[Sca-cooks] Re: Sca-cooks digest, Vol 1 #2332 - 15 msgs

[Elizabeth A Heckert]

On Tue, 27 Aug 2002 10:18:00 -0500 sca-cooks-request at ansteorra.org
writes:
> Message: 2
> Date: Tue, 27 Aug 2002 02:21:13 -0500
> From: "Mark S. Harris" <stefan at texas.net>
>> Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Re: Rhachitis
>
> Yes, the smaller population on Greenland
> would
> have increased the problems compared to Iceland as well as problems
> with the land suitable for agriculture being much less.

     It was as much a short growing season as it was the fact that the
Norsemen tried to raise cattle, especially,  but also, pigs sheep and
goats in a land unsuited to those animals' eating habits.

> I'm surprised with that short of a settlement such remains as this
> dress were there to be found. But then the Norse settlement on
> North America was also short lived and even smaller.

    Herjolfsnes was settled by Icelanders in the 980s.  The settlement
died out between the first and second quarter of the fifteenth century.
Herjolfsnes cemetery yielded c. 31 coffins,  40+ garments,  and about 25
skeletons; for a total of about 70-75 burials.  These burials (dated by
the clothes) come from the last century to century-and-a-quarter.
>
> > The genetic pool on Iceland was influenced by mainland Scandinavia
> (at
> > least if we are to trust the sagas, and I do) and some by
> northern
> > Scotland.

     In the Middle Ages there was (illegal) trading between Greenland and
Scotland.  The style of the clothing recovered from the cemetery reflects
an awareness of what was worn in Europe during the fourteenth century,
but these garments are not what the nobility wore.
>
> Or was this something
> that
> perhaps dropped off with time as the climate worsened or political
> changes occurred?

     There are many theories why Greenland failed.  The longest standing
theory suggests that the weather turned bad.  The truth is more complex.
Hansen, the archeologist who studied the bones in the initial dig, had
certain supremist or maybe racist views.  He believed there was a
degeneration in the 'Viking stock', as it were.  A scientist in the
forties (during WWII, no less!) disproved Hansen's results.  The main
Greenland exports, skins, hides, skin rope (sealskin, I think) walrus
ivory and falcons became less important to Europe in the later Middle
Ages.  The Church required isolation from the Inuit, so the Norsemen
could not learn survival tactics--because the Inuit relied on seals and
other food from the sea, and their way of life was not upset by colder
temps, they flourished, so that  when the Norweigian missionary Hans
Egede traveled to Greenland in the early eighteenth century to visit (he
thought) co-religionists, he discovered he had evangelization of the
Inuit to do.

   Elizabeth



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