[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.As a result of the appre-ciation thereby gained about Greenland's fragility, Greenlanders have fencedoff their most vulnerable pastures and brought sheep indoors for barn feed-ing throughout the entire winter.Efforts are being made to increase thesupplies of winter hay by fertilizing natural pastures, and by cultivatingoats, 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, largelydevoid of vegetation as a result of recent sheep grazing.Within the last 25years, high-velocity winds have eroded the modern farm at the site of theold Norse farm at the mouth of the Qorlortoq Valley, thereby furnishing uswith a model for what happened at that farm seven centuries ago.Whileboth the Greenland government and the sheep farmers themselves under-stand the long-term damage caused by sheep, they also feel under pressureto generate jobs in a society with high unemployment.Ironically, raisingsheep in Greenland doesn't pay even in the short run: the government hasto give each sheep-farming family about $14,000 each year to cover theirlosses, provide them with an income, and induce them to carry on with thesheep.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 Green-land and Iceland Norse: while the Icelanders did enjoy the advantages of aless daunting climate and shorter trade routes to Norway compared to theirGreenland brethren, the Icelanders' clearest advantage lay in not beingthreatened by the Inuit.At minimum, the Inuit represent a missed opportu-nity: the Greenland Vikings would have had a better chance of surviving ifthey had learned from or traded with the Inuit, but they didn't.At maxi-mum, Inuit attacks on or threats to the Vikings may have played a directrole in the Vikings' extinction.The Inuit are also significant in proving to usthat persistence of human societies wasn't impossible in medieval Green-land.Why did the Vikings eventually fail where the Inuit succeeded?Today we think of the Inuit as the native inhabitants of Greenland andthe Canadian Arctic.In reality, they were just the most recent in a series ofat least four archaeologically recognized peoples who expanded eastwardacross Canada and entered Northwest Greenland over the course of nearly4,000 years before Norse arrival.Successive waves of them spread, remainedin Greenland for centuries, and then vanished, raising their own questionsof societal collapses similar to the questions that we are considering for theNorse, Anasazi, and Easter Islanders.However, we know too little aboutthose earlier disappearances to discuss them in this book except as back-ground to the Vikings' fate.While archaeologists have given to these earliercultures names like Point Independence I, Point Independence II, andSaqqaq, depending on the sites where their artifacts became recognized, thelanguages of those people, and their names for themselves, all are lost to usforever.The Inuits' immediate predecessors were a culture referred to by archae-ologists as the Dorset people, from their habitations identified at CapeDorset on Canada's Baffin Island.After occupying most of the CanadianArctic, they entered Greenland around 800 B.C.and inhabited many parts ofthe island for about a thousand years, including the areas of the later Vikingsettlements in the southwest.For unknown reasons, they then abandonedall of Greenland and much of the Canadian Arctic by around A.D.300 andcontracted their distribution back to some core areas of Canada.AroundA.D.700, though, they expanded again to reoccupy Labrador and north-western Greenland, though on this migration they did not spread south tothe later Viking sites.At Western and Eastern Settlements, the initial Vikingcolonists described seeing only uninhabited house ruins, fragments of skinboats, and stone tools that they guessed were left by vanished natives similarto the ones that they had encountered in North America during the Vinlandvoyages.From bones recovered at archaeological sites, we know that Dorset peo-ple hunted a wide range of prey species varying among sites and time peri-ods: walrus, seals, caribou, polar bears, foxes, ducks, geese, and seabirds.There was long-distance trade between the Dorset populations of ArcticCanada, Labrador, and Greenland, as proven by discoveries of tools of stonetypes quarried from one of these sites appearing at other sites a thousandkilometers distant.Unlike their successors the Inuit or some of their Arcticpredecessors, though, Dorset people lacked dogs (hence also dogsleds) anddidn't use bows and arrows.Unlike the Inuit, they also lacked boats of skinstretched 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 set-tlements of just one or two houses, big enough for no more than 10 peopleand just a few adult men.That made them the least formidable of the threeNative 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 upon visiting "Vinland" farther south in Canada because of the dense hostileIndian populations there.Did Vikings and Dorset people meet each other in Northwest Green-land? We have no firm proof, but it seems likely, because Dorset people sur-vived there for about 300 years after the Norse settled the southwest, andbecause the Norse were making annual visits to the Nordrseta huntinggrounds only a few hundred miles south of Dorset-occupied areas andmade exploratory trips farther north.Below, I shall mention one Norse ac-count of an encounter with natives who might have been Dorset people.Other evidence consists of some objects clearly originating with Vikingsespecially pieces of smelted metal that would have been prized for makingtools discovered at Dorset sites scattered over Northwest Greenland andthe Canadian Arctic [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]