The other means besides soil erosion by which the Norse inadvertently made land useless was that they cut turf for buildings and to burn as fuel, because of their shortage of timber and firewood. Almost all Greenland buildings were constructed mostly of turf, with at best only a stone foundation plus some wooden beams to support the roof. Even St. Nicholas’s Cathedral at Gardar had only the lowest six feet of its walls made of stone, above which the walls were of turf, with a roof supported by wooden beams and with a wood-paneled front. Although Hvalsey Church was exceptional in having walls entirely of stone up to their full height, it was still roofed with turf. Greenland turf walls tended to be thick (up to six feet thick!) in order to provide insulation against the cold.
A large Greenland residential house is estimated to have consumed about 10 acres of turf. Furthermore, that amount of turf was needed more than once, because turf gradually disintegrates, so that a building must be “returfed” every few decades. The Norse referred to that process of acquiring turf for construction as “flaying the outfield,” a good description of the damage done to what would otherwise be pastureland. The slow regeneration of turf in Greenland meant that that damage was long-lasting.
Again, a skeptic, on being told about soil erosion and turf cutting, might answer: “So what?” The answer is simple. Remember that, among the Norse Atlantic islands, Greenland even before human impact was the coldest island, hence the one most marginal for hay and pasture growth and most susceptible to loss of vegetation cover by overgrazing, trampling, soil erosion, and turf-cutting. A farm had to have sufficient pasture area to support at least the minimum number of animals required to breed back herd numbers after a long cold winter had reduced them, before the next long cold winter. Estimates suggest that the loss of only one-quarter of the total pasture area at Eastern Settlement or Western Settlement would have sufficed to drop the herd size below that minimum critical threshold. That’s what actually appears to have happened at Western Settlement, and possibly at Eastern Settlement as well.
Just as in Iceland, the environmental problems that beset the medieval Norse remain concerns in modern Greenland. For five centuries after Greenland’s medieval Norse died out, the island was without livestock under Inuit occupation and then under Danish colonial rule. Finally, in 1915, before the recent studies of medieval environmental impacts had been carried out, the Danes introduced Icelandic sheep on a trial basis, and the first full-time sheep breeder reestablished the farm at Brattahlid in 1924. Cows were also tried but were abandoned because they took too much work.
Today, about 65 Greenland families raise sheep as their main occupation, with the result that overgrazing and soil erosion have reemerged. Greenland lake cores show the same changes after 1924 as occurred after A.D. 984: a decrease in tree pollen, increase in grass and weed pollen, and increase of topsoil carried into lakes. Initially after 1924, sheep were left outdoors in the winter to forage for themselves whenever the winter was sufficiently mild. That caused grazing damage at the time when the vegetation was least capable of regenerating. Juniper trees are especially sensitive, because both sheep and horses browse them in the winter when there is nothing else available to eat. When Christian Keller arrived at Brattahlid in 1976, juniper was still growing there, but during my visit in 2002 I saw only dead juniper.
After more than half of Greenland’s sheep starved to death in the cold winter of 1966-67, the government founded a Greenland Experimental Station to study the environmental effects of sheep by comparing vegetation and soil in heavily grazed pastures, lightly grazed ones, and fields fenced to keep sheep out. A component of that research involved enlisting archaeologists to study pasture changes during Viking times. As a result of the appreciation thereby gained about Greenland’s fragility, Greenlanders have fenced off their most vulnerable pastures and brought sheep indoors for barn feeding throughout the entire winter. Efforts are being made to increase the supplies of winter hay by fertilizing natural pastures, and by cultivating oats, rye, timothy, and other non-native grasses.
Despite these efforts, soil erosion is a big problem in Greenland today. Along Eastern Settlement fjords, I saw areas of bare stone and gravel, largely devoid of vegetation as a result of recent sheep grazing. Within the last 25 years, high-velocity winds have eroded the modern farm at the site of the old Norse farm at the mouth of the Qorlortoq Valley, thereby furnishing us with a model for what happened at that farm seven centuries ago. While both the Greenland government and the sheep farmers themselves understand the long-term damage caused by sheep, they also feel under pressure to generate jobs in a society with high unemployment. Ironically, raising sheep in Greenland doesn’t pay even in the short run: the government has to give each sheep-farming family about $14,000 each year to cover their losses, provide them with an income, and induce them to carry on with the sheep.
The Inuit play a major role in the story of the demise of Viking Greenland. They constituted the biggest difference between the histories of the Greenland and Iceland Norse: while the Icelanders did enjoy the advantages of a less daunting climate and shorter trade routes to Norway compared to their Greenland brethren, the Icelanders’ clearest advantage lay in not being threatened by the Inuit. At minimum, the Inuit represent a missed opportunity: the Greenland Vikings would have had a better chance of surviving if they had learned from or traded with the Inuit, but they didn’t. At maximum, Inuit attacks on or threats to the Vikings may have played a direct role in the Vikings’ extinction. The Inuit are also significant in proving to us that persistence of human societies wasn’t impossible in medieval Greenland. Why did the Vikings eventually fail where the Inuit succeeded?
Today we think of the Inuit as the native inhabitants of Greenland and the Canadian Arctic. In reality, they were just the most recent in a series of at least four archaeologically recognized peoples who expanded eastward across Canada and entered Northwest Greenland over the course of nearly 4,000 years before Norse arrival. Successive waves of them spread, remained in Greenland for centuries, and then vanished, raising their own questions of societal collapses similar to the questions that we are considering for the Norse, Anasazi, and Easter Islanders. However, we know too little about those earlier disappearances to discuss them in this book except as background to the Vikings’ fate. While archaeologists have given to these earlier cultures names like Point Independence I, Point Independence II, and Saqqaq, depending on the sites where their artifacts became recognized, the languages of those people, and their names for themselves, all are lost to us forever.
The Inuits’ immediate predecessors were a culture referred to by archaeologists as the Dorset people, from their habitations identified at Cape Dorset on Canada’s Baffin Island. After occupying most of the Canadian Arctic, they entered Greenland around 800 B.C. and inhabited many parts of the island for about a thousand years, including the areas of the later Viking settlements in the southwest. For unknown reasons, they then abandoned all of Greenland and much of the Canadian Arctic by around A.D. 300 and contracted their distribution back to some core areas of Canada. Around A.D. 700, though, they expanded again to reoccupy Labrador and northwestern Greenland, though on this migration they did not spread south to the later Viking sites. At Western and Eastern Settlements, the initial Viking colonists described seeing only uninhabited house ruins, fragments of skin boats, and stone tools that they guessed were left by vanished natives similar to the ones that they had encountered in North America during the Vinland voyages.
From bones recovered at archaeological sites, we know that Dorset people hunted a wide range of prey species varying among sites and time periods: walrus, seals, caribou, polar bears, foxes, ducks, geese, and seabirds. There was long-distance trade between the Dorset populations of Arctic Canada, Labrador, and Greenland, as proven by discoveries of tools of stone types quarried from one of these sites appearing at other sites a thousand kilometers distant. Unlike their successors the Inuit or some of their Arctic predecessors, though, Dorset people
lacked dogs (hence also dogsleds) and didn’t use bows and arrows. Unlike the Inuit, they also lacked boats of skin stretched over a framework and hence could not go to sea to hunt whales. Without dogsleds, they were poorly mobile, and without whale-hunting, they were unable to feed large populations. Instead, they lived in small settlements of just one or two houses, big enough for no more than 10 people and just a few adult men. That made them the least formidable of the three Native American groups that the Norse encountered: Dorset people, Inuit, and Canadian Indians. And that, surely, is why the Greenland Norse felt safe enough to continue for more than three centuries to visit the Dorset-occupied coast of Labrador to fetch timber, long after they had given up on visiting “Vinland” farther south in Canada because of the dense hostile Indian populations there.
Did Vikings and Dorset people meet each other in Northwest Greenland? We have no firm proof, but it seems likely, because Dorset people survived there for about 300 years after the Norse settled the southwest, and because the Norse were making annual visits to the Nordrseta hunting grounds only a few hundred miles south of Dorset-occupied areas and made exploratory trips farther north. Below, I shall mention one Norse account of an encounter with natives who might have been Dorset people. Other evidence consists of some objects clearly originating with Vikings—especially pieces of smelted metal that would have been prized for making tools—discovered at Dorset sites scattered over Northwest Greenland and the Canadian Arctic. Of course, we don’t know whether Dorset people acquired those objects by face-to-face contacts, peaceful or otherwise, with Norse, or whether they were merely scavenged from abandoned Norse sites. Whichever was the case, we can be confident that Norse relations with the Inuit had the potential for becoming much more dangerous than those relatively harmless relations with Dorset people.
Inuit culture and technology, including mastery of whale-hunting in open waters, arose in the Bering Strait region somewhat before A.D. 1000. Dogsleds on land, and large boats at sea, enabled the Inuit to travel and transport supplies much more rapidly than could Dorset people. As the Arctic became warmer in the Middle Ages and the frozen waterways separating Canadian Arctic islands thawed, the Inuit followed their bowhead whale prey through those waterways eastwards across Canada, entering Northwest Greenland by A.D. 1200, and thereafter moving south along Greenland’s west coast to reach the Nordrseta, then the vicinity of Western Settlement around A.D. 1300, and the vicinity of Eastern Settlement around 1400.
The Inuit hunted all of the same prey species that Dorset people had targeted, and probably did so more effectively because they (unlike their Dorset predecessors) possessed bows and arrows. But the hunting of whales as well gave them an additional major food supply unavailable to either Dorset people or the Norse. Hence Inuit hunters could feed lots of wives and children and lived in large settlements, typically housing dozens of people, including 10 or 20 adult male hunters and fighters. In the prime hunting grounds of the Nordrseta itself, the Inuit established, at a site called Sermermiut, a huge settlement that gradually accumulated hundreds of dwellings. Just imagine the problems it must have created for the success of the Norse Nordrseta hunt if a group of Norse hunters, who could hardly have numbered more than a few dozen, were detected by such a big group of Inuit and failed to establish good relations.
Unlike the Norse, the Inuit represented the climax of thousands of years of cultural developments by Arctic peoples learning to master Arctic conditions. So, Greenland has little wood available for building, heating, or illuminating houses during the months of Arctic winter darkness? That was no problem for the Inuit: they built igloos for winter housing out of snow, and they burned whale and seal blubber both for fuel and for lighting lamps. Little wood available to build boats? Again, that was no problem for the Inuit: they stretched sealskins over frameworks to build kayaks (Plate 18), as well as to make their boats called umiaqs big enough to take out into unprotected waters for hunting whales.
Despite having read about what exquisite watercraft Inuit kayaks were, and despite having used the modern recreational kayaks now made of plastic and widely available in the First World, I was still astonished when I first saw a traditional Inuit kayak in Greenland. It reminded me of a miniature version of the long, narrow, fast battleships of the U.S.S. Iowa class built by the American navy during World War II, with all of their available deck space bristling with bombardment guns, anti-aircraft guns, and other weaponry. Nineteen feet long, tiny compared to a battleship, but still much longer than I had ever imagined, the deck of the slim kayak was packed with its own weaponry: a harpoon shaft, with a spear-thrower extension at the grip end; a separate harpoon head about six inches long, attachable to the shaft by a toggle connection; a dart to throw at birds, with not only an arrow point at the tip but three forward-facing sharp barbs lower on the dart shaft to hit the bird in case the tip just missed; several sealskin bladders to act as drags on harpooned whales or seals; and a lance for delivering the death blow to the harpooned animal. Unlike a battleship or any other watercraft known to me, the kayak was individually tailored to its paddler’s size, weight, and arm strength. It was actually “worn” by its owner, and its seat was a sewn garment joined to the owner’s parka and guaranteeing a waterproof seal so that ice-cold water splashing over the decks could not wet him. Christian Keller tried in vain to “wear” modern kayaks tailored to his Greenlander friends, only to discover that his feet couldn’t fit under the deck and that his upper legs were too big to enter the manhole.
In their range of hunting strategies, the Inuit were the most flexible and sophisticated hunters in Arctic history. Besides killing caribou, walruses, and land birds in ways not unlike those of the Norse, the Inuit differed from the Norse in using their fast kayaks to harpoon seals and to run down seabirds on the ocean, and in using umiaqs and harpoons to kill whales in open waters. Not even an Inuit can stab to death at one blow a healthy whale, so the whale hunt began with a hunter harpooning the whale from an umiaq rowed by other men. That is not an easy task, as all you devotees of Sherlock Holmes stories may remember from the “Adventure of Black Peter,” in which an evil retired ship’s captain is found dead in his house, with a harpoon that had been decorating his wall thrust clean through him. After spending a morning at a butcher’s shop, vainly attempting himself to drive a harpoon through a pig’s carcass, Sherlock Holmes deduces correctly that the murderer must have been a professional harpooner, because an untrained man no matter how strong cannot drive in a harpoon deeply. Two things made that possible for the Inuit: the harpoon’s spear-thrower grip that extended the throwing arc and hence increased the hunter’s throwing force and the impact; and, as in the case of Black Peter’s murderer, long practice. For the Inuit, though, that practice began already in childhood, resulting in Inuit men developing a condition called hyperextension of the throwing arm: in effect, an additional built-in spear-thrower.
Once the harpoon head became embedded in the whale, the cleverly designed toggle connection released, allowing the hunters to retrieve the harpoon shaft now separated from the harpoon head embedded in the whale. Otherwise, if the harpooner had continued to hold a rope tied to the harpoon head and shaft, the angry whale would have dragged underwater the umiaq and all its Inuit occupants. Left attached to the harpoon head was an air-filled bladder of sealskin, whose buoyancy forced the whale to work harder against the bladder’s resistance and to grow tired as it dived. When the whale surfaced to breathe, the Inuit launched another harpoon with yet another bladder attached, to tire the whale even more. Only when the whale had thus become exhausted did the hunters dare bring the umiaq alongside the beast to lance it to death.
The Inuit also devised a specialized technique for hunting ringed seal, the most abundant seal species in Greenland waters but one whose habits made it difficult to capture. Unlike other Greenland seal species, the ringed seal winters off the Greenland coast under the ice, by opening breathing holes through the ice just large enough for its head (but not for its b
ody). The holes are difficult to spot because the seal leaves them covered with a cone of snow. Each seal has several breathing holes, just as a fox makes an underground burrow with several foxholes as alternate entrances. A hunter could not knock the snow cone off the hole, else the seal would realize that someone was waiting for it. Hence the hunter stood patiently next to a cone in the cold darkness of the Arctic winter, waited motionless for as many hours as necessary to hear a seal arrive to catch a quick breath, and then tried to harpoon the animal through the snow cone, without being able to see it. As the impaled seal swam off, the harpoon head then detached from the shaft but remained attached to a rope, which the hunter played out and pulled until the seal became exhausted and could be dragged in and lanced. That whole operation is difficult to learn and execute successfully; the Norse never did. As a result, in the occasional years when other seal species declined in numbers, the Inuit switched to hunting ringed seals, but the Norse did not have that option, and so they were at risk of starving.
Thus, the Inuit enjoyed those and other advantages over the Norse and the Dorset people. Within a few centuries of the Inuit expansion across Canada into Northwest Greenland, the Dorset culture, which had previously occupied both areas, disappeared. Hence we have not one but two Inuit-related mysteries: the disappearance first of the Dorset people, then of the Norse, both of them soon after Inuit arrival in their territories. In Northwest Greenland some Dorset settlements survived for a century or two after the Inuit appeared, and it would have been impossible for two such peoples to be unaware of each other’s presence, yet there is no direct archaeological evidence of contact between them, such as Inuit objects at contemporary Dorset sites or vice versa. But there is indirect evidence of contact: the Greenland Inuit ended up with several Dorset cultural traits that they had lacked before arriving in Greenland, including a bone knife for cutting snow blocks, domed snow houses, soapstone technology, and the so-called Thule 5 harpoon head. Clearly, the Inuit not only had some opportunities to learn from Dorset people but also must have had something to do with their disappearance after the latter had lived in the Arctic for 2,000 years. Each of us can imagine our own scenario for the end of Dorset culture. One guess of mine is that, among groups of Dorset people starving in a difficult winter, the women just deserted their men and walked over to Inuit camps where they knew that people were feasting on bowhead whales and ringed seals.
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed Page 34