Could the Greenlandic Norse resist or prevent Thule expansion into Greenland?

Was Thule expansion into Greenland inevitable

  • No

    Votes: 24 50.0%
  • yes

    Votes: 24 50.0%

  • Total voters
    48
The main issue was that Greenland was nothing but a really on-the-edge trading colony, where occasionally Vinandic goods would make it through. Nothing really more. Greenland is a tough place to live.
 

Brunaburh

Gone Fishin'
Do you have any evidence to support your position? And do you have any evidence that Norse in Iceland, Norway, and Sweden had different patterns of using fish bones as fertilizer?

The midden thing is puzzling, but to suggest they used no fish at all is a massive, massive claim. We know of no other coastal society or European society that practiced fish avoidance, and they were living in much less extreme conditions.
 
The midden thing is puzzling, but to suggest they used no fish at all is a massive, massive claim. We know of no other coastal society or European society that practiced fish avoidance, and they were living in much less extreme conditions.
Fish seemed to have been part of their diet in the later stages of the colony according to Archäologietechnik. ( or was it only marine animals like seals ?)
 
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3309771/
Norse Greenland has been seen as a classic case of maladaptation by an inflexible temperate zone society extending into the arctic and collapse driven by climate change. This paper, however, recognizes the successful arctic adaptation achieved in Norse Greenland and argues that, although climate change had impacts, the end of Norse settlement can only be truly understood as a complex socioenvironmental system that includes local and interregional interactions operating at different geographic and temporal scales and recognizes the cultural limits to adaptation of traditional ecological knowledge. This paper is not focused on a single discovery and its implications, an approach that can encourage monocausal and environmentally deterministic emphasis to explanation, but it is the product of sustained international interdisciplinary investigations in Greenland and the rest of the North Atlantic. It is based on data acquisitions, reinterpretation of established knowledge, and a somewhat different philosophical approach to the question of collapse. We argue that the Norse Greenlanders created a flexible and successful subsistence system that responded effectively to major environmental challenges but probably fell victim to a combination of conjunctures of large-scale historic processes and vulnerabilities created by their successful prior response to climate change. Their failure was an inability to anticipate an unknowable future, an inability to broaden their traditional ecological knowledge base, and a case of being too specialized, too small, and too isolated to be able to capitalize on and compete in the new protoworld system extending into the North Atlantic in the early 15th century.
Although the term collapse has been widely used when referring to marked changes in social organization or cultural complexity, what is in reality meant is better captured by decline, a prolonged, decades- to centuries-scale process, which may differentially affect portions of societies or involve settlement reorganization rather than biological extinction. It is rare for a human society to collapse to the point of extinction (1). Many investigators of past human ecodynamics, thus, favor the idea of transformation over collapse and work to differentiate cases showing high human costs from cases of soft landings (2). In the few well-documented cases of painful transformation, where the end is absolute with no direct continuity with future settlement, there is a special need to better understand the factors leading to such changes, implied limitations to adaptation, and failed sustainability. In the case of the Norse, examples of profound change in Greenland can be considered alongside lesser changes elsewhere in the North Atlantic, where a range of Norse societies with both similarities and contrasts can be assessed and differences occurred in terms of geographical setting, pace of environmental change, use of ecological knowledge, social transformation, and choices about sustainable practice, trade, intensification, infrastructure, mobility, and social organization (3).
 
I know people don't like Jared Diamond, but he does document his work, and the people who don't like his work generally don't document. I have not seen a rebuttal of his work.

In any case, there are vast amounts of fish around Greenland. And vast amounts of cod and other fish farther south. If the Norse obtain the extra food, then expansion becomes easier. As the population increases from 5K to 10K to 20K or beyond, we have what is needed to expand. And what is needed to dominate the local area.
Jared Diamond presents a interesting case in "Guns, Germs and Steel and i enjoyed reading the book. Still, the idea that the Greenlandic Norse did not eat fish seems absurd to me.
 
Jared Diamond presents a interesting case in "Guns, Germs and Steel and i enjoyed reading the book. Still, the idea that the Greenlandic Norse did not eat fish seems absurd to me.

Agreed. The Greenlandic Norse kept on going to Vinland and Markland for timber over the centuries. Why would they need timber if they weren't fishing? It seems the timber was so they could keep building boats, given the state of Greenland's forests. Why would seals or whales be the only thing they were fishing for? There's no logical reason why the Greenlandic Norse would not eat fish as much as any other Scandinavian-derived ethnic group. Think of Catholic doctrine, where fish is the only meat allowed to be eaten on Friday.
 
Why would they need timber if they weren't fishing?
They used wooden boats to travel. Boats must have been bery important in Norse Greenlandic society, as that society was sparsely populated and seperated by bodies of water.
norse_settlement_of_greenland.png

THE THREE NORSE SETTLEMENTS IN GREENLAND Østerbygen: Eastern settlement, Mellembygden: Middle settlement, Vesterbygden: Western settlement. Each dot represents a Each dot represents a Norse site, each of which holds between one and 60 individual ruins.
http://icelandmag.is/article/what-h...w-research-shows-cooling-weather-not-a-factor (Source for photo of Greenlandic settlements)

They used boats to hunt for seals and whales too.
Why would seals or whales be the only thing they were fishing for? There's no logical reason why the Greenlandic Norse would not eat fish as much as any other Scandinavian-derived ethnic group.
Agreed
Think of Catholic doctrine, where fish is the only meat allowed to be eaten on Friday.
Good point. On the other hand do we know how "catholic" the Greenlandic Norse were? Did the Greenlandic Norse follow this rule, or try too?
 
I know people don't like Jared Diamond, but he does document his work, and the people who don't like his work generally don't document. I have not seen a rebuttal of his work.

In any case, there are vast amounts of fish around Greenland. And vast amounts of cod and other fish farther south. If the Norse obtain the extra food, then expansion becomes easier. As the population increases from 5K to 10K to 20K or beyond, we have what is needed to expand. And what is needed to dominate the local area.

Well, this is not my impression of the man's writings. I have generally found that he throws out statements without support than on examination turns out not to be factual. He seems to do it to support some very interesting reasoning chains, but he lacks the background in the field he is writing about to support his argument. He is an ornithologis, not an archaeologist.

Now, it is a pattern among Norse societies that they are extremely dependent on fishing. The women pass on recipes on how to cook the best fish, the children play at fishing. And people who are starving will eat their own children in desperation. A Greenlander who married an Icelandic woman isn't going to starve to death surrounded by the food his wife grew up eating. Thats not how humans are wired. (Not to mention that Norse adherence to codes were generally trumped by pragmatism anyway).

On of the reasons actual archaeologists don't think much of Diamond, in my impression, is that he lacks the field background to know things like that you rarely find fish bones in Norse middens. They are entirely absen from middens in Nothern Norway for example (Seaver, I think).

My mother told me that during the German occupation her mother went back to grinding fish bones to flour for them when food was short. It was apparently perfectly common into the early 1900s in Northern Norway.
 
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Easily. We have good evidence the Norse in Greenland did not fish. If they keep fishing like normal Norse, then the population is multiples of OTL population. This extra food and people allows for likely expansion on to the North American mainland or islands.

Actually, they did fish, and quite a bit. This myth comes about because fish bones don't preserve well in the middens. But there's plenty of mortars and pestles which were used to grind up dried fish meal.

The vulnerability of Greenland Norse fishing, however, was in their boats. Greenland had no wood - any wood came from Iceland, itself pretty short, Europe, or Labrador. As Greenland became isolated, the fishing boats became invaluable, and more important, irreplaceable. And a declining depreciating property.
 
I really find it ludicrous that the Greenland Norse did not eat fish. Especially considering that the Norse were a seafaring people with a very strong maritime package. Plus,as others have said,fish bones would've been used for fertilizer. Now,would the Norse have resisted the Thule if they were at full strength? Probably so,maybe a good portion would've assimilated as some Norse have done so. Personally,I'd think that a strong,surviving Greenland Norse would'v meant surviving Vinland settlements.
 
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