All a question of timing for first Euro settlement
team (it stands for Exact Chronology of Early Societies) figured it out by examining bits of wood found on the L’Anse aux Meadows site that had clearly been cut with iron (European) axes. A huge solar flare in 993AD left a spike in that year’s tree rings, so just count rings out from there to the bark. The trees died in 1021.
The specific date of L’Anse aux Meadows doesn’t really matter, of course, but the technique does. Cosmic-ray-induced surges in atmospheric radiocarbon concentrations are another new tool for figuring out the past, and that is now important work.
Two centuries ago our knowledge of the past barely reached back past classical Greece and Rome: say, 3000 years. Now scientists are working hard to puzzle out past climate states ranging from hundreds to billions of years ago, because understanding the patterns of the past may help us through whatever happens next. Every scrap of information may be valuable.
All very well, but why didn’t the Norse settlement last?
They abandoned their exploration of north-eastern North America because the ‘‘cash crop’’ they were looking for in Vinland turned out to be much closer to home: ivory from the abundant walrus population that they could hunt in Disko Bay, 1000 kilometres up Greenland’s west coast.
Two centuries ago our knowledge of the past barely reached back past classical Greece and Rome: say, 3000 years. Now scientists are working hard to puzzle out past climate states ranging from hundreds to billions of years ago, because understanding the patterns of the past may help us through whatever happens next.
They could feed themselves by farming and fishing, but it was the ivory that paid for all the things they needed to import from Europe (timber, iron and bronze, stained glass, etc.). Up to 5000 people lived in the Greenland settlements for more than four centuries, apparently quite happy to ignore Vinland – and then they disappeared.
Where they went or how they died has been promoted as a great mystery, but the real reason is probably that the bottom dropped out of the European market for ivory in the early 15th century as abundant new supplies became available from Africa and Russia’s new Arctic settlements.
The climate had also turned against the Greenland Norse (the ‘‘Little Ice Age’’), so they most likely just upped stakes and moved back to Iceland, or even to Norway. No massacre, no famine, just a change in the trade routes. It’s not always dramatic.