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Ustwo · 05-11-2008, 04:11 PM

Rewriting the archeologic record makes me a sadddddd panda.
http://www.archaeology.org/online/features/greenland/

Quote:

The disappearance of the Greenlanders has intrigued students of history for centuries. One old source held that Skraelings, or Inuit, who had crossed over from Ellesmere Island in the far north around A.D. 1000, migrated down the west coast and overran the settlement. Ivar Bardarson, steward of the Church's property in Greenland, and a member of a sister settlement 300 miles to the southeast, was said to have gathered a force and sailed northwest to drive the interlopers out, but "when they came hither, behold they found no man, neither Christian nor heathen, naught but some wild cattle and sheep, and they killed as many of the wild cattle and sheep as they could carry and with them returned to their houses." The death of the Western Settlement portended the demise of the larger eastern one a century later.

Of the first 24 boatloads of land-hungry settlers who set out from Iceland in the summer of 986 to colonize new territory explored several years earlier by the vagabond and outlaw, Erik the Red, only 14 made it, the others having been forced back to port or lost at sea. Yet more brave souls, drawn by the promise of a better life for themselves, soon followed. Under the leadership of the red-faced, red-bearded Erik (who had given the island its attractive name, the better to lure settlers there), the colonists developed a little Europe of their own just a few hundred miles from North America, a full 500 years before Columbus set foot on the continent. They established dairy and sheep farms throughout the unglaciated areas of the south and built churches, a monastery, a nunnery, and a cathedral boasting an imported bronze bell and greenish tinted glass windows.

The Greenlanders prospered. From the number of farms in both colonies, whose 400 or so stone ruins still dot the landscape, archaeologists guess that the population may have risen to a peak of about 5,000. Trading with Norway, under whose rule they eventually came, the Greenlanders exchanged live falcons, polar bear skins, narwahl tusks, and walrus ivory and hides for timber, iron, tools, and other essentials, as well luxuries such as raisins, nuts, and wine.

Excavations of Erik's farm, Brattahlid ("Steep Slope"), in 1932 by Danish archaeologists (Greenland, which became Danish in 1814, is today a self-governing possession of Denmark), revealed the remains of a church, originally surrounded by a turf wall to keep farm animals out, and a great hall where settlers cooked in fire pits, ate their meals, recited sagas, and played board games. Behind the church they found ruins of a cow barn, with partitions between the stalls still in place, one of them the shoulder blade of a whale--a sign of Viking practicality in a treeless land where wood was always in short supply.

....

Although the presence of the Church had originally uplifted the Greenlanders, it now became their burden. By the middle of the fourteenth century, it owned two-thirds of the island's finest pastures, and tithes remained as onerous as ever, some of the proceeds going to the support of the Crusades half way around the world and even to fight heretics in Italy. Church authorities, however, found it increasingly difficult to get bishops to come to the distant island. Several clerics took the title, but never actually went there, preferring to bestow their blessings from afar.

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Greenland's climate began to change as well; the summers grew shorter and progressively cooler, limiting the time cattle could be kept outdoors and increasing the need for winter fodder. During the worst years, when rains would have been heaviest, the hay crop would barely have been adequate to see the penned animals through the coldest days. Over the decades the drop in temperature seems to have had an effect on the design of the Greenlanders' houses. Originally conceived as single-roomed structures, like the great hall at Brattahlid, they were divided into smaller spaces for warmth, and then into warrens of interconnected chambers, with the cows kept close by so the owners might benefit from the animals' body heat.
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hey ignored the toggle harpoon, which would have allowed them to catch seals through holes in the ice in winter when food was scarce, and they seem not even to have bothered with fishhooks, which they could have fashioned easily from bone, as did the Inuit. Instead, the Norsemen remained wedded to their farms and to the raising of sheep, goats, and cattle in the face of ever worsening conditions that must have made maintaining their herds next to impossible.
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Whoever killed the animals was used to living in squalid conditions. The bone-littered earthen floors had been spread with an insulating layer of twigs that attracted mice and a variety of insect pests. Study of the farms' ancient insect fauna revealed the remains of flies. Brought inadvertently from Europe, the flies were dependent for their survival on the warm environment of the Norse houses and on the less than sanitary state of the interiors. Radiocarbon dating of their remains revealed that they died out suddenly when these conditions ceased to prevail around 1350, presumably when the structures were no longer inhabited. Some of the rooms had been used as latrines, possibly out of habit or because the occupants were reluctant to venture out into the searing cold. An ice core drilled from the island's massive icecap between 1992 and 1993 shows a decided cooling off in the Western Settlement during the mid-fourteenth century.

Please, this is all documented from various sources, there is no questioning, no one lived on a ice shelf or on the perma frost. At least be creative and claim it was 'local conditions' and not a global cooling at the time instead of trying to change known history.