Cultural adaptation, compounding vulnerabilities and conjunctures in Norse Greenland

Abstract

Norse Greenland has been seen as a classic case of maladaptation by an inflexible temperate zone society extending into the arctic and collapse driven by climate change. This paper, however, recognizes the successful arctic adaptation achieved in Norse Greenland and argues that, although climate change had impacts, the end of Norse settlement can only be truly understood as a complex socioenvironmental system that includes local and interregional interactions operating at different geographic and temporal scales and recognizes the cultural limits to adaptation of traditional ecological knowledge. This paper is not focused on a single discovery and its implications, an approach that can encourage monocausal and environmentally deterministic emphasis to explanation, but it is the product of sustained international interdisciplinary investigations in Greenland and the rest of the North Atlantic. It is based on data acquisitions, reinterpretation of established knowledge, and a somewhat different philosophical approach to the question of collapse. We argue that the Norse Greenlanders created a flexible and successful subsistence system that responded effectively to major environmental challenges but probably fell victim to a combination of conjunctures of large-scale historic processes and vulnerabilities created by their successful prior response to climate change. Their failure was an inability to anticipate an unknowable future, an inability to broaden their traditional ecological knowledge base, and a case of being too specialized, too small, and too isolated to be able to capitalize on and compete in the new protoworld system extending into the North Atlantic in the early 15th century.Vikings | marine mammals | Little Ice Age | rigidity trap

An anthropological perspective on the climate change and violence relationship

“…Thule Inuit hunters expanding into southern Greenland around this same time period offered examples of alternative technologies and knowledge for adaptation, but available evidence documents no intercultural exchange, beyond intergroup conflict, or adoption of Inuit technologies by the Norse. As temperatures dropped and storminess and sea ice increased, the Greenlanders intensified their seal hunting [23,56]. However, the Norse Greenlanders could not anticipate the impacts of a shifting climate on their seal food supply and the colony collapsed despite community cooperation to keep it functioning.…”

“…Laws, policies, and ideologies inscribed on architectural features or recorded in texts may indicate societal shifts and institutional support for social inequalities. Analyzed bureaucratic records including agricultural yields, irrigation system use and maintenance, market prices, imports and exports, taxes, census data, and military supplies and movements can offer insights into the daily stresses experienced by people living in a particular city or state through their resource consumption [22,23]. Excavated food remains document dietary differences associated with social and economic class or shifts linked to overharvest, rationing, or famine at the household level.…”

Toward a Global Classification of Coastal Anthromes

“…An analogous, historical coastal trap may explain why Norse settlement in Greenland collapsed in the 15th century [126,127]. Rather than getting pushed out by a marked climatic shift or by overharvesting the seals and walrus on which they depended for subsistence and trade goods, Norse settlers may have abandoned their foothold on Greenland for socioeconomic reasons: the devaluation of walrus ivory, a mainstay of Norse economic activity in Greenland; a concomitant decline in shipping traffic from Iceland and Norway; and aggressive competition for territory by Inuit peoples.…”

“…Rather than getting pushed out by a marked climatic shift or by overharvesting the seals and walrus on which they depended for subsistence and trade goods, Norse settlers may have abandoned their foothold on Greenland for socioeconomic reasons: the devaluation of walrus ivory, a mainstay of Norse economic activity in Greenland; a concomitant decline in shipping traffic from Iceland and Norway; and aggressive competition for territory by Inuit peoples. Dugmore et al [126] (who use the term "rigidity trap") present a resonant summary of the Norse Greenland system: "The choices made by the Norse in Greenland, to invest in fixed resource spaces and social and material infrastructure and intensify marine resource use, increased the effectiveness of adaptation and minimized landscape impacts but at an apparent cost of reduced resilience in the face of 15th century conjunctures. In effect, their concentration on certain marine mammals for subsistence and a highly integrated communal approach to both subsistence and economic activity (the focus on the spring seal hunt and the harvesting and processing of prestige goods, particularly ivory) were effective in the short term; they could be refined to cope with a degree of change over centennial time scales but developed into a rigidity trap on the millennial scale that ultimately lacked resilience in the face of the changing world system and conjunctures" (p. 3362).…”

Critical perspectives on historical collapse

“…Dugmore et al (48) assess differences of social transformation, sustainable practice, environmental change, isolation, mobility, and choices about subsistence and social organization. Under what circumstances can population levels not be maintained?…”