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By Root 2036 0

assaulted the Greenlanders, killing 18 men, and captured two boys and one bondswoman and made them slaves.” Unless the annals were mistakenly attributing to Greenland an attack actually carried out in Norway by Saami people, this incident would presumably have taken place near Eastern Settlement, because Western Settlement no longer existed in 1379 and a Norse hunting party in the Nordrseta would have been unlikely to include a woman. How should we construe this laconic story? To us today, 18 Norse killed doesn’t seem like a big deal, in this century of world wars in which tens of millions of people were slaughtered. But consider that the entire population of Eastern Settlement was probably not more than 4,000, and that 18 men would have constituted about 2% of the adult males. If an enemy today were to attack the U.S., with its population of 280,000,000, and killed adult males in the same proportion, the result would be 1,260,000 American men dead. That is, that single documented attack of 1379 represented a disaster to Eastern Settlement, regardless of how many more men died in the attacks of 1380, 1381, and so on.

Those three brief texts are our sole written sources of information about Norse/Inuit relations. Archaeological sources of information consist of Norse artifacts or copies of Norse artifacts found at Inuit sites, and vice versa. A total of 170 objects of Norse origin are known from Inuit sites, including a few complete tools (a knife, a shears, and a fire-starter), but mostly just pieces of metal (iron, copper, bronze, or tin) that the Inuit would have prized for making their own tools. Such Norse objects occur not only at Inuit sites in locations where the Vikings lived (Eastern and Western Settlements) or often visited (Nordrseta), but also in locations that the Norse never visited, such as East Greenland and Ellesmere Island. Hence Norse material must have been of sufficient interest to the Inuit that it passed by trade between Inuit groups hundreds of miles apart. For most of the objects it is impossible for us to know whether the Inuit acquired them from the Norse themselves by trade, by killing or robbing Norse, or by scavenging Norse settlements after the Norse had abandoned them. However, 10 of the pieces of metal come from bells of Eastern Settlement churches, which the Norse surely wouldn’t have traded. Those bells were presumably obtained by the Inuit after the demise of the Norse, for instance when Inuit were living in houses of their own that they built within Norse ruins.

Firmer evidence of face-to-face contact between the two peoples comes from nine Inuit carvings of human figures that are unmistakably Norse, as judged by depictions of a characteristically Viking hairdo, clothing, or a crucifix decoration. The Inuit also learned some useful technologies from the Norse. While Inuit tools in the shape of a European knife or saw could just have been copied from plundered Norse objects without any friendly contact with a live Norseman, Inuit-made barrel staves and screw-threaded arrowheads suggest that the Inuit actually saw Norse men making or using barrels and screws.

On the other hand, corresponding evidence of Inuit objects at Norse sites is almost non-existent. One Inuit antler comb, two bird darts, one ivory towline handle, and one piece of meteoric iron: those five items are the grand total known to me for all of Norse Greenland throughout the centuries of Inuit/Norse coexistence. Even those five items would seem not to be valuable trade items but just discarded curiosities that some Norse person picked up. Astounding by their complete absence are all the useful pieces of Inuit technology that the Norse could have copied with profit but didn’t. For instance, there is not a single harpoon, spear-thrower, or kayak or umiaq piece from any Norse site.

If trade did develop between the Inuit and Norse, it would probably have involved walrus ivory, which the Inuit were skilled at hunting and which the Norse sought as their most valuable export to Europe. Unfortunately, direct evidence of such