A NEW MEDIEVAL WARM PERIOD CONUNDRUM:
FORGET CLIMATE CHANGE --
DID THE NORSE ABANDONED GREENLAND AFTER
HUNTING OUT THE MAINSTAY OF THEIR FOREIGN TRADE?
Open Access
Ancient DNA reveals the chronology of walrus ivory
trade from Norse Greenland
Bastiaan Star, James H. Barrett, Agata T. Gondek, Sanne Boessenkool
"Less can be said about the end of the Greenland colony based on the evidence here. Is the absence of sampled (or known) European finds of walrus rostrums from the fifteenth century evidence for the end of trade? Is the single, sixteenth-century western clade specimen an example of the last, isolated, Greenland export, or is it a redeposition of an earlier find? These are classic challenges of archaeological interpretation. Nonetheless, it is a conspicuous observation that Greenland may have been the exclusive supplier of walrus ivory to Europe between the 1120s and the fourteenth century. The demise of Norse Greenland would therefore have reduced European supplies of this raw material, whereas a decline in demand would have undermined Greenland's social and economic organization. Whatever other factors may have been influential—from the Little Ice Age [97–100], to gradual out-migration [99,100], to the impact of the Black Death (1346–1353) on European markets [2,96]—the cessation of trade in walrus ivory must have been significant for the end of Greenland's Eastern and Western settlements. Greenland is often discussed as a general example of both human resilience and vulnerability in the face of environmental and economic change [98,101–104]. Thus, the implications of this study—that the influence of ecological globalization for the Greenlandic Norse started small yet became paramount—extend far beyond medieval Europe."
