Seals and Sea Ice in Medieval Greenland

Ogilvie, Astrid E. J.; Woollett, James; Śmiarowski, Konrad; Arneborg, Jette; Troelstra, S.R.; Kuijpers, Antoon; Pálsdóttir, Albína Hulda; McGovern, Thomas H.

doi:10.3721/037.002.0107

Cited by 36 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…Summer sea ice increased around the Eastern Settlement, with direct impacts on navigation, harbor seals, and quality of pasture along shores (48). The increasing sea ice would also have affected the coordination of communal labor during the vital summer months.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cultural adaptation, compounding vulnerabilities and conjunctures in Norse Greenland

Dugmore

McGovern

Vésteinsson

et al. 2012

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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150

107

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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.Vikings | marine mammals | Little Ice Age | rigidity trap

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cultural adaptation, compounding vulnerabilities and conjunctures in Norse Greenland

Dugmore

McGovern

Vésteinsson

et al. 2012

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

Self Cite

150

107

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…He would now argue that there is evidence for both Norse sustainable practice, and successful adaptation to climate change (Dugmore et al 2007(Dugmore et al , 2009. The archaeological evidence also suggests that, in particular in the light of the increasing dependence of the Greenland Norse on marine mammals for food, they took every advantage of the local situation (Ogilvie et al 2009). For a map showing the settlements, see Fig.…”

Section: Perspectives On the Climate Of The Past Thousand Years In Tmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…For discussions on this topic the interested reader is referred elsewhere, to the papers cited above, as well as to, e.g., Keller (1989), Barlow et al (1997), Buckland et al (1996), and Arneborg (2000. However, it may be noted that interdisciplinary collaboration on research in North Atlantic regions between archaeologists, historical climatologists, and others has been particularly fruitful (see, e.g., Ogilvie and McGovern 2000;Ogilvie et al 2009;and http://www.nabohome.org/).…”

Section: Perspectives On the Climate Of The Past Thousand Years In Tmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…Although it is possible that the greater part of "The Description of Greenland" may be reliable, the mention of sea ice is almost certainly not part of the original account, but a later interpolation. The description is tantalizing because it can never be known precisely when the insert on sea ice was written or, indeed, if it is in any way accurate (Ogilvie 1991;Ogilvie and Jónsson 2001a;Ogilvie et al 2009). …”

Section: Perspectives On the Climate Of The Past Thousand Years In Tmentioning

confidence: 98%

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Historical climatology, Climatic Change, and implications for climate science in the twenty-first century

Ogilvie

2010

Climatic Change

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Historical climatology is the use of documentary evidence for the reconstruction of past climate. This paper gives a brief personal view of the development of the discipline from early times to the present day. Although several papers have been published on the importance of carefully analysing and evaluating all historical sources before they are used in climate reconstructions, several of them in Climatic Change, the use of unreliable, unanalysed data still persists. This may lead to false impressions of the climate of the past. In these times, when climate data are being used for political, as well as purely scientific ends, the cause of accuracy, as championed by Climatic Change, will best be served by emphasising, yet again, the importance of using only reliable data. A number of examples are given which illustrate these points. These include discussions on wine growing in England in medieval times, the Norse settlement of Greenland, and comments on the climate history of the past thousand years.

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“…In BOOK REVIEWS / 155 actual fact the situation was, of course, far more complex (e.g. Ogilvie et al, 2009). In contrast to this generality, in the table the oddly precise fact is given that in AD 1001 Leif Ericsson (sic) made a landfall on Baffin, albeit with a question mark.…”

mentioning

confidence: 95%

Circumpolar health atlas

2012

Choice Reviews Online

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Seals and Sea Ice in Medieval Greenland

Cited by 36 publications

References 38 publications

Cultural adaptation, compounding vulnerabilities and conjunctures in Norse Greenland

Cultural adaptation, compounding vulnerabilities and conjunctures in Norse Greenland

Historical climatology, Climatic Change, and implications for climate science in the twenty-first century

Circumpolar health atlas

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