The First European Colonization of the North Atlantic

TL;DR: In this article, the authors focus on the North Atlantic portion of this story with an emphasis on how the archaeology of the settlement period, the medieval period, and the post-medieval period has altered older narratives that sought to explain this early medieval colonial effort as well as created new narratives.

Abstract: Many centuries before Columbus, the Norse peoples of Scandinavia colonized parts of Western Europe as well as the Northern Atlantic islands: the Shetlands, the Orkneys, the Faroes, Iceland, Greenland, and for at least a few years, Newfoundland. This was part of a larger process whose eastern half effected what today is Russia and was at least in part a response to wider Eurasian phenomenon. This chapter will concentrate on the North Atlantic portion of this story with an emphasis on how the archaeology of the settlement period (c. 800–1000 CE), the medieval period (c. 1000–1500 CE), and the postmedieval period (c. 1500–1800) has altered older narratives that sought to explain this early medieval colonial effort as well as created new narratives. A number of key sites in each of the North Atlantic will be discussed and put into a larger archaeological and historical context. In terms of the content of this volume, this chapter will present an earlier colonial phenomenon that was driven by many of the same variables that affected the post-Columbian Americas such as the commodification of natural resources and long-range trade, elite sponsored colonization, and the maintenance of power in the face of novel and unfamiliar conditions. In conclusion, the chapter will discuss the archaeology of the influence of the post-Columbian world on these medieval North Atlantic colonies.

Summary

Introduction

• Many facets of what are commonly considered to be novel and unique characteristics of modern Capitalism have their roots, often in a mature form, in the Medieval Period (Abu-Lughod 1991; Crosby 2004; Hoffmann 2001; Marks 2007).
• Archaeological work focusing on the Norse North Atlantic from the Early Medieval Period through to the Early Modern Period has been especially effective at revealing certain of these phenomena, specifically those dealing with the commoditization of natural resources and the influence of global markets on colonization.
• For the purposes of this volume, this discussion is offered as a counter-point to the discussions of the post-Columbian colonial efforts of the Europeans in the Americas.
• The raiding that took place along the coasts of Atlantic Europe, the Baltic, and the eastern European river systems, was accompanied by the mercantile and colonial elements of the Viking Age (Heather 2011; Sawyer 2000; Sawyer 2003).
• UN CO RR EC TE D PR OO F 2 G. Hambrecht that archaeology has been especially important in revealing is the importance of trade and long-distance markets to the motivations behind the founding of these settlements.

Chronology and Background

• The chronology for the North Atlantic side of the Norse expansion started with the settlement of the Faroe Islands sometime around the year 800 CE.
• Pigs were a major agent of environmental change in the North Atlantic Scandinavian settlements, and they, along with goats, would have been one of the primary terraforming agents used by the settlers to engineer their new environments (Arge et al. 2009).
• Greenland was a different situation in which there was no human settlement in the areas claimed by the Norse settlers, though there had been previous inhabitants, and contact with Dorset and later.
• Not unlike the expansion across the American West, the Norse expansion across the North Atlantic in the past was often portrayed as the work of “rugged individualists” looking for their own piece of land on which they could live independently and self-sufficiently.
• While there was still, in the case of Iceland, catastrophic erosion it was not the result of an unconscious pillaging of natural resources but the result of the conjuncture of a number of variables, geological, climatic, economic, and political (McGovern et al. 2007).

The European Dried Fish Trade in Historical Context

• Beginning in the early medieval period the trade in dried fish, specifically from genus Gadidae, the Cod family, contributed to the growth of European economies and populations into the modern age.
• Yet the cod trade was one of the largest drivers of colonial expansion and economies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the newly discovered regions of the North Atlantic and it remained a major force into the twentieth century.
• This was an excellent food for the provisioning needs of developing states.
• Stockfish and the processed fish trade were one of the first industries, in postclassical Europe, that developed commodities as the authors know them today.
• The origins of this trade are a part of the larger story of the origin of modern commodities, capitalism, and the exploitation of new worlds.

The Archaeology

• Archaeological work in Iceland and the Faroes has been crucial to understanding both the origins and the development of the trade in dried gadids.
• A clear artisanal, precommoditization stage of this trade has been identified in early medieval Norway as well as Iceland at sites that date to the earliest days of settlement (Fig. 9.2).

Identifying the Production and Trade of Dried Fish in Archaeological Contexts An

• Initial first step in identifying the trade in dried fish is to look at the percentage of terrestrial versus fish elements in archaeological sites.
• There is a pattern in the archaeology of the Faroese and Icelandic sites showing a greater focus on Atlantic cod ( G. morhua) through time.
• The change in fish size and in element distribution point to the turn toward stockfish and the standardization and commodification of this dried cod product.
• Skálholt was the cathedral farm, which housed the Bishop of Southern Iceland until 1792.
• This maritime signature is paralleled by an equally unique terrestrial faunal assemblage that featured prime age cattle and sheep being raised and consumed for their meat, which is not at all an ordinary situation in premodern Iceland or North Atlantic archaeological contexts (Hambrecht 2009; Hambrecht 2011).

Discussion

• Many historians have worked to trace the premodern roots of their current global capitalist system.
• Both the influence of long-range trade networks and the growth of sophisticated commodity markets in driving the movement of peoples across the North Atlantic are revealed by the archaeology, and specifically the zooarchaeology of North Atlantic.
• The work described in this piece is the product of a large group of scholars (Perdikaris et al. 2011; McGovern et al. 2007).
• One new development that is relevant to the history and effects of Capitalism is a move towards attempting to construct deep baseline demographic data for both marine fish and marine mammals over the last millennium.

Full text

Hambrecht
George
Department of Anthropology
University of Maryland
College Park, MD, USA
ghambrecht@gmail.com
Abstract
Many centuries before Columbus, the Norse peoples of Scandinavia
colonized parts of Western Europe as well as the Northern Atlantic
islands: the Shetlands, the Orkneys, the Faroes, Iceland, Greenland,
and for at least a few years, Newfoundland. This was part of a larger
process whose eastern half effected what today is Russia and was at
least in part a response to wider Eurasian phenomenon. This chapter
will concentrate on the North Atlantic portion of this story with an
emphasis on how the archaeology of the settlement period (c.
800–1000 CE), the medieval period (c. 1000–1500 CE), and the
postmedieval period (c. 1500–1800) has altered older narratives that
sought to explain this early medieval colonial effort as well as created
new narratives. A number of key sites in each of the North Atlantic
will be discussed and put into a larger archaeological and historical
context. In terms of the content of this volume, this chapter will
present an earlier colonial phenomenon that was driven by many of
the same variables that affected the post-Columbian Americas such
as the commodification of natural resources and long-range trade,
elite sponsored colonization, and the maintenance of power in the
face of novel and unfamiliar conditions. In conclusion, the chapter will
discuss the archaeology of the influence of the post-Columbian world
on these medieval North Atlantic colonies.
Keywords Zooarchaeology - Commodities - Cod - North Atlantic - Norse -
Walrus

UNCORRECTED PROOF
1
Chapter 9
The First European Colonization
of the North Atlantic
George Hambrecht
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015
M. P. Leone, J. E. Knauf (eds.), Historical Archaeologies of Capitalism,
Contributions To Global Historical Archaeology, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-12760-6_9
G. Hambrecht ()
Department of Anthropology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA
e-mail: ghambrecht@gmail.com
Introduction
Many facets of what are commonly considered to be novel and unique characteris-
tics of modern Capitalism have their roots, often in a mature form, in the Medieval
Period (Abu-Lughod 1991; Crosby 2004; Hoffmann 2001; Marks 2007). Archaeo-
logical work focusing on the Norse North Atlantic from the Early Medieval Period
through to the Early Modern Period has been especially effective at revealing cer-
tain of these phenomena, specifically those dealing with the commoditization of
natural resources and the influence of global markets on colonization. The early
medieval colonial expansion of the Norse and the subsequent centuries of interac-
tion with the medieval world system anticipate the central place that international
global markets had on the formation of the post-Columbian world. This essay will
discuss the North Atlantic Norse colonies, specifically the Faroe Islands, Iceland,
Greenland, and Newfoundland. For the purposes of this volume, this discussion is
offered as a counter-point to the discussions of the post-Columbian colonial efforts
of the Europeans in the Americas. The intention is to use the medieval Scandinavian
colonial migration to problematize the larger discussion on the nature of colonies,
colonialism, and the emergence of capitalism.
From the end of the eighth century CE Scandinavian raiders began to appear
throughout Northern Europe in what is popularly termed the Viking Age. The raid-
ing that took place along the coasts of Atlantic Europe, the Baltic, and the eastern
European river systems, was accompanied by the mercantile and colonial elements
of the Viking Age (Heather 2011; Sawyer 2000; Sawyer 2003). These early me-
dieval Scandinavian raiders and merchants planted colonies in regions as varied
as present-day Ukraine and as far west as what today is modern Newfoundland.
These settlements were placed in very different contexts but one unifying factor
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UNCORRECTED PROOF
2 G. Hambrecht
that archaeology has been especially important in revealing is the importance of
trade and long-distance markets to the motivations behind the founding of these
settlements.
Chronology and Background
The chronology for the North Atlantic side of the Norse expansion started with the
settlement of the Faroe Islands sometime around the year 800 CE. Iceland was then
settled around the years 871 ± 2 CE. Greenland was settled not long after this in the
second half of the tenth century CE. Finally, the short-lived Newfoundland settle-
ment was founded around the year 1000 CE.
These four regions differ in terms of climate, topography, and the dramatically
different human geographies of the lands at the time of Norse settlement. All of
these regions lie in either subarctic or boreal ecological zones. All Norse North
Atlantic settlement during this period involved peoples whose main subsistence
activities centered on the raising of the classic Eurasian domestic animal package
(Cattle, Sheep, Horse, Pigs, Goats, and Dogs) and who engaged in the farming of
grain crops when the climate was suitable, which was not often. These people were
accomplished fishermen, marine mammal hunters, and wild bird exploiters. Obvi-
ously, they were also extremely capable sailors (McGovern et al. 2007). The Norse
who settled in the North Atlantic came from a hierarchical culture and the settlers
would have contained chieftains, farmers, both dependent and independent, and
slaves (Bigelow 1991; McGovern 1990; McGovern et al. 2007). Genetic studies of
the current populations of both Iceland and the Faroe Islands show a strong asym-
metry between Scandinavian and British Isles genetic origins. The asymmetry is
expressed by a high proportion of males from Scandinavia and a high proportion
of females originating in the British Isles. This suggests that a significant percent-
age of the initial settlers were single males who left Scandinavia and then found/
persuaded/abducted females from the British Isles to accompany them onward to
the North Atlantic islands (Als et al. 2006; Goodacre et al. 2005).
There are a number of robust paleoclimatic proxies for the North Atlantic, many
of which have excellent temporal resolution. Coupled with a growing paleoenvi-
ronmental record of for the region constructed by environmental archaeologists
and geographers there is a fair understanding of the climatic and environmental
variables from the Settlement Period through to the present day. In terms of the
relevance of such a record for the Settlement Period, there are strong indications of
what some have termed a “Medieval Warm Period” that in the North Atlantic would
have meant higher temperatures, and fewer and weaker storms. Following this and
often termed the “Little Ice Age” was a period from roughly the thirteenth through
the nineteenth century of increased variability in temperature, often trending toward
cold, as well as an increase in both the frequency and power of storms (Dawson
et al. 2003; Meeker and Mayewski 2002; Ogilvie 1981; Ogilvie 1984; Ogilvie 1992;
Ogilvie 2001). The general picture is one in which the Norse settlers of the North
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Atlantic Islands encountered a climatic situation that was much more favorable to
colonization than what they would experience in the following centuries (Fig. 9.1).
The Faroe Islands are a group of fairly small islands with rugged geography
and limited arable land. Much of the landscape is very steep and a great deal of
the coastline is vertical. The settlement areas are on the coast near the few areas
of relatively flat and workable land. The landscape that greeted the first settlers
was most likely made up of wild grasses and sedges, with some juniper shrub and
very limited timber, human impacts on these island landscapes post settlement were
fairly mild and gradual (Lawson et al. 2005). Faroese subsistence was, and still to a
certain extent is, based on sheep farming, fishing, and the exploitation of wild bird
eggs (Brewington 2006; Brewington 2010; Brewington 2011). One of the changes
to this subsistence pattern visible in the archaeological record is the initial presence
and then disappearance in the later medieval period of pigs. Pigs were a major agent
of environmental change in the North Atlantic Scandinavian settlements, and they,
along with goats, would have been one of the primary terraforming agents used by
the settlers to engineer their new environments (Arge et al. 2009). The Faroes has
recently produced strong archaeobotanical indications of a pre-Norse settlement
(Church et al. 2013). Previously it was thought that the Faroese settlement was a
similar situation to that of Iceland which to date has produced no archaeological
evidence of a pre-Norse settlement. The extent or even the identity of the people
behind this earlier settlement is still unknown.
Fig. 9.1 Map of the Norse voyages of exploration in the North Atlantic (from Perdikaris and
McGovern 2000). The red arrows represent warm ocean currents and the blue represent cold ocean
currents. There is often high productivity of marine resources where these warm and cold currents
meet and mix
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Frequently asked questions

Q1. What are the contributions in "The first european colonization of the north atlantic" ?

Hambrecht et al. this paper discuss the early medieval Scandinavian colonisation of the North Atlantic and discuss the influence of the post-colonization world on these medieval North Atlantic colonies. 

Q2. What was the role of pigs in the North Atlantic Scandinavian settlements?

Pigs were a major agent of environmental change in the North Atlantic Scandinavian settlements, and they, along with goats, would have been one of the primary terraforming agents used by the settlers to engineer their new environments (Arge et al. 2009). 

Q3. How far from the sea were the fish transported?

The marine fish that ended up as archaeofauna in these sites must have been transported at least 50 km from where they were originally fished. 

Q4. What was the appropriate environment for a sedentary agriculturalist way of life?

The regions of Greenland that were appropriate for a Eurasian style sedentary agriculturalist way of life were the inner fjords in the Eastern and Western Settlements. 

Q5. What was the landscape that greeted the first settlers?

The landscape that greeted the first settlers was most likely made up of wild grasses and sedges, with some juniper shrub and very limited timber, human impacts on these island landscapes post settlement were fairly mild and gradual (Lawson et al. 2005). 

Q6. What was the common type of construction in Iceland?

Timber had to be obtained from driftwood or be imported and Icelandic structures were, in some cases until the post-WWII period, largely built of turf. 

Q7. What was the main subsistence activity of the Norse during the settlement period?

All Norse North Atlantic settlement during this period involved peoples whose main subsistence activities centered on the raising of the classic Eurasian domestic animal package (Cattle, Sheep, Horse, Pigs, Goats, and Dogs) and who engaged in the farming of grain crops when the climate was suitable, which was not often. 

Q8. What was the main reason for the decline of the English trade in Iceland?

English activity in Icelandic waters peaked between 1490 and 1530 and continued at more humble levels until the eighteenth century, with another period of intensification in the early seventeenth century (Jones 2000). 

Q9. What was the primary role of herring in the Medieval period?

Cured herring had the primary role in terms of total value and volume throughout most of the Medieval Period, though dried gadids were a close second (Hoffman 2001). 

Q10. What is the visible example of the sugar trade?

The most visible example of this being the fact that stockfish was a central part of the diet of the enslaved Africans working the sugar plantations and has remained a common ingredient in Caribbean cuisine to this day (Braudel 1982; Kurlansky 1999). 

Q11. What is the first mention of the Skraelingar?

One of the first mentions of the Skraelingar describes how when attacked with European weapons (and this report also mentions that these particular Skraelingar lacked iron, meaning that they were most likely Dorset) they did not start bleeding until they were dead (Gulløv 2008). 

Q12. What does the first report of a new culture suggest?

Any first report of a new culture that mentions how they behave after being attacked certainly suggests the potential for sustained violence. 

Q13. What has been the subject of a significant amount of scholarship?

The demise of the Greenland Norse colony has been the subject of a significant amount of scholarship and a number of different variables have been offered to explain it. 

Q14. What was the main source of protein for the European and eventually American markets?

Bretons, and Normans were all quick to exploit this new and extraordinarily fertile source of protein and capital for the European and eventually American markets (Fitzhugh 1985; Pope 2004). 

Q15. What are the reasons for the disappearance of the Greenland colony?

Climate change, an inability to adapt to climate change, environmental degradation, conflict with the Skraelingar, as well as economic marginalization, which will be addressed in more detail below, have all been argued to be reasons for the disappearance of the Greenland colony (Arneborg 2002, 2003a, b; McGovern 2000; Petersen 2000; Seaver 1996). 

Q16. What is the significance of the zooarchaeological evidence at Skál?

The clear signs of long-distance and eventually global commodity markets do not reveal themselves in the zooarchaeological sense discussed above at Skálholt.