Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2002, Page 103

Enduring Impacts: Viking Age Settlement in Iceland and Greenland
we should be careful not to submerge
these distinctions through the use of anal-
ogy with later and better documented
periods.
We should also be aware of later
medieval differences between the devel-
opment of Iceland and Greenland. While
there are clear similarities in the econo-
my and society of later medieval Iceland
and Greenland, there are again also sig-
nificant differences. Icelandic animal
bone assemblages become increasingly
dominated by fish bones from the 14th
century onwards, while the Greenlandic
bone assemblages remain dominated by
seals and caribou. No Greenlandic bish-
op was ever a native Greenlander, while
native-born Icelanders frequently held
episcopal offices in Iceland from the 11 th
century onwards. The Icelandic aristoc-
racy forged strong links with English and
continental merchants in the 15th century
at the same time as the Greenlandic
colony became more and more isolated.
While some direct analogies between
the prehistoric settlement period and the
historic period that followed and between
Iceland and Greenland are clearly possi-
ble and profitable, caution and clear
labeling of assumptions is also clearly in
order. While we will continue the tradi-
tion of direct comparison between
Greenland and Iceland, we would like to
emphasize the need for more formal con-
sideration of the sequence of events and
decisions that placed these two related
colonies on what was to prove very dif-
ferent developmental trajectories.
Importance of Early Settlement
The decisions made by the first genera-
tions of settlers were of critical impor-
tance for later developments in both
islands (Amorosi et al. 1997, McGovem
et al. 1988, Smith 1995, Keller 1991).
First settlers in Iceland (traditionally
arriving ca. AD 870) and Greenland (tra-
ditionally ca. AD 985) apparently had lit-
tle contact with any prior Celtic or Paleo-
eskimo inhabitants, and thus based their
initial settlement and subsistence deci-
sions entirely upon the pool of options
and experience they imported from
Europe along with their domestic ani-
mals and plants (and a host of uninten-
tionally imported mice, insects, and wild
plant species - Sadler 1991). The conver-
sion of shrub forests into grassy pastures
and hayfields was thus an ecological
experiment performed without long term
knowledge of local conditions, and cer-
tainly condtioned by expectations formed
in the critically different environments of
Norway and the British Isles. Limited
knowledge of local soils, plants, climatic
variability and possible human and
supematural threats was for a time com-
bined with broadly unconstrained oppor-
tunities to name, catagorize, claim and
exploit a culturally blank landscape and
seascape. The choices of the landnám (lit.
“land taking”) generation thus had reso-
nance for good or ill throughout all the
subsequent history of political, econom-
ic, and environmental interactions in both
islands. Over the succeeding 1100 years,
these interactions proved intense and
often disastrous. The Greenland colony
became entirely extinct by the mid 15th
century (Arneborg 1996), while the
Icelandic society became economically
and socially stagnant and perilously vul-
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