The Vikings (45 page)

The buildings that were raised on the site from this time onwards were unique to Greenland, with all the household functions gathered under the one roof. It seems to have sprouted rooms, with new ones being added on as required over the course of time, at right-angles to the main orientation of the house. A total of sixty-three separate rooms have been identified, the results of eight distinct phases of building activity, though only a fraction of them would have existed at any one time. One that contained a fireplace or oven, with three openings to regulate the draught, was identified by the archaeologists as a kitchen. In another, numerous textile fragments, spindle whorls and warp weights, and part of an upright loom suggested that weaving was done there, and a living room was identified from finds associated with eating and housework. Rooms that were abandoned were turned into stabling for the livestock. Roofing was a patchwork of branches, turfs and loose joists held up by wooden posts standing on flat stones, with each room having its own individual covering. Turf, or a combination of turf and stone, was used for the walls, sometimes with an insulating fill of rubble. Fireplaces were found in many of the rooms, box-shaped structures of flat stone usually built up against a wall next to a door-opening, their bases lined with smaller stones for ease of cleaning. The number of these, by contrast with the single, rectangular, centrally positioned long-fire familiar from excavated Icelandic houses, reflects the continuing battle against the cold. Wood and scrub from the surrounding countryside were important sources of fuel. As these ran low, dried dung was probably used, as well as turf and the blubber of whales, seals and walruses. Rooms were kept small and the ceilings just a fraction above head-height. The warmth from the animals stabled in the surrounding rooms would have been a valuable and much-appreciated source of heat. At some points boards were laid down to make it easier to get about the house, and as leftover food was simply thrown on to the floor archaeologists found plentiful evidence of a thriving world of mice and microfauna below the ripe macroworld of the humans. From personal experience, too, they learnt of the eye-watering smell of ammonia that must have greeted the inhabitants each morning as the sun thawed the upper layer of the permafrost. Some 80 per cent of the heat from an open fireplace literally goes up in smoke, and at times of extreme cold the families must have conditioned themselves to make do with minimal smoke-hole ventilation. Living with these smells and the other discomforts on a daily basis, they would soon have ceased to notice them. Although other farms excavated in the vicinity had bath-houses, no trace of one was found here. One of the earliest of the Eastern Settlement houses, excavated near the modern town of Narsaq, in southern Greenland, actually had its own indoor water-supply and stone-covered sewage system that worked by channelling water seeping down from fields above the house into specially constructed ditches.
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The walls of these dwellings have long since vanished, and for all we know there may have been many openings in them to admit light and let out smoke in the winter. But under any circumstances, in the dead of winter, with only about five hours of daylight, houses must have been dark inside. Fireplaces would have been an important light-source, and small carved soapstone lamps that consumed blubber appear to have been used. But the puzzle of how work was done indoors in such conditions, including intricate handiwork like weaving, remains. Poor and failing eyesight must have been at least as common in Viking times as it is today, and it is possible that in former times the dexterity and sensitivity of the hand were greater than the eye and compensated adequately for the disadvantages of darkness or impaired sight.

Despite living lives that seem hardly to distinguish them from animals, the generations who farmed at Ameralik were distinctly and even heroically human. Locks and keys were found, implying a structure of authority in which certain people controlled access to certain things. They also suggest chests that may have been used for seating. No purpose-built chairs were found, but the vertebrae of whale were, and these may well have been used as stools. The most common solution to tired legs, for most people, however, was not chairs but the squatting position. Trousers preserved in Danish and German bogs at Thorsbjerg, Damendorf, Marx-Etzel and Daetgen show a distinctive pattern of strengthened seat construction which supports the idea that squatting was the position of choice, not only for professional craftsmen but for most everyday household and farm work. Narrow-legged and wide across the buttocks, they were without the central seam of modern trousers which would have split under the strain of prolonged squatting, and are a fine example of the way in which Viking Age clothing was purpose-made rather than merely primitive.
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Soapstone, horn, reindeer antler, bone and wood were carved to make household items, like the shaped wooden case for sheep-shears found at neighbouring Sandnes,
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and the high-quality woollen clothing spun by the settlers for their own use also found an export market,
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as did the spiral tusks of the narwhal, which were traded in the south as the horns of unicorns. Finds of dice and gaming pieces show that in their spare time the home entertainments of these Greenlanders linked them culturally with fellow-Scandinavians as far away as the island of Gotland. There are rare signs of childhood as a separate state too, in the form of tiny, scaled-down copies of soapstone vessels, wooden knives, ships and shoe-lasts, and perhaps it was a child who cut the crude image of a four-legged creature found on a piece of wood. Pieces of wood with names incised in runes tell us that Thor was the name of one member of the community, Bardr of another. A girl called Björk is immortalized in rare knot-runes carved on the lid of a wooden box, along with a dragon’s head and a symmetrically curling plant. Björk may have lived on a neighbouring farm at Austmannadal, where other finds carry her mark. Joel Berglund, one of the archaeologists in charge of the excavation, tells us the box was never finished and wonders whether the lid may be all that remains of a failed love-affair.

 

Life ceased to be sustainable on ‘the farm beneath the sand’ sometime in the fourteenth century. The Medieval Warm Period was coming to an end, to be succeeded by a period of sharply falling temperatures that climatologists refer to as the ‘Little Ice Age’. As the temperatures fell, the ice sheet advanced and the meadows and wetland around the farm flooded, becoming a heavily sedimented lake that could be used by neither man nor beast. With grazing no longer possible and ready access to fresh water gone, a day came when the last occupants of the farm had to face the inevitable and pack up and leave. The skeleton of a goat found beneath a collapsed wall suggests that the animals were abandoned. Ice presently made access to the south and south-west coast of Greenland difficult for ships from Iceland and Norway, and as these vital lines of contact began to fracture the colonies suffered. The Western Settlement was the more exposed of the two in regard to the climate change; it was also the first natural target for the nomadic Thule-culture Eskimos of the north as the cold drove them southward down the coastline. Rumour reached the inhabitants of the Eastern Settlement that the sister colony had been attacked and that it was occupied by Eskimos, and in about 1350 a small force under a Norwegian named Ivar Bardarson sailed up the coast to investigate the situation. When he reached the Western Settlement he found no sign of either colonists or invaders, and the cattle, goats, sheep and horses living wild. Thirty years later, in 1379, the
Icelandic Annals
noted an attack on the Eastern Settlement by Eskimos, whom the Scandinavians called ‘Skrellings’: ‘The Skrellings attacked the Greenlanders, killed eighteen of them, and carried off two boys, whom they made slaves.’
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This notice may have been the inspiration for a papal letter of 1448, attributed to Nicholas V but of questionable authenticity, which refers to incidents ‘about thirty years ago when, God permitting it, a barbarous and pagan fleet from neighbouring shores invaded the island’. Having destroyed the settlement, they ‘led captive to their shores the unfortunate inhabitants of both sexes, and more particularly those who seemed best able to bear the hardships of servitude and tyranny’. According to the letter, many of these managed to escape and make their way back to the colony, which they tried to rebuild. The papal letter, addressed to two Icelandic bishops, requested that the bishops ascertain whether the stories were true and, if so, to provide pastoral care for them. A second papal letter, written by Alexander VI in about 1495, also expressed concern about the spiritual life of the Greenlanders and noted in passing that ‘no vessel has touched there during the past eighty years’. The pope referred to the rumours that, during that time, ‘many who were formerly Catholics have forgotten the faith of their baptism, and that no memory of the Christian religion is found, except a corporal, which is shown to the people once a year’.
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There is no record of either letter resulting in a journey to Greenland. In 1585 an Englishman, John Davis, reached the west coast of Greenland but found no Europeans there. The
Gottskalk’s Annals
, Icelandic annals kept by the priest Gottskalk Jónsson in the sixteenth century, are believed to have been based on a now lost set of annals up to the year 1394, after which its entries became Gottskalk’s own formulations based on diplomas and oral memories.
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To these later years of the annals belongs an entry recording that the colonists ‘
ad Americae populos se converterunt
’. Over the years this statement has excited dramatic speculations and theories involving a full-scale emigration of the remaining colonists to North America where, willingly or otherwise, they became absorbed by North American Indian tribes. But
Americae
is an obvious anachronism, and Gottskalk more likely intended to convey only that, under pressure, the settlers finally abandoned their religion and their pretensions to European civilization and reverted to Heathendom, becoming like the peoples of America, by which term he meant the Inuit. In the early years of the last century Vilhjalmur Stefansson, the Icelandic explorer and anthropologist, advanced a theory, on the basis of personal observation of the Cooper Inuit of Cambridge Bay in Nunavut, that interbreeding had taken place between the Inuit and the Norse. However, DNA testing on saliva samples from 350 Inuit from Greenland and the Cambridge Bay area, carried out in 2002 by Gisli Palsson and Agnar Helgason of the University of Iceland, failed to reveal anything which might have supported the theory.
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The archaeological evidence bearing on contacts of any kind between the Norse settlers and the Eskimos is sparse and hard to interpret. Norse materials have been found at Inuit sites throughout Greenland, but whether the material arrived there as a result of wars, plundering, trading or even looting from a Greenland ship crushed in the ice is impossible to say. In the far north-west of the island, sites that were occupied in the twelfth or thirteenth centuries have turned up a gaming piece, a fragment of chain mail, a piece of woollen cloth and the leg of a metal cooking pot, as well as the inevitable comb. Another site on the east side of Ellesmere Island yielded a similar clutch of material finds, while the recent discovery of a hinged bronze bar from a folding balance, at a site on the island’s western side, is similar to finds made in the footsteps of traders across the Viking Age world, and a hint that relations between the two cultures were not necessarily always fraught.
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In its way, the discovery of this sophisticated piece of technology is as evocative and thought-provoking as that of the wooden bearing-dial, found in 1948 at Uunartoq fjord, near the Eastern Settlement, during the excavation of a Benedictine convent which turned out to have been built on the site of a house from the settlement period.
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Another enigmatic find is that of a small figure, carved in walrus ivory in a style typical of Thule Inuit art of the time and found at a thirteenth-century site on southern Baffin Island, on the North American side of the Davis Strait. The figure wears a tunic of unmistakably European design, and the incision of what looks like a cross on the chest suggests an attempt to depict a priest or bishop. Another possibility is that it represents a woman in her work-clothes; European men and women of the period wore very similar clothing, making any more definite identification of the figure problematic.
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In 1858 the Danish geographer Hinrich Rink collected a number of Inuit folk-tales and beliefs concerning the Norse colonists from Danish missionaries who had been to Greenland and found Inuit living among the abandoned farmsteads. One of the most substantial describes the motiveless killing of two Greenlanders by an Eskimo at Kakortok, or Julianehåb, in the south-west of the island. The murders ignite the chain of revenge and counter-revenge familiar from saga literature, and the story ends with the killing of Ungortok, the chief of the
kavdlunakker
, as the Eskimos called the settlers.
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Ungortok may be an Inuit approximation of the Norse name ‘Ingvar’. Another of the tales collected by Rink reads like a version of the slaving raid, referred to in Pope Nicholas V’s letter. It describes how large ships of unknown provenance appeared suddenly in the Greenland fjords. The nomadic Inuit were able to hide from them, not so the Norse in their fjordside farmsteads. The raids may be associated with the explorations of the Greenland coast known to have been carried out by a Portuguese explorer and slaver named Joao Fernandes in about 1500. Fernandes had business connections with Bristol, and Bristol had respectable trading links with Iceland in the early and middle years of the fifteenth century. However, English pirates and slavers from Hull and Bristol are known to have raided in Iceland in the first half of the fifteenth century, and some unrecorded pirate fleet may well have been active in Greenland and made its contribution in this way to the disappearance of this Scandinavian foothold in the Arctic.