Cows,harp seals,and churchbells: Adaptation and extinction in Norse Greenland

The extinction of the Norse colony in West Greenland (ca A.D. 985–1500) has intrigued generations of historians, medieval archaeologists, and climatologists. This longstanding interest has generated a considerable body of basic paleoclimatic and paleoecological data, as well as a number of largely monocausal explanations for the communities' end. The 1976–1977 Inuit-Norse Project and a variety of recent geophysical and palynological studies have provided the greater detail necessary for a more systematic analysis of cultural adaptation and extinction in Norse Greenland. A dual maritime/terrestrial Norse subsistence economy, combined with a transatlantic trade and long- range arctic hunting, supported a hierarchical social organization and elaborate ceremonial architecture. Elite information management and economic decision- making seems to have been a source of ultimately fatal Norse conservatism in the face of fluctuating resources and Inuit competition.     

Disequilibrium,Adaptation, and the Norse Settlement of Greenland

There is increasing evidence to suggest that arctic cultures and ecosystems have followed non-linear responses to climate change. Norse Scandinavian farmers introduced agriculture to sub-arctic Greenland in the late tenth century, creating synanthropic landscapes and utilising seasonally abundant marine and terrestrial resources. Using a niche-construction framework and data from recent survey work, studies of diet, and regional-scale climate proxies we examine the potential mismatch between this imported agricultural niche and the constraints of the environment from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries. We argue that landscape modification conformed the Norse to a Scandinavian style of agriculture throughout settlement, structuring and limiting the efficacy of seasonal hunting strategies. Recent climate data provide evidence of sustained cooling from the mid thirteenth century and climate variation from the early fifteenth century. Archaeological evidence suggests that the Norse made incremental adjustments to the changing sub-arctic environment, but were limited by cultural adaptations made in past environments.     

The Norse god of autophagy

Macroautophagy was first detected in the late 1950s and was pursued briefly in the 1960s, primarily in regard to physiological responses to glucagon versus insulin. Relatively few people studied this process throughout the subsequent two decades. One of those people, however, was Per Seglen. At the first Gordon Research Conference on “Autophagy in Stress, Development and Disease,” John Lemasters referred to Per as the “Norse god of autophagy” (hence, the title of this perspective). Lest some people in that audience or some readers of this article, think that title a tad presumptuous, I encourage them to read the following interview.     

Sustainable Rangeland Grazing in Norse Faroe

The introduction of domestic livestock, particularly sheep, and rangeland grazing by Norse settlers to Faroe during the ninth century has generally been described as a major pressure on a sensitive landscape, leading to rapid and widespread vegetation change and contributing to land degradation. This view has, however, been developed without consideration of Norse grazing management practices which may have served to minimize grazing impacts on landscapes as well as sustaining and enhancing vegetation and livestock productivity. These alternative scenarios are considered using a historical grazing management simulation model with Faroese climate and vegetation inputs and given archaeological, historical and palaeoenvironmental parameters. Three contrasting rangeland areas are investigated and, based on the maximum number of ewe/lamb pairs the rangeland could sustain, modeling suggests that utilizable biomass declined with the onset of grazing activity, but not to a level that would cause major changes in vegetation cover or contribute to soil erosion even under climatically determined poor growth conditions. When rangeland areas partitioned into what are termed hagi and partir are modeled, grazing levels are still within rangeland carrying capacities, but productivities are variable. Some rangeland areas increase biomass and livestock productivities and biomass utilization rates while other rangeland areas that were too finely partitioned were likely to suffer substantial decline in livestock productivity. Partitioning of rangeland is a likely contributor to long-term differentiation of landscapes and the relative success of settlements across Faroe beyond the Norse period.     

Palatine torus in the Greenlandic Norse.

Physical anthropologists have long been intrigued by the distinctive oral tori expressed by the medieval Norse populations of Iceland and Greenland. To assess the temporal and spatial variation of one form of oral tori, palatine torus, observations were made on all available Greenlandic Norse skeletons, as well as on samples of medieval Icelanders and Norwegians. In terms of temporal variation, 12th to 14th century (medieval) Greenlanders from the Eastern and Western settlements exhibited higher frequencies and more pronounced expressions of palatine torus compared with early 11th century Greenlanders. The early Greenlandic sample closely approximated the medieval Icelandic and Norwegian samples for total torus frequency, although the Norwegians exhibited the trait to a less pronounced degree. As degree of expression is the most distinctive aspect of torus variation among the Norse, some combination of environmental factors, including increased masticatory stress and chronic undernutrition, probably accounts for most of the difference between settlement period and medieval Greenlanders. Although palatine torus may be hereditary in part, environmental factors play a significant role in the expression of this trait.     

Comparing Norse animal husbandry practices: paleoethnobotanical analyses from Iceland and Greenland

The popular view of the Norse settlement across the North Atlantic describes colonies with similar subsistence practices being established from the Faroe Islands in the west to L'Anse aux Meadows in the east. The importance of plant resources to the Norse animal husbandry strategies implemented by settlers upon arrival are not well established, nor are the changes these strategies underwent, eventually resulting in different cultural solutions to varying environmental and social factors. This paper compares archaeobotanical samples from two Icelandic archaeological sites, Svalbare and Gj?gur, and one Greenlandic site, G?rden Under Sandet (GUS). Results of this comparison suggest that heathland shrubs were an important fodder resource for caprines in both Iceland and Greenland while apophytes ("weedy taxa") were part of the cattle fodder in Greenland. Further, the results indicate that mucking out of cattle barns to provide fertilizer was likely practiced at the GUS site in the Western Norse settlement of Greenland.     

Grazing impacts and woodland management in Eriksfjord: Betula, coprophilous fungi and the Norse settlement of Greenland

This paper focuses on the impact of Norse settlement on vegetation and landscape around the head of Tunulliarfik (Eriksfjord) in southern Greenland. Pollen, radiocarbon, microscopic charcoal and fungal spore data are presented from a peat monolith which was collected close to the ruins of a large Norse farm complex (group ?39 at Qinngua in the former Eastern Settlement). Landnám is identified at ca. cal. a.d. 1020 by a small decrease in pollen from Betula, a slight increase in Poaceae, and the appearance of pollen from Norse apophytes (native plants favoured and spread by human activity) and anthropochores (not native and unintentionally introduced by people). Increases in microscopic charcoal and palynological richness are also apparent. This pattern is broadly consistent with that seen in other pollen diagrams from this region. The sequence is unusual for Greenland, however, in that relatively high Betula pollen percentages (average 20% TLP) are recorded throughout the period of settlement, up to the end of the 14th century a.d. before the profile becomes truncated. If these data are primarily representative of the dry land vegetation, then they suggest that birch woodland and scrub may well have persisted close to the farm throughout the Norse period. Given the potential resource value of woodland to the settlers, this may imply that birch was being managed sustainably, as was the case in Iceland during the medieval period. Coprophilous fungal spores typically found on animal dung are abundant during the early phase of settlement, yet subsequently decline in abundance. This may indicate a likely decrease in grazing intensity or livestock numbers over time, possibly in response to climatic deterioration and/or soil erosion that is expected to have placed increased stress on the pastoral farming system.     

Support and conflict of kinsmen in Norse Earldoms,Icelandic families,and the English royalty

Data concerning the Norse Earls of the Orkney Islands, Icelandic families, and the conflicts concerning the sovereignty of England are presented. The data suggest that support vs conflict with kin is influenced by degree of biological relatedness but also by the needs for support by kinsmen, as influenced by the ability to hire retainers, and by the costs and benefits of support vs conflict.     

Norse Greenland settlement: reflections on climate change, trade, and the contrasting fates of human settlements in the North Atlantic Islands

Changing economies and patterns of trade, rather than climatic deterioration, could have critically marginalized the Norse Greenland settlements and effectively sealed their fate. Counter-intuitively, the end of Norse Greenland might not be symptomatic of a failure to adapt to environmental change, but a consequence of successful wider economic developments of Norse communities across North Atlantic. Data from Greenland, the Faroe Islands, and medieval Iceland is used to explore the interplay of Norse society with climate, environment, settlement, and other circumstances. Long term increases in vulnerability caused by economic change and cumulative climate changes sparked a cascading collapse of integrated interdependent settlement systems, bringing the end of Norse Greenland.     

The economics of sheep and goat husbandry in Norse Greenland

Insight into the relative importance of sheep and goat herding and of the economic significance of each species (i.e., milk vs. meat vs. wool) in Medieval Greenland is obtained through the application of Halstead et al.'s (2002) criteria for the identification of adult ovicaprine mandibles to faunal assemblages from three Norse farmsteads: Sandnes, V52a, and ?71S. The economic strategies identified are broadly comparable between the two species and the Eastern and Western Settlement sites examined, and are suggestive of the subsistence production of meat and milk. Comparison with farmsteads elsewhere in Greenland indicates that socio-economic status and/or farmstead size interacted with geographical location in determining the economic strategies employed by the Norse farmers. A broader use of resources and a more varied diet are evident at larger farmsteads in Greenland and this paper suggests that such sites would have been better able than their smaller counterparts to withstand environmental deterioration during the early Middle Ages. These analyses have also confirmed that goats were relatively more common in Norse sites in Greenland than in Norse sites in Iceland, Orkney, or Shetland.     

Some Botanical Aspects of a Norse Economy in Northern Scotland

Summary

In northern Scotland, there is a change from naked to hulled barley sometime around the birth of Christ, although the reason is unclear, and oats were introduced at about this time. Barley cultivation in one area stopped around AD 700; this was possibly related to isolated and early Viking incursions although soil deterioration may have moved cultivation to another part of Freswick Bay. Pollen and macrofossil analyses have been satisfactorily linked and show how they complement each other. Overall the social and economic changes occurring in the north of Scotland during the first millennium AD are obviously nowhere near as clear as those related to the Romans in northern England. Perhaps Earl's Bu will provide at least some of the missing pieces of the jigsaw.     

The Greenland Norse: A biological‐ anthropological study. Meddelelser on Grønland,man and society 24

By Niels Lynnerup. Copenhagen: Commission for Scientific Research in Greenland. 1998. 149 pp. ISBN 87‐90369‐24‐6. $35.00 (paper).     

mtDna and the islands of the North Atlantic: estimating the proportions of Norse and Gaelic ancestry

A total of 1,664 new mtDNA control-region sequences were analyzed in order to estimate Gaelic and Scandinavian matrilineal ancestry in the populations of Iceland, Orkney, the Western Isles, and the Isle of Skye and to investigate other aspects of their genetic history. A relative excess of private lineages in the Icelanders is indicative of isolation, whereas the scarcity of private lineages in Scottish island populations may be explained by recent gene flow and population decline. Differences in the frequencies of lineage clusters are observed between the Scandinavian and the Gaelic source mtDNA pools, and, on a continent-wide basis, such differences between populations seem to be associated with geography. A multidimensional scaling analysis of genetic distances, based on mtDNA lineage-cluster frequencies, groups the North Atlantic islanders with the Gaelic and the Scandinavian populations, whereas populations from the central, southern, and Baltic regions of Europe are arranged in clusters in broad agreement with their geographic locations. This pattern is highly significant, according to a Mantel correlation between genetic and geographic distances (r=.716). Admixture analyses indicate that the ancestral contributions of mtDNA lineages from Scandinavia to the populations of Iceland, Orkney, the Western Isles, and the Isle of Skye are 37.5%, 35.5%, 11.5%, and 12.5%, respectively.     

Modern pollen–vegetation relationships in subarctic southern Greenland and the interpretation of fossil pollen data from the Norse landnám

Aim The objective of this paper is to explore the relationships that exist between vegetation and modern pollen rain in the open, largely treeless landscape of subarctic Greenland. The implications of these results for the interpretation of fossil pollen assemblages from the time of the Norse landnám are then examined. Location The study area is the sheep farming district of Qassiarsuk in the subarctic, subcontinental vegetational and climatic zone of southern Greenland (61° N, 45° W). Between c.ad 1000–1500 this region was contained within the Norse Eastern Settlement. Methods Detrended Correspondence Analysis (DCA) of harmonized plant–pollen data sets is used to compare plant cover in 64 vegetation quadrats with pollen assemblages obtained from moss polsters at matching locations. Presence/absence data are also used to calculate indices of association, over‐ and under‐representation for pollen types. Results Good correspondence between paired vegetation–pollen samples occurs in many cases, particularly in locations where Salix glauca–Betula glandulosa dwarf shrub heath is dominant, and across herbaceous field boundaries and meadows. Pollen samples are found to be poor at reflecting actual ground cover where ericales or Juniperus communis are the locally dominant shrubs. Dominant or ubiquitous taxa within this landscape (Betula, Salix and Poaceae) are found to be over‐represented in pollen assemblages, as are several of the ‘weeds’ generally accepted as introduced by the Norse settlers. Main conclusions Due to their over‐representation in the pollen rain, many of the Norse apophytes and introductions (e.g. Rumex acetosa and R. acetosella) traditionally used to infer human activity in Greenland should be particularly sensitive indicators for landnám, allowing early detection of Norse activity in fossil assemblages. Pteridophyte spores are found to be disassociated with the ground cover of ferns and clubmosses, but are over‐represented in pollen assemblages, indicating extra‐local or regional sources and long residence times in soil/sediment profiles for these microfossils. A pollen record for Hordeum‐type registered in close proximity to a field containing barley suggests that summer temperatures under the current climatic regime are, at least on occasion, sufficient to allow flowering.