable, even though pasture grasses good for feeding livestock grew up to much higher elevations of about 2,500 feet. In both Iceland and Norway we know that saeters had to be closed down when local firewood became exhausted, and the same presumably held for Greenland as well. Just as was true for scarce lumber, the Norse substituted other materials for scarce firewood, by burning animal bones, manure, and turf. But those solutions too had disadvantages: the bones and manure could otherwise have been used to fertilize fields for increased hay production, and burning turf was tantamount to destroying pasture.

The remaining heavy consequences of deforestation, besides shortages of lumber and firewood, involved shortages of iron. Scandinavians obtained most of their iron as bog iron—i.e., by extracting the metal from bog sediments with low iron content. Bog iron itself is locally available in Greenland, as in Iceland and Scandinavia: Christian Keller and I saw an iron-colored bog at Gardar in the Eastern Settlement, and Thomas McGovern saw other such bogs in the Western Settlement. The problem lay not with finding bog iron in Greenland but with extracting it, because the extraction required huge quantities of wood to make the charcoal with which to produce the necessary very high temperature of fire. Even when the Greenlanders skipped that step by importing iron ingots from Norway, they still needed charcoal to work the iron into tools, and to sharpen, repair, and remake iron tools, which they had to do frequently.

We know that the Greenlanders possessed iron tools and worked with iron. Many of the larger Norse Greenland farms