Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2002, Page 102

Orri Vésteinsson, Thomas H. McGovern, Christian Keller
body of charters and estate records from
the 14th century onwards. The narrative
sources allow for a general description of
economic and environmental conditions
in the country in the 12th and 13th cen-
turies whereas the estate records and
charters make a detailed analysis of land
use, property divisions and ownership
pattems possible by the early 1300s.
These late medieval data can also be sup-
plemented with extremely detailed
human and livestock census data from
the 18th century.
In contrast hardly any documentary
evidence survives from the Norse colony
in Greenland. What little there is was
preserved in Iceland, Denmark or
Norway and only gives a skeletal outline
of the colony’s relation with its neighbors
and the main events in its political histo-
ry, as well as some morsels on place
names and church organization (Ólafur
Halldórsson 1978). The archaeology of
Greenland is however both rich and com-
paratively well known. The Western set-
tlement, which was the more northerly of
the two main settlement clusters of the
Greenlandic colony, was abandoned in
the mid-14th century and its southern
neighbor, the Eastern settlement, had
become deserted a century later. These
events have left a unique archaeological
record which has only been minimally
damaged by subsequent Inuit settlements
and post-1700 Danish colonization. In
Greenland there have thus been pre-
served the remains of a complete late-
medieval landscape with possibilities for
comprehensive investigations into a large
number of aspects of environmental
interactions, economy and social struc-
ture.
Since Greenland was settled directly
from Iceland, and since both colonies
shared a common language and were
integrated into the same Norwegian
realm after AD 1264, possibilities for
nearly direct historical analogy are
apparently considerable. There is a long
tradition of using Icelandic historical and
ethnographic data to shed light on the
archaeology of Norse Greenland (Bruun
1918, McGovem 1992a), as well as the
Viking age period in general, often in a
somewhat uncritical and confusing fash-
ion. If we are to avoid the pitfalls of an
a-historical and circular approach to
complex historical and environmental
interactions, we should be clear about the
temporal boundaries of our different data
sets, and about the degree of detail and
resolution we can reasonably expect
from them. For most of the westem
North Atlantic, the whole of the Viking
period (ca. AD 750-1100) was almost
entirely prehistoric in terms of genuinely
contemporary written sources. Direct
evidence for the period of initial settle-
ment is in fact provided only by archae-
ology and paleo-environmental investi-
gation. This type of evidence is growing
rapidly, but remains limited. This direct
contemporary evidence at present indi-
cates strong continuities between 9th-
lOth century patterns and the later
medieval and early modem periods, but
also indicates a growing number of dis-
continuites in pattems of climate and
vegetation, economic strategy and politi-
cal structure. The prehistoric settlement
phase in both islands had a different char-
acter from the later historic phases, and
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