37  ‘Clumsy solutions’ and ‘elegant failures’

Lessons on climate change adaptation from the settlement of the North Atlantic islands

Andrew J. Dugmore, Thomas H. McGovern, Richard Streeter, Christian Koch Madsen, Konrad Smiarowski and Christian Keller

Introduction

The ways that we currently approach and solve problems have profound implications for the future, and the current search for elegant solutions to climate change, biodiversity loss, financial crises, and other social-ecological problems may in fact lead to counterintuitive outcomes. Alternatively, we may also embrace “clumsy solutions” which are those that include many different viewpoints when making a decision or establishing policy (Shapiro, 1988). These may be viewed as “fudges” that muddle along through a series of compromises and the uneasy co-existence of incompatible (or inconsistent) goals (Verweij et al., 2006). Clumsy approaches are the antithesis of focused or “elegant” solutions that are based on a single vision of both the problem and the best way to tackle it. Despite their limitations, clumsy approaches can provide enduring solutions for complex problems (Verweij et al., 2006). Perhaps of most importance, however, is the knowledge of how to avoid “elegant failure,” because although the enhancement of human security is a key goal, an overriding need is to avoid making profound mistakes that threaten long-term security.

In this chapter we illustrate the utility of long-term perspectives when assessing human security through an analysis of the contrasting fates of the Norse Settlement in the North Atlantic islands (see Figure 37.1). The Faroe Islands and Iceland are examples of enduring success where the resilience of settlement over century time scales laid the foundations for prosperous modern societies with well-developed human security. In contrast, Norse settlement in Greenland came to an end after some 450 years. This has been seen as an iconic example of failure, of maladaptation by an inflexible northern European farming community and collapse driven by climate change (Diamond, 2005). Here we argue for a quite different interpretation and relevance for human security. We recognize the successful Arctic adaptations of the Greenland Norse through the tenth to fourteenth centuries and in order to assess why an adaptive and successful community could fail we explore the ideas of “clumsy solutions” to complex problems of human security and “elegant failures.”

The examples we explore have the notable advantage that they are “completed experiments” that we can track over century scales to evaluate different outcomes at different times. Reflecting on current global economic problems and the impact they are having on human security, very different conclusions could be drawn about the wisdom of late twentieth-century decisions if analysis stopped in 2006 (while economies were booming) rather than continuing to 2012 (a year of deepening economic problems following the worst global economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s).

Long-term perspectives

The past can offer illuminating case studies of human activities and the consequences of particular choices through the investigation of coupled natural and human systems, human ecodynamic modeling and the study of long-term human impacts (McGovern, 2008). Indeed, a sustainable future may be unobtainable without a well-understood past (Crumley, 1994). Misleading short observational series of data can fatally undermine landscape and resource management strategies essential for human security. For example, unsuccessful managers of the North Atlantic cod fisheries began their data sets with the early twentieth century as a pristine baseline, despite hundreds of years of prior human impact, with disastrous results both for cod and people (Hamilton 2003, 2007; Hamilton et al., 2004; Perdikaris and McGovern, 2008a, b).

Key advantages of long-term perspectives include the multi-generational data that show when people’s choices can establish resilience and promote enduring human security. We can assess whether some measure of sustainability can be achieved in terms of social practice or the natural environment, and we can explore the circumstances under which changes occur. Some choices may create inherent instabilities that may not become apparent for decades or indeed centuries: examples of this include the “over-optimistic pioneer fringe” (where initial settlement choices may be viable in the short term but have no long-term future) and other types of non-sustainable practices (such as excessive grazing, over hunting and practices leading to reduced soil fertility). If we can identify practices that do establish sustainable and resilient dynamic equilibria over longer timescales, it may be possible to evaluate reasons for instability or change, and identify triggers for change that may be due to both human factors (such as governance or economic practices) and natural variation (such as climate and landscape changes).

The past does, however, have to be studied with care, as there are pitfalls that need to be avoided in order to gain the maximum advantage from the long-term perspectives and rich data that are available. Notable issues relate to the changing nature of society and data resolution. There are, for example, fundamental differences between medieval and modern communities in terms of knowledge, beliefs and technology, social organization and economic activities, socially-induced goals and measures of success. Indeed these sorts of contrasts are such that many choices in the past cannot be directly related to those of the present or future, but understanding the processes that develop vulnerability or resilience may have great relevance and utility.

Additional concerns relate to the scale of environmental change; indeed one point of view is that likely future global changes are such that the last two millennia lack any examples of comparable magnitude indeed. Temperature changes within the next century are likely to be without precedent in terms of past civilizations, however, the past does contain many examples of acute social stress and demographic shock that may be most instructive: for example, when plague repeatedly killed 10–40 percent of entire societies (as in the Black Death and the Second Pandemic (Herlihy, 1997)), when economic activities underwent fundamental change (as in the development of bulk commodity trading by merchants (Brotton, 2002), when world views changed (as in the adoption of Christianity in northern Europe (Vésteinsson, 2000a; Carver, 2003) and when migrations led to new culture contacts (as in the period of Viking migration (Fitzhugh and Ward, 2000; Graham-Campbell, 2001; Konstam, 2005) and the spread of the Thule culture (Gulløv, 2004: 283–343)). In the past, the scale of some environmental and social changes at local and regional scales is likely to match scales of future change – but with the crucial difference that future change will be global in its effects. So although the spatial scale future environmental change may be without precedent, the regional and local expression of future social change may not be.

We can usefully consider general themes such as the nature of the decision-making process: whether there is much discussion with many voices heard or little discussion and few voices heard; and whether decision making is local or distant. As shown in Figure 37.2, the location and breadth of the decision-making process will affect the practical “schemata” or the Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) that forms the tertiary interface between the deep reservoirs that provide cultural legitimacy for action and the store of social memory that informs and provides context for social action (Figure 37.2, McIntosh et al., 2000). The development of TEK encompasses an understanding of likely seasonal variability in resources, ranges of expected weather, its consequences on the decadal scale and alternate strategies for hard times and good. TEK will in turn shape decisions about specialization versus generalization, focus versus breadth, the development of resilience and sustainability. While the breadth or restriction of TEK doesn’t map directly onto “clumsy” and “elegant” strategies, they are likely to be closely related; “elegant” solutions are likely to go hand-in-hand with a restricted development of TEK because they are less inclusive of diverse perspectives, have focused approach and single view of the both the problem under consideration and the solution to that problem.

We also need to beware of misinterpretations that may arise from a lack of data, limited data resolution, or stereotyping. Modern studies can generate very rich data, but as we extend time horizons into the past, data richness generally reduces; a simple lack of data on, for example, social organization, economic activity or health may lead to mistaken conclusions as to the importance of climate change on human security. We may have no doubt that large-scale changes have occurred, such as economic recession (late 1200s A.D.), demographic collapse (the ‘Black Death’) or environmental disasters (the coldest decades of the “Little Ice Age”); if we focus at the resolution of individual households the effects of the large-scale changes are often difficult, if not impossible to identify. The challenge is therefore to have case studies that cover sufficiently long time scales to allow long term change, adaptation and sustainability to be considered, and yet which have a sufficient richness and granularity of interdisciplinary data to enable complex ideas to be explored. This can be done in the North Atlantic for the period of the Norse settlement; there are environmental archives of unparallel quality from ice cores (Mayewski and White, 2002) to palaeoecology and zooarchaeology (McGovern et al., 2007); there are exceptional dating controls that include high resolution tephrochronology (Thorarinsson, 1981) and radiocarbon dating used in Bayesian analyses (e.g. Church et al., 2007), a superb historical record (Jones, 1986; Karlsson, 2000; Vésteinsson, 2000a) and increasingly sophisticated landscape-scale archaeological studies (e.g. McGovern et al., 2007). So it is to this arena we will turn our attention.

The case of the North Atlantic: beginnings

The Norse settled across the North Atlantic from their Scandinavian homelands from around 800 A.D., progressing from the British Isles and Ireland across to the Faroes (c. 825 A.D.), Iceland (from c. 870 A.D.) and on to Greenland (c. 985 A.D.) – with short-lived visits to North America around 1000 A.D. (Fitzhugh and Ward, 2000; Ingstad and Ingstad, 2001). They took with them a remarkably flexible and durable settlement package of ideas, tools and domesticated animals that was adapted to local conditions and is clearly recognizable as “Viking settlement.”

After gaining knowledge of a new island, settlement could proceed rapidly with the creation of a flexible subsistence system based on an introduced domesticated livestock of horses, cattle, sheep, goats, pigs and dogs, closely integrated with a system for harvesting wild resources such as additional fodder, wood, birds, eggs, fish from both fresh water and the sea, shellfish, and marine mammals (McGovern et al., 2001). In favored areas cultivation would take place ranging from cereal production in the eastern North Atlantic to barley and small scale (“walled garden”) cabbage and root crop production in Iceland, problematic barley but some flax in Greenland (Videnskab.dk 2012). Greenland (unlike Iceland and the Faroe islands) has indigenous populations of terrestrial grazing mammals including reindeer (caribou) that were hunted by the Norse.

Traveling westwards from Norway is to encounter essentially “more polar” environments, and so, as the Norse established settlements across the North Atlantic, they crossed a series environmental thresholds – such as the limits to forest growth, cereal cultivation, the distribution of seasonally migrating seals and sea ice. Each new island required different adaptations of the “settlement package,” saw the development of different approaches to gathering wild resources, and offered different opportunities for trade and exchange (Keller, 2010). The consequences were varying opportunities and related travel costs depending on the local environment, the type of resource gathering, and, ultimately, differing impacts on the environment, consequences of environmental and social change and different outcomes in terms of community survival. This allows us to explore key themes of human security in times of global change.

Understanding differing outcomes

The Faroe Islands

In a pan-Atlantic context, the Faroe Islands are perhaps most instructive in terms of what has not happened. Norse colonization of the Faroe Islands did not result in a great overall change in the land cover; the islands had few trees before settlement, grazing was maintained, and there has been no large-scale increase in erosion (Mairs, 2007). Although some destruction of lowland soils and peat has occurred, this is relatively limited and because there were so few trees present before settlement, “deforestation” has had little practical consequence (Lawson et al., 2005). Upland areas have been destabilized with the introduction and long-term activities of grazing mammals, but the overall impact of these changes has been limited (Mairs, 2007). The early Faroese diet included a significant proportion of birds and fish (Church et al., 2005), and whale meat gathered in the grind, communal hunts of pods of pilot whales, Globicephala melas (Bloch, 1996). In common with Iceland and Greenland early settlement included the introduction of pigs as livestock. These animals were closely managed, but were later extirpated, presumably when the costs of rearing exceeded the benefits gained from their consumption. Outfield grazing was also closely controlled and subject to regulation (for example, the Sauðabrævið, ‘Sheep letter’ rules of 1298 A.D.); prior to this there was a shieling system to manage summer-time grazing (Mahler, 2007). Key trade items included both fish and wool.

The restricted range of favorable farm sites combined with the lack of abandoned settlements and the presence of Viking and early-medieval deposits within modern villages suggested that there has been long-term settlement continuity in the Faroe Islands and a number of factors have helped to promote this; most importantly the Norse subsistence system that effectively combined farming, the utilization of wild resources, exchange and trade into regional provisioning networks. Farms provided cereals, meat, dairy and textiles, and the wild resources exploited by the community provided much else; birds for meat, eggs and feathers, fish for subsistence and trade, and marine mammals, in particular the pilot whale, for food and a basis for a community cohesion (Dugmore et al., 2007a). Subsistence was governed by rules that aided the management of resources, and these resources were generally found in close proximity. Cereal production is viable in the Faroe Islands and has been maintained despite the significant labor required.

While significant, the impacts of climate change did not cross key thresholds within the Faroe Islands and trade links proved to be robust (Mairs, 2007). Faroese settlement was nucleated into clusters surrounded by home fields and bordered by upland grazing, bird cliffs, and sealing beaches managed communally. This may have indirectly promoted community-based “clumsy” approaches. In Faroese communities contact between people was forced on a daily basis because of the settlement pattern. This contrasts with the islands to the west where medieval settlement was characterized by dispersed homesteads, which dramatically reduced daily interactions. The breadth and utility of the TEK developed by the Norse in the Faroe Islands is also likely to have benefited from the diverse origins of the original settlers who would have come from both the wooded coasts of Norway and the open landscapes of the Northern British Isles. Crucially the environments of the Faroe Islands while offering distinctive and special challenges (such as no indigenous land mammals or significant pre-existing settlement infrastructure) do have fundamental similarities to the homelands of the Nordic settlers and certainly contained long-term residents whose local TEK had been developed over century timescales.

Iceland

The long-term outcomes of Norse settlement in Iceland have proved to be both similar to those of the Faroe Islands, and different from them. Despite ambiguous references and some controversial archaeological finds, definite evidence of a pre-Viking age non-Nordic occupation has proved elusive, and most workers place first settlement in the later ninth century (Vésteinsson, 2000b).² This ninth-century settlement was both substantial and widespread, apparently involved a mixed Nordic/Celtic population whose TEK had been accumulated in the Northern and Western British Isles and Norway (Vésteinsson, 2012). Settlement of inland and upland districts occurred at the same time as coastal occupation, and there is evidence for planned settlement without village concentrations but with the dispersal of small sites and seasonal shielings to occupy and exploit distant resources from first settlement times onwards (Vésteinsson, 2000b). The Icelandic farms were scattered and mostly land-locked, meaning that there was a different and probably greater mobility cost in the regional organization of subsistence in Iceland compared to the Faroes. In Iceland there was an emphasis on travel by horse and on foot, rather than boat, but there is also convincing evidence for the early development of long-distance intra-island trade and exchange (for example, sea birds eggs and bones from processed sea fish, and marine mammal bones found at inland sites (McGovern et al., 2006)). This allowed for enhanced specialization in the scattered farms and a more complex associated exchange and trade network. Resource management was enshrined in early laws (Grágás (Dennis et al., 1980; Simpson et al., 2001)) and in later times laws acted as a constraint on specialization and economic development; as for example, in the requirement for those who fished to also belong to a farm. Limited cereal cultivation occurred in Iceland from settlement through to the sixteenth century, but then the practice died out for reasons that are unknown (Einarsson, 1963; Simpson et al., 2002; Sveinbjarnardóttir et al., 2007). The increased export of stockfish from the thirteenth century probably triggered a comparable import of cereals as the English stockfish trade from 1410 and the Hanseatic trade from 1470 focused on an exchange of cereals for stockfish (KLNM, 1981). Cultivation became focused on providing winter fodder for animals, to enable them to utilize the extensive grazing of inland areas only available in summer months. Iron production flourished in tenth to fourteenth-century Iceland (Espelund, 2007), but it declined as essential woodland resources were degraded through non-sustainable charcoal production (Church et al., 2007).

Unprecedented climatic variability from the fourteenth century onwards triggered increases in soil erosion despite the presence of otherwise effective stock management because cultural systems were unable to anticipate an unknowable future and effectively match the timing of grazing and plant growth (Simpson et al., 2001). These centuries did see a continuation of sustainable practices begun with the initial settlement, such as the effective conservation and management of waterfowl around Lake Mývatn (McGovern et al., 2006). In addition there is evidence of effective responses to environmental change; woodland conservation that probably developed in the fourteenth century ensured that charcoal production for the maintenance of tools essential for farming was successfully continued through to modern times (Dugmore et al., 2006, 2007b). Wool production and stockfish trade were established early and they provided the pillars of the later Icelandic economy (Karlsson, 2000).

Human security and long-term settlement continuity in Iceland owed much to the resilient self-reliant subsistence based on flexible strategies of farming and wildlife exploitation and dispersed but interconnected settlement pattern that connected inland and coastal resources. This proved to be most effective in dealing with periodic setbacks, which included the most profound and persistent problems of unfavorable weather and periodic outbreaks of disease as well as infrequent natural hazards, such as volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and floods. This subsistence flexibility is, however, likely to have been the key reason for the sluggish economic development which characterized Iceland until the end of the nineteenth century. Modifying or abandoning this ability to deal with setbacks in favor of economic development did not seem like an acceptable strategy until modern times.

Why did the flexible system of subsistence persist as long as it did? The oligarchic Commonwealth period (from settlement to 1262 A.D.) may, at least initially, have been characterized by “clumsiness” in so much as the “goðar” or chieftains all had a voice in decision making in the sense that each one took his own decision – there was no common instance of decision making. With concentration of power (and the loss of independence) many Icelandic voices of the early settlement period were probably silenced – or the creation of higher tiers of authority blocked out those voices. Despite these changes, in the challenging centuries that followed the loss of independence it is likely that the Icelandic elites as much as the colonial rulers in Norway and Denmark, played a key role in shaping subsistence strategies. This system was successful, resilient and endured, but significant costs are likely to have been paid in terms of limited prosperity, lives not lived and environmental degradation.

Greenland

Norse settlement in Greenland lasted for about 450 years. As in the islands to the west, the regionally-based subsistence networks centered on farms and the communal utilization of wild resources was still the focus of subsistence, but the long-term successes of the Norse in Faroes and Iceland were not to be repeated. The Norse population of Greenland was probably similar in number to that of the Faroe Islands and perhaps an order of magnitude less than Iceland. In contrast to the Faroe Islands, settlement patterns were characterized by scattered farms. Despite geographical isolation Norse Greenland was also characterized by regional subsistence networks and communal efforts to utilize marine mammals for both trade and subsistence. A major focus of the economy was the hunting of walrus in the northern hunting grounds (Norðrsetur) which involved journeys of many hundred of kilometers through perilous waters and possible over wintering in hunting camps (see Figure 37.1). This, allied to the time and distance costs involved in harvesting the food resources such as inland caribou and the coastal spring seal migration in a big, sparsely-populated area, led to very large distance costs, with associated labor demands.

Walrus ivory was a key export needed to secure vital imports such as iron, which was not produced within the colonies (Buchwald, 2001; Espelund, 2007). Indeed the trading opportunities presented by large walrus colonies in Greenland, combined with sources of fur and hide not present in Iceland plus the chance to establish new settlements were probably key motivations driving the tenth-century colonization of Greenland. This occurred despite the challenging climate, isolation, extensive winter sea ice and hazardous sea passages to Scandinavian homelands. The walrus tusks collected in the northern hunting grounds were brought back to the permanent settlements of south-west Greenland still embedded in skull bone. The frequency of small chips of tusk ivory accidentally flaked off during tusk extraction drops with time and the numbers of bone fragments increase (McGovern et al., 1996). The implication is that over time and with experience the Norse improved both quality control in ivory production and the volume of ivory collected. Ivory production in Greenland was enhanced (implying a single minded focus) while in Iceland a very different economy based on the trade of fish and wool developed.

In the early centuries of settlement the c. 40:60 ratios of marine to terrestrial food in the Norse Greenlanders’ diets were not dissimilar from those of their relatives in Iceland and the Faroe Islands, but isotopic records from human remains shows that, through time the Greenlanders went on to develop a remarkably high consumption of marine resources – with up to 80 percent of the diet coming from the sea (Arneborg et al., 1999, 2012). Furthermore, as the known marine archaeofaunal record is dominated by seal bones and fish bones are very rare, two further conclusions may be drawn; either fishing was undertaken and the remains were disposed of in such ways as not to become part of the archaeological records investigated to date, or the marine emphasis developed a specialized, if not single minded focus on seals (McGovern, 1980; Dugmore et al., 2007a). If we follow the latter line of argument then at this western limit of Norse Atlantic settlement the local adaptations became very focused on marine mammals for both subsistence (seals) and trade (walrus).

The initial emphasis of the marine diet on seals rather than fish is likely to have been both pragmatic and shaped by traditions practiced to the east; when the Norse arrived in Greenland they would have encountered for the first time the mass spring migrations millions of harp (Pagophilus groenlandicus) and hooded seals (Cystophora cristata). These presented a remarkable opportunity and one that the Norse immediately exploited with a communal hunt that may have drawn on Faroese experience of pilot whale exploitation. Effective hunting requires the participation of many members of the community, and to secure cultural legitimacy (Figure 37.2) the benefits of the hunt are spread through the whole community. The Faroese whale hunt, which has provided a significant part of the islanders’ staple diet for centuries, may well have provided a social as well as an economic model for communal seal hunts in Greenland (Bloch, 1996; Guttesen, 1996).

The intensification of seal hunting coincided with climatic changes that had a significant impact on both terrestrial food production and the ability of the Norse to maintain their livestock. Globally, the thirteenth century was repeatedly affected by volcanically-driven episodes of cooling (Gao et al., 2008), the most significant of which was a short-lived but profound episode driven by a very large low latitude volcanic eruption in 1258–1259 A.D. (Oppenheimer, 2003). This was followed in the fourteenth century by episodes of both unusually variable and particularly cold weather (Barlow et al., 1997; Mann et al., 2009). These changes would have made pastoralism particularly challenging because they would have massively limited both fodder production and the availability of grazing. In the worse years snow cover in the best farming areas of south-west Greenland probably lasted from September through to June. These difficult years could well explain the shift to a greater emphasis on the spring seal hunt which could have been used to plug a crucial subsistence gap. Success could then have reinforced and consolidated the provisioning shift that is apparent in both the human isotope records and midden archaeofaunal data (Arneborg et al., 2012).

A further consequence of the difficult years of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries is likely to have been the consolidation of power within the elite; a phenomenon we can observe in contemporaneous Icelandic society. On small farms there would have been a greater risk that the long, cold and snowy winters would have reduced herds and flocks below minimal biological replacement levels. The magnate farms with their large holdings of both livestock and fodder are likely to have played a key role in maintaining the long-term viability of the farming system so consolidating their power and leading to a greater stratification of society. Greater stratification is likely to be associated with greater conformity and an eroding of “clumsy institutions” where many voices are heard.

In the short term, the adaptations and intensifications of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries seem to have initially served the Norse Greenlanders well. They survived periods of very difficult climate and maintained sustainable subsistence practices of land management and the exploitation of both caribou and potentially vulnerable populations on non-migratory common seals (Phoca vitulina). Subsistence was physically separated from the potential environmental impacts of external trade-generating activities because they involved distant walrus colonies. The distance of the walrus hunt also imposed limits on the generation of goods for external trade because of travel time and the hazards of the journey. This situation contrasted with Iceland where there were no effective natural checks on trade-generating activity; Icelandic walrus was wiped out and Icelandic iron and wool production both led to extensive environmental degradation, although the simple loss of natural capital seems to have done little to have actually constrained these latter activities.

If an assessment of Norse Greenland is stopped in the fourteenth century, it could be considered a great success; having survived very demanding times through developing a focus on core activities and also having embarked on an ambitious programme of church construction. Within a century, however, a very different picture emerges with the demise of the whole colony. In the fifteenth century an unexpected series of events occurred and the hither-to successful focus of the Greenlanders became an “elegant failure”; in the aftermath of the Black Death economic change swept across Europe (Herlihy, 1997) and a new proto-world system began to extend into the North Atlantic; climates deteriorated again, but this time with changing circulation patterns and storminess that developed into the Little Ice Age (Meeker and Maywski, 2002). With storms and sea ice disrupting regional networks of communal subsistence activities and trade, declining human populations in Greenland may have reached a critical threshold in terms of social coherence, just as the Norse were having to manage a new set of relations with the incoming Thule peoples (Gulløv, 2008; Dugmore et al., 2012).

Lessons learned

In the North Atlantic we can evaluate contrasting adaptations of the Norse settlement. In the Faroe Islands with their closely placed resources and comparatively benign climates, the chosen balance of terrestrial and marine subsistence allowed great stability. They were favored by their TEK, close proximity to key resources and the continued viability of cereal cultivation throughout the climate changes of the Little Ice Age (albeit with significant labor demands). Communal approaches and a strongly nucleated settlement may have helped “clumsy solutions” to be found.

In Iceland, the early development of bulk trade in wool and stockfish also underpinned settlement continuity and the maintenance of the settlement despite more limited options (such as the initial lack and later absence of cereal cultivation). “Clumsy” approaches may have facilitated the development of resilient, self-reliant strategies that were effective but inhibited economic development. Scattered settlement, the development of hierarchy and the imposition of foreign rule were probably associated with a loss of “clumsiness” in decision making; settlement endured but it was related to extensive land degradation.

In Greenland, the chosen approaches to both trade and the climate challenges in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were elegant, a greater utilization of marine resources (seal) for subsistence and a more refined production of ivory for export. Greenlandic adaptations were characterized by intensification, whereas Icelandic adaptations involved fundamental changes in economic practice. Greenlandic adaptations proved unable to withstand the conjunctures of the mid-fifteenth century and settlement failed. Less focused, “clumsier” solutions may have proved of greater utility. The Greenlanders’ elegant “failure” was an inability to anticipate an unknowable future, to have a narrowly focused TEK base, and to be too specialized, too small and too isolated to be able to capitalize on, and compete in, the new proto-world system extending into the North Atlantic in the early fifteenth century.

Inevitabable outcomes?

Was the end of Norse Greenlanders inevitable? Could they have continued their multi-century occupation of the island and maintained their human security? We can clearly identify changes that were not made and consider how circumstances might have been different. Changes could have been made to boost the subsistence base; a broader TEK could have plugged subsistence gaps through winter provisioning, but this would have required the adoption of an additional suite of specialized harpoon-based hunting techniques capable to taking ringed seals through breathing holes in sea ice. A mixed Métis population of Norse-Inuit could have provided a route by which ideas might have diffused between the Norse Greenlanders and the incoming Thule Inuit, but there is no evidence of such a group, and we do not understand why this is so.

Through the decades and centuries before the final mid-fifteenth-century ending there is no evidence of economic changes in Greenland: the key products of the early settlement period (ivory hides and fur) are still the same at the end; there is no evidence of attempts to innovate and switch to dried fish or wool production. Fishery production might have been feasible if there was a means of exporting goods to Europe, but commercial wool production might have been impossible given the impact of the frequent bad years that caused high sheep mortality. Data from modern Greenlandic commercial sheep farms that work the land of the old Norse settlements, show the episodic impact of cold and snowy winters on large herds (Madsen, 2008). These not-infrequent surges in mortality require the constant rebuilding of flocks. It is possible that the Norse stocking levels were nicely judged to be those that could be sustained through good years and bad, but these were at a level insufficient to generate surplus for export.

Structural evidence of the mismatch between indoor (overwinter) stalling capacity and the capacity of field pens/livestock enclosures indicates two discrete themes in Norse livestock management within Greenland (Madsen, 2008); the first being the maintenance of a fodder-fed population overwintered indoors (a strategy which could have secured comparatively limited numbers of breeding and milking livestock). In addition there seem to have been free-roaming livestock that may (or may not) have survived the winter outdoors; the total area of the animal enclosures/pens in the Eastern Settlement region from Sermilik fjord to Unartoq Fjord indicates that there was a maximum number of around 15,000 sheep and goats, far above the stalling capacity found at the farmsteads in the same region (Madsen, 2008). This is a strong indication that significant numbers of livestock were being herded extensively, because this estimate of 15,000 is well below the 48,000 ewes and variable numbers of lambs and wethers that were extensively herded in the same area in the 1960s. Norse stocking levels also seem to be significantly below the stable, intensively herded livestock population of some 18,000–21,000 prevailing since the 1980s (Madsen, 2008, 2012).

Following the decline of the Norwegian economy in the aftermath of the Black Death and the rise of the Hanseatic League, motivations for trading voyages into the Atlantic shifted; the Hansa would have had little interest in Greenland’s traditional exports as their focus was on stockfish. Changed economic strategies in Greenland might have maintained contact with Europe, by providing goods that would have attracted merchants and maintained flows of both commodities and people.

In medieval Greenland the Norse faced multiple exposures; to climate change, to the economic transformations sweeping Europe, the development of new proto-world systems, plus the challenges of culture contacts brought about by the migration of the Thule Peoples, phenomena which were unrelated to each other. In the face of these pressures it is likely that settlement collapse occurred because of the resilience lost from the subsistence system; specialization and an apparently “elegant” solution to fourteenth-century climate changes might have quite suddenly lost their utility with devastating consequences for human security.

Now and in the near future we face challenges not dissimilar to those encountered in the medieval North Atlantic; how best to respond to climate threats to food production, how to manage the challenges of new economies, the balance to be struck between generating wealth and promoting security, how best to manage cross-cultural contacts and whether to allow the growth of impoverished groups within society and the concentration of power within a small elite. Inclusive approaches to tackling the challenges of living with global environmental change and enhancing human security are not likely to be elegant. They are more likely to be clumsy. While there is no clear blueprint for successful adaptations, there are lessons to be learned from past failures. Focusing on single points of view and simple solutions to complex problems may well lead to seemingly effective short-term solutions but these strategies can also produce unexpected negative outcomes. The intensification of parts of an established system may be a very problematic way to cope with changes over multi-decadal time scales and crises may arise swiftly and threaten the existence of entire communities.

Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge support from the UK Leverhulme Trust through an International Fellowship to AJD, grants F/00152/F and F/00152/Q and US National Science Foundation through Grants OPP 0352596; BCS 0001026; OPP 02900001 and OPP 0732327.

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