Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [155]
But those same sites make clear that the Greenlanders were desperately short of iron, even by the standards of medieval Scandinavia, where iron wasn’t plentiful. For example, far more nails and other iron objects are found at British and Shetland Viking sites, and even at Iceland sites and at the Vinland site of L’Anse aux Meadows, than at Greenland sites. Discarded iron nails are the commonest iron item at L’Anse aux Meadows, and many are also found at sites in Iceland, despite Iceland’s own shortage of wood and iron. But iron poverty was extreme in Greenland. A few iron nails have been found in the lowest archaeological layers there, almost none in later layers, because iron became too precious to discard. Not a single sword, helmet, or even a piece of one has been found in Greenland, and just a couple of pieces of chain mail armor, possibly all from a single suit. Iron tools were reused and resharpened until worn down to stubs. For example, from excavations in Qorlortoq Valley I was struck by the pathos of a knife whose blade had been worn down to almost nothing, still mounted on a handle whose length was all out of proportion to that stub, and evidently still valuable enough to have been resharpened.
The Greenlanders’ iron poverty is also clear from the many objects, recovered at their archaeological sites, that in Europe were routinely made of iron but that the Greenlanders made of other, often unexpected, materials. Those objects included wooden nails and caribou-antler arrowheads. Iceland’s annals for the year 1189 describe with surprise how a Greenland ship that had drifted off course to Iceland was nailed not with iron nails but with wooden pegs, and then lashed together with whale baleen. However, for Vikings whose self-image focused on terrifying opponents by swinging a mighty battleaxe, to be reduced to making that weapon out of whalebone must have been the ultimate humiliation.
A result of the Greenlanders’ iron poverty was reduced efficiency of essential processes of their economy. With few iron scythes, cleavers, and shears available, or with those tools having to be made of bone or stone, it would have taken more time to harvest hay, butcher a carcass, and shear sheep, respectively. But a more immediately fatal consequence was that, by losing iron, the Norse lost their military advantage over the Inuit. Elsewhere around the world, in innumerable battles between European colonizers and the native peoples whom they encountered, steel swords and armor gave Europeans enormous advantages. For instance, during the Spanish conquest of Peru’s Inca Empire in 1532-1533, there were five battles in which respectively 169, 80, 30, 110, and 40 Spaniards slaughtered armies of thousands to tens of thousands of Incas, with not a single Spaniard killed and only a few injured—because Spanish steel swords cut through Indian cotton armor, and the Spaniards’ steel armor protected them against blows from Indian stone or wooden weapons. But there is no evidence that the Greenland Norse after the first few generations had steel weapons or steel armor anymore, except for that one suit of chain mail whose pieces have been discovered, and which may have belonged to a visiting European on a European ship rather than to a Greenlander. Instead, they fought with bows, arrows, and lances, just as did the Inuit. Nor is there any evidence that the Greenland Norse used their horses in battle as cavalry steeds, which again gave decisive advantages to Spanish conquistadors battling the Incas and Aztecs; their Icelandic relatives certainly didn’t. The Greenland Norse also lacked professional military training. They thereby