Bogucki P., Crabtree P. Ancient Europe 8000 B.C.-A.D. 1000: Encyclopedia of the Barbarian World. Volume 2

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example of an expanded dugout boat with one

added plank on each side is the Vaaler Moor boat

from northwestern Germany.

Use of replica craft and desk-based studies have

shown that these often humble boats had a key role

in developing the early medieval economy in lands

with poor roads. They must have been used for ex-

pected purposes, such as ferrying, local travel of

small numbers of people, ﬁshing, fowling, and

hunting, but many also were capable of carrying the

equivalent of cart or packhorse loads of local pro-

duce or traded goods. For example, the 3.75-meter-

long, Clapton boat, dating to the tenth century

A.D.

and found in London, could carry a crew and as

much as 110 kilograms of cargo.

Larger cargo craft based on dugout hulls ex-

panded by ﬁre, extended by planks, and ﬁtted with

frames also were used in the Low Countries and

around the southern North Sea region. These craft

appear to have been known as “hulcs”; tenth-

century fragments of such a seagoing trading vessel

from the Low Countries were found in London.

The most complete inland version of this type of

vessel can be seen in Utrecht in the Netherlands.

The overlapping planks of the upper hulls were wa-

terproofed in a distinctive manner, with moss held

in place by battens secured with small iron staples

(sintels).

Most large trading, ﬁshing, and war vessels that

were built in early medieval northern Europe, how-

ever, were made in the clinker-planked “keel” style

(“lapstrake”). In this case, a shell of partially over-

lapping planks was fastened to a central beam (also

a “keel”) and end posts to form a hull pointed at

both ends. The planks were split out of large trees

rather than sawn, as in Roman vessels. The use of

clinker planks with light frames certainly also was

employed late in this period for some quite small

boats, such as the 4-meter-long, tenth-century Arby

boat from central Sweden.

In the Slav and Baltic lands to the east of Scan-

dinavia and in England to the west, local styles of

clinker shipbuilding developed both before and

after contact with the Vikings. In both regions the

use of wooden pegs (“treenails”) to fasten the over-

lapping boards commonly is found alongside rather

heavier frame timbers than were used in the Scandi-

navian craft. Perhaps the most thoroughly investi-

Fig. 1. Replica of the Clapton tenth-century Anglo-Saxon

dugout boat being hollowed out by an axe as dictated by the

toolmarks found on the original. COURTESY OF D. M. GOODBURN.

REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

gated non-Scandinavian-built planked vessel of this

period is the Graveney boat, dating to the tenth or

eleventh century, which was a small trading vessel.

This craft was found in northern Kent in southeast-

ern England in 1970 and had a fairly ﬂat, but

rounded bottom with a straight, sloping stern post

and an original length of some 14 to 15 meters.

Fragments of craft built in the same broad style have

been found in London, reused in riverside construc-

tion during the tenth century.

Other traditions of planked vessel construction

will undoubtedly emerge in the coming years with

increasingly systematic archaeological work being

carried out on land, sea, and the intertidal zone.

One of these new ﬁnds being studied in detail is the

Port-Berteau II wreck from the Charente River in

southwestern France. In this vessel the planking was

BOATS AND BOATBUILDING

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431

laid edge to edge, in the manner of carvel-built ships

from later medieval times. The boat may even have

been built frame ﬁrst, rather than with framing

added to a planked shell, as was typical farther

north—even though it initially was dated well be-

fore

A.D. 1000.

See also Trackways and Boats (vol. 1, part 4); Viking

Ships (vol. 2, part 7).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arnold, Bettina. Pirogues monoxyles d’Europe centrale: Con-

struction, typologie, évolution. Vol. 2. Archaeologie

neuchateloise, no. 21. Neuchatel, France: Musée Can-

tonal d’Archeologie, 1996.

———. Pirogues monoxyles d’Europe centrale: Construction,

typologie, évolution. Vol. 1. Archaeologie neuchateloise,

no. 20. Neuchatel, France: Musée Cantonal

d’Archeologie, 1995.

Greenhill, Basil. The Archaeology of the Boat: A New Intro-

ductory Study. London: Adam and Charles Black. 1976.

Litwin, Jerzy, ed. Down the River to the Sea. Proceedings of

the Eighth International Symposium on Boat and Ship

Archaeology, Gdan´sk, 1997. Gdan´sk, Poland: Polish

National Maritime Museum, 2000.

Marsden, P., ed. “A Late-Saxon Logboat from Clapton,

London Borough of Hackney.” International Journal

of Nautical Archaeology 18, no. 2 (1989): 89–111.

McGrail, Seán. Ancient Boats in North-west Europe. Rev. ed.

London: Longman, 1998.

M. GOODBURN

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EARLY MIDDLE AGES/MIGRATION PERIOD

CLOTHING AND TEXTILES

■

Textile and clothing production was an essential do-

mestic industry in preindustrial times. Entire gar-

ments are rarely preserved in the archaeological

record, but fragments of textiles, textile production

tools, written records, and visual representations

allow archaeologists to reconstruct how textiles and

clothing were produced and worn between

A.D. 800

and 1000, that is, the Early Middle Ages in conti-

nental Europe and the Viking Age in Scandinavia.

PRODUCTION

Textile production was primarily a domestic indus-

try in early medieval Europe and Viking Age Scandi-

navia. Archaeological ﬁnds, literary and visual repre-

sentations, and ethnographic analogies to living

cultures all suggest that textiles were produced in

the household by women. In Europe a few profes-

sional centers of production may have existed and

may have exported cloth widely. Cloth was also pro-

fessionally produced in the Middle East, the Near

East, and the eastern Mediterranean during this pe-

riod and was traded with Europe and Scandinavia.

In the latter regions, ﬂax ﬁbers were used to create

linen cloth and wool to create woolen cloth. Cloth-

ing was also made of silk and cotton, but these fab-

rics were imported from other regions, not pro-

duced locally.

In preparation for spinning, wool ﬁbers were

combed with wooden combs possessing long iron

teeth. Combing aligned the ﬁbers and separated the

short ﬁbers from the long. Soft ﬂax ﬁbers were ﬁrst

removed from their tough stem, then combed.

Once the ﬁbers were combed, they were ready to be

spun into yarn. A distaff held the length of loose

combed ﬁbers, and a spindle weighted with a whorl

was used to twist the yarn. The spinner held the dis-

taff in one hand, spinning and dropping the spindle

to pull and twist the ﬁbers downward into yarn. She

or he then gathered the spun yarn into balls or

skeins.

Between

A.D. 800 and 1000, warp-weighted

looms were used to weave fabric throughout most

of Europe and Scandinavia. Warp-weighted looms

were made of two uprights about 2 meters tall that

leaned against a wall or rafter. A crotch at the top

of each upright supported a horizontal beam of vari-

able length. The beam had a series of holes to which

the warp, or lengthwise, strands of yarn were at-

tached. Loom weights made of stone or baked clay

held the warp strands taut. The fabric was woven

top to bottom, with the weaver walking back and

forth, inserting the weft (crosswise strands) through

the warp and beating it upward toward the beam.

The weaver wrapped the woven cloth around the

beam as she or he worked, so that it would be out

of the way.

CLOTHING

Information on early medieval and Viking Age

clothing is available through the archaeological re-

mains of textiles, through written sources, and

through visual representations. Scandinavian ar-

chaeologists have developed a particularly detailed

understanding of Viking Age clothing.

A typical female costume in Viking Age Scandi-

navia consisted of several layers. The ﬁrst layer was

ANCIENT EUROPE

433

a linen shift, smooth or pleated, with long sleeves

and a long skirt. Over this a Viking woman would

have worn a tunic made of imported silk or some

other fabric held in place with a pair of tortoiseshell

brooches. She might have worn a shirt or caftan

over the tunic, fastened with a trefoil brooch, an

equal-armed brooch, or a large round ﬁbula. In cold

weather she would have added a cape or coat closed

in front with a ﬁbula. Finally, her costume would

have included leather booties and perhaps a cap or

other headgear.

A typical male costume in Viking Age Scandina-

via included leggings or wide, knee-length breech-

es. Along with these, a man would have worn a

woolen jacket with overlapping front or a sleeved

coat with bronze buttons, similar to a riding caftan.

To complete the outﬁt, he would have had a leather

belt, boots, and perhaps a hat or cap.

Both men’s and women’s clothing was adorned

with trimmings and ornamentation made from lux-

ury materials, like silk, precious metals, and furs.

Trimmings included woven bands, braid work, and

embroidery.

TEXTILES FROM EARLY MEDIEVAL

EUROPE AND VIKING AGE

SCANDINAVIA

Several European and Scandinavian archaeological

sites are notable for their ﬁnds related to early medi-

eval and Viking Age textiles. Oseberg in Norway

and York in England have yielded evidence related

to textile production, while ﬁnds from Birka in Swe-

den illustrate the richness of clothing between

A.D.

800 and 1000.

The Oseberg burial mound in southeastern

Norway contained the grave of a wealthy woman

buried with a companion in

A.D. 834. Among her

grave furnishings were textile production tools, in-

cluding a set of weaving tablets with an unﬁnished

braid still attached.

York was an early medieval urban center, ﬁrst

for the Anglian kingdom of Northumbria (seventh

7: EARLY MIDDLE AGES/MIGRATION PERIOD

434

ANCIENT EUROPE

and eighth centuries A.D.) and later for the Scandi-

navian-controlled Danelaw (ninth to eleventh cen-

turies

A.D.). Excavations there have produced evi-

dence of textile production, including raw wool and

ﬂax, dye plants, spinning and weaving equipment,

and textile fragments (ﬁg. 1.)

Many textile fragments, both local and import-

ed, have been preserved at the Viking Age site of

Birka (occupied

A.D. 750–970), located on an island

30 kilometers west of Stockholm on the eastern

coast of Sweden. Numerous types of linen and

woolen fabrics have been recovered, varying in their

ﬁber, ﬁber preparation, weave technique, and

threads per inch and in secondary production tech-

niques, such as dyeing. Silk fabrics also have been

recovered at Birka, nearly all of them imported from

Byzantium.

PRESERVATION

Textiles are fragile, organic artifacts that often suffer

from physical and chemical deterioration. Textiles

can be preserved archaeologically if agents of decay

are absent or if agents of preservation are present to

counteract decay.

Agents of decay include water, which acts as a

catalyst for many chemical reactions; oxygen, which

also acts a catalyst; pH levels, which affect various

textile materials differently; bacteria; salts; tempera-

ture; overburden; and organisms. Preserving condi-

tions for archaeological textiles include an absence

of oxygen (often due to a waterlogged environ-

ment); an absence of water (in dry environments);

and the presence of salts and other residues, which

can preserve nearby fabrics by acting as biocides or

by impregnating or replacing adjacent textile ﬁbers.

In wet climates, such as in Europe and Scandi-

navia, textiles are primarily preserved in two envi-

ronments: in waterlogged sites, where the lack of

oxygen prohibits the decay of the ﬁbers by microor-

ganisms; and in close contact with metal objects,

where the decay of the metals preserves the textile

ﬁbers. At York early medieval textiles survived under

waterlogged conditions, while at Birka metallic salts

preserved Viking Age textiles.

See also Emporia (vol. 2, part 7); Jewelry (vol. 2, part 7);

Anglo-Saxon England (vol. 2, part 7); Viking York

(vol. 2, part 7).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cronyn, J. M. The Elements of Archaeological Conservation.

London: Routledge, 1990.

Geijer, Agnes. A History of Textile Art. London: Pasold Re-

search Fund, 1979.

Harte, N. B., and K. G. Ponting, eds. Cloth and Clothing in

Medieval Europe. London: Heinemann Educational,

1983.

Hoffman, Marta. The Warp-Weighted Loom: Studies in the

History and Technology of an Ancient Implement. Oslo,

Norway: Universitetsforlaget, 1964.

Walton, Penelope, and J. P. Wild, eds. Textiles in Northern

Archaeology. NESAT III: Textile Symposium in York,

6–9 May 1987. London: Archetype Publications, 1990.

AE OSTMAN

CLOTHING AND TEXTILES

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435

EARLY MIDDLE AGES/MIGRATION PERIOD

VIKING SETTLEMENTS IN ICELAND AND GREENLAND

■

FOLLOWED BY FEATURE ESSAY ON:

Hofstaðir . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 442

■

Near the close of the eighth century A.D., Nordic pi-

rates, traders, and settlers began the expansion from

their Scandinavian homelands that gave the Viking

Age its name and permanently changed the devel-

opment and history of Europe. In the North Atlan-

tic, Viking Age settlers colonized the islands of the

eastern North Atlantic (Faeroes, Shetland, Orkney,

Hebrides, Man, Ireland) by c.

A.D. 800. Iceland was

traditionally settled c. 874, Greenland c. 985, and

the short-lived Vinland colony survived a few years

around

A.D. 1000 in the Newfoundland–Gulf of St.

Lawrence region. Around

A.D. 1000 a common lan-

guage and culture stretched from Bergen to the St.

Lawrence, and colonists drawn from both Scandina-

via and the British Isles were attempting the danger-

ous business of landnám (land taking, or ﬁrst settle-

ment) over a diverse range of island ecosystems.

In some of these island groups (Ireland, Shet-

land, Orkney, Hebrides, Man) the Nordic voyagers

found well-established Iron Age maritime commu-

nities similar in many ways to their own, with

enough cultural and linguistic overlap to allow

widespread intermarriage and political alliance as

well as feuding and mutual raiding. In other island

groups (Faeroes, Iceland) humanity was either en-

tirely absent or represented by a few (soon depart-

ing) hermetical monks, and the Viking Age settlers

encountered an essentially virgin landscape. In

Greenland and Vinland, contact was with indige-

nous maritime hunter-gatherers rather than agricul-

turalists. The Vinland contact rapidly resulted in

victory for the local population—hostility of the

local Skraeling is the only negative factor reported

about Vinland in the later saga literature, but it was

clearly enough to abort the European landnám of

continental North America for another half millen-

nium. In Greenland, a still poorly understood con-

tact between Norse settlers and Dorset Paleo-

Eskimo hunters resulted in a distribution of Norse

farming settlements along the southwest coast and

Dorset settlements far to the north in the Thule dis-

trict. As they had in Iceland and the Faeroes, in

Greenland the Norse again took over ecosystems

unexploited by large-scale farming and again set up

a new cultural and economic landscape.

After the demise of the Vinland settlement

shortly after

A.D. 1000, Iceland and Greenland were

the westernmost outposts of Scandinavian culture

in the North Atlantic. As Viking Scandinavia be-

came integrated into European Christendom in the

later eleventh century, many new options opened

for would-be chieftains and ambitious younger sons

in Normandy, England, and even Sicily, and the

wind went out of the sails of the Viking Age Atlantic

voyages. Greenland survived for another ﬁve hun-

dred years before becoming extinct. Iceland, by

436

ANCIENT EUROPE

contrast, remains today a very lively modern descen-

dant of the age of settlement.

DOCUMENTARY SOURCES

Prior to the 1970s most scholars of the Viking peri-

od in the North Atlantic were philologists, medieval

archaeologists, and documentary historians, and the

uneven written record for Viking depredations in

Europe and the colorful and diverse saga literature

of Iceland tended to dominate discussion of the pe-

riod (see Adolf Friðriksson, 1994). All of the saga

literature of Iceland postdates the events of the

landnám period in Iceland and Greenland by sever-

al hundred years. The rich documentary sources do

not begin to become contemporary with the events

they describe until the mid-twelfth century, and ac-

counts of earlier times may very well have been

heavily shaped by later political and dynastic agen-

das. Greenland certainly had its own set of sagas, an-

nals, and written historical records, but these were

all lost when the settlements became extinct and

only a few tantalizing fragments remain. The surviv-

ing medieval documentary sources are thus rich and

by no means completely analyzed, but it is unlikely

that more will be discovered and they are thus es-

sentially a closed body of data.

Since the mid-1970s research focus has shifted,

as multiple ﬁeld projects combining archaeology,

paleoecology, and history have been carried out all

across the region, producing new troves of data of

different kinds not wholly dependent upon later

documentary sources. The North Atlantic has be-

come a very active center for ﬁeld and laboratory re-

search, so that every year new ﬁnds are made and

new analyses carried out that change and enrich our

picture of society of the settlement age and the his-

torical ecology of landnám. Rapid expansion of

both radiocarbon dating and the use of tephra (ash)

from Icelandic volcanoes is providing an increasing-

ly detailed chronology for early settlement in both

Greenland and Iceland, and several long-term ﬁeld

projects are concentrating their efforts on early set-

tlement. Thus although archaeology and paleoen-

vironmental studies increasingly are coming to

dominate new research into the essentially prehis-

toric period of ﬁrst landnám, the written accounts

can be reinterpreted in light of fresh evidence to

make a renewed contribution.

Both later documentary references and modern

genetic studies indicate that many of the partici-

pants in each successive westward movement were

drawn from previously settled islands—modern Ice-

landers have a strong British Isles genetic heritage

and saga accounts suggest considerable ethnic di-

versity aboard the landnám vessels. Long open-

water voyages were always dangerous, and of the

twenty-four ships that set out from Iceland to colo-

nize Greenland, only fourteen apparently complet-

ed the journey. First settlers had their pick of the

best land, but in Iceland and Greenland they also

faced a true wilderness without established farms,

ﬁelds, roads, bridges, or local farming expertise.

Domestic animals and human labor would both be

desperately scarce in the early years, and saga ac-

counts mention failed landnám attempts in Iceland.

EVIDENCE FROM EXCAVATIONS

In Iceland, archaeological evidence for early settle-

ment has appeared in many areas, both along the

south coast and in the northern coast and interior.

The recent excavations of a nearly complete ninth-

century longhouse on Aðalstraeði in the center of

modern Reykjavík by Howell Roberts and Mjoll

Snaesdóttir and what may be the tenth-century

farmstead of Erik the Red himself serve to illustrate

the rich evidence for Viking Age settlement in com-

paratively warm southern Iceland. More surprising

has been the discovery of multiple early sites in the

more arctic northern interior around Lake My´vatn

by a long-term project directed by Orri Vésteinsson

and Adolf Friðriksson. These inland high-altitude

sites appear to form part of a whole landscape of set-

tlement involving extensive boundary walls, char-

coal-burning sites, pagan burials, and what has been

identiﬁed (somewhat controversially) as a pagan

temple at Hofstaðir. It would appear that expansion

from the initial settlements along the coast was

rapid and that high inland sites were occupied in the

ﬁrst generation of landnám in Iceland. Barley grow-

ing (for beer as much as bread) was initially prac-

ticed in many areas but was later largely discontin-

ued due to both climate change and soil nutrient

depletion, and most Icelanders depended on milk,

meat, ﬁsh, bird’s eggs, and a few gathered plants for

their basic diet.

A.D. 930 the Icelanders had set up a self-

governing system of local and national things (as-

VIKING SETTLEMENTS IN ICELAND AND GREENLAND

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437

sembly places) intended to regulate competition

among chieftains and adjudicate disputes among

farmers. The assemblies voted to adopt Christianity

as the ofﬁcial religion (although allowing some

pagan practice) in 1000, and Icelandic churchmen

soon began to contest vigorously with secular chief-

tains for power, land, and followers. In the thir-

teenth century competition between great magnate

families led to civil war and the loss of indepen-

dence; in

A.D. 1264 Icelanders submitted to rule

under the king of Norway. After 1250 ﬁshing

played an increasing role in both subsistence econo-

my and overseas trade, and a few ﬁshing towns

began in the eighteenth century. The Icelandic pop-

ulation ﬂuctuated around ﬁfty thousand through-

out most of the Middle Ages and early modern peri-

ods, surviving epidemic disease, volcanic eruption,

climate cooling, and repeated famine to regain po-

litical independence and prosperity based on com-

mercial ﬁshing in the twentieth century.

In Greenland, settlement took place a century

after the Icelandic landnám, and settlers following

Erik colonized two pockets of rich pasture at the

heads of the great fjord systems of the southwest

coast. The settlement was divided into a large east-

ern settlement in the south and the much smaller

western settlement farther north in modern Nuuk

district. Radiocarbon dates from both settlement

areas suggest that, as in Iceland, the landscape ﬁlled

rapidly, with the eastern settlement probably being

settled a generation before the western settlement.

Although Greenland is far larger than Iceland, the

area holding plant communities rich enough to sus-

tain European domestic stock is far smaller, and the

colony seems to have stabilized at a much smaller

population level, with estimates ranging from six

thousand to around three thousand inhabitants.

The Greenlanders were able to set up a chieﬂy soci-

ety with assemblies as in Iceland, and they also

adopted Christianity around

A.D. 1000.

The Greenlandic economy was based partly on

domestic stock, but with considerable supplement

from hunted caribou and seals. Fishing seems to

have played a minor role in Greenland, with walrus

hide and ivory, polar bear and fox skins providing

the key export products. In 1127 the Greenlandic

chieftains traded a live polar bear to the king of Nor-

way to get their own bishop, who appears to have

rapidly taken the best land in the eastern settlement

for his manor. By the fourteenth century, Green-

land boasted a monastery and nunnery as well as

some of the largest stone churches in the North At-

lantic. Archaeological evidence also suggests a

sharply stratiﬁed medieval society, with the bishop’s

manor providing housing for more than one hun-

dred cattle, whereas most farms had room for only

two or three head.

Around

A.D. 1200 the Norse and surviving

Dorset Paleo-Eskimo were contacted by the Thule

Inuit people. Ancestors of the modern Inuit of Can-

ada and Greenland, these newcomers had migrated

from Alaska and employed a highly sophisticated

arctic hunting technology that allowed them to take

baleen whales as well as seals. The dynamics of the

Norse-Thule contact is still not understood, but it

seems to have been a mixture of friendly and hostile

encounters that resulted in a steady migration of the

Thule people into the Norse settlement areas in the

southwest coast. Around

A.D. 1350 the smaller

Norse western settlement became extinct, and by

around 1450 the larger eastern settlement followed

suit. Climate change, Thule contact, and declining

connections to Europe all played a role in this sad

end, but it also appears that settlement decisions

and environmental impacts dating back to the initial

landnám period created serious vulnerabilities in

later Norse Greenland.

FACTORS IN COLONIZATION

Although the perils and opportunities of culture

contact, the struggle to set up households and do-

mestic economies, and the politics of land taking

probably dominated the minds of the ﬁrst settlers,

environmental factors were also at work in the

Norse colonization of the Western North Atlantic.

As Norse settlers moved from the long coast of Nor-

way to Iceland and Greenland they cut diagonally

across the great arm of the Gulf Stream, the North

Atlantic Drift, which brings warm water across the

Atlantic to wash the coast of northwest Europe,

making grain growing possible above the arctic cir-

cle in Norway. As they moved into Iceland and

Greenland, the colonists began to leave the main

channel of the North Atlantic Drift and enter envi-

ronments critically different from their homelands.

The south coast of Iceland is affected by the North

Atlantic drift and is wet and comparatively warm in

winter, but the north coast is low arctic, experienc-

7: EARLY MIDDLE AGES/MIGRATION PERIOD

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ing deep snow and occasional drifting sea ice. West

Greenland is affected by a side stream of the North

Atlantic drift, but is also fundamentally arctic in cli-

mate; for example, it is afﬂicted by summer drift ice.

Thus it was entirely possible for a Norse colonist

to journey hundreds of kilometers southward from

an ancestral home in arctic Troms district to reach

Iceland or west Greenland and still travel to a colder

and more arctic local environment. The environ-

mental differences may have been concealed initially

by climate and biogeography. As Paul Buckland has

pointed out, the ﬂora of the North Atlantic islands

is essentially like that of northwestern Europe, with

the biogeographical break occurring between

Greenland and Canada. Nordic and northern Brit-

ish settlers in Iceland and Greenland would have en-

countered fjords, valleys, and mountains covered

with the same sort of dwarf willow, birch, grasses,

sedges, and ﬂowers so familiar from home. These

plant communities formed the basis for northwest

European Iron Age agriculture, providing grazing

for domestic animals, construction material, fuel for

heating and cooking, charcoal for iron smelting, im-

portant dietary supplements, and folk remedies for

illness and injury. What was less evident to Viking

Age settlers was that these familiar plants were all

much closer to their biological limits in subarctic

Iceland and low-arctic Greenland than they were in

north temperate Britain or boreal northern Norway.

Farming practices sustainable for thousands of

years in the homelands were to prove unsustainably

destructive within a few generations in northern

Iceland and Greenland. The deceptive similarity of

the western North Atlantic islands was probably en-

hanced for the Viking Age settlers by the compara-

tively warm climate of the late ninth and early tenth

centuries. Although climatologists no longer be-

lieve in a centuries-long, uniformly warm “medieval

warm period,” high-resolution proxy climate data

from both ice and deep-sea cores do suggest that

the period of initial landnám was warmer and prob-

ably more stable than the average for the region,

and signiﬁcantly warmer than the colder periods of

the later Middle Ages. In the North Atlantic, a few

degrees difference in annual temperature can have

a massive impact on the viability of imported crops

like barley and on the resilience of local pasture

plant communities in the face of grazing pressure.

The western North Atlantic thus may have

looked deceptively friendly to Norse settlement in

the Viking Age and what was to prove an anoma-

lously warm climate phase contributed to some ini-

tial errors in settlement and subsistence choices. In

Iceland, rapid deforestation followed ﬁrst settle-

ment, and pollen studies suggest that 90 percent of

the dwarf birch and willow forests present at land-

nám were removed in the ﬁrst century of settle-

ment. In some areas, rapid soil erosion took place

soon after, and many settlement-age sites in Iceland

are now located in heavily eroded landscapes. In

Greenland, soils are generally less prone to wind

erosion, but several studies have indicated a parallel

pattern of deforestation and locally signiﬁcant soil

erosion following shortly after landnám. Some-

thing went wrong when the northwest European

Iron Age economy was transplanted to Iceland and

Greenland.

ANIMAL EVIDENCE

Zooarchaeology provides good proxy evidence for

past economy, and a growing number of large well-

excavated animal bone collections from the Viking

Age North Atlantic give an impression of the chang-

ing economy of the landnám period. Domestic ani-

mals imported from Europe clearly were both a cul-

tural and an economic necessity. Farm location in

both Iceland and Greenland was determined by

concentrations of pasture vegetation, and social sta-

tus seems to have been linked to cattle keeping.

There was a relative abundance of domestic animal

bones (cattle, horse, dog, pig and “caprine”—that

is, both sheep and goats) on sites from Norway, Ice-

land, and Greenland. The chieftain’s farm on the

site of A

ker in southern Norway probably represents

a sort of cultural ideal for aspiring farmers, and it is

characterized by a large number of cattle and pig

bones and a relatively small number of sheep and

goat bones. Late-ninth- to early-tenth-century col-

lections from both northern and southern Iceland

show varied success in imitating the Norwegian

model, but all show considerable numbers of cattle

and pigs.

The later tenth-century collections are all from

northern Iceland, and these show a range of differ-

ent strategies employing different mixes of cattle,

pigs, sheep, and goats. By the eleventh and twelfth

centuries these northern Icelandic collections began

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439

to take on the sheep-dominated character of the

later Middle Ages and early modern periods: cattle

bones drop in numbers, and pig and goat bones be-

come extremely rare. This shift in farming strategy

may in fact be a response to the rapid deforestation

and unexpected soil erosion of the ﬁrst centuries of

landnám. It is possible that pigs and goats were

most responsible for the rapid loss of tree cover in

ninth- and tenth-century Iceland and that the loss

of woodlands in turn made the keeping of these spe-

cies uneconomic.

Thus the zooarchaeological record indicates

that by the time Erik the Red and his followers were

contemplating the landnám of Greenland, signiﬁ-

cant economic change had already taken place on

many Icelandic farmsteads. However, the zooar-

chaeological record from early settlement period

phases of Greenlandic sites indicates that the “ideal

farm” of the Nordic homelands still exercised a

strong hold on the ﬁrst settlers. Especially at the

chieftain’s farm at W 51, early layers are rich in cattle

and pig bones, and the overall pattern is more simi-

lar to that of landnám Iceland in the ninth century

than to contemporary eleventh-century Iceland.

Pigs prospered even more poorly in later Greenland

than in Iceland, and the later domestic mammal

samples show few or no pig bones and a general re-

duction in cattle. Imported domestic animals were

only a part of the complete subsistence economy,

and especially in the early days of landnám wild

birds, ﬁsh, and mammals were critical supplements.

The well-established Norwegian chieftain’s

farm at A

ker may have provided a model for domes-

tic stock raising for the early colonists of southern

Iceland at Tjarnargata 4 and Herjolfsdalur, but wild

sea birds (including a few of the now-extinct great

auk) underwrote the initial survival of these early

settlements. The landnám settlers in the greater

Reykjavík area also apparently made use of now-

vanished local walrus colonies, as a few bones of im-

mature walrus have been found at Tjarnargata 4 and

an impressive set of tusks were recently recovered

from the early longhouse at Aðalstraeði nearby. In

northern Iceland, freshwater ﬁsh, preserved marine

ﬁsh, birds, and bird eggs seem to have provided a

major supplement on many sites. In Iceland the

early reliance upon easily depleted bird and walrus

colonies soon shifted toward more extensive use of

marine ﬁsh, especially cod and haddock, laying the

basis for the large-scale commercial ﬁshing of the

later Middle Ages. In Greenland, ﬁsh bones are rare

ﬁnds, but all sites (both early and later) show a mas-

sive amount of seal and some caribou bone. Smaller

sites in Greenland (like W 48) show an increasing

percentage of seal bones through time, a pattern

probably mirrored in the 1999 results of isotopic in-

vestigation of human bones from Greenland by

teams led by Jette Arneborg of the Danish National

Museum showing a steady increase in the amount

of marine foods consumed in the later Middle Ages.

SETTLEMENT STRATEGIES

Advances in zooarchaeology and understanding of

settlement pattern and chronology have prompted

some reexamination of the documentary record,

and especially of retrospective passages in some of

the sagas describing settlement times “long ago.”

An often-cited passage from Egil’s Saga (translated

in The Complete Sagas of Icelanders) describes the

establishment of the settlement of the chieftain

Skallagrim in Borgarfjörður in southeastern Iceland

(emphasis has been added):

Skallagrim was an industrious man. He always kept

many men with him and gathered all the resources

that were available for subsistence, since at ﬁrst

they had little in the way of livestock to support such

a large number of people. Such livestock as there was

grazed free in the woodland all year round. ...

There was no lack of driftwood west of Myrar. He

had a farmstead built on Alftanes and ran another

farm there, and rowed out from it to catch ﬁsh and

cull seals and gather eggs, all of which were there in

great abundance. There was plenty of driftwood to

take back to his farm. Whales beached there, too, in

great numbers, and there was wildlife there for the

taking at this hunting post: the animals were not

used to man and would never ﬂee. He owned a

third farm by the sea on the western part of Myrar

. . . and he planted crops there and named it Akrar

(Fields).... Skallagrim also sent his men upriver

to catch salmon. He put Odd the hermit by Glju-

fura to take care of the salmon ﬁshery there . . .

When Skallagrim’s livestock grew in number, it was

allowed to roam mountain pastures for the whole

summer. Noticing how much better and fatter the

animals were that ranged on the heath, and also

that the sheep which could not be brought down

for winter survived in the mountain valleys, he had

a farmstead built up on the mountain, and ran a

farm there where his sheep were kept.... In this

way, Skallagrim put his livelihood on many footings.

The use of marine mammals, freshwater ﬁsh,

and bird colonies “not used to man,” exploitation

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