Does anyone actually LIVE in Greenland?

[Leifmk]

Anyway, Jared Diamond goes into the demise of Norse Greenland in quite a lot of detail in Collapse. Which is a quite interesting, if depressing, book.

 

[Leifmk]

Funny thing is, they might have.
If they successfully did so there's no way for us to know since then they would then have merged with the Inuit, which wouldn't leave distinguishable traces. Only the failure to adapt at all, or incomplete attempts, would.

DNA analysis would tell. Also, the phenotypes of the populations were different enough that you can tell quite easily which population an excavated skeleton came from, and there pretty much haven't been found any "half-bloods".

The Inuit at least claim to have a store of stories relating to the old Scandinavian settlers. They seem to have been on rather amicable terms.

Funny, then, that the only accounts we have preserved from the Norse side are brief and dismissive and barely rate the Inuit as humans.

 

[Verbose]

DNA analysis would tell. Also, the phenotypes of the populations were different enough that you can tell quite easily which population an excavated skeleton came from, and there pretty much haven't been found any "half-bloods".

I'm not an expert of Greenland archeology, but I imagine the relationship between what's been found and what we would need to find to settle the question might be such that it's not at present possible to make a hard and fast call.
But if you know more I'd be interested in what the situation is with regards to the anthropology and archeology of Greenland?

What I'm suggesting might work for single individuals, as just that, individual solutions to the problem of survival, and not that many of them either. The Scandinavians as a group would be toast anyway.

Funny, then, that the only accounts we have preserved from the Norse side are brief and dismissive and barely rate the Inuit as humans.

The thing about the Inuit life-style is that if the climate gets to balmy, they're not interested. So when the Scandinavians settled, there were no Inuit around. The showed up later, as things cooled down, following the game.

And the greatests problem with the Inuit accounts, as with all oral history in non-literate societies, is that it isn't really dateable. The Inuit stories were all recorded in the 20th c. making them in fact 20th c. stories. We can't dismiss them out of hand but there's always the possibility of later invention/interpretation, during the three or four centuries the Danes have been in contact with them.

 

[Kafka2]

I don't really think it's unfair. They had, apparently, a very conservative attitude to their lifestyle, and while they had contact with (or at least had many opportunities to observe) the Inuit for hundreds of years, they showed no inclination toward adopting any Inuit technologies whatsoever, even when those were clearly superior (such as using the kayak to get around and do hunting and fishing).

I'm going to challenge that point. How can one be sure that there was considerable contact with the Inuit leading up to the climatic change?

It seems to make little sense to me. The dendrochronological evidence suggests that the Norse-occupied Greenland was not experiencing anything close to polar climatic conditions at the time- therefore why would the (migrant polar hunter) Inuits be there? When there would be no seal-bearing ice-floes in the vicinity? Wouldn't they be further north, around Ellesmere or Baffin Island?

When your agricultural culture is doing well in the local climate, why would you be considered unduly conservative for failing to learn polar hunting techniques?

 

[Kafka2]

Funny thing is, they might have.
The Inuit at least claim to have a store of stories relating to the old Scandinavian settlers. They seem to have been on rather amicable terms.

I struggle to believe that. The Inuit were brutally unsentimental when it came to matters relating to their own survival, and in a polar environment I don't think they'd have welcomed competition from struggling norse survivors.

 

[Leifmk]

I'm going to challenge that point. How can one be sure that there was considerable contact with the Inuit leading up to the climatic change?

Their hunting ranges would overlap.

It seems to make little sense to me. The dendrochronological evidence suggests that the Norse-occupied Greenland was not experiencing anything close to polar climatic conditions at the time- therefore why would the (migrant polar hunter) Inuits be there? When there would be no seal-bearing ice-floes in the vicinity? Wouldn't they be further north, around Ellesmere or Baffin Island?

Oh, there is ample archaelogical evidence of Inuit occupation of Greenland just a bit further north than the Norse settlements. As the climate grew colder, they expanded south.

When your agricultural culture is doing well in the local climate, why would you be considered unduly conservative for failing to learn polar hunting techniques?

But the Norse Greenlanders' agriculture wasn't really "doing well" for most of their history. They were reduced to depending on a fairly small subset of the agricultural toolkit, as it were, of their Icelandic and Scandinavian relatives -- none of the staple human-food crops would grow usefully in Greenland, but they could raise livestock. They couldn't subsist on that alone, and during the whole period they also had to hunt both land and sea mammals to supplement their diet, and as the years passed and the climate worsened their diet gradually became dominated by seafood (mostly seals, as they did not fish). But they clung to their own hunting methods, which were considerably less effective than those of their neighbours and competitors.

 

[Willowmound]

the near-total absence of fish from their diet, from the earliest generations of the settlement until its demise.

as they did not fish

Where do you have this from? It sounds completely bizarre to me. The Vikings ate plenty of fish! Why wouldn't the Greenlanders? Do you have a proper reference?

 

[Kafka2]

From http://www.europhysicsnews.com/full/15/article1/article1.html

As a result of 80 years of excavations in Greenland, The Danish National Museum possesses a large collection of bones from burials in churchyards in the old Norse colonies. Stable-isotope analysis of selected parts of this bone material has enabled us to determine which kind of food each individual has eaten - or more precisely: the balance between terrestrial and marine diet (Box 3). At the same time, we have 14C dated the bones by the AMS technique (Box 1 and 2). We cannot claim to have solved the enigma of the disappearance of the Norsemen from Greenland, but we can at least exclude some hypotheses. The isotope analysis indicates that the Norsemen changed their dietary habits. The diet of the first settlers consisted of 80% agricultural products and 20% food from the surrounding sea. But seafood played an increasing role, such that the pattern was completely turned around towards the end of the period—from the 1300's the Greenland Norse had 50-80% of their diet from the marine food chain. In simplified terms: they started out as farmers but ended up as hunters/fishers. Some archeologists have claimed that the Greenland Norsemen succumbed because they—being culturally inflexible—either could not or would not adapt to changing conditions and therefore came to a catastrophic end, triggered by deteriorating climate. This hypothesis may now be refuted.

Even at 20% in the early days, that's still an important food source which indicates habitual fishing.

 

[Willowmound]

Thanks Kafka. That's what I thought.