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By Root 2177 0

trade would be hard for us to recognize, because there is no way to determine whether the pieces of ivory found on many Norse farms came from walruses killed by the Norse themselves or by Inuit. But we certainly don’t find at Norse sites the bones of what I think would have been the most precious things that the Inuit could have traded to the Norse: ringed seals, Greenland’s most abundant seal species during the winter, hunted successfully by the Inuit but not by the Norse, and available at a time of year when the Norse were chronically at risk of exhausting their stored winter food supply and starving. That suggests to me that there really was very little, if any, trade between the two peoples. As far as archaeological evidence for contact is concerned, the Inuit might as well have been living on a different planet from the Norse, rather than sharing the same island and hunting grounds. Nor do we have any skeletal or genetic evidence of Inuit/Norse intermarriage. Careful study of the skulls of skeletons buried in Greenland Norse churchyards showed them to resemble continental Scandinavian skulls and failed to detect any Inuit/Norse hybrid.

Both the failure to develop trade with the Inuit, and the failure to learn from them, represented from our perspective huge losses to the Norse, although they themselves evidently didn’t see it that way. Those failures were not for lack of opportunity. Norse hunters must have seen Inuit hunters in the Nordrseta, and then at the Western Settlement outer fjords when the Inuit arrived there. Norsemen with their own heavy wooden rowboats and their own techniques for hunting walruses and seals must have recognized the superior sophistication of Inuit light skin boats and hunting methods: the Inuit were succeeding at doing exactly what the Norse hunters were trying to do. When later European explorers began visiting Greenland in the late 1500s, they were immediately amazed at the speed and maneuverability of kayaks and commented on the Inuit appearing to be half-fish, darting around in the water much faster than any European boat could travel. They were equally impressed by Inuit umiaqs, marksmanship, sewn skin clothing and boats and mittens, harpoons, bladder floats, dogsleds, and seal-hunting methods. The Danes who began colonizing Greenland in 1721 promptly embraced Inuit technology, used Inuit umiaqs to travel along the Greenland coast, and traded with the Inuit. Within a few years, the Danes had learned more about harpoons and ringed seals than the Norse had in a few centuries. Yet some of the Danish colonists were racist Christians who despised the pagan Inuit just as had the medieval Norse.

If one tried to guess without prejudice what form Norse/Inuit relations might have taken, there are many possibilities that were actually realized in later centuries when Europeans such as the Spanish, Portuguese, French, English, Russians, Belgians, Dutch, Germans, and Italians, as well as the Danes and Swedes themselves, encountered native peoples elsewhere in the world. Many of those European colonists became middlemen and developed integrated trade economies: European traders settled down or visited areas with native peoples, brought European goods coveted by the natives, and in exchange obtained native products coveted in Europe. For instance, the Inuit craved metal so much that they went to the effort of making cold-forged iron tools from iron in the Cape York meteor that had fallen in Northern Greenland. Hence one could have imagined the development of a trade in which the Norse obtained walrus tusks, narwhal tusks, sealskins, and polar bears from the Inuit and sent those goods to Europe in exchange for the iron prized by the Inuit. The Norse could also have supplied the Inuit with cloth and with milk products: even if lactose intolerance would have prevented the Inuit from drinking milk itself, they would still have consumed lactose-free milk products such as cheese and butter, which Denmark exports to Greenland today. Not only the Norse but also the Inuit were at frequent risk of starvation